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One of our most distinguished intellectual historians gives us a brilliant revisionist history.
The Roads to Modernity reclaims the Enlightenment–an extraordinary time bursting with new ideas about the human condition in the realms of politics, society, and religion–from historians who have downgraded its importance and from scholars who have given preeminence to the Enlightenment in France over concurrent movements in England and America. Contrasting the Enlightenments in the three nations, Gertrude Himmelfarb demonstrates the primacy of the British and the wisdom and foresight of thinkers such as Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Paine, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Edward Gibbon, and Edmund Burke, who established its unique character and historic importance. It is this Enlightenment, she argues, that created a moral and social philosophy–humane, compassionate, and realistic–that still resonates strongly today, in America perhaps even more so than in Europe.
This is an illuminating contribution to the history of ideas.
From Publishers Weekly
Himmelfarb, a leading neoconservative historian of ideas (One Nation, Two Cultures, etc.), takes on the ambitious project of reclaiming the Enlightenment from what she sees as delusionary French thinkers and restoring it to the (apparently) virtuous moderation of the English. The French Enlightenment, she claims, was excessively preoccupied with reason and insufficiently concerned with individual liberty; the philosophes idealized Man in the abstract but despised the common man. In contrast, a distinctively humane British Enlightenment was underpinned by ideals of social virtue: compassion, benevolence and sympathy. These thinkers were tolerant and pragmatic, convinced that private self-interest and public welfare were ultimately compatible. Their legacy, Himmelfarb argues, exerts a major influence on contemporary U.S. culture. Himmelfarb’s book is both sophisticated and accessible, and makes some valuable revelations: Adam Smith’s hostility to the “business class”; Burke’s antipathy to British rule in India. One wonders about the value of the term “Enlightenment” when it is so broad as to encompass John Wesley, and the author’s exaltation of the English-speaking philosophical tradition appears particularly problematic in her treatment of the American Enlightenment. Was the American Civil War, allegedly fought in defense of liberty, any less terrible than the infamous Terror? Nonetheless, this is a book with important ideological implications that deserves to be read and debated across the political spectrum.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Reclaiming the Enlightenment would be an ambitious challenge for any historian, but it is perhaps even more daunting for one so closely identified with a particular brand of politics (neoconservatism). No one questions Himmelfarbs credentials for tackling the job: she is professor emeritus at the City University of New York and the author of nine books. But she takes some hard lumps for attempting to link the Enlightenment to the current American political scene (one reviewer dubbed her “an apologist for the Bush administration”; another accused her of knowingly “reading her own political agenda into the text of the past”). Is it any wonder that the more conservative critics provided raves and liberals gave sharp critique? Detractors felt Himmelfarb ignored historical facts inconvenient to her viewpoint. Ultimately, as its mixed reviews illustrate, The Roads to Modernity succeeds in at least one area: inspiring impassioned debate about a controversial new idea.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
Himmelfarb’s earlier books (The De-Moralization of Society, 1995, and One Nation, Two Cultures, 1999), established her as a talented intellectual historian most deeply concerned with, and by, modern moral and social mores. Her latest book is more muted in its engagement with the postmodern academic culture wars, if only because she is confident that her side has already won. Analyzing the traditional stalwarts of Enlightenment thought in America (Jefferson, Paine), France (Tocqueville, Voltaire, Diderot), and Britain (Locke, Smith, and, somewhat surprisingly, Burke), Himmelfarb presents a cogent case for the chronological priority and philosophical primacy of the British model in shaping the philosophy of reason and liberty on the cusp of modernity. Essentially, she would like to see the Enlightenment wrestled away from the French and away from academics who would deconstruct its intellectual foundations in favor of social and economic explanations for the genesis of modern political thought. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Support[ed] with great passion and wide-ranging scholarship. . . . Himmelfarb has written a keenly argued and thought-provoking intellectual history of the 18th century.” –San Francisco Chronicle
“Exciting intellectual pugilism É Himmelfarb mounts a vigorous argument that the British [Enlightenment] was reformist rather than subversive, respectful of the past and present even while looking forward to a more egalitarian future.” –The New York Times Book Review
“[Himmelfarb’s] writing . . . has a verve and sharpness. . . . It is a pleasure to read.” –The New York Review of Books
“Exceptionally well written and clever.”–The Washington Post Book World
“Himmelfarb has one of the keenest intellects of our time.” –The Houston Chronicle
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Inside Flap
One of our most distinguished intellectual historians gives us a brilliant revisionist history.
The Roads to Modernity reclaims the Enlightenmentan extraordinary time bursting with new ideas about the human condition in the realms of politics, society, and religionfrom historians who have downgraded its importance and from scholars who have given preeminence to the Enlightenment in France over concurrent movements in England and America. Contrasting the Enlightenments in the three nations, Gertrude Himmelfarb demonstrates the primacy of the British and the wisdom and foresight of thinkers such as Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Paine, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Edward Gibbon, and Edmund Burke, who established its unique character and historic importance. It is this Enlightenment, she argues, that created a moral and social philosophyhumane, compassionate, and realisticthat still resonates strongly today, in America perhaps even more so than in Europe.
This is an illuminating contribution to the history of ideas.
About the Author
Gertrude Himmelfarb taught for twenty-three years at Brooklyn College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York, where she was named Distinguished Professor of History in 1978. Now Professor Emeritus, she lives with her husband, Irving Kristol, in Washington, D.C. Her previous books include The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values; On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society; Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians; The New History and the Old; Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians; The Idea of Poverty: England in
the Early Industrial Age; On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill; Victorian Minds (nominated for a National Book Award); Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution; and Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics.
From The Washington Post
Why should Gertrude Himmelfarb have bothered to write a study of the Enlightenment ? A leading neo-conservative intellectual, author of nine books that mostly hail the virtues of Victorianism, she is passionately worried about the decline of religion and the cultural corruption of modern American life. Her sensibilities seemingly have little in common with a movement so entangled with scientific rationalism, an emerging liberal political philosophy, and critical confrontation with inherited dogma. It would also be surprising if, as she states, Himmelfarb were concerned merely with the esoteric task of distinguishing different national “enlightenments” or, for the historical record, “restoring” the standing of even a supposedly temperate British tradition. Something more has to be at stake. There is.
The Roads to Modernity is an exceptionally well written and clever attempt — all the more clever since its political aims are never made explicit — to employ a redefined Enlightenment both as a bulwark for neoconservatism and as a device for explaining current conflicts between supposed allies. In Himmelfarb’s proudly revisionist history, the English and American variants of the Enlightenment thus confront the French one while, incredibly, she identifies the Enlightenment’s best aspects with an attachment to “religious dispositions,” a morally upright capitalism and a “benign imperialism.” Making these arguments, however, cuts the Enlightenment off from its rich historical roots and corrals it inside the 18th century. It also requires partitioning a genuinely cosmopolitan movement into three relatively isolated parts and connecting each with one essential idea: The British Enlightenment is consequently associated with “social affections,” the French with the “ideology of reason” and the American with the “politics of liberty.”
Of course, historians should seek to recover the particular truths obscured by easy generalizations. But Himmelfarb loses the forest for the trees. She spends little time on the international scientific revolution started by Descartes, Sir Francis Bacon and Galileo or the burgeoning secular political outlook of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, whose influence on the continent was probably as great as that of any intellectual other than Sir Isaac Newton. These trends in England helped undermine the public power of religious institutions and turn faith into a matter of individual choice. They also inspired what is usually associated with the British Enlightenment: the radical skepticism of David Hume, the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and social reformism later embraced by John Stuart Mill and the Fabians.
Himmelfarb has no use for any of this. She instead emphasizes the concern with empathy highlighted by Lord Shaftesbury, the small-scale capitalism with a moral conscience preached by Adam Smith, and the traditionalism of Edmund Burke. She is, after all, “engaged in a doubly revisionist exercise, making the Enlightenment more British and making the British Enlightenment more inclusive.” Yet how Himmelfarb’s version of the British Enlightenment paves the road to modernity remains an open question. Her concern is not with how the Enlightenment contested traditional religious prejudices or feudal institutions. Nor is she concerned with how the new mathematical logic of profit and loss undermined the various flowery moral justifications employed by advocates of the new capitalist society. Such matters would only get in the way of transforming the Enlightenment — by sleight of hand — into a tame and tepid romanticism.
Fear of critique fuels Himmelfarb’s book. She attacks the French Enlightenment, in particular, for a supposed over-reliance on “reason” that generated the guillotine. But this idea is not new. Virtually every 19th-century reactionary pounced upon it, just as reactionary romantics invoked the stereotype of the Enlightenment intellectual as a superficial rationalist throughout the 20th century. Himmelfarb ignores the French legacy of the “engaged intellectual” intent upon opposing political injustice and furthering social change. She likewise seems blissfully unaware that not French philosophy but German idealism was most obsessed with “reason,” “speculation” and “critique,” or that this tradition developed through a creative engagement with the thinking of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Hume.
As for the American Enlightenment, without forgetting the impact of European ideas, the historian Henry Steele Commager already argued that it incarnated “the blessings of liberty.” Himmelfarb adds little by looking back to Jonathan Edwards, quoting the founders or noting that the treatment of Native Americans — rather than merely of slavery and its consequences — poses a “problem.” Her institutional discussion is old hat.
It is important to understand that no national expression of the Enlightenment has a unique claim to “social affection,” “reason” or “political liberty.” In suggesting otherwise, Himmelfarb conceals key reasons why reactionaries in all three nations condemned the new movement. Contempt for the way inherited prejudices inhibit personal liberty, a preoccupation with the liberal rule of law and the call for responsive political institutions marked the new international “republic of letters.” But Himmelfarb devotes hardly a word to common Enlightenment ideals like progress, rights, institutional accountability, popular sovereignty, the scientific revolution and the critique of feudal tradition. She has even less to say about the intolerance of the religious establishment, the barbarism of the aristocracy and the power of superstition.
She also tosses aside the Enlightenment’s injunction to question authority — including, in principle, the shallow prejudices held by many of its most illustrious representatives. Nor does she take on modern thinkers who chastise the Enlightenment for its supposedly white, male and Eurocentric biases. More pressing matters are at stake. Himmelfarb wishes to show that President Bush’s “coalition of the willing” has intellectual roots in the past. She depicts a libertarian Anglo-American philosophy with “social affections” that has bravely opposed the cynical and latently authoritarian hyper-rationalism of the French since the birth of modernity. Similarly, given the author’s uncritical admiration for Smith and Burke, it becomes possible to legitimate the president’s “compassionate conservatism” in terms of the Enlightenment.
The problem lies not in reinterpreting the past with an eye on contemporary politics. That can be refreshing and daring. The trouble is Himmelfarb’s limited sense of the intellectual bravado exhibited by the philosophical revolutionaries of the Enlightenment, the valor of their assault on inherited dogma, the reformist social movements they inspired, and their influence on a host of non-European leaders ranging from Simon Bolivar to Nelson Mandela. What remains from her book is a pallid warning, stemming from a provincial and debilitating “common sense,” built upon hidden political aims: The failings of the Enlightenment — oh, dear! — lie in its excesses. Thinking of this sort represents not what the Enlightenment offers, but what it challenges us to overcome.
Reviewed by Stephen Eric Bronner
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1. “Social Affections” and Religious Dispositions
The British did not have “philosophes.” They had “moral philosophers,” a very different breed. Those historians who belittle or dismiss the idea of a British Enlightenment do so because they do not recognize the features of the philosophes in the moral philosophers–and with good reason: the physiognomy is quite different.
It is ironic that the French should have paid tribute to John Locke and Isaac Newton as the guiding spirits of their own Enlightenment, while the British, although respectful of both, had a more ambiguous relationship with them. Newton was eulogized by David Hume as “the greatest and rarest genius that ever rose for the ornament and instruction of the species,”[1] and by Alexander Pope in the much quoted epitaph: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;/God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.” But Pope’s An Essay on Man sent quite a different message: “The proper study of mankind is man” implied that materialism and science could penetrate into the mysteries of nature but not of man. In an earlier essay, the allusion to Newton was more obvious; it was human nature, not astronomy, Pope said, that was “the most useful object of humane reason,” and it was “of more consequence to adjust the true nature and measures of right and wrong, than to settle the distance of the planets and compute the times of their circumvolutions.”[2] While Newton received the adulation of his countrymen (he was master of the Royal Mint and president of the Royal Society, was knighted, and given a state funeral), and his scientific methodology was much praised, he had little substantive influence on the moral philosophers or on the issues that dominated the British Enlightenment. (His Opticks, on the other hand, was an inspiration for poets, who were entranced by the images and metaphors of light.)[3]
John Locke, too, was a formidable presence in eighteenth-century Britain, a best-selling author and a revered figure. But among the moral philosophers he was admired more for his politics than for his metaphysics. Indeed, the basic tenets of their philosophy implied a repudiation of his. What made them “moral philosophers” rather than “philosophers” tout court was their belief in a “moral sense” that was presumed to be if not innate in the human mind (as Francis Hutcheson thought), then so entrenched in the human sensibility, in the form of sympathy or “fellow-feeling” (as Adam Smith and David Hume had it), as to have the same compelling force as innate ideas.
Locke himself could not have been more explicit in rejecting innate ideas, whether moral or metaphysical. The mind, as he understood it, so far from being inhabited by innate ideas, was a tabula rasa, to be filled by sensations and experiences, and by the reflections rising from those sensations and experiences. The title of the first chapter of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding was “No Innate Speculative Principles” (that is, epistemological principles); the second, “No Innate Practical Principles” (moral principles). Even the golden rule, that “most unshaken rule of morality and foundation of all social virtue,” would have been meaningless to one who had never heard that maxim and who might well ask for a reason justifying it, which “plainly shows it not to be innate.” If virtue was generally approved, it was not because it was innate, but because it was “profitable,” conducive to one’s self-interest and happiness, the promotion of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Thus, things could be judged good or evil only by reference to pleasure or pain, which were themselves the product of sensation.[4]
Locke’s Essay was published in 1690. Nine years later, the Earl of Shaftesbury wrote an essay that was, in effect, a refutation of Locke. This, too, had its ironies, for this Shaftesbury, the third earl, was brought up in the household of his grandfather, the first earl, who was a devotee of Locke and had employed him to supervise the education of his grandchildren. It was this experience that had inspired Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education–and inspired as well, perhaps, the pupil’s rejection of his master’s teachings.[5] Shaftesbury’s essay, “An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit,” was published (without his permission but to great acclaim) in 1699 and reprinted in 1711 in somewhat revised form in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. That three-volume work, reissued posthumously three years later and in ten more editions in the course of the century, rivalled Locke’s Second Treatise (a political, not metaphysical tract) as the most frequently reprinted work of the time. The hundred-page essay on virtue was the centerpiece of those volumes.
Virtue, according to Shaftesbury, derived not from religion, self-interest, sensation, or reason. All of these were instrumental in supporting or hindering virtue, but were not the immediate or primary source of it. What was “antecedent” to these was the “moral sense,” the “sense of right and wrong.”[6] [Shaftesbury’s “moral sense” was very different from John Rawls’s recent use of that term. For Shaftesbury it was an innate sense of right and wrong; for Rawls it is an intuitive conviction of the rightness of freedom and equality.] It was this sense that was “predominant…inwardly joined to us, and implanted in our nature,” “a first principle in our constitution and make,” as natural as “natural affection itself.”[7] This “natural affection,” moreover, was “social affection,” an affection for “society and the public,” which, so far from being at odds with one’s private interest, or “self-affection,” actually contributed to one’s personal pleasure and happiness.[8] A person whose actions were motivated entirely or even largely by self-affection–by self-love, self-interest, or self-good–was not virtuous. Indeed, he was “in himself still vicious,” for the virtuous man was motivated by nothing other than “a natural affection for his kind.”[9]
This was not a Rousseauean idealization of human nature, of man before being corrupted by society. Nor was it a Pollyannaish expectation that all or even most men would behave virtuously all or most of the time. The moral sense attested to the sense of right and wrong in all men, the knowledge of right and wrong even when they chose to do wrong. Indeed, a good part of Shaftesbury’s essay dealt with the variety of “hateful passions”–envy, malice, cruelty, lust–that beset mankind. Even virtue, Shaftesbury warned, could become vice when it was pursued to excess; an immoderate degree of “tenderness,” for example, destroyed the “effect of love,” and excessive “pity” rendered a man “incapable of giving succour.”[10] The conclusion of the essay was a stirring testament of an ethic that, by its very nature–the “common nature” of man–was a social ethic: “Thus the wisdom of what rules, and is first and chief in nature, has made it to be according to the private interest and good of everyone to work towards the general good; which if a creature ceases to promote, he is actually so far wanting to himself and ceases to promote his own happiness and welfare…. And, thus, Virtue is the good, and Vice the ill of everyone.”[11]
The contrast, not only with Thomas Hobbes but with Locke as well, could not be more obvious.[12] Neither was explicitly named by Shaftesbury, perhaps out of respect for Locke, who was still alive when the essay was written (although he had died by the time it was reissued). But no knowledgeable reader could have mistaken Shaftesbury’s intention. In 1709 he wrote to one of his young proteges that Locke, even more than Hobbes, was the villain of the piece, for Hobbes’s character and base slavish principles of government “took off the poison of his philosophy,” whereas Locke’s character and commendable principles of government made his philosophy even more reprehensible.
‘Twas Mr. Locke that struck at all fundamentals, threw all order and virtue out of the world…. Virtue, according to Mr. Locke, has no other measure, law, or rule, than fashion and custom: morality, justice, equity, depend only on law and will…. And thus neither right nor wrong, virtue nor vice are any thing in themselves; nor is there any trace or idea of them naturally imprinted on human minds. Experience and our catechism teach us all![13]
As Shaftesbury did not mention Locke in the Inquiry, so Bernard Mandeville did not mention Shaftesbury in The Fable of the Bees–at least not in the first edition, published in 1714. But appearing just then, a year after Shaftesbury’s death and at the same time as the second edition of the Characteristics, Mandeville’s readers might well take it as a rebuttal to Shaftesbury’s work. The subtitle, Private Vices, Public Benefits, reads like a manifesto contra Shaftesbury.[14]
The original version of the Fable, published in 1705 as a sixpenny pamphlet (and pirated, Mandeville complained, in a halfpenny sheet), consisted of some thirty verses depicting a society, a hive of bees, where everyone was a knave, and where knavery served a valuable purpose. Every vice had its concomitant virtue: avarice contributed to prodigality, luxury to industry, folly to ingenuity. The result was a “grumbling” but productive hive, where “…every part was full of Vice,/ Yet the whole mass a Paradise.” A well-intentioned attempt to rid the hive of vice had the effect of ridding it of its virtues as well, resulting in the destruction of the hive itself, as all the bees, “blest with content and honesty,” abandoned industry and…
