A BLIND SPOT?

The eighteenth century sailed forward into an era of unparalleled stability ... No ferment of ideas or memories remained.
PERRY ANDERSON

       The year 1783 brought the launching not just of the AmericanRepublic but also, more modestly, of the Berliner Mittwochgesellschaft(Wednesday Club), a debating society typical of those thensprouting in German cities. In a local periodical, one of its membersbroached the question: `What is enlightenment?' Strenuous debatefollowed. Three hundred and sixty miles to the east, in Königsberg,a professor of philosophy offered his contribution. In his `Answer tothe Question: What is Enlightenment?' (1784), the great ImmanuelKant deemed that `if it is now asked whether we live at present in anenlightened age, the answer is: No', although he did add, `we do livein an age of enlightenment': Europe was in the throes of becomingenlightened. How?

    To secure `man's release from his self-incurred immaturity', Kantjudged, people must think for themselves under the watchwordsapere aude ? `dare to know' ? a tag from the Roman poet Horace.Yet it was not so simple. The thinker must indeed `dare to know';nevertheless, in his capacity as clergyman or civil servant, hisprimary duty lies in serving his church and obeying his prince ? inKant's case, Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, an enlightenedmonarch, no doubt, and a fan of Voltaire, but a man Machiavellian,militaristic and autocratic. Subjects, Kant concluded, were duty-boundto swallow dissent and uphold the royal will so as to precludedisorder.

    Kant's denial that his age was enlightened is often endorsed byhistorians. Yet, taken for historical fact, it is utterly misleading. Itmay well apply to his own university city, the modern Kaliningrad,on Russia's Baltic coast, east of Poland, where he had been born in1724 and would die eighty years later ? in his entire life the philosopher,while boldly voyaging in the mind, never ventured his goutytoes outside East Prussia. His daily constitutional was almost as faras he ever went ? and such a regular was he that the locals were saidto set their watches by the professorial tread.

    Not all that many Königsbergers, one suspects, had sapere audehung over their beds. And Kant's denial arguably applies morebroadly to Prussia at large, a feudal kingdom manned by hereditaryserfs whose forced labour sustained a haughty landed nobility, acadre of tame officials and a fearsome military machine. DespiteFrederick's own advanced postures and policies, Prussia qualifies forthe epithet `enlightened' only in a somewhat Pickwickian sense.`A government, supported by an army of 180,000 men,' terselycommented the English traveller John Moore, `may safely disregardthe criticisms of a few speculative politicians, and the pen of thesatirist.'

    A faithful state functionary, Professor Kant's ideal of freedom wasas timid as the man himself. Elsewhere in Europe, the question ofenlightenment had been raised and, many were sure, resolved,decades before Berlin's Wednesday talking shop was even dreamedup. However sublime a philosopher, as a culture-watcher Kant wasfated to be a man on the margins, hardly au fait with political realitiesto the west, where phrases like `this enlightened age' had long beenten-a-penny. In England, Ambrose Philips's magazine the Free-Thinkerhad adopted Horace's `sapere aude' as its masthead as early as1718, launching an assault on superstition; and in a nation in whichformal censorship had ceased back in 1695, such an assertion offree-thinking raised few eyebrows ? the Mittwochgesellschaft, bycontrast, positively gave its imprimatur to press censorship.

    Already, by Phillips's time, Englishmen prided themselves uponliving in the light. A full three-quarters of a century before Kant,Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, had addresseda comrade in the Netherlands in far more spirited terms:

There is a mighty Light which spreads its self over the world especially in those two free Nations of England and Holland; on whom the Affairs of Europe now turn; and if Heaven sends us soon a peace suitable to the great Successes we have had, it is impossible but Letters and Knowledge must advance in greater Proportion than ever ... I am far from thinking that the Cause of Theisme will lose anything by fair Dispute. I can never ... wish better for it than when I wish the Establishment of an intire Philosophicall Liberty.

    As this book will stress, the Whig peer's elation at enjoying `intirePhilosophicall Liberty' in a free and progressive country was sharedby many of his contemporaries. How peculiar, then, that historianshave had so little to say about the role of English thinkers in theEuropean Enlightenment as a whole!

Complex revisionisms mark our times. For long the `age of reason'was slighted by Anglo-American scholars as an arid or pretentiousinterlude, personified by know-alls such as Voltaire and oddballssuch as Rousseau. More recently, however, the Enlightenment hasbeen achieving recognition ? sometimes notoriety ? as a movementdecisive in the making of modernity. The American historian PeterGay reinstated the philosophes as dauntless critics, wrestling with problemsof modern life which still tax us today. And since then, ourunderstanding of the Aufklärung has been further enriched. We cannow see it as stretching far beyond the `little flock of philosophes'celebrated by Gay: today's cultural historians point to the ferment ofnew thinking amongst the reading public at large, stimulated vianewspapers, novels, prints and even pornography ? the Enlightenmentshould be viewed not as a canon of classics but as a livinglanguage, a revolution in mood, a blaze of slogans, delivering theshock of the new. It decreed new ways of seeing, advanced by a rangeof protagonists, male and female, of various nationalities and discretestatus, professional and interest groups.

    This image of an engagé Enlightenment, criticizing, cajoling andcalling for practical improvement on a broad front, represents amajor advance upon the dated image of periwigged poseurs prattlingon in Parisian salons. In this welcome revisionism, however, the roleof Britain remains oddly neglected. That is nothing new. In hisestablishing of the Enlightenment pantheon, Ernst Cassirer's magisterialand profoundly influential The Philosophy of the Enlightenment,translated from the German in 1951, had not so much as mentionedBolingbroke and Bentham, Priestley, Price and Paine or Godwinand Wollstonecraft (the Enlightenment's premier husband-and-wifeteam), or that astonishing polymath Erasmus Darwin, let aloneAnglo-Scottish political economy ? no Adam Smith! ? or laypreachers like Addison and Steele. From his philosophical eyrie,Cassirer patronized those few English thinkers he did deign to discuss:'among the leaders of this movement', he concluded of the Deists,`there is no thinker of real depth and of truly original stamp'.

    Cassirer's erudition proved justifiably influential, and his neglectof England characterized his successors. Leonard Marsak's anthologyThe Enlightenment presented no readings at all from English writers,while Lester Crocker's equivalent barely did better, with a token fourout of fifty. The pattern thus set a generation ago continues: JamesSchmidt's recent What Is Enlightenment? contains thirty-four essays,not one of which focuses on England. A survey of religion andphilosophy in Georgian Britain got by without using the term`Enlightenment' at all; Christopher Hill likewise, deprecating themystifying rationality of `Yahoo society'; and literary historians haveoften opted for the label `Augustan', partly because `age of reason'has been thought to suggest a `winter of the imagination'. Andwhen not thus ignored, English achievements have been denied.Henry Steele Commager rated England `a bit outside the Enlightenment',while a fellow American pronounced as recently as 1976, `theterm "English Enlightenment" would be jarring and incongruous ifit were ever heard'. This book will, I trust, be a jarring experience.

    Such scholarly disdain has deep roots. Unlike the self-styled lumièresor illuminati across the Channel, Georgian gentlemen did not in somany words term themselves `enlighteners', nor did the phrase `theEnlightenment' enter English usage until the mid-Victorian era, eventhen being used to curl a lip at Voltaire and the other facile scoffersof that `age of reason' which the Romantics and Victorians soabhorred. The term continues to carry pejorative airs: the 1973edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary glosses it as denoting`shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt forauthority and tradition, etc., applied esp. to the spirit and aims of theFrench philosophers of the 18th c.' ? a definition proud to perpetuatenot just English philistinism but Oxonian deference to `authority andtradition'.

    It does not come as a surprise, therefore, that no book exists called`The English Enlightenment' or `The British Enlightenment'; thenearest is John Redwood's Reason, Ridicule and Religion (1976), whichis at least subtitled `The Age of Enlightenment in England, 1660-1750'.Written by a fellow of All Souls, Oxford, who, hardly bychance, went on to become a far right Conservative Party politicianand outspoken Eurosceptic, it advances a decidedly rum case:incapable of mounting a truly rational critique of Throne andAltar, rationalist enemies of the Establishment had instead, rathercaddishly, stooped to raillery and ridicule. Subsequent neo-conservativehistorians like J. C. D. Clark, who also did time at AllSouls, have in effect denied by silence an Anglo-Enlightenment,holding that Hanoverian England remained a `confessional state'with Church and King beliefs supreme. For all its scholarship andintelligence, Clark's reading is highly idiosyncratic: eyes glued on thepolitical superstructure, he overlooks the zest for change bubblingup in society at large. Yet his stress on the durability of hideboundHigh Church and Tory convictions is valuable in its own way, sinceit highlights the intensity of ideological conflict, and so reminds usthat enlightened attitudes formed not some bland background musicto events but a partisan voice, expressive of sectional interests anddivided élites.

    There are, of course, distinguished exceptions to this academicblind spot ? J. G. A. Pocock and Margaret Jacob, in particular, havemade a point of utilizing the term, and what follows will draw greatlyand gratefully upon their pioneering scholarship. Nevertheless, therehas been no study of the `British Enlightenment' as such, nor anydebate on `English Enlightenment' comparable to those over thescientific and industrial revolutions.

What makes all this so very odd is that the philosophes themselveslooked to England as the birthplace of the modern. Anglophiles inFrance, Italy and the Holy Roman Empire celebrated Britain'sconstitutional monarchy and freedom under the law, its open society,its prosperity and religious toleration. `The English are the onlypeople upon earth,' declared Voltaire in his significantly titled Lettresphilosophiques ou Lettres anglaises (1733), the first grenade lobbed at theancien régime,

who have been able to prescribe limits to the power of Kings by resisting them; and who, by a series of struggles, have at last established that wise Government, where the Prince is all powerful to do good, and at the same time is restrain'd from committing evil; where the Nobles are great without insolence, tho' there are no Vassals; and where the People share in the government without confusion.

    However idealized, Voltaire's homage was at least based uponfirst-hand experience. After a spat with the Chevalier de Rohan, theyoung writer had been roughed up by the nobleman's bully boys andthrown into the Bastille, and was released only on condition that hewent into exile. Resident in England for three years from 1726, heenjoyed the companionship of poets and politicians and plunged intothe works of English scientists, philosophers and religious freethinkers.

    The Lettres saluted England as a `nation of philosophers' and thecradle of liberty, tolerance and sense, using it, like Montesquieu later,as a stick to beat his own patrie. Francis Bacon was the prophet ofmodern science, Isaac Newton had revealed the laws of the universe,and John Locke had demolished Descartes and rebuilt philosophyon the bedrock of experience. Together, their teachings beat a pathbetween dogmatism and scepticism, opening up new views of nature,morals and society.

    A philosophe of a younger generation, Denis Diderot felt no lessardent. Reflecting on the `two countries in Europe in which philosophyis cultivated', he drew a telling distinction: `In England, philosophersare honoured, respected; they rise to public offices, they areburied with the kings ... In France warrants are issued against them,they are persecuted, pelted with pastoral letters ... Do we see thatEngland is any the worse for it?'

    France `owes to England', the Journal encyclopédique was to acknowledge,`the great revolution which has taken place in everythingwhich can contribute to render peoples more happy and Statesmore flourishing'. Progressives in Paris formed an informal Englishfanclub, while a popular comedy of the 1760s guyed the Anglomaniacwho had `Hogard' and `Hindel' on his lips, drank only tea, readnothing but Shakespeare and Pope and declared: `The teachers ofmankind have been born in London, and it is from them we musttake lessons.' There was even a touch of truth in that caricature, asEdward Gibbon ? hardly a vulgar chauvinist ? found when visitingParis just after the inglorious Bourbon defeat in the Seven YearsWar: `Our opinions, our fashions, even our games, were adopted inFrance; a ray of national glory illuminated each individual, and everyEnglishman was supposed to be born a patriot and a philosopher.'

    Continentals lapped up English ideas. Take another Anglophile,the Piedmontese nobleman Alberto Radicati di Passerano. `Heabsorbed the more violent and polemical elements from Englishdeism,' the great Italian historian Franco Venturi once observed:

He dreamed of a world without property or authority, and, at the sametime, showed enthusiasm for the mixed government of the British Isles,which he experienced during his difficult and troubled exile. He combinedthe most diverse elements from the commonwealthmen in a curious andoriginal way ... Every aspect of this example, both the ideological and thepolitical, reveals particularly well the penetration on the continent of theideas formed in England at the turn of the century.

    Continental savants were galvanized by English innovations inpolitics and ethics, epistemology, aesthetics and even belles lettres ? somuch so that Diderot was led to exclaim that `without the English,reason and philosophy would still be in the most despicable infancyin France'. Religious critiques infiltrated France through the worksof Toland, Tindal, Collins, Wollaston, Woolston and those Deisticalaristocrats Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke, spreading even fartherafield, via Leibniz and the Electress Sophia to the German states, andinto Italy through Giannone.

    English moral benevolism also rippled to the Continent. Diderot'spassion for vertue was kindled by his translating Shaftesbury; otherphilosophes applauded Pope's An Essay on Man (1733-4), while Rousseaufound balm in Addison and Steele, confessing, `The Spectator particularlypleased me, and improved my mind.' Later on, British utilitarianismspurred legal reformers, a Spaniard declaring `the grandBaintham' to have been `the most universal genius which the worldever produced ? a Solon, a Plato, and a Lope de Vega'. Norwas exporting less brisk in the natural sciences ? with Newtoniangravitation finally weaning the French off their beloved Cartesian`vortices' ? and also in the practical arts: `France owes to Englandthe great revolution which has taken place in her literature,' gushedthe Journal encyclopédique in 1758:

How many excellent works ... have appeared in recent years upon the useful arts ? upon agriculture ... upon commerce, finance, manufactures, navigation and the colonies, in short upon everything which can contribute to render peoples more happy and States more flourishing.

The peerless Encyclopédie itself, launched in 1751 by Diderot andd'Alembert and completed in twenty-eight volumes, originated in ascheme to translate Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia, which hadappeared back in 1728.

    Even British fiction became fashionable. Robinson Crusoe (1726) tookGermany by storm ? by 1760 over forty sequels had appeared; so didthe verse of Ossian, the `Scottish Homer', at a later date; whilesentimental drama and novels ravished Continental hearts: `ORichardson, Richardson, man unique in my eyes,' sang Diderot ofthe author of Pamela, `thou shalt be my reading at all times!' Inshort, so a French critic confessed in 1768, once English lettershad been tasted, `a revolution quickly took place in our own: theFrenchman ... no longer welcomed or valued anything that had notsomething of an English flavour about it'.

    Contemporary comment thus suggests it was an English sun whichlit up many of the Continental children of light. How, in that case,do we explain modern verdicts like R. R. Palmer's?

    At a banal level ? that of historical tastes ? the paradox is easilyaccounted for: `The Enlightenment is ordinarily thought of as aFrench affair.' By custom, the movement is assumed to beFrancophone, albeit perhaps finding its metaphysical apotheosisamong German philosophers. `There were many philosophes,' ruledGay, `but there was only one Enlightenment' ? and that was France-centred,headed by that Voltairian party of humanity which championedthe modern trinity of atheism, republicanism andmaterialism. Leonard Marsak dubbed the Enlightenment `primarilya French phenomenon'; it was `pre-eminently and focally French',agreed Lester Crocker, while Robert Darnton has recently restatedthat it was `in Paris in the early eighteenth century' that enlightenmenttook off.

    Such readings owe much to the assumption current ever sinceEdmund Burke and the Abbé Barruel that the Enlightenment'sclimax ? or nadir ? lay in what Palmer styled `democratic revolution',enshrined first in the American and then in the French Revolutions.The fact that there was no English revolt to match, indeed that JohnBull proved the bulwark of counter-revolution, seems to lend supportto the idea that there can have been no English Enlightenmentworthy of the name.

    Indeed, small surprise that historians should belittle British developmentsif the Enlightenment's defining features are taken to be theatheism, republicanism and materialism supposedly fired by thephilosophes' big guns and sparking the French Revolution. Hailed thusas the authorized prophets of the modern, must not the avant-gardehave been `radical' to the very marrow? Gay freely bestows bouquetslike `revolutionaries', `skeptics', `democrats' and `atheists'; and if theEnlightenment is primarily to be read, following him, as the `rise ofmodern paganism', it must make sense to put into the foregroundVoltaire's écrasez l'infâme, along with d'Holbach's atheistic materialism.Hence, finding in England few pagans or insurrectionistspanting to throttle the last king with the guts of the last priest, howeasy it is to conclude that the `English Enlightenment' must be amisnomer or an oxymoron.

    Yet in sober truth few French philosophes, and virtually none oftheir German, Italian or Dutch confrères, were devoted democrats,materialists or atheists. The shrill rhetoric of some philosophes, andthe loathing many truly felt for cardinals and even kings, should notbe mistaken for practical plans to turn society itself upside-down.Dazzling sloganizing made the French Enlightenment central to laterradical mythologies and reactionary demonologies alike, but the linksbetween the High Enlightenment and revolutionary activity wereanything but clear cut. Many philosophes, as revolutionaries themselvescomplained, had feathered nests for themselves under theancien régime ? d'Alembert, after all, held four more sinecures than DrJohnson. To what extent, and until when, would Voltaire orDiderot, had they lived to see the Revolution, have applauded itsactual course ? one which beheaded the chemist Lavoisier and droveCondorcet to suicide, and was criticized by latter-day philosophes likeRaynal and Marmontel? Looking at the Enlightenment retrospectivelythrough modern political lenses creates a fatally distortingteleology.

    Anglophone developments have also been skipped over thanks tothe intellectualist fallacy dear to academics who, echoing Cassirer'sverdict on the Deists, prize `profundity' above all and rate deadthinkers on an abstrusity scale. Given this scholarly snobbery, suchseminal figures as the idiosyncratic Shaftesbury, the ironist Toland,the suave Steele or the populist Paine get low marks. Even thedecision to call his book the philosophy of the Enlightenment perhapsinvolved Cassirer in a distortion, a betrayal even, of its spirit, especiallyinsofar as he imagined the philosophes stumblingly trying, avant lalettre, to write The Critique of Pure Reason. After all, scholasticism wasthe last thing activists were trying to advance.

    Anyone embracing Cassirer's criteria would certainly find Englishdiscourse pretty low grade, though they might award more points toScottish academics like Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart for theirmethodical manuals of methodology. Undoubtedly England producedno Kant, but that is not the point: there is no earthly reasonwhy systematic metaphysics should be taken as the acme of enlightenment.Thinkers like Locke abhorred l'esprit de système and swept asidethe old scholastic cobwebs; the most ingenious way of becomingfoolish was to be a system-monger, quipped Shaftesbury, who maderidicule the test of truth. England's modernizers had no stomach forindigestible scholastic husks; they were not ivory-towered academicsbut men (and women) of letters who made their pitch in the metropolitanmarket place and courted the public, hoping, with JosephAddison, who supported Cicero's praise of Socrates for bringingphilosophy down from the heavens, to make it `dwell in Clubsand Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee Houses'. Sellingphilosophy to urbanites, and uniting the man of letters to the man ofthe world, English thinkers made it their business to be palatable,practical and pleasing.

    If academics have misled themselves with monolithic and anachronisticmodels of what `true enlightenment' must have been,things are changing. Recent scholarship has been in a disaggregatingmood, replacing the old essentialist assumptions of a pure and unitary(for which, read French) movement with a pluralism, appreciative ofa variety of blooms, from Dublin to Lublin, from York to NewYork, each with its own seeds and soil, problems, priorities andprogrammes. In place of the old emphasis on superstars, widerenlightened circles are now being investigated from perspectiveswhich accommodate E. P. Thompson's `peculiarities of the English'? alongside, of course, those of the Prussians, the Poles and thePortuguese. Today it seems arbitrary and anachronistic to rule thatonly crusaders for atheism, republicanism and materialism deservethe adjective `enlightened'; the time is ripe, as Thompson himselfmight surely have said, to rescue the English Enlightenment fromthe `enormous condescension of posterity'.

    To trace the part played by British thinkers in the making ofmodernity, better mappings are needed of the contacts and circuitsof literati and their listeners. The loops between London, Edinburghand Dublin, between the metropolis and the provinces, betweencultures high and low, religious and secular, male and female, mustall be traced. Appealing against guilty verdicts on the treason of theintellectuals ? Perry Anderson's withering `no ferment of ideas ormemories' ? Thompson points to the formation of `scores of intellectualenclaves, dispersed over England, Wales and Scotland, whichmade up for what they lost in cohesion by the multiplicity of initiativesafforded by these many bases'. J. H. Plumb likewise has guided thebedazzled eye away from the `peaks of culture': `too much attention,it seems to me,' he wrote, `is paid to the monopoly of ideas amongstthe intellectual giants, too little to their social acceptance. Ideasacquire dynamism when they become social attitudes and this washappening in England.' These are some of the challenges thisbook takes up. I shall now turn to the core problems of the BritishEnlightenment, and signpost the key themes covered in the chaptersto follow.

Continues...
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