Enlightenment and modernity

1. Enlightenment and modernity Dr. Stuart Middleton October 2019

2. How enlightenment ‘made the modern world’ • Opposition to enlightenment and the making of the modern world • Questionable legacies of enlightenment • The idea of ‘enlightenment’ in history

3. Enlightenment and democracy Democracy obviously not an enlightenment invention; and enlightenment thinkers not all proponents of democracy But enlightenment thinkers made major contributions to modern theories of democracy: • Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748): wary of pure democracy, but advocated a form of representative democracy • Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762): the ‘general will’ as basis of sovereignty Competing claims for ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ enlightenment as progenitor of democracy – but the fact that claims can be made for such disparate tendencies within the enlightenment perhaps underlines its importance to development of democratic ideas

4. Liberalism Development of central enlightenment ideas: • ‘man’ at the centre of moral & intellectual universe • liberty & religious toleration • human nature: egotism leavened by sociability, epitomised in commerce Adoption of utility as moral principle – thus Bentham: the ‘scales had fallen from my eyes’ (upon reading Hume on utility) John Locke (1632-1794)

5. Socialism Early socialism extends enlightenment beliefs in beneficent natural order, essential goodness of human nature, and rational forms of social organisation Henri Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) – ‘science of politics’ to replace government with rational administration Charles Fourier (1772-1837) - the ‘Phalanstère’, an organised society in which reason and the passions would be held in equilibrium Fourier’s Phalanstère (1834)

6. Secularisation A ‘meta-narrative’ of modernity: inexorable displacement of religion and the sacred by a world-view centring on humanity, and defined by science and rational inquiry Enlightenment as hand-maid of secularisation: self-conscious, decisive break with scholasticism, and in some of its aspects presenting radical challenges to religion Challenges to secularisation ‘narrative’ in recent years: and historians now recognise a more complex relationship between enlightenment and religion (not just outright hostility) But major enlightenment legacies remain: e.g. de-sacralisation of political authority; secular conceptions of natural law and human nature

7. Industrialisation Industrialism: harnessing of new productive technologies and relations enabling a radical expansion of economic productivity from late C18 Influence of enlightenment ideas and practices: the ‘industrial enlightenment’ (Joel Mokyr) – • Dissemination of knowledge & practices of enlightened science among networks of industrialists, e.g. Birmingham Lunar Society (the ‘Midlands Enlightenment’) • Josiah Wedgwood: ‘everything yields to experiment’; Matthew Boulton ‘very ingenious, philosophical, and agreeable’

8. The ‘industrial Enlightenment’ in the Midlands Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a Lamp is put in Place of the Sun (1762)

9. Challenges to the ‘industrial enlightenment’ • Innovations in production didn’t simply emerge from a world of ‘useful knowledge’; productive innovations, and mercantilism, arguably more important • ‘Industrial enlightenment’ doesn’t account for the role of conquest and appropriation as key factors underpinning industrialisation • Some clear instances of transfer of enlightened ideas to industrial invention/ innovation; but many other cases in which they played no discernible role

10. How the enlightenment ‘made the modern world’ • Opposition to enlightenment and the making of the modern world • Questionable legacies of enlightenment • The idea of ‘enlightenment’ in history

11. Priestley riots, 1791 Enlightenment contested & opposed during C18, at elite and popular levels; continuing adherence to ‘throne and altar’ (or ‘church and king’)

12. Priestley & Tom Paine supping with the devil (1792)

13. The ‘counter-enlightenment’ Isaiah Berlin 1973: • concerted opposition to (what he identified as) ‘the central dogma of the enlightenment’, i.e. existence of universal laws of social & civilisational development, susceptible of rational knowledge • instead, insistence on the particularity of truth & values; rejection of ‘progress’ • strong focus on German thinkers, late C18 – early C19 Historians now less sure that there was a single ‘enlightenment’ to which one could be ‘counter’; but idea still used in more geographically expansive & intellectually diffuse sense Darrin McMahon, Enemies of Enlightenment (2001): not a fully worked-out, coherent ideology, but a pattern of assumptions & values centring on key ideas such as ‘throne and altar’

14. Conservatism Not a systematic political ideology; rather a set of shared emphases or values, including: • importance of temporal and spiritual authority • value of custom and tradition • rejection of universalism • negative view of human nature Some conservative thinkers displayed pre-revolutionary affinities with enlightenment – e.g. Burke & Maistre Maistre: ‘All power, all subordination, rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association’ Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821)

15. Romanticism Wordsworth on the French Revolution: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven! […] When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights, When most intent on making of herself A prime Enchantress—to assist the work Which then was going forward in her name! —William Wordsworth, ‘The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement’ Difficulty of defining ‘Romanticism’; its origins in enlightenment itself (particularly Rousseau’s lapsarian account of modernity) Thought as self-expression and revelation – Coleridge: ‘My opinion is […] that deep Thinking is attainable only by a man of deep Feeling, and that all Truth is a species of Revelation.’

16. Romanticism Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774): ‘I return into myself and find a world.’ Valuation of feeling and imagination over reason Against enlightenment view of nature as matter over which reason would attain mastery: instead, a site of spiritual contemplation and renewal A major caveat to arguments that modernity is a creation of the enlightenment – including the very idea of ‘modernity’ (conceived by Romantics as alienation – not progress) Caspar David Friedrich, The Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog (1818)

17. How the enlightenment ‘made the modern world’ • Opposition to enlightenment and the making of the modern world • Questionable legacies of enlightenment • The idea of ‘enlightenment’ in history

18. Imperialism Identification of non-European people as ‘primitive’ (in enlightenment schemes of civilisational development) – obviously supplies a powerful rationale for European colonial projects But historians also recognise countervailing, anti-imperialist enlightenment tendencies: • Diderot’s opposition to attempts to ‘civilise’ non-European people – not inconsistent with his belief in single developmental framework • Kant’s defence of the right to define one’s own manner of living, without external coercion Other ideological underpinnings of imperialism, besides enlightenment – e.g. Christianity, C19 racism and nationalism

19. Imperialism “The world-wide facility of communication has allowed the wind of Western civilization to blow into the East, where not a single grass or tree has been left unswayed by it. […] To plan our course now, therefore, our country cannot afford to wait for the enlightenment of our neighbours and to co-operate in building Asia up. Rather, we should leave their ranks to join the camp of the civilized countries of the West. Even when dealing with China and Korea, we […] should behave towards them as the Westerners do.” FukuzawaYukichi, ‘On De-Asianisation’ (1885), in Meiji Japan Through Contemporary Sources, vol. 3 (Tokyo, 1972), p.129, p.133 FukuzawaYukichi (1835-1901) – Meiji-era Japanese intellectual & reformer

20. Race Enlightenment ‘science of man’ as origin of scientific racism: making humanity the object of scientific observation & classification produces schemes of biological racial difference Johann Friedrich Blumenbach – five varieties of human skull

21. Racism Overtly racist statements by key enlightenment thinkers - e.g. David Hume, ‘Of National Characters’ (1748) - I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. … and Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) – […] but in short, this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid. How integral to enlightenment is this kind of racial thinking? E.g. is the universalism of Kant’s mature moral philosophy undermined by implicit limits to his concept of personhood?

22. Dialectic of Enlightenment Max Horkheimer Theodor W. Adorno “In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates under the sign of disaster triumphant.”

23. How the enlightenment ‘made the modern world’ • The ‘counter-enlightenment’ and the making of the modern world • Questionable legacies of the enlightenment • The idea of ‘enlightenment’ in history

24. The idea of ‘enlightenment’ in history Ideology of ‘enlightenment’ as source of our dual concept of modernity (both a period and an ideal) But adopting enlightenment as the starting-point of ‘the making of the modern world’ can produce a Eurocentric account of modernity: an invention of Europe that was subsequently diffused in the rest of the world In order to avoid this perspective, we should recognise the global production and re-making of ‘enlightenment’ – e.g. Fukuzawa (above); but also the revolution in Saint-Domingue (Haiti), arguably a fuller realization of enlightenment ideals than either the American or French revolutions This global adoption and modulation of ‘enlightenment’ (as an ideal), after the ‘age of enlightenment’ (as a period) had come to a close, a second reason for seeing a critical understanding of enlightenment as part of the making of the modern world.