BOOKS
663
Variants of Enthusiasm
THE CONSECRATION OF THE WRITER,
1750-1830.
By Paul Beni–
chou. Translated by Mark K. Jensen . University of Nebraska.
$65.00.
IN RECENT YEARS there has been an extended and sometimes strident
debate about the Enlightenment. Was it a predominantly good or bad
development? How different was it in different countries? Who were
the leading figures? Though many scholars have concluded that there
were several "Enlightenments," some continue to make generalizations .
about
the
Enlightenment and speak about the "Enlightenment
agenda." The notion that the Enlightenment refers to a relatively
coherent body of thought is especially strong among critics of the
period, who associate the era with modernity-a vague notion that
refers to a wide variety of negative developments: the loss of commu–
nity, secular humanism, laissez-faire capitalism, Marxism-Leninism,
materialism, consumerism, scientism, rationalism. In
Endgames: Ques–
tions in Late Modern Political Thought
(1977),
John Gray argues that
the "Enlightenment project" conflated modernization with westerniza–
tion and hoped to institute "a dreary modern utopia."
In
The Consecration of the Writer,
I750-I830,
which was first pub–
lished in France in
1973,
the French literary scholar Paul Benichou, who
taught for many years at Harvard, also speaks of
the
Enlightenment; he
argues that during this period there was a dramatic elevation of the sta–
tus of writers. The men of letters we call the
philosophes,
he says, "were
promulgating a new faith, which they wished
to
be less dogmatic than
the old one, but just as positive, and their critique of the old faith was
only an instrument of the new."
Benichou is less concerned with the Enlightenment, however, than
with French romanticism, which he says was deeply influenced by
Enlightenment thought. Although the royalist romantic writers of the
early nineteenth century attacked the
philosophes,
they too consecrated
the writer, but it was the poet they consecrated, not the
philosophe.
"The distinctive trait of romanticism," Benichou says,
is surely the exaltation of poetry, now considered to be truth, reli–
gion, and the illumination of our destiny, and ranked as the high–
est value: it is scarcely an exaggeration
to
say that nothing like this
had ever been thought of before. The inspired writer replaced, as
the priest's successor, the
philosophe
of the preceding era.
