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.

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.

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.”

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).