The Enlightenment

A Very Brief History

Anthony Kenny

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780281076444
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Humanism in Philosophy

'If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.'
VoltaireMontesquieu, Hume, Voltaire, Diderot, Smith, Gibbon, Bentham... These are among the great thinkers who contributed to the dramatic developments in religion, science and philosophy that we now call the Enlightenment. They dominated the second half of the eighteenth century and their writings continue to shape the intellectual and political worlds we now inhabit. Written by a world authority, this brief history of the Enlightenment concludes with a perceptive assessment of the cultural, religious, ethical and political dimensions of its legacy.'A remarkable short tour of the Enlightenment that is brisk but never hurried, covering more than seems possible. Kenny is as spirited and opinionated as the age he describes, tempered by a moderation and breadth of knowledge that comes from experience and hindsight.'
Julian Baggini, founder editor of The Philosophers' Magazine

Part 1
THE HISTORY

1
The Enlightenment: when and where?

The Reformation began – so we used to learn at school – when Martin Luther pinned his manifesto on the door of Wittenberg Castle Church on 31 October 1517. The French Revolution began – so we used to learn at school – when the Bastille was stormed on 14 July 1789. No similar day or year is handed down as the starting point of the Enlightenment, and any attempt to assign one is bound to be arbitrary. But if one were forced to choose an initial date, I would suggest 16 April 1746, the date of the Battle of Culloden Moor. It was then and there that the Duke of Cumberland, son of George II, defeated the army of the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart, thus ending his attempt to return the crown of England to the dynasty of his ancestors. It was not that ‘Butcher’ Cumberland was an enlightened figure: far from it. But Prince Charles’ invasion of England, which reached as far as Derby before being turned back, was the last rally in Britain of those institutions that the Enlightenment saw as the forces of darkness. For Charles was a member of the Roman Catholic Church, and in politics a proponent of absolute rule, being himself the great grandson of the monarch who had proclaimed the divine right of kings.

While in Britain Culloden marked the end of the pre-­enlightenment era, France was still ruled by an absolute monarch, and French life was in many ways controlled by a Catholic hierarchy. None the less, the same decade marks the launch of the Enlightenment there. In recent decades there has been considerable debate about where to locate the centre of the Enlightenment. Was the movement fundamentally a French phenomenon, as people long believed? Or did it originate in Britain and reach its consummation in Germany, as different scholars have argued? The entire argument, in my view, obscures the point that the Enlightenment was essentially an international phenomenon, and that was how it was seen by its participants.

Leaders of the French Enlightenment, such as Montes­quieu and Voltaire, spent formative years in England; of their British counterparts, Hume wrote his first work in Anjou, Gibbon for half of his life thought in French, and Priestley and Bentham were among the first citizens of the French Republic. While Voltaire wanted France to become more like England, Hume thought that life in Paris was infinitely preferable to life in London. Voltaire and Diderot accepted invitations to spread the word in Berlin and in St Petersburg. Finally, one of the finest embodiments of the Enlightenment’s scientific and political ideals was an American, Benjamin Franklin, who spent large parts of his life in London and Paris.

In the year 1746 most of the principal figures of the ­movement were alive and active, but their major contributions to the Enlightenment lay in the future. Montesquieu was 57, but he was yet to publish De l’esprit des lois.Voltaire was 52, but it would be 18 years yet before he published his Philosophical Dictionary. Hume was by now 32, and had at an early age published his A Treatise on Human Nature, but it fell, in his own words, ‘deadborn from the Press’. It was Hume’s later work, some of it published only posthumously, that made a decisive contribution to the Enlightenment. Of the editors of the future Encyclopédie, Diderot was 33 and d’Alembert was 29. Adam Smith was only 23, and his Wealth of Nations lay 30 years in the future. The two founding fathers of the enlightenment discipline of aesthetics, Lessing and Burke, were both just 17. Two of the youngest enlightenment heroes were still children: Tom Paine and Edward Gibbon were both nine years old. Two men who in different ways would bring the enlightenment project to its conclusion – Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant – were in their early twenties.

The enlightenment philosophers – and philosophes was what in France they most liked to call themselves – held many things in common. They rejected the great continental metaphysical systems of the previous century, such as those of Descartes and Leibniz (some made an exception for Spinoza). Instead they admired the physics of Newton and the epistemology of Locke. One of Voltaire’s earliest works was entitled Éléments de la philosophie de Newton, and he and his colleagues rejected Descartes’ theory of innate ideas. They all believed that the way to discover truth about the world is the systematic use of the senses – such as sight and hearing – in investigation and exploration. They believed that scientific endeavour depended on observation and experiment, and that its progress would lead to the betterment of the human condition.

In this they were following the lead of Locke, but Locke himself believed that experience provided not only the method of science but the object of science. He insisted that the only kind of certainty we can achieve is not really about the world in itself but only the deliveries of our senses and imagination, the items he called ‘ideas’. Ideas and thoughts are what we meet when we look within ourselves. Some of his followers went further and claimed that ideas, and the sensory impressions from which they derive, are all that we can ever really know. This extreme form of empiricism is a philosophical blind alley, as later philosophers were to show, notably the greatest philosopher at the end of the enlightenment period, Immanuel Kant.

However, not all the philosophes were extreme empiri­cists, and the form of empiricism that each of them adopted affected the way they set out to follow the lead of Newton. Franklin, using the experimental method, made genuine ­scientific discoveries about the real world. Hume, an extreme empiricist, set out to do for psychology what Newton had done for physics: he aimed to provide an account of the relationships of ideas that would be a counterpart to the gravitational attraction between bodies. But because he based himself on introspection rather than observation and experiment, he produced a philosophy of mind that turned out to be ultimately futile. Fortunately, his contributions to enlightenment thinking were not vitiated by the flaws in his theoretical philosophy.

In matters of politics, enlightenment thinkers shared a common antipathy to arbitrary rule and its various mani­festations: judicial torture, imprisonment without trial, proliferation of capital punishments and corruption of tribunals. However, the path to reform they proposed differed from one country to another depending on the nature of the status quo. Where there was an absolute monarch, his or her power should be subjected to some external restraint, if only by allowing their subjects freedom of speech. In a constitutional monarchy, and even in a republic, there must be a separation of powers between executive, legislature and judiciary. As Gibbon was to put it, ‘the principles of a free constitution are irrecoverably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive’ (DF I. 66). Democracy, however, was not initially a key goal of the Enlightenment. Voltaire and Diderot were content to work for despots, and the last thing they aimed at was the empowerment of what Voltaire called ‘the rabble’. They protested against the abuse of power by governments but did not propose fundamental political change. That came to the fore only in the later stages of the Enlightenment, in particular in the writings of Tom Paine. However, along the political axis that has auto­cracy at one end and anarchy at the other, the enlightenment figures, wherever they were placed, shared a common direction of movement away from autocracy.

In matters of religion it was a common feature of the Enlightenment to value reason above faith. Few enlightenment thinkers were outright atheists, but on the continent they were fiercely anti-clerical, and in Britain they were at least sceptical about the supernatural. Individuals’ views of Christianity were aligned along a spectrum from suspicion to hostility. Few were any longer prepared to accept the Bible as an unerring guide to the truth. Many were deists; that is, they believed that reason could establish the existence of a creator God but not of a God who intervened in human history or offered a revelation through sacred texts. The variety of religious sects, according to the Enlightenment, provided a reason for toleration rather than enforced conformity. As the century progressed, many moved further and further from the orthodoxy of the established churches. Some saw it as a moment of triumph for the Enlightenment when a goddess of reason was enthroned in the Cathedral of Notre Dame by French revolutionaries in 1793.

The Enlightenment was a network rather than a school: there were few settled doctrines that were common to all the philosophes. It was a movement rather than a party: its members shared a common direction rather than a common platform. Immanuel Kant, writing in 1784, asked himself whether he was living in an enlightened age. No, he replied: only in an age of gradual enlightening, an age approaching enlightenment.

2
President Montesquieu

The first major attempt to present an enlightened understanding of the human social and political condition was the work of Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755). His The Spirit of the Laws was published in 1748 and drew on a mass of historical and sociological erudition to build up a theory of the nature of the state. The volume took many years to compose, and it was preceded by a lighter working-up of some of its material in the form of an epistolary novel, the Persian Letters of 1721.

The novel relates the travels in Europe of two Persians, the patriarch Usbek and his youthful companion Rica. Their letters home express their surprise and astonishment at many features of Christian culture that Europeans take for granted. They report, for instance, that in Paris, in reverse of the Persian custom, the men wear trousers and the women wear skirts. The narrative offers a vehicle for satire on French society and on institutions like the papacy and the Inquisition. However, in the course of their journeys the travellers become aware of the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the Islamic society they have left at home. For Montesquieu, universal and fundamental human needs and passions find a variety of expressions in radically diverse cultures. He illustrates this with reference, among other things, to various possible arrangements for relationships between the sexes. He goes so far as to imagine a female paradise in which the women will possess their own seraglio where the men are confined under the guard of eunuchs.

The Spirit of the Laws is a more ponderous presentation of a similar theme. In accordance with enlightenment methodology it assembles a massive, if not wholly reliable, database of geographical, historical and anthropological material. ‘Men’, Montesquieu tells us, ‘are governed by many factors: climate, religion, law, the precepts of government, the examples of the past, customs, manners; and from the combination of such influences there arises a general spirit’ (EL 6.6). The general spirit of a particular society finds its expression in the laws appropriate for it: it creates ‘the spirit of the laws’, which gives the treatise its title.

Montesquieu believed that there were fundamental laws of justice established by God, which held in advance of any human legislation. But these universal principles did not themselves suffice to determine the structure of any particular society. No single set of social institutions was suitable for all times and places: the government should be fitted to the climate, the wealth and the national character of a country. Humans are always and everywhere subject to the same passions, which fall within the scope of a supreme natural law; but this law has to be expressed in different systems in accordance with the external conditions of each society.

Following the lead of Aristotle, Montesquieu classified the constitutions he had collected into three types: repub­lican, monarchical, and despotic (EL 2.1). In a despotic state, government is by the decree of the ruler, backed up not by law but by religion or custom. In a monarchy, government is carried on by a hierarchy of officials of varied rank and status. In a republic, all the citizens need to be educated in civic values and trained to carry out public tasks.

The dominant characteristic of a republican state is virtue; the other two states are dominated respectively by honour and fear. Montesquieu does not mean that in a given republic people are virtuous, but that they ought to be. Again he does not mean that in each monarchy people have a sense of honour, and that in each despotic state everyone is ruled by fear. However, unless these features predom­inate, the relevant type of government will fail to function smoothly (EL 3.2).

‘Liberty’, we are told, ‘has its roots in the soil.’ Freedom is easier to defend in mountainous or insular countries than in ample and fertile plains. Consequently a repub­lican constitution suits cold climates and small states, while despotism suits large states and hot climates. A constitution suitable for Sicilians would not suit Scotsmen since, inter alia, sea-girt islands differ from mountainous mainlands. Among the various possible constitutions, Montesquieu’s own preference is for monarchy, and particularly the ‘mixed monarchy’ he discerned in England.

The feature Montesquieu admired in the British constitution was the principle of the separation of powers. After the revolution of 1688, Parliament had achieved sole legis­lative power, while leaving in practice considerable execu­tive discretion to the King’s ministers. Simultaneously, judges became largely free of governmental interference. To be sure, there was not to be found in British constitutional law any explicit statement that the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government should not be combined in a single person or institution. The present-day UK Supreme Court is a very young institution, only recently detached from the House of Lords, which is a branch of the legislature. In Britain there has never been a constitutionally formulated theory of checks and balances. None the less, Montesquieu’s benign interpretation of the contemporary British system, in which the sovereign’s ministers essentially depended for their power on the consent of Parliament, was to have a lasting influence on constitution makers in many parts of the world. In particular it became entrenched in the constitution of the United States, where its effects are, for better or worse, perceptible to this day.

The separation ...