The true nature of the Enlightenment is best demonstrated by 18th-century Britain, where such concepts as nature, liberty, reason, rights and truth were most fully adumbrated in the concern for the ‘moral sense’. The thesis is revisionist, for the French philosophes have been considered to embody the paradigm, and only the Scottish (but not Burke!) have been understood as members of the canon. But British writers from Shaftesbury through Smith and on to the great Anglo-Irishman, along with the practical example of John Wesley’s Methodists, demonstrate the fundamental predilection to see dignity in all men. Not so the philosophes, preoccupied with the ‘ideology of reason’, as were the British Dissenters, or the Americans, focused on the politics of liberty. So Britain’s ‘sociology of virtue’ makes the strongest claim to the Enlightenment’s essence; however, each country’s subsequently development bears something of the others. A bibliography worth exploring, and worth revisiting for its brilliance and clarity.
Enlightenment
15. Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (10 Oct 2016)
Evaluates the conceptual novelty and disciplinary trajectory of 18th-century thought, emphasizing the pervasiveness of reason. In contrast to the Renaissance concern for maths-based systems, the Enlightenment sought for approaches to accommodate continuous, scientific progress. Descartes and Newton exemplified the former, while the French philosophes represented the latter, as they were responsible for introducing systemic analysis to philosophic thinking. Leibniz bridges this gap, due to his theory of entities (monads) in an ever-becoming status. Lessing, the poet, emerges the author’s final hero for adding to rationalism’s perfunctory analysis an endemic creative power. Deeply exploring concepts across many fields — science, religion, statecraft, psychology, aesthetics — this is a first-rate history of ideas.
16. Himmelfarb, Roads to Modernity (23 Oct 2016)
British thinkers following in the footsteps of Locke and Hume — Berkeley, Hutcheson, Gibbon, Smith joined by Burke and Wesley — were the Enlightenment’s first and foremost cohort, seeking to elaborate social compassion, benevolence, and sympathy. Where the French philosophes concentrated on the ‘ideology of reason’, born of universally applying the systems of Newton and Descartes to society’s structure and pursuits, and the American Founding Fathers on equitable political liberty, the British sought new precepts for a gentler, more virtuous society. These moral philosophers ‘posited a moral sentiment in man as the basis of the social virtues’. Himmelfarb places a major emphasis on Methodism (as an offshoot of the Anglican Church) and Dissent. Burke’s role was to take the British approach further, ‘by making the “sentiments, manners, and moral opinions” of men the basis of society itself, and, ultimately, of the polity as well’.
6. Becker, Heavenly City of the 18th-Century Philosophers (6 Mar 2018)
The Enlightenment philosophes, so far from being the first modern cohort, were in fact premodern because of their unshakeable belief in reason and progress. Relying on nature to reveal the organic laws of society, although based on the Newtonian approach to the physical sciences, was simplistic and bound to fall short. Becker focuses on the philosophes’ inability to solve such problems as the nature of virtue, while sidestepping their manifest challenge to the received wisdom of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The philosophes are always compared with the scholastics: there is no discussion of classical antiquity, a comparison which would lend another perspective on the basis of inquiry. At the same time, Becker himself points out history was the most popular scholarly topic of the late 18th century. Following Hume, contemporaries sought to identify universal principles of human nature (i.e., natural law) as well as continuity and progress. Such as variegated field is hardly to be compared with religious doctrine. Heavenly City turns on his own assumptions. The world is factual not rational, the author asserts (as an aside, saying it’s more important to use things efficiently than to understand them!); there is no predetermined order of progress or end of things; and no contemporary cohort can really understand the world of its predecessors. Accordingly, intelligence is conditioned by the very forces it seeks to understand. Thus, Becker not only stands in direct contrast with Cassirer, who described the philosophes as the first moderns, but also as a neo-Romantic and a forerunner of the postmoderns. As the introduction points out, Becker’s work was well timed to match emerging relativism and has since enjoyed periodic revival, but the failure to consider Athens as well as its historicism is crucial.
22. Kirk, Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered (29 Nov 2019)
Narrates the life and elucidates the political legacy of Edmund Burke, whose views on constitutional government, political party, and sociopolitical reform are fundamental to Western civic heritage. Though lacking the élan of Rousseau or Johnson, Burke’s wisdom pertains in the mid-20th century. Drawing on numerous Burke scholars, Kirk makes particular use of Peter Stanlis’ summary of Burke’s objectives:
- To maintain the structure of the British state
- To define the limits of British monarchy
- To extend the role of the House of Commons
- To expound the role of the political party
- To extend civil rights and economic opportunities to all citizens, including throughout the Empire (according local custom)
- To defend the historical traditions and order of Europe (i.e., Greco-Christian West) versus the Enlightenment
- To solve problems (i.e., to do justice) with an eye to custom (often ‘prudence’) and equally the ethics of prevailing legal norms
As early as 1746, Burke worried that decadent Western elites would succumb to leveling rationalism. As a parliamentarian, his initial impact owed to advocating self-government in Ireland and America, restraint of the British monarch (‘economy’) and simultaneously promotion of the political party, and social justice in India. His moral imagination and literary genius revealed his approach: ability to reform, disposition to preserve. Thoughts on Our Present Discontents first propounded the role of party harnessed to national interest (i.e., accountability to the public), because rising ‘popular interests’ would no longer abide conventional monarchy or aristocracy; but party needed to surmount the taint of faction. Burke always opposed arbitrary power and so the turn to opposing Jacobinism evidenced his recognizing rationalism’s inciting a European civil war. Reflections on the Revolution in France demonstrated the natural ends of Enlightenment government: the destructive energy of all radicals and the insistence on absolute submission to will. Contesting the notion that Burke ‘gave to party what was intended for mankind’, Kirk shows Burke’s political philosophy in fact formed the initial and most enduring defense of Western civilization. Meanwhile, the defection of the Old Whigs to the Tories created the first and oldest political party (contra Jones, Invention of Modern Conservatism). Elsewhere Kirk is concerned to demonstrate Leo Strauss’ misreading, in Natural Right and History, of fatalism: though seeming to concede he could do no more, in fact Burke’s works during the 1790s anticipate Churchill in locating perseverance in the English public and rallying them to it. Valuable as one of the clearer biographies, Kirk settled the debate over whether Burke was a conservative.