In recent decades, Jonathan I. Israel writes, the Enlightenment has emerged as “the single most important topic, internationally, in modern historical studies, and one of crucial significance also in our politics, cultural studies and philosophy.” That is a large claim for a movement of 18th-century thought, and many will find it exaggerated, if not self-serving, seeing that its author, a professor of history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Prince­ton, N.J., has devoted the last decade of his life to exploring that very subject.

Still, in the context of a worldwide religious resurgence and the war on terror, the Enlightenment has become a favored precursor of our time, replacing wizened rivals like the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Russian Revolution. Speaking before the British Parliament in May, President Obama invoked the “ideals of the Enlightenment” as a treasured source of modern values. Others disagree, presenting the movement as the source of contemporary ills, ranging from irreligion to Western hegemony to the tyranny of reason. In these readings, the Enlightenment serves nicely as the opening chapter in a book of stories we tell about ourselves.

In Israel’s telling, the story goes like this: Not long ago, the world lived in near-total eclipse. Men and women fumbled in the dark, and in their ignorance and fear they gave credence to all manner of superstition and injustice — God and the angels; aristocracy and the divine right of kings; empire and slavery; and the oppression of women, people of color and the poor. But then, in tenebris lux, a few bold philosophers marched forward. Spreading reason, tolerance, a love of liberty and humanity, they fostered a revolution of the mind, setting the world on its modern course.

Image Credit... Roger-Viollet/The Image Works, courtesy of the Musee Carnavalet, Paris

If the story sounds familiar, it should. Eighteenth-century men and women said much the same about themselves, even as their enemies decried their false lights. Partisans and opponents continued the battle in the 19th century, creating “The Enlightenment” as an accepted historical category. At critical junctures in the 20th century, too, after the First and Second World Wars and in the 1960s, when the fate of civilization seemed imperiled or doomed, critics returned to the Enlightenment as a sort of palimpsest on which to read and write our fate.