The Enlightenment in America is sometimes conveyed in a single phrase, the political right of self-determination realized. The reduction is possible because self-determination as a philosophical principle incorporates the basic eighteenth-century tenets of Enlightenment thought: the primacy of reason, the reliability of human understanding, the value of individual freedom, trust in method, faith in education, belief in progress, and a corresponding disregard for tradition, constituted authority, and received dogma. At the same time, the realization of self-determination in national ideology has tended to equate philosophical principle with political practice. Since the Revolution claims government by consent of the governed as the irreducible source of its achievement, self-determination becomes the sign and symptom of the Enlightenment at work in each succeeding generation. This is the legacy of the Revolution in daily life.

Not coincidentally, the Enlightenment has been a partisan concept in American historiography, one in which subsidiary notions of liberalism, progress, and rationality have shaped the character of historical reconstructions. Because the idea of an American Enlightenment coincides with national formation and a developmental sense of country, its proponents tend to dwell on the emerging prospect. They see and make use of the original aspiration of human freedom but lose all sense of the Enlightenment as a historical process with its own patterns of constraint. The result is a peculiar one-sidedness or intellectual vulnerability in critical inquiries about the subject.

MARXISM, PROPAGANDA AND SHAW: VARIETIES OF IBSENITE CRITICISM

'I feel I must do something to make people understand our Ibsen a little more than they do,' wrote Eleanor Marx to Havelock Ellis in late December 1885. So invitations went out to a 'few people worth reading Nora to'; and on 15 January 1886, in their flat in Great Russell Street, Karl Marx's youngest daughter and her common-law husband, Edward Aveling, played host to one of the first readings in England of an Ibsen play - A Doll's House in the Henrietta Frances Lord translation. Bernard Shaw was a favoured invitee, playing the part of Krogstad to the Mrs Linde of William Morris's daughter, May. And the evening turned out to be an auspicious one for 'Ibsenism', a meeting point for the plethora of '-isms' - Marxism, Socialism and Fabianism - that hailed Ibsen as a spokesman of their cause.

Before the Great Russell Street soirée, Ibsen had been the subject of articles by proselytizing but generally apolitical English Scandinavianists, like Edmund Gosse, who were intent on making him known beyond the boundaries of Norway. Now Aveling was giving rabble-rousing papers on Ghosts and stirring up debate in the Playgoers' Club at which (writes Shaw) 'Mrs Aveling and I, being of course seasoned socialist mob orators, were much in the position of a pair of terriers dropped into a pit of rats.' Eleanor Marx was spreading the Ibsenist gospel beyond the confines of Bloomsbury to the working-class districts of London and the Midlands.

FREEDOM, TRUTH AND SOCIETY - RHETORIC AND REALITY

During the night of 9 January 1871, a young Dane lay awake in his hospital bed in Rome writing. He was committing to paper a poem to which he had given the title 'To Henrik Ibsen'. He had recently received a letter from Ibsen - a letter carrying a powerful appeal to him to put himself at the head of the 'revolution of the human spirit' which the age cried out for. In the poem which formed his enthusiastic response, the young Dane - the critic Georg Brandes (1842-1927) - described how all those mendacious and authoritarian forces of the contemporary age would be brought low when 'the intellectuals' made their revolt. And he raised the banner of freedom and progress with the words: 'Truth and Freedom are one and the same.'

Time after time in the years that followed, Ibsen was himself to raise this same revolutionary banner - with truth and freedom as the central watchwords. In later years these concepts could sound both abstract and ambiguous; nevertheless, within their historical context, they served as a battle cry in the struggle against the prevailing situation. 'Truth' alone - that truth of the new age such as a Brandes and an Ibsen saw it — could achieve liberation. Without truth there could be no change, no genuine 'freedom'.

Because the New England Puritans radically distrusted the senses and the imagination and were highly suspicious of all forms of art, most literary scholars either have ignored their poems or have treated them as curiosities. The advocates of Anne Bradstreet continue to construct an image of her as a cultural rebel who produced poetry in spite of the religious and social forces against her as a woman and as a Puritan. Similarly, when the poems of Edward Taylor were discovered and published in the late 1930s, many literary historians explained that his self-conscious artistry violated Puritan doctrines and that his poetic impulses suggested that he was by temperament more Catholic or Anglican than Puritan. The long disappearance of his work prompted a conclusion that he had feared exposure of his artistry and thereby enjoined his heirs to suppress his poetry. Not only, in this view, did theology prevail against Puritan art but the harsh physical conditions of New England life left no time for aesthetic indulgences. Bradstreet's productions were attributed to the leisure available to a woman of her high social standing and Taylor's to the quiet life in his wilderness parish of Westfield, Massachusetts.

To be sure, there are many valid historical reasons for assuming the term “Puritan poetry” to be an oxymoron. In England from the late sixteenth century, Puritan theologians and ministers had warned that the senses were unreliable, that appeals to the imagination were dangerous, and that the use of figurative, imagistic, or symbolic language bordered upon idolatry. Reasoning that God had inscribed all the truth that humanity needed in the scriptures, they held that plain and direct discussion of His word was the only truly legitimate and humble mode of verbal expression.

By the time of the Restoration of Charles II in England in 1660, Puritan New England had developed into a relatively prosperous, stable, and independent colony. Some who had left for England during the Protectorate returned to New England after 1660, and other English Puritans, like Edward Taylor, fled to America to escape renewed Anglican persecution. With the native tribes still traumatized by the violence of the Pequot War in the late 1630s, Puritan villages proliferated, and different local governments, customs, and economies replicated the various peasant cultures of places such as Yorkshire, Kent, East Anglia, and the West Country of England. On the whole, travelers in New England in the 1650s described flourishing agricultural communities of pious, hardworking families where the churches and the state appeared to cooperate in governance.

In larger cities such as Boston and Salem, there arose a merchant class based upon manufacturing, the fishing industry, and foreign trade, while the rural villages remained dependent upon farming. Open-field farming continued in some areas until the late seventeenth century, but most land was converted to small individual holdings. Because Congregationalism encouraged village independence, forms of government were quite varied, with selectmen sometimes possessing broad powers, and in many the influence of the ministers upon civil decisions was diminishing.

This slow process of secularization was hastened and became more dramatic when two serious difficulties arose that would precipitate drastic changes in the social and religious order between 1660 and 1690: a land shortage and growing religious uncertainties among the young. Word of the prosperity of the early colonists attracted to New England growing numbers of less pious immigrants who primarily sought financial opportunities.

Brand is a work that has invited terms of discontinuity. It was Ibsen's response to what Halvdan Koht called the volcanic events of the year 1864, an eruption of bitterness over the death of his National-Romantic illusions about a modern Scandinavian brotherhood to match the heroic past. Georg Brandes, Ibsen's Danish critic and ally, referred to 'a shocking, yes overwhelming, impression of having come face to face with a strong and indignant genius, before whose penetrating gaze weakness feels constrained to lower its eyes'. Bjorn Hemmer has identified it as a milestone in Scandinavian literature, leading away from the current aesthetic and idealistic tendency into new fields, committed and contemporary; Brand became, and has remained, the most powerful drama of ideas in the whole of Scandinavian literature. And it is primarily by the ideas that criticism has been at once inspired and divided.

Brand has been taken to be a Christian and an anti-Christian work; the enactment of a specifically theological debate between Old and New Testament concepts of divinity; the story of an individual fighting an existential battle to define his own religious identity; a celebration and an expose of idealism, secular or religious. It has been derived, for approval or blame, from different philosophical systems - Kierkegaard, Hegel, Nietzsche - and related to mythic patterns of universal extent. Brand has been seen as both a vindication of Romanticism and its indictment; or, more recently, as the victim of psychological or socio-psychological conditioning. The ambivalence concentrates, finally, on the meaning of the last scene; does it imply Brand's acceptance or rejection, and in what terms?

fougault among the historians – part i

Foucault's work always had an ambivalent relation to established academic disciplines, but almost all his books are at least superficially classifiable as histories. His first major work, in particular, seems to proclaim its status in the title: Histoire de la folie à l'age classique. One plausible way of trying to understand and evaluate this seminal book is by assessing its status as a work of history.

The reactions of professional historians to Histoire de la foile seem, at first reading, sharply polarized. There are many acknowledgments of its seminal role, beginning with Robert Mandrou's early review in Annales, characterizing it as a “beautiful book” that will be “of central importance for our understanding of the Classical period.” Twenty years later, Michael MacDonald confirmed Mandrou's prophecy: “Anyone who writes about the history of insanity in early modern Europe must travel in the spreading wake of Michel Foucault's famous book, Madness and Civilization.” Later endorsements have been even stronger. Jan Goldstein: “For both their empirical content and their powerful theoretical perspectives, the works of Michel Foucault occupy a special and central place in the historiography of psychiatry.” Roy Porter: “Time has proved Madness and Civilization far the most penetrating work ever written on the history of madness.” More specifically, Foucault has recently been heralded as a prophet of “the new cultural history.”

To many of his readers, Foucault's preoccupations with subjectivity and practices of the self in his later writings have been puzzling and disappointing – even embarrassing. His turn toward an esthetics of the self appeared on the surface to fly in the face of his earlier proclamation of the death of man and his anti-authoritarian predilections for anonymous authorship. Moreover, it seemed to mark a retreat into the self and away from the more politically engaged texts such as Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Vol. I. Had Foucault, the notorious “post-humanist” critic, recanted? This very question manifests a now outmoded concern for coherence and continuity – in short, for identity – in an author's work and life. Yet, if we are to take Foucault at his word, each of his works can be understood as “part of [his] own biography.”

A dominating frame of reference assimilates the crises in meaning and the contradictions in practice that it generates. The Enlightenment shapes early republican culture in just this way. It is both the source of ideas and the boundary placed upon them in revolutionary America, both the expression of broad aspirations and the enforcement of narrow instrumental controls. The literature of public documents offers a proximate case in point. The Federal Constitution of 1787 embodies the central aspirations of the Enlightenment. In daring to know and then in imposing their knowledge, the framers assume the capacity of reason to define and control human society. Their text, the Constitution, celebrates the association between correct human mechanism and universal improvement. Knowledge, through mechanism, forms a more perfect union that will establish justice, insure tranquillity, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for the people of the United States. Yet, at another level, the body and mechanics of the Constitution take back the scope and sweep of its preamble.

Not everyone in America is so insured, so promoted, so secured, so blessed. Quietly but emphatically, the Constitution eliminates whole categories from the rubric of “we, the people.” In a shocking adaptation of the mathematical penchants of the Enlightenment, the Constitution, in Articles 1 and 4, perpetuates the institution of slavery and reduces all individuals who are not “free” to three-fifths of a person. Again in Article 1, it excludes Native Americans from the apportionment of representation and gives Congress an exclusive power in commerce over them.

In one of his last essays, one that is uncharacteristic in its positive and programmatic format, Michel Foucault asked: “What is modern philosophy?… modern philosophy is the philosophy that is attempting to answer the question raised by Kant two centuries ago: What is Enlightenment?” Foucault, echoing Kant, answered that Enlightenment is not the name of an epoch but the exit from immaturity to maturity. The possibility of that exit lies in the relationship the philosopher establishes with the use of reason at the present historical moment. Such a philosopher is not searching for origins and uncovering totalities, nor sculpting Utopias. A modern philosopher, one who is curious about the specificity of the present moment, is someone seeking to find out what difference it makes to be thinking today. This is a critical task in the Kantian sense of an exploration of limits. The task is to inquire into the conditions in which the use of reason is legitimate “in order to determine what can be known, what must be done, and what may be hoped.” Such an inquiry entails reflection on the limits of the individual's free use of reason, the political conditions under which that use is possible, and a diagnosis of the current state of affairs. It sits at the crossroads of “critical reflection and reflection on history.” As we will see, it requires an understanding of thought as a practice and critical thought as a specific kind of situated testing and reflection on the results of that testing which is thoroughly active.

The genteel tradition in American letters was born in the early Republic. An active periodical culture came into being during this time, providing a forum for persons of learning to expound their thoughts on society and literature. With the pronouncements and actions of such critics, the overwhelming majority of whom were men, originates the split – or, more accurately, the obscuring of the connection – between money-making and the arts that has characterized elite literary judgment in this country well into the twentieth century. But the relation between high culture and the commercial spirit was not one just of opposition; it was also a relation of complicity. The very magazines that were airing patrician views accommodated the popular reading habits of the nascent liberal order and opened their pages to voices that disputed established hierarchies. No one more vociferiously proclaimed literature's superiority to the vulgarities of American life than did the foppish editor and essayist Joseph Dennie. Yet this archconservative struggled to make authorship a vocation and helped prepare the way for Washington Irving, the nation's first financially successful writer.

Early periodicals in both England and America evolved out of newspapers and were often indistinguishable from them, a lineage that militated against the segregation of art from mundane affairs. American newspapers were an important outlet for cultural production; they welcomed poetry, literary essays, and vignettes, and their format frequently effaced the line between factual and nonfactual material. Leafing through the papers gives one a vivid sense of the interpenetration of early culture with everyday life.

There can have been few periods of theatrical malaise as extended and as acute as that of the 1870s and early 1880s. Theatre, it was generally agreed by most who wrote about it, did not reflect the intellectual and scientific advances of the nineteenth century, nor did it address the fundamental problems created by an age of industrialization and urbanization. Zola's famous call-to-arms, the essay 'Naturalism in the Theatre' (1880), was but the most inflammatory contribution to what was becoming, by the late 1870s, an escalating critical assault upon the theatre. Zola accused French and, by implication, European drama of being mechanical, superficial, lacking in authentic characters, and perpetuating the outworn cliches of Romanticism. These objections were shared by critics elsewhere. The brothers Hart, leading theorists of the German naturalist movement, bewailed the decadence of German theatre, claiming that no great drama had been written since Schiller and that acting had been in decline since the Napoleonic wars. Everything presented on stage was intended either to complement the 'trivial, shallow taste of the public' or to underpin those values that created a complacent, materialistic society. In England things were little better; Harley Granville-Barker, looking back on the 1880s, suggests that theatre was all 'a rather childish affair'.

A recent ethics textbook aimed at university-level students, in listing the presuppositions of any ethical system, begins, “Singular moral judgments are never merely singular.” By their very nature moral judgments are implicitly universalizable, and only “a peculiar kind of irrationality” that “has come to infect contemporary thinking” could allow one to dispute this self-evident truth. Aristotle was mystified by those who claimed that a characteristic function could be found for an eye, a hand, a foot, a carpenter, or a tanner, but that none could be found for human beings in general. An ethical principle, according to Kant, must be universally applicable if it is to be considered as having any validity whatsoever.

Foucault, however, disconcerts. By claiming that there are no universally applicable principles, no normative standards, “no order of human life, or way we are, or human nature, that one can appeal to in order to judge or evaluate between ways of life,” Foucault, according to Charles Taylor, relinquishes any critical power that his historical analyses might have. Without such a “normative yardstick,” according to Jiirgen Habermas, Foucault's historical analyses cannot be genuinely critical. Indeed, Foucault's skepticism with regard to the notions of universal human nature or universal rationality is clear. He associates universal human nature with the Enlightenment doctrine of humanism, which provides a vision of the human essence with which men and women are expected to conform, thus offering a universal criterion of moral judgment.

In his Introduction to the 1957 edition of his Collected Plays, Arthur Miller singled out certain aspects of Ibsen's work for comment:

In 1873 - close to the mid-point of half a century of creative authorship - Ibsen published the drama which he himself regarded as his 'hovedvserk', his 'main work' or masterpiece: Emperor and Galilean. It was not to be a historical drama of the merely traditional kind. Ibsen's choice of subtitle - 'a world-historic drama' - betrayed his ambitions.

It was a vast historical canvas which he then unfolded, much broader than that of any of his earlier dramas. Years of painstaking labour, including the close study of historical sources, went into this evocation of characters and events from a distant past: the Roman Empire of the fourth century AD and the last twelve years of the life of Julian the Apostate.

Ibsen himself admitted in his correspondence [iv, 603-9]x that the historical material he had been grappling with was enormous, and that he realized that he had sacrificed years of his life to this mammoth work, a 'double' drama in ten Acts. To call forth this historical epoch had been 'a Herculean task'. Nevertheless he was persuaded that he had succeeded in re-creating these historical characters in 'realistic' form. This had however not been his main concern: his perspective of history here had been — to use Nietzsche's terminology — neither antiquarian nor monumental.

The disruptive modes in sermonizing and pamphleteering in eighteenth-century America compete with the predisposition toward consensus evident in so much writing of the period. As the first chooses perception through crisis, so the second emphasizes the possibilities in reason and progress. Separate narratives, they both contribute to revolutionary discourse – sometimes in the same breath. The skill in revolutionary writing demands the promiscuous manipulation of these tendencies in prose that often tries to be provocative and encompassing at once, but an accident of history tips the balance between them. Acrimony grows on all sides in the 1780s and, with it, an intellectual preoccupation; early republicans yearn for a better definition of their experiment in government. Constitutionalism will control that quest, and its impulses are consensual in form.

From the first, American constitutionalism differs from its English equivalent in its commitment to the written word. The biblical conjunction of sovereignty and the book of law, the need for an artificially imposed order in the wilderness, and the politics of Anglo–American relations–these factors all encourage a literal documentation of governmental forms as the reference point of communal identity. Since every act of founding a new community is also a challenge to the status quo ante, the challenge itself, however implicit, must be laid to rest in new claims of authority, placement, and acceptance. Invariably, then, community in America begins in some act of writing. If such writings tend to confirm traditional beliefs, they also reconstitute those beliefs in a moment of registered agreement, and these moments in them-selves soon become a prerequisite to group identity.

From the very start of his career, Henrik Ibsen learned the compulsions of working to a rigorous deadline. When in the autumn of 1851 he was offered a post at the newly established theatre in Bergen, his contract stipulated that he was to 'assist the theatre as dramatic author'. The unwritten assumption was that he would be expected to come forward with an original dramatic work, all ready and rehearsed for performance, every 2 January - the anniversary of the founding of the theatre. This, as he soon discovered, was to be achieved alongside a punishing regime of daily practical work in the theatre as 'Instructeur'.

His first 'anniversary' occasion, on 2 January 1852, clearly allowed him insufficient time to compose a new full-scale dramatic work; but he did go some way towards meeting his obligations by writing a 'Prologue', partly in rhymed and partly in unrhymed verse, the sentiments of which placed the young author very firmly behind the nationalistic endeavours of the new theatre [i, 619-20].

The succeeding five anniversary occasions — and the nature and quality of the works performed — clearly testify that during these years Ibsen found himself having to work at the composition of his dramas under severe time pressure. On the first of these, in 1853, St John's Night flopped, running for only two performances; although at the time he was quite ready to acknowledge the play as having come from his pen, in later life he tried to disown it [see i, 686].