Introduction

A generation ago historical scholarship conveyed a serene, untroubled view of the Enlightenment. As portrayed by scholars of the 1960s and 1970s, the Enlightenment was a movement based in France and England; secular, even "pagan" in temper; based unproblematically on scientific method; and devoted to reform and progress.1 In the intervening years, however, these familiar features of the Enlightenment have been questioned by Enlightenment revisionists inspired by diverse theoretical enterprises, chief among them the work of the Frankfurt School and of Michel Foucault. Enlightenment revisionism is perhaps most aptly viewed as a long-term consequence of the Holocaust, the rationalized attempt by leaders of a putatively enlightened nation to destroy a branch of the human race. Indeed revision got underway amid the Holocaust itself in the famous book by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno entitled Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in 1944.2 Here emerged the view that would haunt the passages of late twentieth-century scholarship: the Enlightenment as a great movement toward "the world of the administered life," one in which intellect was identified with "that which is inimical to the spirit. " 3

Of the questions raised by this denunciation of Enlightenment, none was, or remains, more crucial than the nature of the Enlightenment heritage in respect to science. Horkheimer and Adorno argued that "not only the pursuit but the meaning of science [had] become problematical" because science ineluctably encouraged an instrumental approach to nature and humanity. Science, they asserted, undergirded all improving movements that "as representatives of power - even if of power for good - ... became historical forces which could be organized, and as such played a bloody role in the true history of the human race: that of the instruments of organization. "4 This attack on the Enlightenment heritage of science followed from the philosophical presuppositions of Horkheimer and Adorno, who saw Enlightenment originating in a drive to self-preservation that produced "blindly pragmatized thought" bereft of "its transcending quality and its relation to truth. "5 Their perspective did not, however, rest on historical investigation of the actual practice of science in Enlightenment Europe. Nor could it have, since at the time of their writing the history of Enlightenment science was little developed. To be sure, the

Enlightenment had been readily integrated into the positivist history of science elaborated in the nineteenth century. So viewed, the Enlightenment continued the Scientific Revolution and thus stood at the font of subsequent scientific development in the West. But close study of what kind of science was done under the aegis of Enlightenment - methods, problems, aims - was in short supply. Nor, given the generally optimistic cast of both history of science and Enlightenment studies in the postwar decades, did the gloomy perspective of Horkheimer and Adorno spur historical investigations that might lend empirical weight to their rethinking of reason, science, and Enlightenment.