Despite the recognition of different national, cultural, and religious enlightenments, and regardless of recurrent doubts about the utility of the concept itself, a dominant form of intellectual history remains committed to the reality of a single process or project of Enlightenment, even if this is something that has to be synthesised from diverse intellectual expressions, institutional settings, and historical locales. Horst Stuke offers a classic instance of this historiography in his Begriffsgeschichte of Aufklärung, written for that great encyclopedia of German conceptual history, the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuke 1972). Despite his illuminating sketch of a variety of different forms of enlightenment – ranging from the Pietists' doctrine of spiritual rebirth to the Wolffian conception of conceptual self-clarification - Stuke's history is one of the progressive unification and conceptualisation of these ‘programmatic’ enlightenments.