Thematic Essay: Political and Social Thought of the Enlightenment

I

Introduction

Thematic Essay: Political and Social Thought of the Enlightenment

Thematic Essays combine a broad survey of a particular topic with key supplementary readings to create a comprehensive learning experience. This essay by historian Isaac Kramnick traces the cultural and political factors that led to the development of the Enlightenment. Accompanying the essay are Sidebars consisting of excerpts from the works of some of the movement’s most influential thinkers.

By Isaac Kramnick

The Enlightenment was a philosophical movement based on the belief that science and human reason can triumph over political and religious tyranny. An intellectual spirit that knew no national boundaries, it drew proponents from America, England, France, Germany, Italy, Scotland, Spain, and Russia.

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Although its advocates were widespread, 18th-century French thought is usually regarded as best embodying the principles of the Enlightenment, particularly the writings of Denis Diderot, Charles Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and others. Known by their French label the philosophes, these writers helped define Enlightenment philosophy by publishing their magisterial, 17-volume collaboration, the Encyclopédie (1751-1772). This work was designed as a catalog of all human understanding, containing an exhaustive range of definitive articles on science, the arts, history, and philosophy. The writers expressed unorthodox views in this work, arguing that science and reason could triumph over the blindness of religion and tradition. Although these views caused French royalty and the clergy to condemn the book and persecute its authors, they served to introduce and declare Enlightenment principles.

The philosophes regarded three Englishmen as the prophets of the Enlightenment; thus, they dedicated their Encyclopédie to Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton. American statesman Thomas Jefferson, a disciple of the Enlightenment, agreed with this assessment, ordering for his library in 1789 a composite portrait of the same three men. They had, he wrote to a friend, laid the foundation for the physical and moral sciences of modernity and were “the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception.”

II

Historical and Political Setting

To set a precise date on an intellectual movement is impossible, but most important events of the Enlightenment took place during the 100-plus years from the 1680s to the 1790s. The movement’s beginnings were marked in Great Britain by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This bloodless overthrow of King James II provided a constitutional arrangement that effectively abolished the line of Stuart monarchs and ushered in religious tolerance and a strengthened Parliament. The dawn of Enlightenment thinking in Great Britain was heralded by two publications. The first was published in 1687, Newton’s Principia, which used mathematics to explain observed phenomena such as gravitation. The second, Locke’s “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (1690), emphasized formulating ideas through experience.

Two milestones signal the beginnings of the movement in France. First, in 1685 King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had granted limited tolerance to French Protestants in 1598. The second milestone was the writings in the late 1680s of religious skeptic Pierre Bayle and scientist Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle. Both authors questioned the prevailing religious attitudes in styles that would become characteristic of the Enlightenment movement.

The end of the Enlightenment is best linked to the realization of its ideals, which occurred in the revolutionary fervor that swept through America and France in the last quarter of the 18th century. These ideals, in turn, gave rise to a move toward romanticism in art and literature. It also provided the basis for the political liberalism and spirit of reform that spread throughout the 19th-century Western world.

The events of the 1680s provide glaring evidence of the different settings for Enlightenment thought in France and Britain. Religious tolerance and freedom of publication generally flourished in the liberal atmosphere of Augustan England. This period, characterized by literary grandeur under the restored monarch Charles II, earned its name for its resemblance to imperial Rome under Augustus. In France, on the other hand, Louis XIV dealt a ringing blow to religious tolerance in 1685 when he revoked the Edict of Nantes. The revocation ushered in a century of oppressive and absolute rule in France, with first the persecution and then the flight of the French Protestants, known as Huguenots. Further, royal and clerical control and censorship of publications led to the arrest of Voltaire and other writers. Before long, the works of Diderot, Montesquieu, Claude Helvétius, and Paul Henri d'Holbach were condemned and suppressed. Finally, the Encyclopédie itself was banned in 1759.

III

Political Thought of the French Enlightenment

Montesquieu and Diderot, attempting to avoid suppression, often invented fictional foreigners whose observations criticized French political institutions and the Catholic Church. The harsher realities of repression and persecution lent the political writings of the French Enlightenment a tone that is more bitter and less compromising than that of the British. Not that despotism, when freed from religious zeal, was utterly incompatible with the French Enlightenment. Several of the philosophes, including Voltaire, Diderot, and Helvétius, envisioned the political ideal as an “enlightened despot,” a reforming monarch. Their ideal monarch was personified by Frederick II of Prussia and Catherine II of Russia. The “enlightened despot,” while sponsoring religious tolerance, was committed to rational reform of the political, legal, and economic aspects of an age of reason. Examples of such reforms include Frederick introducing new agriculture and manufacturing methods, and Catherine attempting to modernize Russian law by establishing a legislative commission.

Political differences notwithstanding, the intellectuals of the French and British Enlightenment operated in relatively similar social settings. They shared the profound transformation of Western life brought by commerce and industrialization. Far from being alarmed at this great change, they generally embraced the new commercial civilization and its values. They saw it as a progressive, reforming force that would undermine aristocratic privilege and religious fanaticism. Theirs was also an age of increasing literacy: For the first time in history, reading ceased to be a monopoly of the rich and the clergy. Intellectuals eagerly wrote for an audience of new readers, having not yet become alienated from the “philistine” public in a posture of romantic weariness.

IV

Reason and Reform

The central message of Enlightenment intellectuals was that unassisted human reason, not faith or tradition, was the principal guide to politics and all human conduct. “Have courage to use your own reason—that is the motto of Enlightenment,” the German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote in 1784.

To Enlightenment thinkers, everything, including political and religious authority, must be subject to a critique of reason if it were to command the respect of humanity. Particularly suspect were religious faith and superstition. Humanity was not innately corrupt, as Catholicism taught, nor was the good life found only in a blissful state of otherworldly salvation. Pleasure and happiness were worthy ends of life and could be realized in this world. The natural universe was not governed by the miraculous whimsy of a supernatural God. Rather, it was ruled by rational scientific laws, which were accessible to human beings through the scientific method of experiment and observation.

Science and technology were the engines of progress, enabling modern people to force nature to serve their well-being and increase their happiness. Science and the conquest of superstition and ignorance provided the prospect to endlessly improve and reform the human condition, to progress toward a future that was perfection. The Enlightenment elevated the individual and the moral legitimacy of self-interest. It sought to free the individual from all kinds of external corporate or communal limitations. Further, it sought to reform the political, moral, intellectual, and economic worlds to serve individual interests.

More than anyone else, Voltaire, with his motto Ecrasez l'infâme ('Crush the infamous thing'), symbolized the war against the evils, including torture and persecution, bred by religious fanaticism and superstition—the “infamous thing.” But virtually all Enlightenment theorists followed the lead of Locke’s famous “Letter on Toleration” (1689) in demanding freedom of religion. They argued that if religion were removed from public life and public authority, it would be reserved for the private sphere of individual preference and individual practice. Public matters in a commercial society concerned markets and property, not the saving of souls. Voltaire approvingly described the Royal Exchange in London as the place where “the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together, as though they all professed the same religion, and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts.” Jefferson, in turn, rendered the same liberal, tolerant theme in simple American folk wisdom: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

Faith in progress required that the aristocratic, feudal past be viewed critically, and once again Voltaire guided the Enlightenment. History, he wrote, in 1754, is “little else than a long succession of useless cruelties” and “a collection of crimes, follies, and misfortunes.” Progressive Enlightenment philosophers had no respect for the superstitious past and its political traditions in general, which could not pass the skeptical test of reason. The American philosophe Thomas Jefferson summarized this ideal, attacking what he labeled “the Gothic idea,” which dictates that one “look backwards instead of forwards for the improvement of the human mind.” Jefferson argued that Americans would have nothing to do with such errors: “To recur to the annals of our ancestors for what is most perfect in government, in religion, in learning, is worthy of those bigots in religion, and government, by whom it is recommended, and whose purpose it would answer. But it is not an idea which this country will endure.”

Enlightenment thinkers such as Jefferson viewed humanity as no longer chained to the past, with its irrational, repressive, and unjust institutions. Guided by their reason, enlightened men and women could change and reform their political world. They could shake off the oppressive weight of tradition and custom. For most Enlightenment writers this meant political reforms. They directed these reforms against what they considered the tyrannical power of the Church, the nobility, and the monarchy. Such reforms were for the benefit of the free individual.