Thematic Essay: Political and Social Thought of the Enlightenment

V

Liberal Individualism

At the heart of the Enlightenment’s social and political thought lies a profoundly radical individualism. Enlightenment philosophers proclaimed the individual as the creator of meaning, truth, and even reality. The Enlightenment’s political ideal set the individual free politically, intellectually, and economically. It demystified the political universe, as rational acts of consent replaced the magical power of thrones, scepters, and crowns. The individual (understood in the Enlightenment as male and property-owning) did not receive government and authority from a God who had given his secular sword to princes and magistrates to rule by divine right. Nor did the individual keep to his lower place in a divinely inspired hierarchy, in which kings and noblemen had been placed above him as society’s natural governors.

Government, Enlightenment theorists argued, was voluntarily established by free individuals through a willful act of contract. Individuals rationally agreed to limit their own freedom and to obey civil authority in exchange for public protection of their natural rights. Government’s purpose was to serve self-interest, to enable individuals to enjoy peacefully their rights to life, liberty, and property. It was not to serve the glory of God or dynasties—and certainly was not to dictate moral or religious truth.

The Enlightenment saw the individual as free in the intellectual and moral world as well. Governments should only be concerned with the worldly matters of life and property, not with immaterial things such as the salvation of souls. Public authority, be it secular or spiritual, was not to enforce unquestioned and absolute truths upon individuals. Matters of belief and moral conviction had to be reserved for the private realm, where each individual was free to believe as he wished. Public law no longer enforced God’s higher truths nor any ideal of the moral life; it merely kept order. Clerical or royal censorship and persecution of free individual minds was the lightning rod for contempt.

VI

Removing Economic Restraints

As the liberalism of the Enlightenment would free the individual from intellectual constraint, so it would also liberate the individual from economic restraints on private initiative. The Enlightenment rejected the ideas of a moral economy in which economic activity was understood to serve moral ends of justice, whether these ends were realized through church-imposed constraints on wages and prices or through magistrates setting prices and providing food to the poor. Church, state, and guilds (powerful trade associations) would no longer oversee economic activity. Instead, individuals would be left alone to seek their own self-interest in a free voluntary market, which would work toward the good of all through “an invisible hand.”

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These Enlightenment ideals are associated principally with the Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith and the French Physiocrats, the name used for proponents of the economic theories proposed by Anne Robert Jacques Turgot and Françoise Quesnay. However, such ideals pervade the era and are found in the writings of Voltaire and Jefferson as well.

Jefferson knew exactly what he was doing when he changed Locke’s trilogy of rights “life, liberty, and property” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Property, and the individual’s right to it, was but one form of the larger human right to individual happiness. The Enlightenment’s revolutionary objective, enshrined in Jefferson’s text for the Declaration of Independence, was to place the sacredness of each individual’s quest for happiness at the heart of politics. No longer was there assumed to be a Christian conception of the good life or the moral life, defined by the church and state. The Enlightenment assumption was that each individual pursued his or her own happiness and individual sense of the good life—as long as in doing so they did not interfere with other people’s lives, liberty, or pursuit of happiness. Or as Jefferson put it, as long as “it neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my leg.”

VII

The American and French Revolutions

For many, the Enlightenment’s rejection of feudalism and aristocracy along with its faith in progress through unfettered individualism were realized in the American (1775-1783) and French (1789-1799) revolutions. The French philosophe the marquis de Condorcet described America as, of all nations, “the most enlightened, the freest and the least burdened by prejudices.” Its respect for human rights, he wrote, provided a lesson for all the peoples of the world. He offered what would be the characteristic praise of America, where there were “no distinctions of class” and where property was secure and hard work encouraged. In America no spiritual or political aristocracy, he wrote, held “a part of the human race in a state of humiliation, simplicity, and misery.” Diderot, in turn, saw America as “offering all the inhabitants of Europe an asylum against fanaticism and tyranny.” For Turgot, the American people were “the hope of the human race, they may well become its model.” Anglo-American political philosopher Thomas Paine joined the chorus, writing that the cause of America was “the cause of all mankind.”

The French Revolution, as well, seemed to realize much of the Enlightenment’s agenda. The politics of the aristocratic and monarchical old order were replaced by parliamentary institutions and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Feudal restrictions on individual economic activity were removed. Primogeniture (the firstborn son’s right to property inheritance), enforced tithes, and obligatory service to the lord of the manor gave way to new economic ideals focused on individual property rights and free market principles. The revolutionaries waged a vigorous campaign to “de-Christianize” France. The state took over schools and church property, making the clergy civic employees.

VIII

Legacies of Enlightenment Thought

The excesses of the French Revolution, especially Maximilien Robespierre and the Reign of Terror, led many observers associated with the conservative and romantic movements of the late 18th and early 19th centuries to condemn the Enlightenment as having too exalted a view of human reason. These observers argued that the Enlightenment neglected the roles played in human nature by feelings, imagination, spirit, and intuition. Similarly, the Enlightenment, with its zeal for political reform, was criticized as misunderstanding the useful roles that tradition, custom, and habit play in society.

Today, environmentalists criticize the Enlightenment’s worship of science and technology, citing the damage done by human-produced innovations such as pesticides and auto exhaust. Devout Christians find fault with the movement’s strictly secular vision of the state. Communitarians, who believe in a cooperative way of life, take issue with its rampant individualism. Still, Enlightenment social and political ideals live on today in the rhetoric of those who argue for reason, reform, and tolerance in the face of custom, tradition, and orthodoxy.

About the author: Isaac Kramnick is the Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He is the author of several books, including The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (1996).

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