0073-2753/11/4902-0217/$10.00 © 2011 Science History Publications Ltd Hist. Sci., xlix (2011) SCIENCE IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT, REVISITED Jan Golinski University of New Hampshire Nearly a quarter of a century ago, a brash young author published in these pages a rather tendentious review of a book by a respected senior scholar. Greeting the publication of Thomas L. Hankins’s Science and the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1985), the reviewer ignored most of the content of the book, focus- ing instead on the relationship signalled in the title, that between the sciences in the eighteenth century and the contemporaneous movement of the Enlightenment. The reviewer insisted that the relationship was in urgent need of clariication. He liber- ally recommended more theoretical consideration of this, but had little to show to represent the kind of historical scholarship he favoured. Several readers found the ending of the review anticlimactic. It gestured toward the possibility of reconstructing an integrated vision of the Enlightenment, but made only vague recommendations as to how this might be achieved. The invocation of Michel Foucault in this connection did not seem particularly promising. Fortunately, Professor Hankins accepted the ambivalent tribute with remarkable forbearance and good grace, and the reviewer was forgiven the youthful impetuosity of his venture. 1 Looking back, the best one might be inclined to say of this review was that it cor- rectly identiied a problem, though offering little by way of a solution. The problem was to describe the identity of the Enlightenment, an issue that the reviewer asserted was crucial to understanding the history of science in the period. What Geoffrey Cantor had elsewhere dubbed “the eighteenth century problem” (that of the rela- tionship between the different ields of knowledge in the era) was thus reframed as the question of the role of the sciences in a broader process of cultural transforma- tion. 2 The review pursued this question by tracing different characterizations of the Enlightenment, from Ernst Cassirer’s vision of a dynamic “mind” of the era, to Peter Gay’s psycho-social account of a struggle for identity by a small coterie of philosophes, to Robert Darnton’s project of mapping the expansion in publishing and distribution of printed materials. 3 In the course of this narrative a fairly clear trend emerged. As the Enlightenment had come to be understood more in terms of its local manifestations and material conditions, its integrity as a whole had receded from view. The reviewer’s claim was that a fragmented, even nebulous image of the Enlightenment had made it harder to understand the situation of science in the period. Hence the slightly desperate turn to Foucault at the end, since The order of things (originally Les mots et les choses, 1966, translated in 1970) had passionately defended the possibility of uncovering deep structures in the history of ideas. While Foucault’s account had its own notorious historiographical problems, and did not in fact feature the Enlightenment in its scheme of periodization, it seemed to offer a