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.