This essay is a response to the discussion paper by Daniela Tinková on Enlightenment and vernacularization. The author welcomes the approach that sees Enlightenment as a debate, since to see it as a battle is to confuse logical truth with fiction. It should be said, however, that Tinková’s model attributes an active role only to the elites, and overstates the idea of the disappearance of the state. In the 18th century we may not have had a national state, but we did have a state. A common fallacy among Czechs regarding the timing and mechanism of the emergence of the National Revival is to ignore that state and consequently espouse the unrealistic thesis that the national agitation arose among a free people in the repressive period preceding March 1848. They also fail to appreciate the importance of the constitutional monarchy post-1861, when for the first time Czechs were able to engage in free political debate. As a result it was not until the late 19th century that a belated Czech Enlightenment took hold, inspired largely by France and Scotland. Home-grown Enlightenment traditions had by then been forgotten.
This study, in the form of an essay or first draft of opening remarks delivered at an international conference on Culture in the Age of Enlightenment, presents one of many possible models for the conceptualization of the Enlightenment in the Czech Lands. Here Enlightenment is conceived as a process whereby ‘knowledge’ (information) is disseminated and gradually democratized and information networks are expanded. This conception draws primarily on theories of vernacularization and cultural transfer. In view of the directional dynamic, we have focussed mainly on ‘unidirectional’ flow in the sense of dispersal from (informational/cultural) centres to the (informational/cultural) periphery – both socioeconomically (transfer to lower social classes) and geographically (transfer to rural areas remote from major urban and educational centres). In this model, the process of vernacularization and democratization of knowledge was divided into three periods: the early formation of educated elites; the ‘acculturation’ of the middle classes; and the extension of information networks to the petty intelligentsia – and through them to the wider rural population. This last phase, carried out as part of a ‘programme’ of popular enlightenment around the turn of the 19th century, more or less coincided, in the theory Miroslav Hroch, with the first and second phases of the Czech National Revival and relied on the same media (Czech-language newspapers, ‘popular’ literature) and authors (Kramerius, Tomsa, Rulík, et al.)