It seems every generation gets the Enlightenment it deserves. With distance from the Second World War, Adorno and Horkheimer's worries about a dialectic of Enlightenment that led to mass terror have been displaced by encomia that insist on 'enlightenment now' so that reason might broaden its progressive agenda in the world. The concept of Enlightenment is at once descriptive and normative. It is inextricably bound to questions of periodization and linked to the related concept of 'modernity'. This paper will address the recent history of debates over the scale of Enlightenment -- its remit, its content, its future -- with an eye toward clarifying its function in historical interpretation.