Historical article
The Illuminati and the German Enlightenment
The order made sense only in its time: a world of reading societies, lodges, censorship and the question “What is Enlightenment?”
The Illuminati are often imagined outside time. In fact the order was a product of a particular moment: the German Enlightenment (Aufklärung) of the 1770s and 1780s.
A culture of societies
Educated Germans of the period met in reading societies, learned academies and Masonic lodges, where men of different estates could discuss ideas with some freedom. The Illuminati borrowed from this world — above all from Freemasonry, whose grades and rituals Adolph Knigge adapted for the order.
Enlightenment under censorship
In Catholic Bavaria, Enlightenment ideas met strong resistance from Church and state. Weishaupt's answer was secrecy: a hidden society that would educate its members morally and intellectually and place them, over time, where they could do good. Critics then and since have pointed to the tension between an order devoted to reason and its reliance on secrecy, hierarchy and surveillance of members.
Princes and poets
Membership spread well beyond Bavaria. In Weimar, Duke Karl August and Goethe joined in 1783; in Gotha, Duke Ernst II was a member and later sheltered Weishaupt. Why such men joined is debated — see Goethe.
"What is Enlightenment?"
In December 1784, months after the first Bavarian edict, Immanuel Kant published his famous answer: "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity." Kant was not a member, but the question he answered was the one the Illuminati had set out to address — by very different means.
Further reading
See the Bibliography, especially van Dülmen (1975) and the edition of the order's correspondence.
Sources
- Richard van Dülmen, Der Geheimbund der Illuminaten: Darstellung, Analyse, Dokumentation (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1975).
- W. Daniel Wilson, Geheimräte gegen Geheimbünde (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991).
- Hermann Schüttler, Die Mitglieder des Illuminatenordens 1776–1787/93 (Munich: Ars Una, 1991).
- Reinhard Markner, Monika Neugebauer-Wölk and Hermann Schüttler (eds.), Die Korrespondenz des Illuminatenordens, 2 vols. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013).