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Comment by jackcosgrove | Hacker News Reader

I am not abreast of current thinking on the Enlightenment, but it seems blaming things like the world wars and their atrocities on the Enlightenment is bad history. The more likely culprit of those wars is romantic nationalism, which was a reaction to the Enlightenment. That the Enlightenment didn't figure everything out and precipitate the end of history in 1789 doesn't seem like an indictment of it, and it hardly seems fair to lay the crimes of counter-movements at its feet. I'm curious what the historical interpretation is that pins nationalism on the Enlightenment.

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Some aspects of nationalism can certainly be traced to the Enlightenment. For example, the concept of one country = one language stemmed from the ideologues of the French revolution, who swiftly went to work suppressing regional languages in their own country. This fell like a lit match on Austro-Hungary, where each ethnic group now felt even greater pressure to carve out its own space on linguistic grounds.

I grant that the Enlightenment principle of the commonality of all people would lead to a universal language, and ending regional languages is the first step of that. However delineating linguistic boundaries based on national ones seems more like a throwback to the Westphalian settlement than to a universalizing movement. Just because something happened during the ferment of the Enlightenment doesn't mean its pedigree is pure; there are always atavistic forces at work.

You’re missing the key point expressed as exchanging theological conflict for political conflict through nationalism. Humans are a predator species and that doesn’t change.

To wit: “ Hume and his acolytes had not counted on the translation of superstition and intolerance from religion into politics. Just as soon as people stopped being willing to kill and die for their religion, they started killing and dying for their country.”

Austria-Hungary collapsed after WW1, quite some time after Enlightment. It survived the Napoleonic Wars just fine.

I thought that the political entity was known as the Holy Roman Empire up to the Napoleonic wars, and that Austria-Hungary was what it went by after. Maybe that's their point; at least nominally the basis of the empire went from being religious to being based on secular culture/ethnicity, and eventually a lot of the land previously part of the Holy Roman Empire instead eventually merged with Prussia into what became Germany.

So, I just read a bit on my pre-WW1 European history... And now I know why I regarded Austria-Hungary as seperate entity already before the Napoleonic Wars: The Prussian and Austrian tension arose already before, an in my memory that registered as an united Empire in name only, or as Volaire put it: Neither Roman, Holly nor an Empire.

One point to formalize this split would be 1806, rather early in the Napoleonic Wars.

Overall so, you are right. The Asutria-Hungary I talked about existed only between the Napoleonic Wars and the end of WW1.

My learning about this was all back in high school during AP European History over a decade ago, so I did have to do a quick search before my comment to make sure I remembered correctly when the transition from the Holy Roman Empire to Austria-Hungary happened as well. I also don't have any illusions that even if my memory of it was perfect, the stuff I learned wasn't necessarily any more accurate than anything anyone was taught to the contrary, since as you mention, trying to pin down an exact date of transition is a bit open to interpretation.

At least from what I remember being taught, Prussia definitely did start to rise in power before the Napoleonic Wars, and the Holy Roman Empire was certainly not a very unified entity (Voltaire's quote always sticks in my mind as well, although I honestly had forgotten who had said it). I think the textbook we used often would talk specifically about the Habsburg dynasty and their sphere of influence in order to be more precise about what was under a more centralized authority versus more independent, and it's arguable that centralized rule over the Holy Roman Empire was already proven infeasible by the Thirty Years War. My impression was that the disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire as a unified entity was more or less inevitable, but where exactly all the pieces would end up was much less clear. Prussia obviously ended up a large winner, but their influence was contested in places; they fought wars against Denmark and France later in the century in addition to Austria-Hungary in the process of unifying a larger German state, and even those claims didn't necessarily last (e.g. France taking back Alsace and Lorraine after WWI). The Napoleonic Wars kind of just eliminated any remaining pretense of Austrian control over the lands that they hadn't really had much authority over for some time beforehand, which made the path Prussia to expand and consolidate easier than ever before.

Austria-Hungary finally collapsed after an entire 19th century full of ethnic strife, where many ideologues specifically pointed to French Revolution values.

More fundamentally, I tend to roll my eyes at anyone who blames our wars on one simple thing. Humans have been fighting and killing since there was more than one of us. Only the rationalizations, tools, and scale have changed.

> That the Enlightenment didn't figure everything out and precipitate the end of history in 1789 doesn't seem like an indictment of it

It's an indictment of the idea that reason is able to get us to transcend our nature.

Things have gotten better since then haven't they? It's not just because of the industrial revolution; attitudes did change. I think the best indictment of the Enlightenment is that its thinkers were too premature with their declaration of victory over human nature. This is ongoing, in fits and starts, but with an upward trajectory.

Your own declaration of success seems premature. We still haven't yet seen the full effects of post-religious societies.

Because, enlightment or not, there are no post-religious societies.

What we did see, plenty, is the effect of highly religious societies, and it ain't pretty when religion and politics aren't seperated. And we see the first nascent examples of religious nationalism in India, which isn't pretty neither.

If there are no post-religious societies, what makes you sure there can be post-religious politics?

By way of response, here's a link to the Inequality Database. Note the bottom 50% recently. Not very upward.

https://wid.world/country/usa/

How do you differentiate between a "reaction" and a natural consequence? Maybe as religion / superstition diminished, that left an identity vacuum which was filled by nationalism?

I don't. The main work of the Enlightenment was to end religious wars, and I don't think that should not have been attempted because religious wars would be replaced by national wars. We have to keep working through all the crises that ensue. Blaming the Enlightenment for all the dominoes that fell over removes responsibility for other actors and currents, and makes the Enlightenment a scapegoat.

there is one field called "economic history" that is as dense as theology.

Their job is to gatekeep the reception and accepted nomenclature of the papers economists churn with contents that social scientists wouldn't touch with a 12ft pole, and they instead write with the utmost confidence. They produce all the "schools" of economics we talk about here which mean nothing.

Blaming enlightenment to the failures of the last imperialism is the accepted speak today.

How do you view romantic nationalism and its extensions (Nazism, Russian communism, white supremacy, etc.) as opposed to Enlightenment principles rather than as their offspring? I have always been taught the opposite.

> I have always been taught the opposite.

I find that sad.

It is historically correct that romanticism was a reaction to the Enlightenment. The thinkers of the day said as much. As I said elsewhere, you can't blame a thesis for its antithesis.

The Enlightenment emphasized universality, and pluralism as the means to coexist given our pre-existing differences. Romanticism celebrates the particular and the local. Many but not all Romantic thinkers extended this to include basically chauvinism for their own particular kind of culture.

The Enlightenment emphasized reason, evidence, and dispassionate analysis. Romanticism emphasized emotion, the inner life, and passion.

They could not be more different, given that Romanticism was conceived as a reaction to the Enlightenment and so its thinkers staked out opposing positions.

If you were actually taught that romanticism was not opposed to the Enlightenment I feel your education has done you a disservice.

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