Such is Brown’s argument. It is surely attractive, combining conceptual subtlety with great documentary reach. If, however, one wished to push back against it, where might one do so?

In the first place, one might question the inclusion of some of the texts on which Brown draws. The natural assumption is that an Irish Enlightenment was something that happened in Ireland; and, as we have seen, Brown tailors the overall contours of his argument so as to match up with the peculiar problems which beset the island of Ireland after the War of the Two Kings. But that strict geographical focus — which is one of the main sources of the attractive specificity of Brown’s argument — is necessarily diluted when Brown draws into the scope of his exposition texts written by Irishmen, to be sure, but published elsewhere in very different settings. Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer was premiered in London in 1773, and its setting seems thoroughly English.  Nevertheless, Brown sees its comedy of social misprision as a dramatic meditation on the tensions between rank and sentiment which he has diagnosed in Irish society.  Maybe so, and the fact that the play apparently takes its cue from an actual blunder committed at the house of the Featherstone family in Longford is intriguing. But if the play is really to be conscripted into an argument about the Irish Enlightenment, then ideally some evidence would be produced of Irish responses to Dublin productions of the play which corroborated Brown’s specifically Irish reading of it.

Burke is a particular victim of Brown’s intellectual colonialism. His Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was published in 1757, a full seven years after he had uprooted himself from Dublin to London. In what sense, then, can this text be claimed for an Irish Enlightenment, unless that term is being used without any of the geographical strictness which Brown’s argument requires? A study of great and enlightened books written by men and women of Irish birth and published in the 18th century might be a worthwhile academic project, but it is not the project that Brown has said he is pursuing.

Similar qualms are raised by Brown’s use of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. First published in 1790, and at a moment when Burke’s attention was focused firmly eastward, in the first place towards the dissenting circles in London which had created the conditions for Richard Price’s provocative sermon of 1789 “On the Love of Our Country” (which was of course the proximate cause of Burke’s Reflections), and beyond that to France and the Continent, the Reflections does not concern itself at all explicitly with Irish affairs, and if it does so latently, it is only at a very deep level. It is certainly true that in the final years of his life Burke was deeply troubled by what he saw as the injustice (and consequent imprudence) of the Ascendancy. But it is hard to detect that particular anxiety at work in the text of the Reflections. Undeterred by such considerations, Brown discusses the Reflections at some length, and he clearly wishes us to associate Burke’s analysis of the errors of the French revolutionaries in some way with his own analysis of the Irish predicament. But the nature of the affinity or link is never made explicit.