RICHARD WHATMORE’S INTRIGUING new book is a study of eight late eighteenth-century figures one would not expect to be brought together. All, with the exception of the unfortunate Jacques-Pierre Brissot, guillotined in October 1793, were British, and all were convinced, according to Whatmore, that the Enlightenment was at an end.
Much of late has been written about the Enlightenment and what it stood for — the numerous volumes produced over the last two decades by Jonathan Israel immediately spring to mind — and Whatmore is only too ready to accept that there have existed a “plurality of Enlightenments”. However, his Enlightenment is not one, in Peter Gay’s
