THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN NEW FOCUS

Enlightenment scholars have had some difficulty in getting the German Enlightenment in focus. If one's conception of the Enlightenment has been shaped by reading Peter Gay and Robert Darnton, then the German Enlightenment fails to fit their model. France offers us the picture of an intelligentsia, largely located in the capital, maintaining a degree of independence with some help from patrons, and in many cases opposed to the governing regime. Whether, like Gay, one focuses on the high-profile frequenters of the Paris salons, or, like Darnton, on half-starved hack writers, one has something approaching the modern conception of the intellectual, and hence a flattering genealogy for present-day intellectuals. It is easy to forget that philosophes could also be professional administrators, like the economist Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, and that Enlightened thinking was also diffused throughout the provinces by academies and scholarly networks.