Critical Global Studies and Planetary History: New Perspectives on the Enlightenment

: Though doing so invites methodological problems, the concept of ‘ the Enlightenment ’ is nevertheless in need of widening: it can no longer be reduced to any one historical period; nor can it be restricted to Europe. As a process of rationalization, scientification, technification, secularization, or democratiza-tion, forms of Enlightenment can be identified in many periods and regions. I wish to argue here that an expanded meaning opens up opportunities for an enhanced and interdisciplinary Enlightenment research. On the basis of two recent approaches to the Enlightenment — by Felicity A. Nussbaum and Dipesh Chakrabarty — I will try to show the interdependency of period and process notions, and ponder the ways in which they inform one another. A combined reading of both approaches shows how they might serve as models for a specific form of interdisciplinary global history in the heritage of the Enlightenment.

Abstract: Though doing so invitesm ethodological problems,the concept of 'the Enlightenment' is nevertheless in need of widening:itcan no longer be reduced to anyo ne historical period; nor can it be restricted to Europe. As ap rocess of rationalization, scientification, technification, secularization, or democratization, forms of Enlightenment can be identified in manyp eriods and regions.I wish to arguehere thatanexpandedmeaning opens up opportunities for an enhanced and interdisciplinary Enlightenment research. On the basis of two recent approachestothe Enlightenment-by FelicityA.N ussbaum and Dipesh Chakrabarty-Iwill try to show the interdependency of period and process notions, and ponderthe ways in which they informone another.Acombined readingofboth approachess hows how they might servea sm odels for as pecific form of interdisciplinary globalh istory in the heritageo ft he Enlightenment.
It has often been remarked that-more than other period concepts of history-the concept of the Enlightenment is characterized by asemantic double structure: it signifies on the one hand the historical period of the eighteenth century,a nd a transepochal and still ongoing process of rationalization on the other.This double meaning (or even double concept) was giveni ts canonical formulation by JürgenH abermas'sn otion of the 'project of Enlightenment' (Habermas 1990). Whereas historians and philologists in recent decades have tried to narrow down the concept and to radicallyh istoricize the Enlightenment by limiting it to objects of the eighteenth century, the broader understandingofthe Enlightenment was left to sociologists,p olitical scientists or the field of literary studies. Robert Darnton'sa ttempt to reduce the Enlightenment to as pecific movement in Paris and aspecific type of historical agent against an 'industry of the Enlightenment' (Darnton 2003)-or Quentin Skinner'smethodological remarks,a lready formulated in the late 1960s against the myth of continuity of (not onlyE nlightenment)i deas (Skinner 1969)-are onlyt he most prominent examples of these attempts.Inthe decades after the 1980s, one often emphasized the distances between now and then in an attempt at warding off the danger of an ideological misuse of the Enlightenment: the non-Enlightened aspects of the eighteenth century have been stressed, and occultisms, esotericisms, and the persistenceofreligions and superstitions have been examined to show the discontinuities,rather than as imple scheme of plainm odernization since the eighteenth century.¹ Nonetheless all these pleadingsf or historicization and contextualization could not prevent the Enlightenment being understood in its broad meaning: as ap rocess of rationalization, scientification, technification, secularization,o r democratization. In this sense, forms of Enlightenment can be identified in periods or regions other thant he European eighteenth century:o ne can speak of Islamic Enlightenments in the eleventh centurya sw ell as considering that perhaps,nowadays,the Enlightenment has its place in Latin America rather than in Europe.² Especiallyt he broader and science-transcending discussions in the public sphere refert oawide understandingo ft he Enlightenment and indicate the ongoing social relevance of the concept of the Enlightenment as ap roject.
Indeed, despite all the methodological problems that professional historians have with such aw idening of the concept,t hey on the otherh and know that there are no naked facts that can be reduced to the eighteenth century,o ra ny historical period. Positivism might be am ethodological presupposition, but can also turn into an ideologyofmere facts. Historization alone doesn'tprevent ideology, and can be even more ideological thanconstructions that make explicit their cognitive interest and standpoint.F romi ts questions posed to the past about the theories that are applied, to questions of reception and impacts, historiographyi sa lways transcendingt he narrow context of the examined period. This is especiallyt rue when questions of intellectual history are touched upon, and when the ideas of aperiod-as in case of the Enlightenment-have anormative surplus that transcends the end of the eighteenthc entury. It is not by chance, that in the very last years, beneath avivid positivist research on details of the eighteenth century,s ome of the most inspiring approaches have been based on ab road understanding of the Enlightenment that aims to think of the concept of period and the concept of project together.The newlye merging global history discourse has proved especiallyf ruitful in this respect.
Authors from postcolonial, postmodern, and subaltern studies discovered the Enlightenment.J acques Derrida tried in some of his last essays to mediate  See, for instanceNeugebauer-Wölk (1999). Most recently, Luise Schorn-Schütteargued against ap lain narration of modernity (2009).  In an interview with the New Left Review in January 2010,Eric Hobsbawm answeredthe question if thereare anyvivid Enlightenment traditions with areference to Latin America: "Certainly in Latin America, politics and general public discourse arestill conducted in the old Enlightenment-liberal, socialist,c ommunist-terms." (New Left Review,6 1, 2010,p .13-14) between ac ritique of Enlightened universalism and as alvation of reason through the concept of an 'Enlightenment to come' ("Le 'Monde' des lumières av enir") ( Derrida 2003). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak made as imilar attempt with her concept of the Enlightenment as an 'enablingv iolation' (Spivak 2008, pp. 8 -9). From adifferent perspective,Zev Sternhell tries to show in his engaged studyonTheAnti-EnlightenmentTradition thatthere is not onlyatranstemporal processofEnlightenment,but also aCounter-Enlightenment tendency that is defined by ac ultural and national essentialism, starting in the eighteenth century with Edmund Burke and Herder and lasting until today (Sternhell 2006). Last but not least,Daniel Fulda and his team at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Research on the European Enlightenment (IZEA)i nH alle have examined underlying 'cultural patterns of the Enlightenment' emerging in the eighteenth century and lasting until the present day( Fulda2 010).
In my contribution, Iwish to arguet hat the double meaning of the Enlightenment is not onlyadanger but at the same time opensupopportunities for an enhanceda nd interdisciplinary Enlightenmentr esearcht hat goes beyond the narrow borders of an academic historical or philological reconstruction of a past period thati sp resumed to have nothing to do with our contemporary concerns.Onthe basisoftwo recent approaches to the Enlightenment-by Felicity A. Nussbaum and DipeshC hakrabarty-Iw ill try to show the interdependency of period and process notions, and ponder the ways in which they informo ne another.F elicity A. Nussbaum pleads for an enhanced and globalized view of the eighteenthc enturyi no rder to overcomet raditionalE uro-centric interpretations of that period. She argues that such areinterpretationofthe pre-history of globalization in the period of the Enlightenment alsoa llows us to modify our contemporary understanding of these processes in the direction of ap luralized view of multiple ways to modernity (1). Whereas Nussbaum'ss tarting point is thus ah istoricalr einterpretation of the eighteenthc entury, one of the most prominent current postcolonial critics of the Enlightenment'sE urocentrism, Dipesh Chakrabarty, rediscovers certain universal notions of the eighteenthcentury-namelyt he idea of au niversal history of mankind as as pecies-in order to face contemporary global challenges such as climate change, and tries to reformulate them with respect to amodification of basic postcolonial methodological assumptions. He argues that the culturald iversity and pluralitya xioms of postcolonialism have to be mediated with an anthropological and biological deep history of the human species as awhole (2). Both approaches can serveasmodels for aspecific form of interdisciplinary global history in the heritageofthe Enlightenment.

Felicity A. Nussbaum'sr esearch programo f Critical GlobalE ighteenth CenturyS tudies
In the introduction to her standard volume on questions of Enlightenment and Globaliziation, TheGlobal Eighteenth Century,Felicity A. Nussbaum givesanoutline of the possibilitiesand limits of non-Eurocentric eighteenth century studies. She develops her approach to what she calls 'critical global studies' in opposition to al inearn arrative of globalization and modernization. She calls this narrative-starting in the Enlightenment and ending up in today'sglobalized world -akind of European victory history.Based on some insights taken from postcolonial studies and the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment'suniversalism, she pleads for ap luralization, specification, and modificationo ft he traditional triad of European Enlightenment,m odernity,a nd globalization. This, she contends,i saprecondition for ac ritical view on imperial forms of globalization and gender hierarchies,a sw ell as for the acknowledgement of indigenous forms of knowledge or for giving av oice to subalterns or minorities: "In particular,postmodern thinkers,Marxist theorists, and, more frequently, feminists and historians of race,h aves ignificantlyc omplicated our understandingo ft he genealogyo fh uman difference." (Nussbaum 2003,p .6) What makes Nussbaum'sapproach an important argument in our context is her assumption that it is just such an enhancedu nderstanding-ab roader historical reconstruction of the eighteenth centuryand the Enlightenment-thatenables at the same time agenealogical deconstruction of monocausally structured Eurocentric understandingso fg lobalization: Critical global studies helps us to understand that the unmodifiedterm 'globalization'-like 'modernity'-is inadequateinreflectingits manyhistorical meanings,and imprecise in conveying the complexities of varied social, economical, and cultural conditions in their specific geographical locations.( Nussbaum2 003,p .5 ) The tasks of such aprogram of enhancedstudy of the eighteenth century would be: [to]analyze the European encounterwith other populations throughout the world and offer ways to think criticallya bout the imperative of that [European] imperial project… [and to] query the boundariesofnational histories and literatures that have limited our understandingst or econsider sexual and racial intermingling, religious encounters, the exchange of goods and diseases,i ndigenous knowledge,a nd the real and imagined mappingo ft he earth'sd omain. (Nussbaum2 003,p .1) These global crossings,encounters,exchanges, transfers, appropriations and diffusions are at the root of the European Enlightenment,which can itself be defined as an accelerated and enhanced "movement of ideas across borders and over time" (Nussbaum 2003,p .2 ), rather than as af ixed set of genuinelyE uropean ideas. European travelers, emperors and scientists didn'tcome to the extra-European world with ready-made models of an Enlightened society,b ut rather, the global experience is at the root of concepts that are generallys een as genu-inelyE uropean and/or Enlightened. World travelers such as James Cook, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, GeorgForster, or Alexander vonHumboldt and their reports initiated broad debates about the state of nature and the critique of European societies that otherwise would not have taken place. In addition, 'defining elements' of the Enlightenment such as state sovereignty,n ation-based citizenship, and modern economic institutions were, even in eighteenth-century Europe, far from being fullyelaborated, and even fartherf rom actual implementation.
Examining these exchanges can show thatdistinctions between centers and peripheries, European and non-European, and modern and premodern societies are often retrospective divisions that have no referencet ot he specific historical situation. Forexample, as JürgenOsterhammel has remarked, eighteenthcentury agricultures and so-called premodern societiesinEurope as well as elsewhere (his example is China)a re based on similar structures,a nd mayh aveh ad more in common then than they do in the eraofi ndustrialization and capitalism (Osterhammel 2009,p .21). Often the borders are drawnwithin Europe-e. g., in respect to Ireland or Eastern Europe where 'savages' were identified in one'so wn country-but also, Great Britain was often not seen as part of Europe.
Since ideas about Europe have never been homogenous or uncontested, there are no fixed borders between Europe and non-Europe, but always,h istoricallya si nt he present,c onstructions against the background of specific interests. In the eighteenth century,t he world was not composed of essentiallyd istinct cultures-of aE uropean or western center and an on-European periphery. Rather,itwould be much more precise to speak of hybrid and transeuropean cultural spaces, such as the Eurasian Russian or the Ottoman Empire in the East, the United Stateso rL atin America as transatlantic spaces,orM editerranean regions such as the Maghreb, with its mixture of Turks, Christians, and Jews, or of Moors, Arabs, Bedouins, Berbers, and Kabyles in the South.
In this waythe center-periphery distinction and traditional forms of empireand world systems-theory can be shown as Eurocentric shortcomings. Empirebuilding has not been aE uropean monopoly: there are and have always been various forms of non-European empires,s uch as the Arab,O ttoman, Mughal and Qing empires (and manym ore), as John Darwin has shown in his recent comprehensive history of global empires (Darwin 2008).
While the center-periphery formula is problematized, the concept of modernity becomes pluralized within critical global studies. In the place of as ingle model of progress,one can speak of different phases of globalization. In critical global studies, the emphasis would be put on discontinuities and historicalruptures rather than on linear conceptions of progress.The models underlying this approach are the conceptso fm ultiple modernities (Eisenstadt 2002)a nd of different phases of globalization. Walter Mignolo and Ottmar Ette, for example, interpret the Enlightenment as as econd phase of European expansion after the conquests of the 15 th and 16 th Centuries (Mignolo 1998).Following this periodization, the Enlightenment can be defined as as pecific form of reflection on-and partlyalsoacritique of-the earlier European expansion projects and of previous forms of colonialism (Muthu 2003;D'Aprile). In addition, it can be seen as anot onlyp olitically but also scientificallym otivated measurement of aw orld that had alreadyb een widelyd iscovered before (Despoix 2009).
What Nussbaum formulatesf or eighteenth century studies has been undertaken in as imilar wayb ya uthorsl ike Christopher Bayly, JürgenO sterhammel and John Darwin in the general field of global historiography (Osterhammel 2009;Darwin2008;Bayly 2005). Allthese recent approaches can be seen as critical global studies following the insight that an on-Eurocentric perspective is a crucial necessity in global history.

Dipesh Chakrabarty'sr esearch program of PlanetaryH istory
Whereas Felicity Nussbaum applies insights from modernp ostcolonial theories to the studyofthe eighteenth century in order to come to amodified understanding of current globalization, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty goes the other way around. In as eries of recent articles, Chakrabarty,o ne of the most important and prominent founding fatherso fp ostcolonialism (along with EdwardS aid, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Homi Bhaba), tries to reformulate or even rehabilitate aspects of the Enlightenment'sh istoricalthinkingi nt he face of current environmental challenges and crises.
Accordingt oC hakrabarty,t hese challenges require ar ethinkingo ft he Enlightenment'sp roject of ac ommon universal history of mankind or of the human species, first developed in the eighteenth century.I nt his respect,Chakrabarty claims that the Enlightenment'su niversalism cannot onlybes een as an expression of the Euro-Atlantic world'sc laim to hegemony, but is at the same time av ery important meansf or criticizingt he consequences of this hegemony -among them, today'sC limate crisis as an effect of the industrializing the world: "I'ma gainst anyi deas of hierarchies of civilizations but the idea of one common civilization of humanityo nt his planets eems to me an important part of our anti-colonial heritage." (Chakrabarty 2010,p .10, my transl.) In his article on Humanism in an Age of Globalization,Chakrabarty pointsto ac rucial difference between the 20 th and the 21 st Centuries (Chakrabarty 2008, pp. 74 -90): whereas the 20 th Century was characterized by the question of race, the 21 st will be shaped by the global challengeo fc limate change. Because of this new situation, he claims, every reflection on globalization processes has to takeinto account questions of planetary history.Whereas (postcolonial) thinking on globalization is concerned with the historical and culturald ifferences, questions of colonialisms, racisms, and classismso nt he one hand and tolerance, cosmopolitisms and intercultural dialogue on the other,planetary history instead always thinks of humanity in the sense of aunity of the species. Human beingsare construed in the latter as members of aspecies who are characterized by ageneral-even if unequal and diverse-pursuit of happiness,through which they destroy their own biosphere and thus the foundationso ft heir existence (Chakrabarty 2010,p.146). This leads Chakrabartytothe conclusion thathis former theoretical approaches to globalization, such as "Marxist analysis of capital, subaltern studies,a nd postcolonial criticism over the last twenty-five years, while enormouslyu seful in studying globalization, had not reallyp repared me for making sense of this planetary conjuncture within which humanity finds itself today." (Chakrabarty 2010,p .199) In his 2009 article in the journal Critical Inquiry,bearing the title TheClimate of History,C hakrabarty givest he most explicit outline of his program of an ew planetary history (Chakrabarty 2009,pp. 197-222).What makes our current situation different from all other periods in history,a ccordingt oC hakrabarty,i st he fact that humans are able to destroy the foundations of their owne xistence, and thus that the old distinction between natural history and human history cannot be upheld anylonger. Humans are no longer simplypart of nature,or'biological actors',but have now gained the status of 'geological actors'.Therefore, it is not enough to write an environmental history (Umweltgeschichte)i nw hich the interdependencies between humans and theire nvironment are described; rather,w hat is needed is an ew kind of planetary history.C hakrabarty calls this new period of history,inwhich mankind has become ageological actor, 'Anthropocene'-aterm thatisintended to conveyits planetary significance through analogyt og eological periods likeH olocene or Pleistocene. Earth processes and questions of human or cultural history have gainedanew statusofinterdepend-ence in this new era. This different situation requires us to bring together deep structures of history with cultural and oftenv ery short-term developments, thus compellingacollaboration of the naturals ciences( such as biologyo ra nthropology) with history.T he traditionalc ategorical separation between them two cannot be kept up anyl onger: 'Human behavior is seen as the product not just of recorded history,ten thousand years recent,but of deep history, the combined genetic and culturalchangesthat created humanity over hundreds of [thousands of]years.' […]W ithout such knowledge of the deep history of humanity it would be difficultt oa rrive at as ecular understandingo fw hy climatec hange constitutes acrisis for humans.Geologists and climatescientists mayexplain whythe currentp hase of global warming-as distinct from the warmingo ft he planett hat has happened before-is anthropogenic in nature,but the ensuingcrisis for humans is not understandable unless one works out the consequences of that warming. The consequences makes ense onlyi fw et hink of humans as af orm of life and look on human history as part of the history of life on this planet. (Chakrabarty 2009,pp. 205-6;quotingWilson, Ed-wardO .[ 1996]: In Search of Nature) Chakrabartyu ses two arguments to refute the objection advanced by historians that culture and nature (the history of mankind and the history of nature) are categoricallyd ifferent thingss ince the formeri sb ased on freedom and agency, whereas the latter is not-an argument that has been part of the basic assumptions of the theory of history since Vico'saxioms. In the amalgamation of biological and culturalm odels, they see abiologist reduction and essentialism of cultural and social processes. Firstly, Chakrabarty (quoting DanielL ordS mail) points out that the historical deep structure models of natural sciences are not determinist models, as can alreadyb es hown in the most prominent example, the Darwinian evolutionary model: Species, according to Darwin, are not fixed entities with natural essences imbued in them by the Creator. … Natural selection does not homogenize the individuals of as pecies. … Giventhis stateofaffairs,the searchfor anormal … nature and bodytype [of anyparticular species] is futile. And so it goes for the equallyf utile quest to identify "human nature." (Chakrabarty 2009,p p. 214-215) Secondly, natural scientists alsoconcede that the capacity of reflection changes with changinge nvironments.J ust as Karl Marx and others assumed thatw ith changingclasses in society,aclass consciousness would develop, these natural scientists think thatt he samei st rue for changingg eo-biological environments. They are convinced thatonthe basis of environmental change, different learning processes and experiences of failures and catastrophes, humans will learn to develop as elf-consciousness of species. In this respect,n atural scientists also speak the 'languageo fE nlightenment',a sC hakrabarty calls it (Chakrabarty 2009,p .2 15).
Nonetheless,Chakrabarty'saim is not that we should all become natural scientists. Rather,h eb elieves thatt he contribution of naturals cientists to the understandingo fd eeps tructures of species history has to be accompanied by a critical genealogyo fg lobal capitalism since the eighteenth century.A fter all, it was the process of capitalized and industrialized globalization thatled to climate catastrophe, without being plannedb yaspecific actor.S og lobal reflection on the height of the challenges has to bring together planetary history with acritical history of globalization. As it is sketched by FelicityA .N ussbaum, one could add: The task of placing, historically, the crisis of climatec hange thus requires us to bringt ogether intellectual formations that aresomewhat in tension with each other:the planetary and the global; deep and recorded histories;species thinkingand critiques of capital. (Spivak 2003,p .2 13)³ At the end of his article, Chakrabartyoutlines his program of anew globalreflection, which he calls 'negative universalhistory'.Evenifwedon'thaveany historical experience of mankind as ageologicalactor,wehavetoface the fact thatwe have become one. Despite all inequalities in dealing with the costs of climate change, and even if it is an unintended consequenceo fh uman actions, climate changei sc haracterized by the fact that everyone will be affected by it.I nc ontrast to the universal history of the eighteenth century,weh avec ome to know that there is no "Hegelian universal arising dialecticallyo ut of the movement of history,o rauniversal of capital brought forth by the present crisis." We always have to startw ith the perspectivesa nd experienceso fl ocal actors and thus the universal that 'cannot subsume particularities' exists onlyinanegative way: in the common consciousness and knowledge that take the form of a 'shared sense' of the possibility of ag eological catastrophe. In this situation, the Enlightenment becomes increasingly significant: "in the eraofthe Anthropocene, we need the Enlightenment (that is, reason) even more than in the past." (Spivak 2003,p.211) Onlythrough scientific analysis-meaning the collaboration of natural and cultural sciences-can the effects of the actions of the species as a whole be understood.

Conclusions
Nussbaum and Chakrabarty both operate with aw ide concept of the Enlightenment,and bothapproaches show interesting and promisingwaysofovercoming the fruitless opposition in Enlightenment research of historical-philological to theoretical-systematicala pproaches. Nussbaum elaborates to what extent ad ifferentiated, widened, and morec omplex study of the eighteenthc entury can lead to amodified understanding of our own ideas of globalization. Chakrabarty, in his model of planetary history,outlinesanoverarchingconception combining postcolonial theory with geo-and life-sciences.
Both open up interdisciplinary fieldsf or Enlightenment research. As Peter Reill has shown, the "close correspondence between nature and humanity" (between nature and culture) is one of the crucial significances of Enlightenment thinking and acting,f rom the beginning of the paradigm of mathematicsa nd physics in the late 17 th century up to the vitalist theories at the end of the eighteenth century (Reill 2005). The key concepts and main projects of the Enlightenment-such as the history of species, holistic models of natural and human history,pre-evolutionary theories, or conceptualizations of world markets,political economy, or of asociety of knowledge,asdevelopedbyMaupertuis, Buffon, Diderot,H erder,K ant,A .S mith and manyo therE nlightenment authors-could thus be reread with respect to systematic questions related to what Chakrabarty calls the Anthropocene. At the samet ime, these questions have to be combined with ac ritical history of knowledge.The keyconcepts of the Enlightenment can be shown in their genealogyasresults of enhanced globalcirculations,aswell as of specific relations of power.Their presumed universality (in the sense of transtemporalt ruths) can be deconstructed in order to make wayf or aview of these concepts as constructions and narrations produced in aspecific historicalsituation. Models of natural history,n atural philosophyo rn atural sciences can be shown in their interdependency with social, culturaland economical interpretations as well as with leading metaphors and narrations of their times.
As one example for ac ritical genealogya nd discourse analysis of current challenges, one could refer to Joseph Vogl'sw orks on the poesis of capitalism, of the homo economicus,and of global financial crises since the eighteenthcentury (Vogl2008;2010). In ah istorical-systematical vein, Göran Therborn tries to give an introduction to planetary thinking in his most recent publication, combining insights from geology,b iology, economy, sociology, and history to form a 'beginner'sg uide' to the world, addressed to all of us who are used to identifying with our family, country or continent,but among whom "most of us are beginners on the planetary terrain of humankind" (Therbom 2011, p. ix). Such re-