ABSTRACT
Yet, as enduring and deeply held as such perceptions are, they can mislead us both about Enlightenment attitudes toward religious belief and about the Enlightenment’s place in European cultural history. Condorcet s extreme hostility toward Christianity was one that few eighteenth-century intellectuals shared. Voltaire (François Marie Arouet [1694-1778]) and David Hume (1711-76) may have railed against the clergy and lampooned its pretensions and institutions, but their criticisms of religious belief were more muted, and, in Hume’s case, published only posthumously. Moreover, the conviction that the Enlightenment represented a decisive liberating moment in Western cultural history must itself be called into question. The bald citation of Condorcet’s views out of their historical context masks the fact that they were formulated at a moment when this most ardent propagandist for enlightenment was being hunted down by the French revolutionary government. The irony of Condorcet’s position arises not because the radicalism of the French Revolution was in any obvious way either the realization or the perversion of Enlightenment ideology-the transformative experience of political revolution belies any such direct linkage —but because both enlightenment and political repression are more deeply linked in the historical trajectory of Western culture, a point made so brilliantly by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno half a century ago.
