Page - 10 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Introduction10 allegiances—while it is also true that subsequently they were again capable of assuming broader significance.20 What this leads us to acknowledge is that we need to pay more attention to the multilayered intellectual gravitation, cultural loyalty, social experience, and realms of existence or “life worlds” (Lebenswelten) of individual actors who move among these (national as well as sub- and supra-national; religious, pro- fessional, institutional, socio-cultural) realms with considerable ease.21 In oth- er words, it points to the recognition that if we want to understand springs of action, actions, and agents in the Enlightenment as they were, in and of them- selves both “national” and “trans-national” frameworks of interpretation are inadequate, and we need one that takes account of the possibility and the real- ity of shifting accents and flexible adaptability between the one and the other of these “realms.” Two metaphors are especially helpful in elucidating such a framework. One is the idea of the Enlightenment Republic of Letters as an “echo chamber.”22 In it, thanks to the medium of print culture and the prolif- eration of review journals, a plurality of voices would be rendered almost ca- cophonic by the near-inevitability of one’s own utterances being critically re- sponded to by a commentator with whom one was personally unacquainted. At the same time, and for the same reason, in this space it was always possible to appeal to an authority beyond one’s immediate environment. As a matter of fact, this is inseparable from the larger phenomenon of “the rise of the pub- lic (sphere)” in eighteenth-century Europe, with its myriad venues and vehi- cles of polite and scholarly sociability.23 Second, it is also useful to approach the Enlightenment as a “system” in a sense similar to Immanuel Wallerstein’s 20 Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore, 6 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1969–90); John Robertson, “Franco Venturi’s Enlightenment,” Past and Present 137 (1992): 183–206; Robertson, “The Enlightenment above National Context,” Historical Journal 40 (1997): 667–97. 21 Cf. “The Enlightenment is perhaps best framed as a transnational process characterized by secular and religious motives and implications, and by which a constantly evolving series of movements dynamically intersect and dialectically constitute one another.” Jeffrey D. Burson, “Introduction,” in Burson and Lehner, Enlightenment and Catholicism, 1–37. On the centrality of spatial dimensions to the Enlightenment’s concerns and con- tents, see Charles W.J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 22 Lorraine Daston, “Afterword: The Ethos of Enlightenment,” in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 1999), 495–504. 23 The concept derives from Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1989 [1962]). See the joint review of the English edition of Habermas’s book with Reinhart Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis, Anthony LaVopa, “Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe,” Journal of Modern History 64, no. 1 (1992): 79–116; also