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.”