Age of Enlightenment

V

A Cosmopolitan Movement

In many respects, the homeland of the philosophes was France. It was there that the political philosopher and jurist Charles de Montesquieu, one of the earliest representatives of the movement, had begun publishing various satirical works against existing institutions, such as his Persian Letters (1721; translated 1961), as well as his monumental study of political institutions, The Spirit of Laws (1748; trans. 1750). It was in Paris that Denis Diderot, the author of numerous philosophical tracts, began the publication of the Encyclopédie (1751-1772). This work, on which numerous philosophes collaborated, was intended both as a compendium of all knowledge and as a polemical weapon, presenting the positions of the Enlightenment and attacking its opponents.

The single most influential and representative of the French writers was undoubtedly Voltaire. Beginning his career as a playwright and poet, he is best known today for his prolific pamphlets, essays, satires, and short novels, in which he popularized the science and philosophy of his age, and for his immense correspondence with writers and monarchs throughout Europe. Far more original were the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose Social Contract (1762; trans. 1797), Émile (1762; trans. 1763), and Confessions (1782; trans. 1783) were to have a profound influence on later political and educational theory and were to serve as an impulse to 19th-century romanticism. Rousseau also made emotion as fashionable as reason, thus serving—along with David Hume and Étienne Condillac, who saw passion as the mainspring of the human mind—to refute the charge that the Enlightenment exalted bloodless reason at the expense of emotion.

The Enlightenment was also a profoundly cosmopolitan and antinationalistic movement with representatives in numerous other countries. Kant as well as Christian von Wolff and Gotthold Lessing in Germany, Hume in Scotland, Cesare Beccaria in Italy, and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in the American colonies all maintained close contacts with the French philosophes but were important contributors to the movement in their own right. The Enlightenment affected every sphere of culture, not simply philosophy. Composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven imbued their respective operas, The Magic Flute (1791) and Fidelio (1814), with the spirit of the Enlightenment. In Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, it is the Turkish pasha who expresses Enlightenment views when he refuses to avenge his father’s death and spares the lives of his European captives. French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon preserved in marble the likenesses of leading figures of the Enlightenment.

During the first half of the 18th century, the leaders of the Enlightenment waged an uphill struggle against considerable odds. Several were imprisoned for their writings, and most were hampered by government censorship and attacks by the church. In many respects, however, the later decades of the century marked a triumph of the movement in Europe and America. By the 1770s, second-generation philosophes were receiving government pensions and taking control of established intellectual academies. The enormous increase in the publication of newspapers and books ensured a wide diffusion of their ideas. Scientific experiments and philosophical writing became fashionable among wide groups in society, including members of the nobility and the clergy.

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VI

Political Consequences

A number of European monarchs also adopted certain of the ideas or at least the vocabulary of the Enlightenment. Voltaire and other philosophes, who relished the concept of a philosopher-king enlightening the people from above, eagerly welcomed the emergence of the so-called enlightened despots, of whom Frederick II of Prussia, Catherine II of Russia, and Joseph II of Austria were the most celebrated examples. The philosophes, in turn, were welcomed at their courts. Many ideas of the Enlightenment were useful to rulers, including educational and judicial reform, a trained bureaucracy, tolerance of (often talented and industrious) religious dissidents, and the abolition or improvement of serfdom, enabling peasants to pay more taxes. In retrospect, however, it appears that most of these monarchs used the movement in large part for propaganda purposes and were more despotic than enlightened.

The philosophes were united in support of tolerance, the rule of law, social welfare, and secular education, and in their hostility to privilege. They were not, however, opposed to the state as such: They viewed it as a crucial instrument for the realization of their ideals, as long as the ruler respected reason and natural law. Especially in central Europe and Italy, Enlightenment thinkers were more interested in strengthening the state so that it could do its job properly than in limiting its power. The main targets of their hatred were the church and the nobility.

The philosophes welcomed the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, seeing them as putting enlightened ideas into action. The Marquis de Condorcet, a moderate revolutionary who died in prison in 1794, argued in his Sketch of the Intellectual Progress of Mankind (1795) that the purpose of knowledge of human society can only be to guarantee the basic rights of men and, in his view, women. These rights are personal security, free enjoyment of property, equality before the law, and the participation of every citizen in government. The American states, he believed, were the first to convert these ideas into action.

VII

End of the Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment is usually said to have ended with the French Revolution, which it helped to bring about. Indeed, some see the social and political ferment of this period as being responsible for the Revolution. While embodying many of the ideals of the philosophes, the Revolution in its more violent stages, from 1792 to 1794, served to discredit these ideals temporarily in the eyes of many European contemporaries. To conservative minds the Enlightenment was too radical, while romantic writers and artists of the following period found the Enlightenment without passion or soul and heedless of the individual.

Yet the Enlightenment left a lasting heritage for the 19th and 20th centuries. It marked a key stage in the decline of the church and the growth of modern secularism. It served as the model for political and economic liberalism and for humanitarian reform throughout the 19th-century Western world. It was the watershed for the pervasive belief in the possibility and the necessity of progress that survived, if only in attenuated form, into the 20th century.