Books: Peter Berkowitz on The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightments by Gertrude Himmelfarb
Gertrude Himmelfarb.
The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments. Alfred A. Knopf. 284 pages. $25.00 Recent
events could cause one to wonder whether
we live in an enlightened age. Only yesterday the answer seemed
clear: The end of history was upon us, liberal democracy was
spreading abroad, the culture wars were dying down at home, America
was using its military power for exclusively humanitarian ends, and
the new economy was promising fun-filled work and amazing wealth
all around. But that was the 90s. Today partisan rage has reached heights not seen
since the 1960s, the economy persists in operating under the same old
rules, America finds itself locked in a war with an implacable
enemy who rejects the notion central to our liberal and democratic
traditions that all men and women by virtue of their common
humanity are deserving of respect, and, despite our shared
commitment to liberal democracy, substantial segments of the
population of our European allies regard the United States as a
principal source of danger to world stability. Far from
progressing, we seem to be backsliding.
We are not the first among moderns to confront
conflicting signals about the spirit of our age. And the answer
that Immanuel Kant supplied in the late eighteenth century to the
question of whether his was an enlightened era provides a source of
instruction to ours. As the Enlightenment flowered throughout
Europe, Kant argued that he and his contemporaries did not live in
an “enlightened age,” but that they did live in
“the age of enlightenment.” The distinction was
necessary because the full moral and political demands of
enlightenment had by no means been met. That would require universal enlightenment,
or “man’s emergence from his self-incurred
immaturity.” Maturity, from the moral point of view, consists
in the use of reason in all matters of conscience. From the
political point of view, maturity consists in government that
leaves matters of conscience to the free choice of individuals. The
reality, as Kant stressed, was that laziness and cowardice
continued to keep most people immature for life, dependent not upon
themselves but upon clergy, dogma, and tradition for authoritative
guidance concerning their rights and duties. Yet his age, Kant
believed, did mark a turning point. For the first time the
principle of enlightenment — that all men had an obligation
to think for themselves and government had an obligation to protect
their freedom to do so — had come into full view and could be
seen clearly by reasonable people as binding on all humanity.
At its origins, enlightenment had a progressive
thrust because it demanded the overthrow of the old authorities
— throne and altar. Yet its purpose was not to overthrow all
authorities or the very idea of authority — it did not
sanction anarchy or permanent revolution — but rather to
install reason as the one true authority. And, of course, not only
in morals and politics. Enlightenment is also inseparable from the
rise of modern natural science. The nonhuman physical world, as
much as the human world, needed to be placed under the dominion of
reason through systematic examination of the laws that govern it.
Nevertheless, Kant maintained that religion “is the focal
point of enlightenment.” This was in part because the state
had less interest in taking over the sciences (and the arts). More
important, it was “because religious immaturity is the most
pernicious and dishonorable variety of all”: It involved
relinquishing the use of reason in the humanly most important
spheres of life. Maturity in the exercise of reason, Kant implied,
would foster religious maturity. Yet as reason demanded more
respect and more responsibility in moral and political life, it
found it increasingly difficult to accord respect and share
responsibility with religion.
We can say of our own time what Kant said of
his: We live in the age of enlightenment though ours is not an
enlightened age. To be sure, there are differences. The tenets of
enlightenment are even more widely affirmed in our culture and
politics than in Kant’s, though of course often betrayed in
practice. Moreover, in addition to the forms of immaturity Kant
catalogued and beyond the appearance of grave new military threats
specific to our era, enlightenment in our age confronts a moral and
intellectual challenge that Kant did not contemplate: the
postmodern challenge, or the ambition to overthrow the authority of
reason itself.
Among a prominent segment of the literary and
academic worlds, the idea that the moral life is governed by reason
has long been subject to arch skepticism if not outright derision.
Reason, postmodern thinkers proclaim, is a construct, rights are an
invention, nature is a fiction, and truth is an illusion. Despite
these familiar anti-enlightenment precepts, postmodernism regularly
betrays its roots in the spirit of enlightenment. For
postmodernism’s implicit claim is that it has at last shined
the light on the reality of reason, rights, nature, and truth.
What’s more, based on its purportedly superior understanding
of the human condition, postmodernism aims to emancipate human
beings from dependence on false and degrading beliefs by bringing
their arbitrary character to light. On inspection, the postmodern
critique of enlightenment turned out to represent a radicalization
of the enlightenment quest for individual freedom through the
criticism of unjust and unreasonable authority. But is emancipation
from the authority of reason reasonable? Or a sturdy ground of
freedom?
Certainly
not according to the distinguished
intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. The aim of her elegant
new study is to “reclaim the Enlightenment.” The
Enlightenment needs reclaiming not only from its postmodern critics
and the temper of our turbulent times, but also from a pronounced
tendency among scholars to identify it with the French
Enlightenment, the Enlightenment of Voltaire, the philosophes, and
the French Revolution. In fact, argues Himmelfarb, the eighteenth
century was home to a multiplicity of enlightenments. The most
estimable, in her view, was the British Enlightenment along with
its spirited offspring, the American Enlightenment. In comparing
the British, the French, and the American Enlightenments, she
stresses that all three were constituted by “ideas about
reason and religion, liberty and virtue, nature and society.”
In all three Enlightenments, these “ideas spilled over from
philosophers and men of letters to politicians and men of
affairs.” And all “three Enlightenments represented
alternative approaches to modernity, alternative habits of mind and
heart, of consciousness and sensibility.” But the better
balance — the most reasonable understanding of reason and its
limitations in relation to religion, of liberty and its link to
virtue, and of society and its grounding in human nature —
was achieved by the British and American Enlightenments.
Himmelfarb takes issue with the authorities,
implicitly including Kant, that reason is the defining feature of
Enlightenment. Virtue’s role, she contends, has been
neglected, and this has impaired appreciation of the British
Enlightenment’s distinctive contribution, where “it was
virtue, rather than reason, that took precedence.” Or rather,
it was a distinctive interpretation of virtue that took precedence.
In contrast to the Aristotelian tradition’s austere moral
virtues, the British Enlightenment elaborated “the
‘social virtues’ — compassion, benevolence,
sympathy — which, the British philosophers believed,
naturally, instinctively, habitually bound people to each
other.” Here perhaps Himmelfarb overstates her case, because
it is only in a restricted sense that the elaboration of the social
virtues impelled the British to derogate from the authority of
reason. It would be more accurate to say that British thinking,
based not on inherited authorities but on their own observation and
analysis about human nature and the moral life, led to the
conclusion that human beings, both in acting well and in acting
badly, tended to be guided more by passions than by reason, a
conclusion of reason that a rational society needed to take into
account in framing just and effective institutions and laws.
According to Himmelfarb, the Third Earl of
Shaftesbury (1671-1713) set the tone for the British Enlightenment with his
three-volume Characteristics of Men,
Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), which (along with
Locke’s Second Treatise [1689]) was one of the best-selling works of the eighteenth
century. Shaftesbury rejected the traditional view that virtue was
grounded in religious faith, and he rejected as well typically
modern attempts to reinterpret virtue as an expression of
self-interest, sensation, or reason. Instead, he contended that
human beings, by nature, possessed a “moral sense.”
This was not something learned but built in. It predisposed human
beings to a “natural affection” for others and for
society as a whole. When properly cultivated it received expression
in the exercise of the social virtues, which were their own reward
for individuals and promoted happiness for society. Although these
social virtues did not depend on religious faith, their exercise
did lead, in the day-to-day treatment of other human beings, to
conduct consistent with religion’s teachings.
Not all the major figures in the British
Enlightenment were moral philosophers, yet most followed
Shaftesbury in giving pride of place to the social virtues.
Preeminent among them was Adam Smith (1723-1790), best known today for An
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) but also famous in his time for The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). The political
economy of the former was closely connected to the moral philosophy
of the latter. For example, a great advantage of the “system
of natural liberty” or the free market, Smith stressed, was
that it advanced the good of society, particularly that of the
least well-off. Nor is this contradicted, as Himmelfarb points out,
by Smith’s famous pronouncement in the Wealth of Nations that
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer,
or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to
their own interest.” The greater reliability of self-interest
as a motivation in economic relations was perfectly consistent with
the reality of the social virtues and their primacy in noneconomic
relations. Moreover, it was Smith’s attention to the social
virtues that led him to deplore the deadening effects of the
division of labor and to propose a state-run system of education so
that commercial life would lead instead to improvement in
workers’ skill, dexterity, and judgment.
More controversially, Himmelfarb goes on to
argue that Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Smith’s “avowed disciple,” also
deserves a place of honor in the British Enlightenment. Best known
for his Reflections on the Revolution in
France (1790), which defends the wisdom embodied in tradition and
condemns the French revolutionaries for seeking to remake political
society on the basis of abstract theories of political right, Burke
is often thought of as a leading figure of the
counter-Enlightenment. But, as Himmelfarb observes, though a
conservative, he is a conservative defender of liberty. He argued
that free-market economics was essential to prosperity while
insisting that the institutions and sentiments conserved across the
centuries work to keep a commercial society from deteriorating into
barbarity. Moreover, in The Sublime and
the Beautiful (1774) Burke places the passion
of sympathy — by which we enter into the concerns of others,
see and feel as they do, and take pain at their suffering —
at the center of the moral life. His credentials as an
Enlightenment figure are further enhanced by the progressive stands
he took on foreign policy. He supported the cause of the American
colonists, insisting that England had a duty to respect their
rights. And he criticized British policy in India, not because he
opposed imperialism but rather because he favored, as Himmelfarb
puts it, “a benevolent imperialism — a liberal
imperialism, it would later be called — an empire worthy of
an enlightened England that would respect the rights of the Indian
people and the traditions of an ancient civilization.”
To be sure, not all eighteenth-century British
thinkers belonged to the social virtues wing of the party of
enlightenment. Richard Price, Joseph Priestly, Thomas Paine, and
William Goodwin were radical or rational dissenters; they displayed
a faith in the power of reason to correct the confusions of moral
and political life and to serve as the motive for action more
typical of the French. Radical dissent reached its climax in
Godwin’s An Enquiry Concerning
Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and
Happiness (1793) in which skepticism toward religion hardened into
the belief that religion had to give way, according to Himmelfarb,
to the “sovereignty of reason.”
At the same time, the British example shows
that enlightenment needn’t be seen as diametrically opposed
to religion. Most of the outstanding thinkers were deists for whom
reason and faith could coexist peacefully and who believed that
both mandated the principle of toleration. Moreover, argues
Himmelfarb, some explicitly religious thinkers should be considered
members in good standing of the distinctly British Enlightenment.
She makes the case for John Wesley and Methodism. Focusing on the
feeling and experience of faith, Methodists left individuals free
to form their own opinion. Insisting only on the desire for
salvation of the soul, they prescribed no particular form of
worship. Articulating a religious ground for the moral sense,
Methodists preached the obligation to relieve the suffering of the
poor and the sick.
Nor was it only for the devout that the British
Enlightenment flowed readily beyond the realm of ideas. The
eighteenth century was also the “age of benevolence”
for the British in practice. They formed civil or voluntary
associations in abundance. They established clinics and hospitals,
reformed prisons and workhouses, cared for orphans, and sought to
abolish slavery. Their ambition, Himmelfarb approvingly notes, was
not to remake society from the ground up but to improve it.
Himmelfarb
devotes considerably less time to the
French Enlightenment, both because it is better known and because
criticizing what is familiar is more straightforward than
reclaiming what has been lost and forgotten. She cites
Tocqueville’s explanation for why French thinkers more
readily succumbed to the romance of reason and its attendant
immoderation: Whereas intellectuals in England were closer to and
exchanged views with those who governed, intellectuals in France
sought to elaborate abstract principles for good governance and did
so in complete independence of those who had responsibility to
administer the state. The literary expression of their surpassing
confidence in reason was the Encyclopedia, which aimed to provide a comprehensive account of
human knowledge. Such was the advanced state of understanding,
French thinkers believed, that they could conclude without
hesitation that religion in all its forms was false. Yet far from
creating confusion or consternation, the overthrow of religion, in
their view, would provide the opportunity to establish reason as
the supreme authority for society.
In what way would reason rule? Generally
speaking — Montesquieu (1689–1755), a hero of the American Enlightenment, is the
outstanding exception — reason as understood by French
Enlightenment thinkers issued in universal laws good for all
human beings everywhere. From their point of view, there was no
reason in principle that an enlightened despot could not elaborate
and administer these universal rules and good reason, given the
typically low opinion French Enlightenment thinkers had of the
people, for believing that only an enlightened despot could grasp, and govern
in accordance with, the dictates of universal reason.
The idea of the general will, developed most
memorably by Rousseau (1712–1778) in The Social Contract (1762), explained how the people’s higher or best interests
could be determined without their input or involvement. Although
people err, the general will does not. So better for the more
rational to discern it directly, by reflecting on man’s
nature and the laws and institutions that could perfect it. This
would be preferable to getting bogged down with the people whose
views about right and wrong, liberty and virtue, and reason and
religion were bound to be distorted by passion, interest, and
ignorance. The general will represented the principles that the
people would embrace if they had the capacity to rise above their
limitations and reason clearly. Accordingly, the general will, or
the authoritative statement of it by those who presumed to
understand its imperatives, typically diverged, often dramatically
from what the people believed to be in their interest. Although, as
Himmelfarb insists, one cannot blame the French Enlightenment for
the brutality of the French Revolution, one ought to observe how
the apotheosis of reason, the embrace of enlightened despotism, and
the conceit of the general will encourage illiberal and
undemocratic tendencies of the sort that received expression in the
Revolution’s notorious excesses.
The American Enlightenment was more akin to the
British than the French. While American thinkers did not provide
systematic investigations of them, the social virtues supplied a
background assumption about human nature and the moral life against
which their thinking about freedom and self-government took place.
The problem of liberty lay at the heart of their politics as well
as their thinking. Indeed, even more so than in England, theory and
practice were united in America. Many of the American
Enlightenment’s leading lights — Franklin, Adams,
Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison — were also among its preeminent
statesmen. Their intellectual and political energies converged in
the task of establishing for a large commercial republic a
constitutional government that was rooted in the sovereignty of the
people and capable of protecting individual liberties.
There was no shortage of disputes in
eighteenth-century America about how to achieve the goal. It is
easy to forget in an era in which the legitimacy and viability of
democracy are taken for granted — at least in the West
— how widespread were the fears that the American experiment
would fall prey to the tendency, vouched for by history, of
democracies to degenerate into tyranny or anarchy and the tendency,
supported by the preponderance of authorities, of commerce to
corrupt morals. The solution, embodied in the Constitution and
explained in The Federalist, was to take men as they are, driven in large
measure by self-interest but capable of virtue, and design
institutions that would contain individual waywardness by pitting
self-interest against self-interest and draw forth from the
population to represent the people the most gifted and
public-spirited citizens. Although the American founders distanced
government from responsibility for cultivating religion and virtue,
they taught religious toleration. They did so in part as an
imperative of reason, in part as a religious obligation, and in
part from the conviction that religion was indispensable to the
cultivation of that part of virtue on which good government
depended.
Himmelfarb
refrains from drawing lessons for
the present from her exploration of the past. About the closest she
comes is to remark that in America it was “a belief in human
imperfectability, and the civic and political arrangements deriving
from that belief, which sustained the country — a united
country — through all the turmoil of its history.”
However, had she wished to relax her scholar’s
self-discipline and indulge in informed speculation concerning our
current predicament, her rich and suggestive historical
explorations would have furnished ample opportunity.
For example, she might have observed that the
conceit driving the French doctrine of the general will is alive
and well in the thinking of those international lawyers who today
seek to bind all nations (but especially the United States) on the
basis of principles that, despite vigorous disagreement among
nations and the absence of consent, possess, the lawyers insist,
universal validity and therefore reflect the will of all peoples
everywhere. She might also have suggested that the respect for the
limits of reason which leads to regard for the wisdom embodied in
tradition and the mystery and teachings of religious faith is no
less an imperative of reason than it was in the eighteenth century.
And, in light of Edmund Burke’s complex career, she might
have pursued the thought that because, now as then, circumstances
vary and threats to liberty are multifarious, it may well be the
better part of wisdom to struggle at home, on the leading edge of
the Enlightenment, to conserve freedom’s moral preconditions
while seeking progress abroad in the protection of liberty and
equality. Although Himmelfarb leaves such speculations to others,
her historical labors clarify their pertinence and lay intellectual
foundations for their pursuit.
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