Rescuing the Enlightenment from Supper -Table Dictators

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To this day,” Voltaire wrote in his “Philosophical Dictionary,” “I have not known anyone who has not governed some state. I am not talking of ministers, who really govern, some for two or three years, others for six months, others for six weeks. I am talking about all the other men who, at supper or in their studies, display their systems of government, reforming the armies, the church, the law, and the economy.” It is a fine image of the French Enlightenment, which was above all an affair of conversations and debates, proposals and schemes. Over the course of the 18th century, even as actual power remained concentrated in the hands of the king and his ministers, the intellectual franchise was expanded to every man who could read, write, and think – who counted himself a citizen of the republic of letters.


It was the widening of that gap between authority and opinion that made the French Revolution inevitable. “Everything I observe,” Voltaire wrote to a friend in 1764, “is sowing the seeds of a revolution that will inevitably come to pass and which I shall not have the pleasure of witnessing. … By degrees enlightenment has spread so widely that it will burst forth at the first opportunity, and then there will be a grand commotion. The younger generation are lucky; they will see some great things.”


When Gertrude Himmelfarb quotes this prediction in “The Roads to Modernity” (Alfred A. Knopf, 284 pages, $25) it is with a heavy dose of irony. The revolution about which Voltaire was so sanguine did come, 11 years after his death. But it turned out to be more sanguinary than he, or any of his free-thinking colleagues, had expected. Indeed, the career of Jacobinism – which turned the notional re public of letters into an actual “republic of virtue,” complete with persecutions, denunciations, and the guillotine – puts Voltaire’s innocent supper-table dictators in a whole new light. When they got the chance to put their “systems of government” in practice, the result was ideological terror.


Ms. Himmelfarb’s short book is an attempt to rescue the good name of the Enlightenment from its French corrupters. The very word Enlightenment, she writes, automatically conjures up the French 18th century, not the British or the American; it means Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, not Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, or Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Yet the legacy of the French Enlightenment, in her judgment, is far less valuable than those of the British and American versions. In “The Roads to Modernity,” she undertakes a brief comparative sketch of what the Enlightenment meant in these three countries, aiming to show that the French “ideology of reason” was not nearly as admirable as the British “sociology of virtue” or the American “politics of liberty.”


Ms. Himmelfarb is an eminent historian of Britain, and it is the British 18th century that receives the lion’s share of her attention. If the French Enlightenment was famously an “age of reason,” she argues, the British deserves to be called an “age of benevolence.” This was, first of all, a matter of philosophy. The pioneering liberal thinkers of the 18th century, Hobbes and Locke, had thought of society as a contract among basically self-interested individuals.


But the so-called “common sense” philosophers of the 18th century – many of them Scottish, like Thomas Reid, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Smith – believed that this picture was incomplete. Morality, they argued, is just as innate as self-interest, and human beings form societies because they are social beings by nature. “Benevolent affections,” Reid argued, are “no less necessary for the preservation of the human species than the appetites of hunger and thirst.” The best expression of this view was Smith’s “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” which made him famous long before he wrote “The Wealth of Nations.” Ms. Himmelfarb quotes its opening declaration: “How selfish so ever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others and render their happiness necessary to him.”


Ms. Himmelfarb goes on to show how those “principles” helped to shape British society, politics, and religion. The 18th century, she writes, was a great age of philanthropy. Societies were founded for “Promoting Christian Knowledge,” “Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor,” abolishing slavery, caring for orphans, rehabilitating prostitutes, and dozens of other purposes. Education was a particular focus: Free Sunday schools enrolled 200,000 children by the end of the century. In 1756, the historian William Maitland congratulated his countrymen on the “truly Christian spirit of benevolence, which at this time so generally prevails among us, to the great honour of this age and nation.”


Ms. Himmelfarb goes on to contrast this British enthusiasm for practical good works with the French passion for abstract reason. The philosophes, she argues, were intelligent men who thought too highly of intelligence: They wanted a state rationally planned from the top down, rather than one charitably reformed from the bottom up. Nor were they democrats: They considered the vast majority of men canaille, not to be educated above their station or trusted with power. “Distrust the judgment of the multitude,” Diderot warned in the famous Encyclopedia; “its voice is that of wickedness, stupidity, inhumanity, unreason, and prejudice.”


Such elitism helps to explain the philosophes’ enthusiasm for enlightened despots, and their lack of interest in political liberty. This marks the central difference between France and America, Ms. Himmelfarb’s third subject. The American Founders, she writes, devised a Constitution based not on pure reason but on practical checks and balances; they did not theorize about the best imaginable government, but actually created the best possible one. They even managed to make liberty and religion mutual allies, to the surprise of Tocqueville: “Among us,” he wrote, “I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions. Here I found them united intimately with one another.”


In contrasting these three Enlightenments, Ms. Himmelfarb uses broad strokes and bright colors, and it is often tempting to argue with her conclusions. British “benevolence” can easily seem like just a mask for an increasingly rapacious capitalism, while Voltaire and Diderot showed greater moral courage in confronting religious questions than did the rather evasive Smith. But a brief book like “The Roads to Modernity” is meant to start debates, not to settle them; in that purpose, Ms. Himmelfarb succeeds admirably.


The New York Sun

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