ROBERT DARNTON, GEORGE WASHINGTON'S FALSE TEETH

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Robert Darnton. "George Washington's False Teeth." New York Review of Books. March 27, 1997, p. 34ff.

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BIBLIOGRAPHIC AND BIOGRAPHIC

Robert Darnton is an historian at Princeton, specializing in the eighteenth century.

SELECTED SUMMARY NOTES ON THE TEXT

This is a modest defense of the Enlightenment against the totalistic attacks against it by postmodernists.

Darnton proposes to deflate what he considers the inflated scope of Enlightenment studies. By so doing, he hopes to rescue it from the overblown attacks of postmodernists.

He rejects the idea, now afloat in postmodern criticism, that the “Enlightenment” is synonymous with “the totality of Western thought in the eighteenth century.

Darnton limits The Enlightenment to the French elite men of letters in the earlier 18th century, the philosophes, who were committed to the cause of reducing superstition through the exercise of rational thought.

This was a specific political action group in a particular place in Europe. Darnton argues persuasively that they did not originate the notions of natural law, liberty, equality and the like: they appropriated them from the larger western cultural milieu. Though he shrinks the scope of the Enlightenment, Darnton zigs in his argument to assert that its key ideas had a broad influence beyond France and still are alive and influential, despite the attacks of postmodernists.

He then offers a six-point summary of the indictment of the Enlightenment:

1. "The Enlightenment'’s claim to universalism really served as a cover for Western hegemony.”" Captain Cook is an example.

2. "The Enlightenment was cultural imperialism masquerading as a higher form of rationality.”" Orientalism is an example.

3. "The Enlightenment pursued knowledge so fanatically that it undermined ethics.” " Example: the Marquis de Sade

4. "The Enlightenment had an excessive faith in reason.”" Example: the naive cult of progress. He cites a typical postmodernist attack: John Gray, Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (Routledge, 1995).

5. "The Enlightenment belongs to the origins of totalitarianism."”

6. "The Enlightenment is outdated and inadequate as an outlook for coping with contemporary problems."

Darnton'’s essay ends with some personal observations that defend the Enlightenment for today.

(1) Its advocacy of a pan-nationalist Republic of Letters is a useful opponent of destructive nationalism.

(2) Enlightened self-interest has an ecumenical breadth.

(3) The Enlightenment has led to progress with a small "p"--to dentures that are superior to Washington's wooden teeth!

"“If [Voltaire] seems too foreign for postmodern America, why not summon up the central figure in our own political culture? When the crunch comes, we may be able to face up to the injustices around us by gritting our teeth and remembering how hard it was for Washington to grit his."

SIGNIFICANCE, EVALUATION, AND RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER WORK

Darnton's brief piece gives us an IMPORTANT corrective to the ironic TOTALISTIC tendencies in postmodern criticism itself--ironic because the intent of postmodern criticism generally is to oppose the totalistic tendencies of modernism.

Darnton's comment deserves to be read as a gloss on numerous writers who, one way or the other, from Darnton's perspective, overly generalize the significance of The Enlightenment. These include the following:

Baudrillard

Foucault

Derrida

Rorty

Darnton adds a useful gloss on THE PROGRAMME's Floating Final Formulation.

Darnton turns our Commandment II in the Ten Commandments of the Postmodern against postmodernists themselves. By totalizing the Enlightenment to represent western culture as a whole, they commit the postmodern sin of creating grand stories that pretend to explain everything.