The View From 1776

From the closing decades of the 19th century through mid-20th century, academics (who were heavily influenced by the socialistic materialism espoused in the great German universities, then regarded as the ultimate source of PhD degrees) taught a distorted version of American history.  That version centered around the false idea that the Declaration of Independence represented the egalitarian spirit of the French socialist revolution and that the Constitution was a reactionary effort to kill egalitarianism.  Notable among those academics were Vernon L. Parrington (Main Currents in American Thought) and Charles A. Beard (An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States).

Because academics of that era, just as is true today, favored the collectivism of the socialistic welfare state, they identified the 17th and 18th century Enlightenments exclusively with the socialistic French Revolution.

Robert Curry sets about dismantling that academic fraud.

Sorting out the Enlightenments
By Robert Curry

A Review of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Roads To Modernity: The British, French, And American Enlightenments (Knopf, 2004)

“Can you recommend a book that sorts out the various Enlightenments and makes it clear why I should care?”

The Roads To Modernity ought to be the perfect answer to that question.  As you might anticipate because of the author’s sterling reputation, where it is good it is very, very good indeed.  Unfortunately, although the author accomplishes the task brilliantly in two magnificent chapters, she also creates confusion in a third chapter.  Despite the problems with that third chapter, The Roads To Modernity remains the best answer to the question, and even the chapter that goes awry has much to recommend it to the alert reader.
The two outstanding chapters are the ones on the French and the American Enlightenments.  They are models of brevity, clarity, and scholarly command of the subject.  The French and the American Enlightenments are brought into sharp focus, and their profound differences are made clear.

Prof. Himmelfarb brilliantly contrasts the French Enlightenment, which she terms “the Ideology of Reason,” and the American Enlightenment, termed by her as “the Politics of Liberty:”

“The idea of liberty…did not elicit anything like the passion or commitment [from the French] that reason did. Nor did it inspire the philosophes to engage in a systematic analysis of the political and social institutions that would promote and protect liberty.”
This passage is an example of the book at its best.  The philosophes and the Founders were working in very different directions on very different projects.  These differences help explain the very different outcomes of the American and the French Revolutions.
Because the study of the Enlightenment has traditionally focused on France, these two chapters provide the interested reader with an opportunity to make a great leap forward not just in understanding the Enlightenments, but also in understanding America.  Many Americans who take a keen interest in American history do not realize how much America’s Founding was an Enlightenment project.  They are surprised to learn that The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and The Federalist are among the greatest achievements of the Enlightenment.  Prof. Himmelfarb’s thoughtful analysis makes a powerful case for the historical significance and the uniqueness of the American Enlightenment.

Prof. Himmelfarb also ably demonstrates that the philosophes’ concept of reason explains their disdain for the common people.  Voltaire, for example, never concealed his disdain for the people, habitually referring to them as “la canaille” (the rabble), and Diderot wrote that “the common people are incredibly stupid.” The philosophes’ statements about their fellow citizens are very different from Jefferson’s ringing declaration that “all men are created equal…endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” What made for this difference?  Prof. Himmelfarb correctly assigns the difference to the role of two Enlightenment conceptions, the moral sense and common sense.  Moral sense and common sense doctrines were central to the American Enlightenment and absent from the French Enlightenment:

“The moral sense and common sense…attributed to all individuals gave to all people, including the common people, a common humanity and a common fund of moral and social obligations.  The French idea of reason was not available to the common people and had no such moral or social component.”

Much ink has been spilled on the question of why the French and the American Revolutions had such different outcomes.  Here you have a key difference, stated with brilliant clarity.  The difference between the philosophes and the Founders is this: the primacy of reason versus the primacy of the moral sense and common sense.

However, always pairing the moral sense and common sense, as Prof. Himmelfarb very correctly does, raises a problem.  The moral sense and the common sense schools of philosophy are the two schools that make up the Scottish Enlightenment.  This is so well established that the heading for a chapter on the Scottish Enlightenment writes itself:  “The Moral Sense and Common Sense.” There is no need for the brilliant defense Prof. Himmelfarb provides for “the Ideology of Reason” as the proper heading for the French and for “the Politics of Liberty” as the proper one for the Americans.  Yet there is no chapter on the Scottish Enlightenment.  Instead, there is a single chapter combining the British and the Scottish Enlightenments under the single label of the British Enlightenment.

The Scottish Enlightenment was a response to developments in England.  As Isaac Kramnick wrote,

“The beginnings are marked in Britain by the Glorious Revolution in 1688…as well as by the writings of Locke and the publication in 1687 of Newton’s Principia.”

The Scots enthusiastically entered into the scientific project of the Enlightenment but they were alarmed and aroused by the Lockean one.  The moral sense and common sense schools of philosophy were their response to Locke.  In the words of Garry Wills:
“Man was seen, after Locke, as determined by the impact of pleasure and pain upon his senses.  [Thomas] Reid saw this as a challenge to the certainty of knowledge.  [Francis] Hutcheson saw it as a threat to the very possibility of virtue.”

Reid founded the common sense school and Hutcheson the moral sense school to meet the Lockean threat.  Subsequently, the Scots handed their twin doctrines on to the Americans who used them in their “systematic analysis of the political and social institutions that would promote and protect liberty.” The Scots had done the brilliant theoretical work that opened the way for the success of the Founders’ systematic analysis.  A chapter on the Scottish Enlightenment placed between a chapter on Locke and the British Enlightenment and the chapter on the American Enlightenment would have told that story quite clearly.  The design of the book makes clear that Prof. Himmelfarb wants to tell a different story. 

The chapter on the British Enlightenment is over three times as lengthy as either the chapter on the French or the one on the Americans.  Remarkably, there is a lengthy section in the British chapter in which Prof. Himmelfarb argues that Edmund Burke is an Enlightenment thinker, though she admits that he is generally assigned to the counter-Enlightenment.  Even more remarkably, there is an even lengthier section on Methodism.  These are not merely brief digressions.  The Burke and the Methodism sections taken together are much longer than either the chapter on the French or the chapter on the American Enlightenments. 

In light of the number of pages dedicated to Burke and to Methodism, the page count dedicated to Locke is especially and curiously meager.  The apparent justification for the minimal attention paid to Locke is that Prof. Himmelfarb chooses to downplay Locke’s significance.  In what is almost an aside, Prof. Himmelfarb denies Locke and Newton the role traditionally assigned to them: 

“John Locke and Isaac Newton are often designated as the fathers of the British Enlightenment.  I myself would give that distinction to the third Earl of Shaftesbury…”
This claim is more than audacious.  Locke and Newton are not just “often designated” as the men who fathered the Enlightenment.  On this point the French, the Scots and the Americans of the Enlightenment are in agreement. 

As a result of the diminished role of Locke and Newton, no attempt is made to represent for us how Newton’s scientific discoveries, Locke’s philosophical writings and the possibilities suggested by the Glorious Revolution’s limits on governmental power combined to open up the new vision for Western civilization that we call the Enlightenment.  For, of course, if Newton and Locke do not have a central role, there is no need for Prof. Himmelfarb to make that attempt.

But why choose Shaftesbury instead for the central role?  The answer to that question is made clear simply by continuing the sentence just quoted above:

“…I myself would give that distinction to the third Earl of Shaftesbury, who was also the father of the Scottish Enlightenment although he was neither Scottish nor a professor.”

If Shaftesbury is the father of both the British Enlightenment and the Scottish Enlightenment, then a single chapter combining those two Enlightenments under the single label of the British Enlightenment would make sense.  The need for a separate chapter on the Scottish Enlightenment is eliminated—but at what a cost!  The problems are not limited to denying Newton and Locke their iconic status.  Starting the Enlightenment with Shaftesbury instead of Locke has the additional problem that Shaftesbury’s purpose was to refute Locke.  Like the Scots, Shaftesbury was alarmed and aroused to action by Locke, though he was careful not to name Locke in print, perhaps for personal reasons.  (Locke had personally supervised Shaftesbury’s education as a boy.) In a famous letter to a friend, Shaftesbury made his view of Locke quite clear:
“ ’Twas Mr. Locke that struck at all fundamentals, threw all order and virtue out of the world…Virtue, according to Mr. Locke, has no other measure, law, or rule, than fashion and custom: morality, justice, equity, depend only on law and will….And thus neither right nor wrong, virtue nor vice are anything in themselves.”

Like Shaftesbury, the Scots took up the task of refuting Locke and finding philosophical foundations for moral judgments and for knowledge claims as well.  Therefore it seems appropriate to place Shaftesbury where the Scots always placed themselves, that is, as one of the many thinkers following on Locke.

We are now able to envision the remodeling of the Enlightenment carried out by Prof. Himmelfarb in the chapter on the British Enlightenment.  She has raised an interior wall that moves Newton and Locke to the periphery, and taken down other walls in order to send out large additions, one to house Edmund Burke and another vast wing to make a place for Methodism.  The result is certainly strange.  What can be the purpose of these drastic assaults on its venerable floor plan?  Prof. Himmelfarb has spoken movingly of her lifelong interest in Burke.  Perhaps this massive Enlightenment remodeling project can best be understood by noting that it makes it easier to find a place for Burke within it.  Certainly an Enlightenment that includes Methodism, keeps Locke and Newton in the background and mixes the Scots and the British together is one from which it would be more difficult to justify excluding Burke.

Whether or not the problems with the chapter entitled “the British Enlightenment” are the result of a special effort to re-make the British Enlightenment so that it is sufficiently capacious to contain comfortably Edmund Burke, the chapter has much to offer the reader who is alert to the actual historical sequence.  If you read the chapter carefully, you are positioned to find within it much of value and much to admire.  If your style of reading would allow you to do such a thing, I recommend that you consider reading the chapters on the French and the Americans first.  With those two chapters under your belt, and armed with an awareness that the moral sense and common sense are the handiwork of the Scots, while reading you may begin to perceive within this unwieldy chapter many of the elements of two brilliant chapters, one on the British Enlightenment and one on the Scottish Enlightenment.