Enlightenolatry from Peter Gay to Steven Pinker: Mass Marketing Enlightenment and the Thick Eighteenth Century

Abstract: Peter Gay's two-volume study, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1966/69), won the National Book Award in 1966, where its tendentious version of the Enlightenment was embraced as a moderate, hopeful response to the radicalized public sphere of the 1960s. This essay argues that Gay's achievement, and the interdisciplinary seminar that he founded at Columbia University to develop it, provided a key impetus for the organization of the institutional study of eighteenth-century studies. Moreover, the constellation of ideas celebrated as the "Enlightenment" in Gay's work has provided an enduring template for twenty-first-century Enlightenolatrists like Steven Pinker, whose Enlightenment Now (2018) slavishly follows Gay's argument. The persistence of Gay's "undead text," in the sense of Lorraine Daston and Sharon Marcus's phrase (2019), suggests an additional and troubling dimension to eighteenth-century studies beyond the "wide" and "deep" eighteenth centuries as theorized by Felicity Nussbaum (2003) and Joseph Roach (2007).