Envisioning Power. Eric R. Wolf
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while others wanted to install the truth by ending the domination of society by “tyrants and priests”; where the true workings of reason were obscured by oppressors, its light could be rekindled by removing these princes of darkness. Still others identified the cutting edge of reason with the novel machine invented by Dr. Guillotine.
Yet all would have resonated to Kant’s slogan of sapere aude, the call to take courage in using one’s own reason to gain and apply knowledge. As Kant saw it, the Enlightenment would permit humanity to shed its immaturity, which had been fostered by dependence on the guidance of others, and bring on a real maturity grounded in the autonomous use of reason. This meant in practice that humans could now break through the limits erected by cultural tradition and political domination and could confront the world rationally, choosing the most efficient means to achieve posited ends.
The appeal to reason, however, entailed consequences. One must not forget to ask who is using reason, rationality, logic, and emotional neutrality to do what to whom. As states and enterprises around the world incorporated the Enlightenment appeal to reason to enhance their managerial efficiency, the application of instrumental logic often exacted an exorbitant price. Rule by reason appealed most directly to state managers and private entrepreneurs and to scientists and intellectuals. Adopted by these strata, it invested them with a professional sense of superiority, which they could direct at the unenlightened obduracy of others. Those charged with dispensing reason can readily tag others as opponents of progress. Down to the present, the protagonists of reason have seen themselves as apostles of modernity. They have advocated industrialization, specialization, secularization, and rational bureaucratic allocation as reasoned options superior to unreasoned reliance on tradition.
One of the ideas that came out of the turmoil produced by the Enlightenment was “ideology.” The term actually had an inventor in Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836), who saw himself as the intellectual heir of the eighteenth-century philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac. Arguing against Descartes’s acceptance of “self-evident truths,” Condillac had championed “the testimony of the senses” obtained through observation and experiment, as advocated by the British empiricists Francis Bacon and John Locke. In the wake of the French Revolution, in 1795, Destutt de Tracy was asked by the Revolutionary Convention to create a research center for the “analysis of sensations and ideas” within the newly founded Institut National. Destutt de Tracy defined ideology as the “science des idées” (Barth 1974, 9); his book on the Éléments d’idéologie of 1801 (1824–1826) envisioned the research program of the new center as an effort to study ideas naturalistically, indeed as part of zoology. In the service of this goal one of the members of the institute, Joseph-Marie Degérando (1772–1842), drew up a very modern-sounding study guide for an ethnography of Australian natives.
It soon became evident, however, that the “ideologues” pursued contradictory goals (Hall 1978, 10). On one level, they wanted to understand how people perceived sensations, transformed them into ideas, and then communicated these ideas to others. On another level, they hoped that such inquiries would not only illuminate processes of thought but also produce theories that could free thought from “the yoke of prejudices.” The study of ideology thus embodied from the start a wish to subject ideas to the dispassionate eye of science, and another wish to define the really true ideas that could found a just society and magnify human happiness. The contradiction soon evoked the wrath of no less a critic than Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon had joined the institute enthusiastically in 1797, during the years of his ascent to power. Yet, once embarked on his imperial career and faced with renegotiating relations with the Catholic Church, he began to see the freethinking and republican “ideologues” as obstacles to his assumption of imperial authority. Accusing them of grounding the laws of men in “gloomy metaphysics” instead of basing them on “a knowledge of the human heart and of the lessons of history,” he disbanded their research section in 1803. They became for him major imaginary enemies bent on his undoing. In the wake of the disastrous Russian campaign in 1812, he even denounced them as the chief cause of “all the misfortunes which have befallen our beloved France” (in Barth 1974, 27).
The Counter-Enlightenment
In the wake of the French Revolution, marked first by the Terror and then by French military expansion, many followers of the Enlightenment deserted its cause, convinced like the Spanish painter Francisco Goya that the dream of reason breeds monsters. Other protagonists of the emerging Counter-Enlightenment were true reactionaries who set their faces against any party that advocated universal liberty, equality, and fraternity for all humankind. They felt most directly threatened by the revolution in France, which at one fell swoop abolished distinctions between aristocrats and plebeians. Still others sought to defend feeling, faith, and local tradition against the encroachment of Reason proclaimed by the Enlighteners. At the roots of this reaction lay the protests of people—self-referentially enclosed in the understandings of localized communities—against the leveling and destruction of their accustomed arrangements. Together these varied conservative responses to change ignited the first flickering of the relativistic paradigm that later unfolded into the key anthropological concept of “culture.”
These conservatives were soon joined by recruits from the new cadre of “nationalists,” who came to resent the ways in which revolutionary France expanded its sway and influence abroad. These new nationalists protested the surging conquests of the revolutionary armies, as well as French claims that they were dispensing freedom by abrogating local custom and installing new civic legal codes premised on teachings of the Enlightenment. The anti-French reaction grew especially strong in the Germanies, primarily in the regions associated with Prussia, although groups in other regions too, such as the Rhineland and Bavaria, long sympathized with the revolutionary cause. The conflict between the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment in the Germanies is often portrayed as a battle for the German spirit fought out between France and the true German patriots; but for some decades attitudes were not that clearly polarized. Thus, Kant, Hegel, and Fichte all greeted the advent of the French Revolution with enthusiasm, and they all owed much to Rousseau. Herder, who became a major defender of national identities, was influenced by Condillac, while Wilhelm von Humboldt, who became a leader of the Prussian movement for renewal, spent years in Paris, in association with Destutt de Tracy’s ideologues. Some influential individuals, such as the Baltic “Sage of the North” Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788), were Enlighteners in the first part of their lives and enemies of the movement in the second. French and German identities certainly came to be locked in opposition, but this was the outcome of a long process of political change, and not—as nationalists on both sides have depicted it—the result of an instantaneous cultural repulsion.
Viewed in broad outlines, where the Enlightenment celebrated reason the Counter-Enlightenment affirmed a belief in faith and in the primordial wisdom of the senses. Hamann proclaimed that God was “a poet, not a mathematician,” that reason was “a stuffed dummy,” and that Nature was not a repository of primordial virtue but “a wild dance” (Berlin 1982, 169). Where the Enlightenment projected the ideal of a common humanity with universal goals, its opponents exalted differentiation, particularism, and parochial identities. The émigré Savoyard aristocrat Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821)—a founder of sociology, as well as arguably a precursor of fascism (Bramson 1961; Berlin 1990)—rejected human universalism outright: “The constitution of 1795, just like its predecessors, was made for man. But there is no such thing as man in the world. I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians. . . . But as for man, I declare that I have never met him in my life” (in Berlin 1990, 59). Others, notably the East Prussian Johann Herder (1744–1803), undertook to write a universal history of humanity but transformed the project into a synthetic presentation of the multiple histories of particular peoples.
Herder read the language and folklore of each people as expressions of its unconscious inner genius, its characteristic Volksgeist. This drew on Condillac’s idea that “each language expresses the character of the people who speak” (in Aarsleff 1982, 346). This formulation could be employed to modify Enlightenment universalism in order to envisage a pluralistic assembly of particular peoples, each seen as imbued with a distinctive “spirit.” One outcome was a fateful conflation of linguistic studies with an ethnically based psychology (Whitman 1984). This orientation was even more evident in