There have been many attempts to present a working definition of the Enlightenment--from its chronology to its geography as well as its intellectual and material representations. Some believe that the Enlightenment has not ended, that the attitudes of enquiry that probe the potential powers of human achievement, social improvement, and political reform continue to characterize even the early twenty-first century--spreading throughout the world. Other scholars have been far less sanguine in the analysis of the legacy of the Enlightenment. For Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, writing their Dialectic of Enlightenment in wartime exile in New York, Enlightenment worship of reason gave man sovereignty not only over nature but over humanity itself, creating a new totalitarian regime that ultimately led to fascism and new levels of human barbarism. Still others have argued that the Enlightenment ended with the withdrawal of confidence in the authoritarian regime of Napoleon Bonaparte. But late-twentieth-century scholarship also questioned the geographical limits of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment was obsessed with geography, at once seeking to identify others who were thought to share Enlightenment values, searching for the boundaries of where rational, enlightened civilization ended and the yet unenlightened, savage world began. But precisely because the Enlightenment concerned itself with its own propagation under the banner of the ''civilizing process,'' precise boundaries can never be located. However, debates over who best embodied and applied the principles of the Enlightenment to civil duty and social improvement began to refine the general category of ''European'' to a narrower, national level. The Enlightenment vocabulary that gave birth to ''civilization'' also invented Eurocentrism, which by the end of the eighteenth century had turned into ''enlightened nationalism.'' This increasing fragmentation within Enlightenment geography has multiplied the number of sites that must be investigated in local context rather than by presuming a unified ''European'' Enlightenment, which is reflected in late-twentieth-century scholarship's attempt to analyze the Enlightenment in context and within a comparative framework.

Virtually all assessments of the Enlightenment have received their fair share of criticism, mainly because any attempt to delimit or define the results or pursuits of the Enlightenment appear to impose stability on what was, by most accounts, a dynamic movement. Hence defining the Enlightenment is yet another paradox scholars continue to confront.

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