AHC no Enlightenment

No protestant revolution and thus no Spanish Inquisition, French Wars of Religion and 30 years war should do it.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
The idea that "Enlightenment" = "appeals to reason" (and, more crucially, that "no Enlightenment" = "appeals to reason cut no ice at all") is mostly the result of self-proclaimed "Enlightened" thinkers thumping their chests. Using reason to attempt to arrive at truth and understanding was already a major thing for the Scholastics centuries earlier. Even many of the "reason-inspired" proposals for human rights and economic reform (to name just two things) that Enlightenment thinkers came up with had mostly been arrived at way, way earlier by the School of Salamanca (among others).

This is not to say that you can't remove the Enlightenment and its age of upheaval and revolution... but the general framework of ideas (or perhaps I should say: the intellectual background) was already there. The Enlightenment didn't arise from a vacuum. Without going way, way back, you can at most keep the old political order in place for much longer... but in many places, movements towards reform preceded the "Age of Enlightenment". Even if not associated with some mass upheaval, they would just have been introduced much more gradually.

If you really want to prevent the entire Enlightenment, you need to remove its antecedents... going back to, say, the 12th century. The whole narrative of "Enlightenment" contrasted with "Dark Ages" (with a "Renaissance" - a term invented by Enlightenment thinkers after the fact! - in between) is just fundamentally flawed, and there's far more continuity across the ages. Wiping out the "Enlightenment" - or rather: wiping out many of its intellectual elements - isn't possible without also wiping out a lot of stuff that came before.

Of course, if there's specific social or political developments you want to prevent, that can be arranged. ;)
 
"Using reason to attempt to arrive at truth and understanding was already a major thing for the Scholastics centuries earlier."

Yeah, I got this. I studied the Scholastics and I always wondered about what the fuss with the Enlightenment about, since the whole thing seemed less interesting than what intellectuals were doing in the 12th century. It seems to be another 19th century trash the Middle Ages thing.

However, there was some substance. I'm pretty sure the abolition of slavery, freedom of conscience, equality before the law, and universal suffrage were all Enlightenment projects. Same with a whole bunch of other rationalization and reform projects, of which the metric system was probably the most successful.

Also, and argument can be made that after Okham, intellectual life in Europe went backwards from the Scholastics. What you were getting around 1600 just wasn't that impressive. Could it have stayed in that rut?
 
Improve the Caroliginean reintroduction of education to the Western world about 800 AD and encourage durable print. Toss in a crude wooden block or metal type printing press based on a Roman wine press.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
"Using reason to attempt to arrive at truth and understanding was already a major thing for the Scholastics centuries earlier."

Yeah, I got this. I studied the Scholastics and I always wondered about what the fuss with the Enlightenment about, since the whole thing seemed less interesting than what intellectuals were doing in the 12th century. It seems to be another 19th century trash the Middle Ages thing.

However, there was some substance. I'm pretty sure the abolition of slavery, freedom of conscience, equality before the law, and universal suffrage were all Enlightenment projects. Same with a whole bunch of other rationalization and reform projects, of which the metric system was probably the most successful.

Also, and argument can be made that after Okham, intellectual life in Europe went backwards from the Scholastics. What you were getting around 1600 just wasn't that impressive. Could it have stayed in that rut?

I'm sure you could arrange for a "downswing", of sorts, but ideas are hard to kill... not to mention the fact that no-one was bent on fighting "modern ideas" or something. That particular obsession only came about in reaction to, well, the Enlightenment. I'm also not totally convinced that even ideas like abolition of slavery and freedom of conscience were exclusively Enlightenment projects in a meaninful way. Freedom of concience certainly precedes the Enlightenment (various Dutch philosophers were big on it 200 years earlier already), and opposition to slavery was a big deal for the Salamancans (to the point that they severely criticised Spanish policies in the New World). Equality before the law did certainly get a lot of traction, but the idea (though not the practice) was of course also there long before. It's a tenet of natural law, so important that it came back again and again (even if only in lip service). For instance, Gratian felt the need to explicitly refer to it as a fundamental principle when introducing his codex of canon law (thus placing canon law within the larger framework guided by, and theoretically adhering to, such higher principles).

I'll grant that the idea of universal suffrage was quite the innovation, and that various rationalisation and reform projects indeed got implemented in a more direct and comprehensive way than would otherwise have been the case. Still, I'm pretty sure that even if we propose that a "rut" of sorts lasts for a while, it will eventually be followed by an upswing again. That might take the form of a latter-day "Enlightenment", or of a longer period of piecemeal reforms. Keeping things in a sort of social, economic, and political stasis, however, strikes me as bloody difficult to arrange.
 
Top