Caroline Winterer

Winterer’s excellent study shows that the idea of an American Enlightenment—the notion that the founding moment of the U.S. gave rise to a nation-defining ideological heritage—is a 20th c. invention. For the founding generation (influenced both by the Bible and by new, secular theories), enlightenment was not a single event or achievement but an ongoing process driven by a particular disposition of mind. Winterer also challenges the idea that Enlightenment ideas were developed in Europe and subsequently transmitted to the Americas by noting the influence that the Americas had on Europeans' view of the world and themselves, as a consequence of the links that tied the regions together from the late 15 c. on.

Treating a range of topics from theories on the creation of the earth and the development of human societies to alternative conceptions of religion, political economy and government, Winterer demonstrates the essential role that the Americas played in the rise of the idea of enlightenment in the first place. An ‘international republic of letters’ stimulated a vibrant intellectual and scientific community: seashell fossils uncovered in the Appalachians forced Europeans to reconsider their own sense of where they stood in time; the remains of ancient indigenous civilizations (including the lately vanquished Aztecs) and surveys of scattered extant native Americans forced a rethinking of the evolution of human populations. The expansion of trade and the ethnographic, biological and zoological diversity of the Americas forced Europeans to think of the world in new ways.

Winterer’s sources are well deployed, the details are fascinating, and her prose is keenly turned for such a scholarly presentation. The chapter on debates about slavery is superb, the discussion of political economy on the eve of industrialization invaluable for understanding the genesis of ideological polemics. All in all, American Enlightenments is top-shelf intellectual history. Any time is a good time to be reminded of the ambivalence and doubt among those people we tend to think of as "Founders."… (altro)