In
the 1700s, many of Europe’s major social thinkers were strongly influenced by
a body of ideas described as “the Enlightenment.”
Enlightenment
thinkers had in common, first of all, belief
in “systematic doubt”—that everything must be subjected to the critical
light of reason, and that no ideas or opinions or traditions should be accepted
without first proving their accuracy and worth.
Second,
they took science as the correct method of reasoning and saw the natural world
as the model for human behavior. They
judged human behaviors and institutions by whether or not they accorded with
“natural law” (and not whether they fit with the teachings of the classical
world or with the doctrines of the Church).
Third,
most rejected Christian doctrine and believed that reason was the path to Truth,
which could not be reached by theology (or divine revelation, or the guidance of
priests).
Fourth,
they rejected the Christian view that people were inherently depraved.
They claimed that humans have reason and human behavior follows laws,
just as other aspects of nature follow laws.
Fifth,
they saw physical science, social science, and the humanities as connected, and
believed that by applying the “scientific method” people could determine and
understand all aspects of nature, society, and the individual.
Sixth,
they were “on a mission,” to liberate humanity from darkness and ignorance
through the application of science, reason, tolerance, and humanitarianism.
They believed in the possibility of Progress through rationality used
their writings to influence a
“broad” audience—the “reading public.”
They were not writing for “other philosophers.”
(See the section in Coffin chapter 19 on Enlightenment culture, the
“reading public,” and the “public sphere”—pages 668-72)
Seventh,
they often criticized the principles of Absolutism and monarchical rule and the
entire social system of the “old order,” including the economic principles
of mercantilism. Their ideas
regarding government and the economy were closely linked to new movements for
representative government, constitutions, and laissez-faire free market
capitalism.
But
(as in all previous lectures), there are some things that we must bear in mind
before going further:
1)
Not all
Enlightenment thinkers were “democratic,” and in fact Enlightenment
political thought could be carried in a number of different directions—some
Enlightenment thinkers were supporters of Absolutism. Many rejected the idea of equal rights for women or for
non-Europeans.
2)
Not all
Enlightenment thinkers saw a connection between “rationality/progress” and
the emergence of a capitalist economy and society—some felt that private
property corrupted society.
3)
While
Enlightenment ideas did not stop when they reached national borders, there were
important “national” variations on the Enlightenment—the Anglo-Scottish
Enlightenment, for instance, placed greater emphasis on “political economy”
than did the French Enlightenment; the French and the English placed greater
emphasis on political liberty than did the German Enlightenment (etc).
“Dare
to Know!”
Enlightenment
thinkers believed that nature followed rational rules—that life consistently
abided by a set of logical principles. They
contrasted this to the way mankind had allowed itself to become organized
according to “irrational” and “unnatural” principles.
To the philosophes
(Enlightenment thinkers) poverty, injustice, ignorance, etc., were the
consequence of humans’ failure to live according to “natural” rational
principles.
If
the scientific method were applied to studying society, they believed, then we
could discern the “natural laws” that govern the economy, law, government,
morality, etc. All human
institutions, therefore, should be judged on the basis of their accordance with
these “natural laws”: those that followed natural laws, that were
“rational,” would promote progress and well-being for the individual and the
society; those that did not measure up—that failed to follow “rational
principles” of “natural law”--had to be replaced.
For
the most part, their model of science was that of Bacon and the
Empiricists—which stressed the importance of analyzing observational data
instead of Cartesian “pure logic” and “system building.”
Implicit
in the Enlightenment emphasis on science and natural law was man’s ability to
reason, to think, to reflect upon experience.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant described Enlightenment as
“reaching maturity”: the
failure to think for yourself did not come from a lack of intelligence, but from
immaturity—the desire to have someone else make your decisions for you, like a
child—and from a lack of courage to use your own intelligence.
Kant’s motto for the Enlightenment was “Dare to know! ”
Denis
Diderot, a leading figure in the French Enlightenment, said that every issue,
every idea had to be examined critically without concern for breaking taboos or
hurting feelings. Only by
“daring” to think this way could the world be made better.
Knowledge, truth, rationality would defeat ignorance, corruption,
superstition, and tyranny.
As
one writer put in at the time, “Ignorance and servitude are calculated to make
men wicked and unhappy. Knowledge,
reason, and Liberty alone can reform them and make them happier.
.... Men are unhappy only
because they are ignorant, and they are ignorant only because everything
conspires to prevent them from being enlightened...they are wicked only because
their reason is not fully developed.”
Religion, Deism, Skepticism and Atheism
Enlightenment
thinkers saw themselves as living in an age of Enlightenment, an Age of Reason
(to use a phrase made famous by Thomas Paine), which they viewed as the
rejection of the previous “Age of Faith.”
They
blamed the institutions and teachings of Christianity for promoting superstition
instead of reason; for keeping people in a state of moral childhood by telling
them that God and Church would provide them with all they need to know; for
teaching that humans by nature were wicked and sinful, and that happiness can be
found only in heaven.. so as to keep people from trying to improve the world in
which they live; for stoking the fires of fanaticism and hatred against those of
other faiths, which led to the Crusades, the Inquisition, and wars of religion;
and for frightening people into submission, so that they would obey tyrants
instead of seeking liberty.
Enlightenment
thinkers criticized the Bible for its logical contradictions and condemned faith
in miracles and the supernatural as irrational. The Scottish Enlightenment thinker David Hume, for instance,
argued that a “miracle” was by definition a violation of natural law; any
phenomenon occurring in nature, Hume argued, can be examined and eventually
explained by science, and therefore is not “miraculous.”
The
French Enlightenment thinker Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet) described theology
as “madness” and questioned the morality of any religion that would treat
knowledge as sinful (i.e., Genesis, eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge
causes the expulsion from Eden). He
reasoned that the Judaic-Christian God wanted man to remain “a dunce” (and
that the serpent urging man on to eat the fruit of knowledge made a lot more
sense to him than did God....).
Voltaire
condemned the institutions of Christianity as hypocritical for claiming to
preach love while in fact teaching hatred—for encouraging slaughter after
slaughter of non-believers and of those who practice a different form of
Christianity than one’s own. But
Voltaire was not an atheist—he did believe in a “righteous God,” and he
did believe in the importance of following God’s “moral commandments.”
Voltaire
and most Enlightenment thinkers were “deists.”
Building off of the ideas of 17th century “free-thinkers”
like Pierre Bayle (in France) and Matthew Tindal (in England), they condemned
the immoral behavior of clergymen and attacked religious dogmas.
But at the same time they saw fundamental truth in the idea of a wise and
just God. Rituals, dogma, most
teachings of Christianity, the deists believed, had little or nothing to do with
God’s few simple truths. As Tindel put it, true religion—God’s original moral
law--meant doing as much good as we can. This
was the essence of religion for deists—it was a moral code, based upon
principles of justice and humane behavior.
The
deists also believed that God was logically necessary as a “first cause” of
the universe—that something as perfect as nature could not have been
accidental, and must have been designed by an intelligent creator.
The deists viewed God the designer of the universe, an all-knowing
creator who built the clock to followed simple rules.
Unlike Newton, who believed in the active presence of God in man’s
affairs through the intercession of angels (etc), the deists believed that God
let nature run on its own.
Most
deists, like Voltaire, argued that belief in God was necessary to give people a
“moral compass”—to keep people behaving properly. Voltaire wrote that “If God did not exist, it would be
necessary to invent him.” But God
also had given man the ability to reason, to study, reflect, and understand the
moral and scientific laws that govern the universe.
Not
all Enlightenment thinkers agreed with the principles of Deism; David Hume, for
instance, did not see any logical necessity for a “Creator”—just because
the world behave according to “laws,” Hume argued, does not necessarily
infer that there was some “cosmic watchmaker.”
Among those who rejected the conclusion of the deists also were atheists
like Paul-Henri Tiray (Baron d’Holbach), who argued that all religion was a
product of child-like fear of the unknown, and that the idea of God itself was
the result of fear and ignorance.
Power and Liberty
The
“philosophes” considered tyranny and “despotism” to be the other source
of human ignorance and unhappiness (together with established religion).
They hoped not only for an age of Reason, but also for an Age of Liberty.
One
of the key political concepts for Enlightenment thinkers was the “contract
theory” of government, the two best known versions of which are associated
with John Locke and Jean–Jacques Rousseau.
Locke—like
Thomas Hobbes before him--argued that man had originally lived in a “state of
nature.” But whereas for Hobbes, the state of nature was a constant, violent,
selfish struggle for survival, Locke described it as a state of “absolute
freedom” and liberty—which for Locke meant the freedom to do whatever one
wanted with oneself and one’s property.
Both
Locke and Hobbes agreed that mankind could not sustain itself in the “state of
nature”—that many individuals seeking to protect their own interests created
chaos and insecurity—and so mankind agreed to give up the state of nature and
establish “civil society,” and to create a government that would function as
the mediator of disputed.
What
was significant about Locke’s version of this idea of man inventing government
to protect himself from other men who might take away his liberty was that he
saw it as being based upon a contract. According
to Locke, men “contracted” with government, which was supposed to make sure
that the “laws of nature” were followed.
The
function of government was to protect the “rule of law,” which meant to
preserve the fundamental rights of individuals. Most critical of these laws, according to Locke, were that
all men had the rights of life (meaning that you can’t just up an kill me),
liberty (the freedom to do anything that does not cause harm to others), and
private property (that I can use or dispose of my private property in whatever
way that I see fit).
Locke’s
vision of government gave it very limited powers—any powers that the
“contract” did not explicitly give to the state were powers reserved for the
individual; state power, being contractual, could be “revoked” by the
people, particularly if the state acted in such a way as to deprive the people
of their liberty and rights.
Like
Locke, most Enlightenment thinkers argued that the best way to ensure that
government acted to protect the rule of law and the best way to limit the power
of government was through a constitution—a law that defines the limits of the
state’s powers.
Although
he came from a very different starting point than did Locke, the French thinker
Charles Louis de Secondat (Baron de Montesquieu) agreed on the importance of
limiting government power. Montesquieu
argued that different historical and cultural conditions had led to the
emergence of different forms of government in different lands, but that there
were “universal norms” that applied to all peoples—natural laws.
In
his work “The Sprit of the Laws,” he tried to balance belief in the
evolutionary differences between the different countries’ laws and governments
with the idea that there were “absolute standards” of natural law; all laws,
he concluded, must conform with natural law, while at the same time reflecting
the specific “spirit” of the nation. He
concluded that there were three basic forms of government:
1)
the republic, in which the people have supreme power. If power in the republic
lay with the entire people, it is a democracy; if only a part of the people have
power, according to Montesquieu, it is an aristocracy
2)
the monarchy, in which a king (etc) governs according to established laws and
traditions
3)
despotism, in which a tyrant rules arbitrarily without any regard for law.
To
protect liberty and prevent government from sliding into despotism, he argued,
government must be divided into three main components—legislative, executive,
and judicial. Also, means must be
implemented to ensure checks and balances between the powers so that no one
branch of government can monopolize power.
Whenever one person or body acts as legislator, executive, and judge, he
concluded, the result is despotism and tyranny.
Not
all philosophes agreed with Locke or Montesquieu. Voltaire had little faith in the ability of ordinary people
to rise above base superstitions and favored “Enlightened Absolutism”—he
believed that the best path to progress was to trust reform-minded absolute
monarchs (like Fredrick II of Prussia or Catherine II of Russia), who would make
progressive changes for their subjects. Voltaire
considered the aristocracy—the nobles—to be in alliance with the Church
against all progress; the only force capable of overriding the church and the
nobility, he concluded, was the Monarch, and therefore he favored Absolutism.
Jean-Jaques
Rousseau’s conception of politics also differed radically from that of Locke.
Rousseau in some ways is a precursor of Romanticism more than an champion
of the Enlightenment—he felt, for instance, that gaining knowledge had
corrupted people and he was suspicious of the philosophes “glorification of
reason.” Science and philosophy,
he argued, give people a better understanding of the world but lead to moral
decay. He argued that man in the
“state of nature”—the “savage man”--was morally superior to the
“civilized man” of civil society, who lives in an “artificial,”
“unnatural” world. We are all
innately good, he insisted, but society perverts us.
Rousseau
argued that private property did not exist in the “state of nature,” and
that the birth of private property had destroyed equality and led to the
creation of civil society and the state, which were tools by which the rich and
clever dominate the rest of society. Bad
government had increased the corruption of man’s morality. The only path back
to freedom and morality, Rousseau argued, was to find a means of balancing the
interests of individuals with that of society as a whole.
His
“solution” to this problem, laid out in his essay “The Social Contract,”
was for each individual to unconditionally surrender all rights to the community
as a whole and submit entirely to the community’s authority.
That would ensure that the good of the whole community was
asserted—Rousseau referred to this as the “general will.”
He did not mean “majority rule” or “unanimous consent.”
Instead, he insisted, the “plain truth” would come out in public
discussion by “listening to our hearts.”
The general will, he claimed, is always right, and should be the only
principle on which society is governed—freedom is assured when citizens all
obey the laws and devote themselves fully to the welfare of the community. This, he claimed, would transform the individual, so that all
cared primarily for the happiness
of others and not their own selfish concerns.
While
Hobbes had endorsed the idea of the hereditary monarch, Voltaire “Enlightened
Absolutism,” and Locke parliamentary government, Roussseau called for direct
democracy—sovereign state power would be composed of the collective body of
all citizens, who because they all jointly “made” the law would voluntarily
follow the law.
Many
historians and political scientists see in Rousseau’s ideas a foreshadowing of
later forms of political dictatorship, in which leaders who claim to understand
the general will and to be acting on the basis the public good rule by a reign
of terror against those who they identify as outside the community or defying
the general will.
(e.g., Robespierre in the French Revolution).
What I want to stress here is that already in the range of Enlightenment
thought we see sharply divergent ideas about the nature of liberty and rights.
For
instance, Locke, the most fundamental natural right, the right that ensured all
others, was the right of private property—so long as the individual controlled
property, Locke argued, no other man could make him a slave.
In contrast, Rousseau considered private property a force that corrupted
nature law and led to the loss of rights and liberty.
Similarly,
we have seen differences among the philosophes over the best means of organizing
government to promote progress and liberty—from supporters of absolutism to
supporters of parliamentary monarchy to supporters of direct democracy.
As
Coffin explains, Enlightenment thinkers also differed in their views on
women’s rights. Some—perhaps
most—agreed with Rousseau and Thomas Paine that women were fundamentally
different from men, that they were not equals to men and were in fact incapable
of the sort of mature enlightenment as men, and their ultimate function was to
be useful to men. The most
significant advocate of women’s equality in the late 1700s was the
Englishwomen Mary Wollstonecraft, who argued that men could not be free and live
in liberty as long as women were considered and treated as inferiors.
She outright rejected all arguments that women were incapable of advanced
thought and condemned the idea that women should be weak and childish.
Wollstonecraft cleverly turned around the prejudices of her time:
since women were the main force in nurturing male children, she argued,
the failure to promote women’s education, women’s rights, and women’s
equality was dooming the cause of liberty and enlightenment among young men—to
raise men who respected freedom required nurturing by educated, free, morally
strong women.
And,
also as Coffin points out, were inconsistent and often self-contradictory on
matters of race—while many condemned enslavement of Africans, others turned a
blind eye to it; Voltaire, for instance, considered European enslavement of
Africans to be hypocrisy, yet considered Africans and Jews alike to be racial
inferiors. Ultimately, for most
Enlightenment thinkers, natural law applied primarily to European men of the
educated classes.
Laissez-faire economic thought
We
have seen how Enlightenment thought attacked principles of organized religion
and could be used to criticize Absolutist government; what about the
relationship between Enlightenment ideas and Mercantilism?
A
school of French economic thinkers, the “Physiocrats,” argued that
mercantilist obsession with foreign trade and the accumulation of gold and
silver was based upon a wrong-headed concept of national wealth and power.
Instead, they argued, the real source of the country’s wealth came from
agriculture. Trade policies that
supported manufacturing at the expense of agriculture would weaken and not
strengthen France, they argued. One
of the physiocrats’ arguments was that France should simplify its system of
taxes and tariffs and free up the buying and selling of goods without government
restrictions. They called this “laissez-faire” (“let it
alone”—meaning let things work themselves out according to natural law).
But
the most important champions of laissez-faire economic thought were not
French—they were British. Among
the most important principles to come out of the Anglo-English enlightenment
were key laissez-faire “political-economic concepts”—the idea that control
over one’s property was a fundamental natural right (which we have already
discussed), and the “labor theory of value.”
A broad range of British thinkers, including Locke and Adam Smith,
accepted the idea that objects in nature had no intrinsic value until human
beings did something to them—that it was human labor that gave them value.
The value of an apple, for instance, is the sum of the labor put into
planting and tending the tree, picking the apple, etc.; the value of an article
of cloth is the sum total of all the human labor that went into it, etc.
The
single most important “political economist” of the Enlightenment has already
mentioned several times in earlier lectures, Adam Smith.
Smith applied the scientific method to the economy—he close observed
the workings of the growing market (capitalist) economy around him in an effort
to discover the “natural laws” that govern economic activity.
For
Smith, private property was a fundamental natural right and people were
motivated by the desire to use their private property to their own economic
advantage. Allowing people to do
so, he insisted, would serve the public good.
The “invisible hand”—the underlying natural law moral principle
governing the economy—would turn the activities of self-serving individuals
towards the pubic welfare.
But
to ensure that people can use their property as they see fit, the state must not
interfere in the free contract between individuals in the market place—no
state endorsed monopolies, no guilds, no legal restraints on trade could be
permitted. (In other words,
mercantilism was out the window.) Free
competition in the market place would produce the best goods and the lowest
prices and promote the public good while rewarding the businessman.
The
market, Smith argued, had a clear logic of its own. One of the laws that govern the market, for instance, was the
law of supply and demand. Another
was the principle that the division of labor into discrete stages, each done by
a different worker, would increase profit in two ways--by increasing
productivity (the number of goods produced per labor hour), and by reducing the
amount of skill necessary to production and therefore lowering the wages
demanded by the worker.
Smith
explained this system of production for the market motivated by the pursuit of
individual profit as “capitalism.”
Conclusion: The ideas of the Enlightenment still shape the ways we think
today—our continued faith in progress, for instance, is an artifact of the
Enlightenment. Similarly, we still
live in a world dominated by the economic ideas of Smith—the ideas of
laissez-faire capitalism—and by the political ideas of John Locke, Montesquieu,
etc.
But
as I have pointed out repeatedly, Enlightenment ideas could be taken in many
directions.
And
these ideas were not without their
critics, either in the late 1700s, or in the early 1800s, or since.
In
many regards, the history we will be discussing for the rest of the semester can
be seen as a product of and reactions against the legacies of the Enlightenment.