Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World Read online

  Yet in sober truth few French philosophes, and virtually none of their German, Italian or Dutch confrères, were devoted democrats, materialists or atheists.48 The shrill rhetoric of some philosophes, and the loathing many truly felt for cardinals and even kings, should not be mistaken for practical plans to turn society itself upside-down. Dazzling sloganizing made the French Enlightenment central to later radical mythologies and reactionary demonologies alike, but the links between the High Enlightenment and revolutionary activity were anything but clear cut.49 Many philosophes, as revolutionaries themselves complained, had feathered nests for themselves under the ancien régime – d'Alembert, after all, held four more sinecures than Dr Johnson.50 To what extent, and until when, would Voltaire or Diderot, had they lived to see the Revolution, have applauded its actual course – one which beheaded the chemist Lavoisier and drove Condorcet to suicide, and was criticized by latter-day philosophes like Raynal and Marmontel? Looking at the Enlightenment retrospectively through modern political lenses creates a fatally distorting teleology.

  Anglophone developments have also been skipped over thanks to the intellectualist fallacy dear to academics who, echoing Cassirer's verdict on the Deists, prize ‘profundity’ above all and rate dead thinkers on an abstrusity scale. Given this scholarly snobbery, such seminal figures as the idiosyncratic Shaftesbury, the ironist Toland, the suave Steele or the populist Paine get low marks. Even the decision to call his book the philosophy of the Enlightenment perhaps involved Cassirer in a distortion, a betrayal even, of its spirit, especially insofar as he imagined the philosophes stumblingly trying, avant la lettre, to write The Critique of Pure Reason. After all, scholasticism was the last thing activists were trying to advance.

  Anyone embracing Cassirer's criteria would certainly find English discourse pretty low grade, though they might award more points to Scottish academics like Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart for their methodical manuals of methodology.51 Undoubtedly England produced no Kant, but that is not the point: there is no earthly reason why systematic metaphysics should be taken as the acme of enlightenment.52 Thinkers like Locke abhorred I'esprit de système and swept aside the old scholastic cobwebs; the most ingenious way of becoming foolish was to be a system-monger, quipped Shaftesbury, who made ridicule the test of truth. England's modernizers had no stomach for indigestible scholastic husks; they were not ivory-towered academics but men (and women) of letters who made their pitch in the metropolitan market place and courted the public, hoping, with Joseph Addison, who supported Cicero's praise of Socrates for bringing philosophy down from the heavens, to make it ‘dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee Houses’.53 Selling philosophy to urbanites, and uniting the man of letters to the man of the world, English thinkers made it their business to be palatable, practical and pleasing.

  If academics have misled themselves with monolithic and anachronistic models of what ‘true enlightenment’ must have been, things are changing. Recent scholarship has been in a disaggregating mood, replacing the old essentialist assumptions of a pure and unitary (for which, read French) movement with a pluralism, appreciative of a variety of blooms, from Dublin to Lublin, from York to New York, each with its own seeds and soil, problems, priorities and programmes. In place of the old emphasis on superstars, wider enlightened circles are now being investigated from perspectives which accommodate E. P. Thompson's ‘peculiarities of the English’ – alongside, of course, those of the Prussians, the Poles and the Portuguese.54 Today it seems arbitrary and anachronistic to rule that only crusaders for atheism, republicanism and materialism deserve the adjective ‘enlightened’; the time is ripe, as Thompson himself might surely have said, to rescue the English Enlightenment from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’.55

  To trace the part played by British thinkers in the making of modernity, better mappings are needed of the contacts and circuits of literati and their listeners. The loops between London, Edinburgh and Dublin, between the metropolis and the provinces, between cultures high and low, religious and secular, male and female, must all be traced. Appealing against guilty verdicts on the treason of the intellectuals – Perry Anderson's withering ‘no ferment of ideas or memories’ - Thompson points to the formation of ‘scores of intellectual enclaves, dispersed over England, Wales and Scotland, which made up for what they lost in cohesion by the multiplicity of initiatives afforded by these many bases’.56 J. H. Plumb likewise has guided the bedazzled eye away from the ‘peaks of culture’: ‘too much attention, it seems to me,’ he wrote, ‘is paid to the monopoly of ideas amongst the intellectual giants, too little to their social acceptance. Ideas acquire dynamism when they become social attitudes and this was happening in England.’57 These are some of the challenges this book takes up. I shall now turn to the core problems of the British Enlightenment, and signpost the key themes covered in the chapters to follow.

  Britain experienced profound transformations during the long eighteenth century: the overthrow of absolutism, accelerating population growth, urbanization, a commercial revolution marked by rising disposable income, the origins of industrialization. Shifts in consciousness helped to bring these changes about, to make sense of and level criticism at them, and to direct public attention to modernity, its delights and its discontents.58

  Striking changes were afoot in ‘high culture’. Protestant scripturalism – the belief that every word of the Bible had been dictated by the Holy Ghost – was refined into a new rational faith, attended by more optimistic models of man's lot under the Supreme Being (see chapter 5). Basking in Newton's glory, the new science was acclaimed and extended to pastures new, natural and social alike. Scientific methods, political arithmetic, probabilistic thinking, systematic observation, experiment and quantification and appeals to the yardstick of Nature all gained prestige and applicability (see chapter 6).

  Partly as a consequence of these new beliefs, vast intellectual capital was vested in creating sciences of man and society. Hobbes, Locke and their successors anatomized the mind and emotions, and recognizable precursors of today's social and human sciences – psychology, economics, anthropology, sociology and so forth – took shape (see chapters 3, 7, 17). Divine Right and other prescriptive dogmas which had buttressed a static, hierarchical social order were assailed by critical thinking on power, leading to the felicific calculus, to utilitarian reformism and to the Rights of Man (see chapters 8 and 18).

  I shall be scrutinizing these and many other innovations in scientific, theological, psychological, social and political discourse, by focusing on such key figures as Newton, Locke, Bernard de Mandeville, David Hartley, Erasmus Darwin, Priestley, Paine, Bentham, Godwin and Wollstonecraft, and examining the publicizing of their ideas by Addison and Steele, Defoe, Pope and Sterne and a host of other poets, preachers and popularizers. Much work has been done on such past masters, but it remains fragmentary; the pieces have yet to be put together and the full jigsaw revealed.

  Big ideas must be contextualized in terms of broader transformations in casts of mind, habits of thinking and shades of sensibility, and their diffusion among the reading public must be addressed, so that the practical consequences of enlightened ideologies can be grasped. Only then will the fundamental revisions wrought in public outlooks become clear: biblicism and providentialism were being challenged by naturalism; custom was elbowed aside by an itch for change and faith in the new. In many fields – in moral quandaries, self-identity, artistic taste, reading habits, leisure pursuits – deference to tradition was spurned as antiquated, backward or plebeian by boosters conjuring up brighter futures there for the taking. Central to enlightened modernizing were the glittering prospects of progress conveyed through print.

  In Britain, at least, the Enlightenment was thus not just a matter of pure epistemological breakthroughs; it was primarily the expression of new mental and moral values, new canons of taste, styles of sociability and views of human nature. And these typically assumed practical embodiment: urban r
enewal; the establishment of hospitals, schools, factories and prisons; the acceleration of communications; the spread of newspapers, commercial outlets and consumer behaviour; the marketing of new merchandise and cultural services. All such developments repatterned the loom of life, with inevitable repercussions for social prospects and agendas of personal fulfilment.

  England's avant-garde enjoyed different prospects from those to be expected elsewhere. Activists were not thwarted at every twist and turn by monarchical fiat, lettres de cachet or an ossified status quo in State, Church and society. Quite the reverse. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the very statute book incorporated much of the enlightened wish list: freedom of the person under habeas corpus, the rule of law, Parliament, religious toleration, and so forth. Furthermore, unlike elsewhere, neither censorship, police spies nor petrified ecclesiastical protocols stopped the articulate and ambitious from pursuing their goals, be they experiments in free-thinking and -living, self-enrichment or the pursuit of pleasure. Promoters of enlightened rationality did not need to storm barricades, for doors swung open within the system, giving some plausibility to Bacon's oft-quoted maxim: faber suae quisque fortunae (‘each man [is] the maker of his own fortune’). Not until late in the eighteenth century did the Enlightenment's new men feel radically alienated from the English Establishment.

  Hardly surprisingly, therefore, one trait of enlightened England was a buoyant pragmatism, underpinned by a Baconian philosophy of action. The proof of ‘pudding time’ lay in the uses of freedom, the enjoyment of well-being. Foreign visitors marvelled at England's thriving hive. ‘The English are great in practical mechanics,’ declared the Swiss-American Louis Simond,59 while Pastor Moritz from Prussia drooled over English improvements, right down to the knack of ‘roasting slices of buttered bread before the fire… called “toast” ’.60 Predictably, English piety was also esteemed for its emphasis on works not words: ‘religion in England, in towns, and even in the smallest villages,’ envied the Abbé Prévost, ‘finds its expression in hospitals for the sick, homes of refuge for the poor and aged of both sexes, schools for the education of the children’.61

  Conversely, when on Grand Tour, the enlightened British were not slow to bridle at Continental benightedness, and were shocked by the misery they met. Finding the peasantry of the Palatinate ‘poor and wretched’, Elizabeth Montagu drew the hackneyed contrast between starving yokels and ‘princes so magnificent’.62 ‘I cannot help thinking they groan under oppression,’ commented Tobias Smollett, lamenting the ‘poverty, misery, and dirt, among the commonalty of France’.63

  British pragmatism was more than mere worldliness: it embodied a philosophy of expediency, a dedication to the art, science and duty of living well in the here and now. Lord Chesterfield's commendation to his son of hedonism and savoir vivre finessed Locke's dictum that ‘Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our Conduct’ – Pope's view that ‘the proper study of mankind is man’.64 Would it be fanciful to suggest that Prime Minister Walpole's preferred self-presentation as ‘no saint, no Spartan, no reformer’ had an enlightened tint? The displacement of Calvinism by a confidence in cosmic benevolism blessed the pursuit of happiness, and to this end Britons set about exploiting a commercial society pregnant with opportunities, and the practical skills needed to drive it.65

  Modernizers faced pressing predicaments. Above all, in the ‘great scramble’ of a market society,66 how could a stable order be achieved which would facilitate the pursuit of happiness? Enlightened crusaders waved the liberty banner, legitimizing such claims through Lockean liberalism and the moral and psychological formulae known as benevolism, sensationalism, associationism and utilitarianism. Did not each man best know how best to pursue pleasure? ‘Virtue is the conformity to a rule of life,’ explained the Revd John Gay, ‘directing the actions of all rational creatures with respect to each other's happiness.’67 Glossing a famous phrase from Pope's An Essay on Man, another respected Anglican divine, the Revd William Paley, deemed that ‘whatever is expedient is right’ – a breathtaking maxim to come from the pen of a Cambridge tutor and member of the Church of England.68 Sanctifying self-interest and private judgement, Joseph Priestley urged: ‘it is most advisable to leave every man at perfect liberty to serve himself’.69 Even the sober Joseph Butler, later a bishop, doubted we were justified in pursuing virtue, ‘till we are convinced that it will be for our happiness, or, at least, not contrary to it’.70 And egoism in practice had a pretty free run amidst the trappings of what admittedly remained a confusing and cluttered hierarchy. The endorsement from Locke to Smith of the inviolability of private property, and the assurance that ‘the inconveniences which have arisen to a nation from leaving trade quite open are few’,71 found expression in economic liberalism and laissez-faire (see chapters 11 and 17).

  It has furthermore been argued that it was enlightened England which brought, at least amongst genteel and professional people, the first flowering of ‘affective individualism’ within the conjugal family: greater exercise of choice as regards marriage partner, some degree of female emancipation from stern patriarchy, and for children from the parental rod (see chapters 12 and 15). Over from France, Madame du Boccage found that the daughters of the gentry ‘live in much less constraint than young ladies amongst us’.72 Writers and artists similarly basked in unwonted opportunities. ‘How sweet this bit of freedom really is!’ exclaimed Haydn in 1791, on one of his money-spinning London concert tours. ‘I had a kind prince, but sometimes was I obliged to be dependent on base souls. I often sighed for release, and now I have it in some measure.’73

  This emancipation of the ego from hidebound tradition and the stern judgementalism of elders, family and peers, this rejection or attenuation of the ancestral ‘moral economy’,74 was widely thought worth the risk as a feelgood factor became programmed into enlightened expectations. Conviction grew that the time was ripe to cast off from the old world and set sail for a cape of Good Hope; Moderns could and should outdo Ancients. The auguries were auspicious: human nature was not flawed by the Fall; desire was desirable, society improvable, knowledge progressive and good would emerge from what Priestley dubbed man's ‘endless cravings’.75

  All this chimed with a new faith in Nature at large: Newton's universe, like society itself, was doubtless composed of myriad atoms, yet its ensemble comprised a harmonious and resplendent natural order, which man had a right to explore and master through natural science and the practical arts (see chapter 6). And confidence also grew about the Divine Order. God's benevolence resolved the theodicy problem: Satan was but a metaphor, evil at bottom mere error. Providence – Smith's ‘invisible hand’ – had bid self-love and social be the same in a programme of amelioration;76 ‘private vices’ were, fortunately, ‘public benefits’; and self-interest could also be enlightened. In Shaftesbury's sunny phrase: ‘The Wisdom of what rules, and is First and Chief in nature, had made it to be according to the private Interest and Good of everyone, to work towards the general Good’77 – or, in the less lofty sentiments of Frederick Eden, ‘the desire of bettering our condition… animates the world [and] gives birth to every social virtue’.78

  Thus heartened, Albion's polite and commercial people seized their chance to express themselves, to escape the iron cages of Calvinism, custom and kinship – and even to indulge their ‘whims’.79 Acquisitiveness, pleasure-seeking, emotional and erotic self-discovery, social climbing and the joys of fashion slipped the moral and religious straitjackets of guilt, sin and retribution (see chapter 12). Harshness towards children was relaxed, while philanthropy kindled sympathy towards lunatics and dumb animals, the deaf and disabled (see chapters 15 and 16).80 Yet, enlightened élites still had to prove that self-emancipation and pleasure-seeking could actually be ventured without precipitating the moral ruin and social chaos widely feared. Sodom and Gomorrah, Babylon and Rome – all had collapsed; the pious bloodshed of the Civil War and Interregnum had left deep scars; and the libertinism
of the Cavalier Court was a salutary reminder of how hedonism not only destroyed itself through the bottle, pox or pistol, but also meant sinister alliances with Popish tyranny. Hobbes had hurled down a challenge: since man was incurably selfish, could not Leviathan alone curb his excesses? No more than Divine Right kingship or the theocracy of saints was Hobbism an option admissible to enlightened minds.

  Hence the problem lay in ensuring that private fulfilment did not subvert public orderliness. And any proposed solution had to take into account certain singular features of English society. For one thing, having bid absolutism good riddance at the Glorious Revolution, enlightened élites were confronted with a truculent populace.81 Rowdy street politics, mused the Prussian Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, was the price the nation paid for freedom: ‘The idea of liberty,’ he wrote, ‘and the consciousness of protection from the laws, are the reasons why the people in general testify but little respect for their superiors.’82 Subjects who could not be hammered had to be humoured. Madame du Boccage did not mince her words: ‘In France we cringe to the great, in England the great cringe to the people.’83