Abstract
On the account of its impact and legacy in modern democratic societies and their constitutive values and institutions, the Enlightenment can be considered the critical historical point and the landmark intellectual event in contemporary, specifically postmedieval Western and world civilization since the eighteenth century. At least it can be thus considered in conjunction with the Industrial Revolution and the French and American Revolutions, as its direct or indirect economic and political outcomes, realizations, or expressions, respectively.
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Notes
- 1.
Weber observes that the “ecclesiastical supervision” by the “Calvinistic State Churches” of individual life “almost amounted to an inquisition” and Tawney (1962) identifies an “inquisitorial discipline” in early Calvinism, including Puritanism.
- 2.
Smelser and Mitchell (2002:21) observe that “American hegemony also has a less tangible political-ideological ingredient, namely, a conviction of the moral superiority of a particular [American] version of democracy.”
- 3.
Like other super-patriotic conservative sociologists and economists, Lipset and Marks (2000) extol the supposed “resilience” and “stability” of American democracy in an invidious distinction from the “old” and unstable European societies. However, in view of a myriad of admittedly non-democratic, including theocratic, practices and legacies, notably the continuing predominance of Protestant sectarianism (Lipset 1996), ranging from New England’s Puritan theocracy through McCarthyism to the “politics of unreason” of neo-conservatism, this extolled “stability” reappears as what Mises calls the “peace of the cemetery” after the model or image of “Salem with witches” (Putnam 2000).
- 4.
In a critical analysis, Garrard (2003:105) acknowledges that the Enlightenment’s “broad consensus [was] that history had seen the essentially progressive, if often slow and uneven, expansion of human freedom, reason, and happiness and the unleashing of human powers through the overcoming of various natural and metaphysical obstacles, largely through expanding scientific discovery and application and the slowly diminishing influence and power of organized religion, prejudice, and superstition.” Garrard (2003:105) remarks that the Enlightenment view of social development and progress is compatible with the belief that during any specific period civilization may advance slowly, stop or even temporarily regress [to] account for periods such as the “Dark Ages”.
- 5.
Champion (1999:9–10) registers that “Locke was the son of a Puritan” and “advocated the toleration of all religious sects except Roman Catholics and atheists,” thus effectively only of Protestants. In this account, the “former were excluded because they maintained a foreign allegiance to the Pope, and the latter because they lacked moral responsibility, and were not bound by oaths” (Champion (1999:10–1). Admittedly, “for Locke there were limits to tolerable opinion. Atheism and popery were beyond the pale [and seen] as threats to social order. [He] specifically thought atheists were a danger to society because they could not be bound by promises or oaths (sanctioned by the threat of divine retribution). So even for Locke, still studied as a founder of modern liberalism, the defense of conscience was ultimately rooted in a conception of the duty to pious conviction, rather than the logical rights of free expression [i.e.] what Locke enfranchised was the free expression of a Christian conscience, rather that the rights of free expression” (Champion 1999:24). In turn, Bayle rejected Locke’s argument by positing that “atheists are less dangerous than idolators, and that lack of religious faith does not necessarily lead to bad conduct” and even that a “society of atheists could be more moral than a society founded on religious superstition [as] nothing is more common than to see orthodox Christians living evil lives, and free thinkers living good ones” (Champion 1999:25–6). Fitzpatrick (1999:49) also registers that “Locke was opposed to toleration for Roman Catholics and atheists [i.e.] those who owed allegiance to a foreign authority, those who could be absolved by their religion of moral and political crimes, and those who did not believe in the moral order.” By contrast, “as a Deist, [Locke’s pupil] Shaftesbury was able to set aside traditional Christian concerns such as original sin, grace, and salvation [and adopted Pufendorf’s] separation of theology and morality (reason)” (Fitzpatrick 1999:51). In this alternative to Locke’s Puritanism “the religious conscience [as] derived from the moral conscience is fearful of God’s disapproval of our actions and hopes for his approval of good behavior (yet) not the main motivating or regulating force.” Our prime concern is to do good for its own sake for, although fear of divine retribution is an element of the religious conscience, that fear itself is derived from an evaluation of conduct by the moral or natural conscience. Deistic thinking placed secular morality at the heart of conscientious concern; it set aside fears of future rewards or punishments as the basis for conscientious action, for to act on such a basis would imply a loss of moral freedom, involving doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Whereas Locke had placed checks on liberty of conscience (Shaftesbury) implied the “relaxation of restraints” (Fitzpatrick 1999:52). In turn, Zaret (1989:175–6; also Walzer 1963) considers Locke a key representative of political liberalism and thus the Enlightenment by proposing that he offered an “essentially secular conception of politics with a religious rationale [i.e.] a Protestant identity” as against Puritanism’s ideal of “godly politics” citing his statement that “there is absolutely no such thing [as] a Christian commonwealth” in apparent reference to Cromwell’s Puritan “Holy Commonwealth” in seventeenth century England. However, in light of the above rather than Locke, as at most its precursor, with Hobbes even more so, Hume was the true epitome of the British, namely Scottish, Enlightenment and liberalism in general (Berry 1997).
- 6.
Bloemraad et al. (2008:155) comment that “during the Enlightenment, justification of subjecthood led to Lockean notions of consent and contract, opening the way to liberalism’s language of individual rights, a central part of contemporary citizenship.” Zaret (1989:163–76) considers Locke an archetype of “liberal-democratic ideology,” including an “essentially secular conception of politics with a religious rationale [i.e.] a Protestant identity” (also, Walzer 1963).
- 7.
According to Garrard (2003:79), Sparta “provides Rousseau with his political ideal [for] civil religion. [For him] dissensus is fatal to political unity (so) strongly disapproves of religious nonconformity, which fosters division rather than unity. It was in deference to this principle that he justified his return to Protestantism during his visit to Geneva in 1754, even though he had ceased to be a Calvinist” In this account, “his prohibition on religious intolerance is primarily based on a desire to limit civil strife and disunity in already heterogeneous societies rather than on the intrinsic value of either toleration or diversity, which is hardly surprising in a man who admired Sparta” (Garrard 2003:80). Conversely, Rousseau “came to detest the salon culture of Paris in [favor of] the rough Spartan manliness of Geneva” (Garrard 2003:25), thus essentially detesting the Enlightenment versus theocratic Calvinism.
- 8.
Popper (1973:26) comments “it is necessary to ask which attitude is more Christian, one that longs to return to the ‘unbroken harmony and unity’ of the Middle Ages, or one that wishes to use reason in order to free mankind from pestilence and oppression?”
- 9.
Bauman (2001:65) extends Schumpeter’s expression to modernity as a whole describing the latter as “the era of creative destruction, of perpetual dismantling and demolition; the ‘absolute beginning’ was another face of the instant obsolescence of all successive states.”
- 10.
Bauman (2001:63) suggests that “unlike classical antiquity,” the Enlightenment and modernity in general “had a job to do: creating an order which otherwise would not come about, shaping the future which otherwise would assume an unacceptable form.”
- 11.
Reiman (1997:9) registers that Descartes proof of the “natural right of the rational subject to authority over [their] beliefs is the light in the Enlightenment.”
- 12.
Garrard (2003:13) registers that Bacon was “one of the heroes” of the Enlightenment philosophers in France.
- 13.
Garrard (2003:78) comments that for Rousseau “Christianity has caused a debilitating and destructive separation of the City of God from the City of Man, with the latter subordinate to the former [theocracy]. Christianity’s refus du monde turns our attention away from earthly concerns, thereby allowing tyranny to flourish. That is why true Christians are ‘made to be slaves.’ (Christians’) first allegiance is to the otherworldly City of God (which) is why Christianity is incompatible with good citizenship.”
- 14.
In Artz’s (1998:50) view, Montesquieu “was the first [Enlightenment] Philosophe to win a widespread reputation.”
- 15.
Kenshur (1993:5) comments that Montesquieu was “baffled by the specific and mutually inconsistent commandments of revealed religions, commandments according to which objects and practices are arbitrarily designated as pure or impure and hence as pleasing or repugnant to God.”
- 16.
Kenshur (1993:5) comments that Montesquieu “believes that people are capable of obtaining moral knowledge through rational means, by dint of their capacity to grasp transcendent principles of equity and justice, and of behaving virtuously in accordance with that knowledge.” Kenshur (1993:5) adds that, according to Montesquieu, “not only are people capable of being virtuous without being constrained to do so; only unconstrained acts can count as virtuous: actions performed out of fear of punishment or hope of reward are not meritorious,” expressing what modern liberals call “moral liberalism” (Reiman 1997).
- 17.
Reiman (1997:6) suggests that “two great Enlightenment formulations of liberalism” are those of Locke and Kant. However, John Locke is more accurately and commonly considered, not the least because of his latent Calvinism, notably his Puritan-rooted denial of religious tolerance and freedom to non-believers, non-Christians, and some Christians (“Papists”) in contrast to Voltaire (Fitzpatrick 1999), at best a precursor of the Enlightenment and thus liberalism, in this case its British version, in contrast to David Hume as its true exponent. Also, DeLue (1999:xii) identifies “two different enlightenment traditions [in] Kant and Smith,” as representing the German and Scottish Enlightenments respectively, but Hume is a better example for the latter (after all, he greatly influenced Smith).
- 18.
Simon (1995:3) adds that “the writers of the Enlightenment are part of the beginning of the phenomenon of mass culture [i.e.] mass enlightenment.”
- 19.
Eisenstadt (1998:215) points to Weber’s identified “contradictions” in modern society: between “the creative dimension inherent in the visions that led to the crystallization of modernity – the visions of the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment and the Great Revolutions – and the flattening of these visions, the ‘disenchantment’ that resulted from the growing routinization and, above all, bureaucratization of the modern world.”
- 20.
However, Calhoun (1993) comments that positioning their nation within history allowed nationalists who claimed ancient roots still to evoke the heroism of creation and the prestige that since the Enlightenment adhered in many quarters to the production of something new – as in the US’s claim to be “the first new nation.” If so, this illustrates the abuse and perversion of Enlightenment values by anti-liberal, especially conservative, forces in Europe and America. In short, it exemplifies the nationalistic and conceivably militarist and imperialist abuse and perversion of the Enlightenment.
- 21.
Trey (1998:3) observes that “initially the newness of the modern period meant a return to the ‘grand old days,’ referring to the golden age of antiquity [as] exemplified in the art and literature of the Italian Renaissance [but later], as a consequence of the French Enlightenment, modernity came to refer to a newness that was independent of the past.”
- 22.
Artz (1998:79) adds that “Voltaire believed in a natural religion (as) engraved on the hearts of men everywhere (Confucius, Socrates, Cicero) opposed to organized Christianity (miracles, supernatural doctrines, positive religious duties).” “He attacked the contradictions in the Bible and the improbabilities of miracles (and) the childish absurdities in the Bible.” In this view, Voltaire also made “criticism and a satirizing of the idea of Leibniz and Pope that this is ‘the best of all possible worlds’ (Artz 1998:82).”
- 23.
Byrne (1997:201) adds that, deviating from Calvinism and Christianity overall, “in his rejection of any innate human depravity through original sin (emphasis on the positive effect of environment on the development of the human being), Rousseau has had an immense influence on the modern Western understanding of the human subject.”
- 24.
Byrne (1997:201) suggests that Rousseau’s “vision of human innocence was instrumental in the emergence of a de-theologized anthropology on which the rationale of the human sciences depend.”
- 25.
This is in sharp contrast to Hayek’s own teacher and colleague within the Austrian school of economics, Mises who was positive and even enthusiastic about the Enlightenment and rationalistic liberalism seen as its “flower” in relation to traditionalism.
- 26.
Weber’s follower Jaspers coined the term the “Axial Period” (Habermas 1996) or “Axial Age” (Gorski and Altinordu 2008), a concept especially elaborated by Eisenstadt (1986).
- 27.
It is remarkable blunder or omission that Hayek overlooks that it was the Enlightenment that provided the first or most articulated and consistent theoretical foundation and justification for his celebrated “spontaneous market order,” including, as Keynes remarks, the laissez-faire doctrine. Hayek’s blunder or omission is also striking because his teacher and colleague Mises, like Keynes, essentially attributed or linked the conception of a free market economic system, notably the laissez-faire doctrine, to the Enlightenment or its ramifications in classical political economy represented by Smith, who was himself officially a member of Hume’s Scottish Enlightenment (Berry 1997; Tribe 1999). And, if Hayek, as he does, credits Smith with the design of a “spontaneous market order” he overlooks or forgets that this classical economist was also an Enlightenment philosopher, who wrote the “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” just as the “Wealth of Nations.” For instance, Garrard (2003:26) comments that for the (French) Enlightenment “positive laws, institutions, and beliefs are (since society is natural) unnecessary to produce the general harmony of nature in society, although steps are sometimes required to eradicate or regulate forces that disrupt this natural harmony, such as religious conflict. This French Enlightenment conception of the spontaneous order of nature and society is consistent with its rejection of contract theory (e.g. its pessimistic Hobbesian form), according to which order is the intentional product of human will.”
- 28.
Smith (2003:468) registers that Enlightenment Cartesian rationalism or constructivism ‘uses reason to deliberately create rules of action, and create human socioeconomic institutions that yield outcomes deemed preferable, given particular circumstances, to those produced by alternative arrangements. “Notably, following Hayek’s attack, Smith (2003:468) proposes that even though Enlightenment rationalistic constructivism is “one of the crowning achievements of the human intellect, it is important to remain sensitive to the fact that human institutions and most decision making is not guided primarily, if at all, by constructivism.”
- 29.
Berry (1997:vii) remarks that “Scottish Enlightenment” refer[s] to Scotland between 1740 (Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature) and 1790 (Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments). He also includes Hume’s followers or successors Ferguson and Smith in the “membership of the Enlightenment family” (Berry 1997:23). In this view, notably Hume’s “experience was European rather than narrowly Scottish and British” citing his lucid statement “Some hate me because I am not a Tory, some because I am not a Whig, some because I am not a Christian [sic] and all because I am Scotsman” (Berry 1997:18).
- 30.
Berry (1997:197) comments that “just as there is more to Smith’s liberalism than a defense of ‘natural liberty’ so there is more to the social theory of the Scottish Enlightenment than Smith; it does not all fall under his shade. The Scottish Enlightenment in general is held to be significant for ‘liberal’ thinking.”
- 31.
Foucault (1996:392) also includes what he calls the “organization of an opposition between the art of being governed and that of not being governed in such a manner.”
- 32.
Linton (2001:3) comments that the “social and cultural history of the Enlightenment is now as vital as the ideas themselves to any account of the nature of the Enlightenment. No longer are historians content to consider the Enlightenment as a set of ideas viewed in isolation from their readership: they are also engaged in assessing the effect of the growth in an audience for intellectual works, particularly amongst the bourgeoisie.”
- 33.
Simon (1995:7–14) observes that the French “nascent bourgeoisie,” although politically disenfranchised, [still] exerted their influence precisely in the creation of a public sphere separate from both the state and civil society [i.e.] the bourgeois public sphere [with] a counter-ideology to the dominant one of aristocratic privilege [viz.] liberal political discourse in spite of the lack of “capitalists” in eighteenth century France.
- 34.
Artz (1998:31) adds that “one of the causes of these changes in the thought [the Enlightenment] was the great growth of the middle classes.”
- 35.
Pareto remarks that the “religion of Christ, which seemed especially made for the poor and humble, has generated the Roman theocracy” and implies that Protestantism, making initially identical claims and promises like liberation and equality, has subsequently done the same through its own, especially Calvinist and Puritan, theocracies.
- 36.
Overall Collins (2000) suggests that in France the “Enlightenment intellectuals [were] supported by combination of state bureaucracy as patronage base, plus divided political authority promoting cultural competition.” In turn, the Scottish Enlightenment was “based on civil servants imposing peace on political-religious strife [while] the German idealist movement [was] a surprising turn from the Enlightenment repudiation of metaphysics” (Collins 2000).
- 37.
Artz (1998:109–10) adds that the French “government, urged on by the Church, intervened to forbid circulation of the work. Along with science and technology, the Encyclopedia emphasized nature, reason, and tolerance. In this it appealed to all but the most Conservative readers.” Further, the Encyclopedia “contained many articles on the arts and letters, and [also] laid the foundations of modern sociology, anthropology, and ethnology” (Artz 1998:110).
- 38.
Juergensmeyer (2003:157) comments that “whole books of the Hebrew Bible are devoted to the military exploits of great kings, their contests related in gory detail. Though the New Testament did not take up the battle cry, the later history of the Church did, supplying Christianity with a bloody record of crusades and religious wars.” In short, “despite its central tenets of love and peace, Christianity—like most traditions—has always had a violent side” (Juergensmeyer 2003:19). He invokes Protestantism, with its persistent “model of warfare” and tenet that “Christian living is war,” as an “example” within Christianity (Juergensmeyer 2003:157).
- 39.
Simon (1995:19) remarks that, as “in some sense representative of the French Enlightenment,” Rousseau’s “vision of utopia leads to social conformism [and thus] a form of totalitarian social control,” as indicated by the “totalitarian implications of his efforts to instill a sense of community among the citizenry.” In this view, in a “classic definition of totalitarianism as a collapse of the distinction between the state and civil society, [Rousseau’s] emphasis on civic virtue (etc.), combined with his call to nationalism, bear a striking resemblance to fascism. His political programs eradicate the distinction between the state and civil society (as) all relations are both social and political relations (Poland, Corsica) because the state mediates all aspects of its citizens” lives. “Rousseau’s nostalgia for classical republics [etc.] culminates in political programs that resemble the mass engineered domination of totalitarian regimes” (Simon 1995:20). While identifying the “protototalitarian impulses in Rousseau’s social theory [as in] the mob psychology of the fascist state” and the dissolution of individual to “national identity,” Simon (1995:170–4) still classifies Rousseau (and Diderot) into the “first critical theorists.” One symptom of his “protototalitarian impulses” was Rousseau’s support (in Discourse) of burning the Library of Alexandria by Muslim rulers and conceivably by Christian popes (Garrard 2003:17). Another one was his claim that Geneva’s Calvinist Spartans “had wisely banned [the modern theater]” (Garrard 2003:25).
- 40.
Weber registers that “in Western Europe, since seventeenth century, the strata of Enlightenment religions produced (in Anglo-Saxon and French culture areas) unitarian and deistic communities and (those) of a syncretistic, atheistic, or free-church variety. In Germany, Enlightenment religious views found a hearing among the same groups that were interested in Freemasonry (i.e.) those who have little direct economic interests (e.g. university professors, declassed ideologists and educated strata who partly or wholly belonged to the propertyless people).”
- 41.
Byrne (1997:10) comments that Hume’s skepticism “about ordinary knowledge and about religious truth (involved) a nascent agnosticism which in the (nineteenth) century would develop into a systematic articulation of atheistic philosophy.” In turn, according to Garrard (2003:19–20), the “influence of Hume on the trend away from concepts such as the state of nature, the social contract, and natural law was considerable at this time.” In this interpretation, Hume’s Of the Original Contract “presents a powerful skeptical case against what he elsewhere refers to as the ‘fallacious and sophistical’ theory of the social contract.” Related to this eighteenth century decline in contract theory was the growing appeal of the idea of human beings as naturally sociable, a view that enjoyed almost unanimous support among the philosophes. [e.g.] Diderot never wavered from his conviction that men “were never isolated.” [For d’Holbach also] “what is called the state of nature would be a state contrary to nature” (Garrard 2003:20).
- 42.
Hobbes’ open or implied atheism or agnosticism is well-known and paradigmatic. Spinoza is also often classified among atheists, agnostics, or deists due to his “rational reading of the Bible.” If interpreted literally, the Bible is full of errors and contradictions and impossibilities. “[Spinoza] pleaded strongly for toleration and religious freedom as practiced in Holland” (Artz 1998:7; also, Kaplan 2002). He proposed that “the nature of things is not to be understood through the Bible, but the Bible is to be understood by the nature of things” and became a “martyr for the freedom of thought [and] one of the early prophets of democracy” (cited in Artz 1998:8). In this account, Leibniz is also a precursor of the Enlightenment because “Leibniz’s God is not like an Oriental despot,” “seeking to reconcile Christianity with rationalism” (Artz 1998:9).
- 43.
Foucault (1996:383–4) suggests from the Protestant Reformation especially there was a “veritable explosion of the art of governing men [viz.] a displacement in relation to its religious source (laicization), an expansion into civil society of [it] and the methods for doing it.”
- 44.
Foucault (1996:385) implies that Renaissance and implicitly Enlightenment or modern Critique was to promote “universal and indefeasible rights to which every government (the monarch, the magistrate, the educator, or the father) will have to submit [as] the problem of natural law.” He adds that “natural law is certainly not an invention of the Renaissance, but from the sixteenth century on it took on a critical function, one it would always retain” (Foucault 1996:385).
- 45.
Byrne (1997:1) states that “in a narrow sense ‘Enlightenment’ refers to [the mid eighteenth century] when, particularly in France, there emerged groups of freethinkers intent on grounding knowledge on the exercise of critical reason, as opposed to tradition, established religion, or conventional political and social thinking.”
- 46.
Byrne (1997:184) remarks that “Rousseau’s ideal state owes a great deal to the political structure of his home town of Geneva (a citizen) raising the issue of the impact of Calvinist theology on European political theory.” [Yet] it is worth noting Rousseau’s bitter disappointment when the Small Council of Geneva (the highest ruling body) condemned Emile and The Social Contract. The city-state which Rousseau had admired as a model of good government had shown itself somewhat less tolerant than he had anticipated. Rousseau was prepared to trace this intolerance back to Calvin himself: “Calvin was undoubtedly a great man, but he was, in the end, (only) a man, and what is worse, a theologian. He had, besides, all the pride of a genius who feels his superiority and who is outraged that anyone disputes it with him.” In this account, his theory “reflects a tension inherent in Rousseau’s home and model state, Geneva, where the Calvinist form of theocratic government existed in an at times uneasy relationship with the liberating Protestant emphasis on the purity of the gospel and the inviolability of the individual conscience” (Byrne (1997:185). Similarly, Garrard (2003:1) suggests that “even after his ‘reform,’ which took Rousseau back to his native city in 1754 to be readmitted to the Calvinist Church and to have his Genevan citizenship restored, he returned to the salons of Paris.” In this view, Rousseau “favored an ‘enlightenment’ of the spirit achieved through the cultivation of virtue with the aid of conscience, rather than an ‘enlightenment’ of knowledge and reason” (Garrard (2003:3). Yet, he reportedly “participated in, influenced and was influenced by a social, cultural, political, and philosophical environment that was predominantly French in an age when France was the dominant cultural force in Europe” (Garrard 2003:11). En passant, his book Emile “was banned for its religious heterodoxy in both Catholic Paris and Calvinist Geneva” (Garrard 2003:70).
- 47.
Bremer (1995:225) adds that “but in the early eighteenth century, in England and in the colonies, many were attracted to the philosophers claim to have discovered natural laws, their optimistic view of man, and their skepticism toward all orthodoxies.” Also, Bremer (1995:225) suggests that “the English Enlightenment (from Newton’s Principia Mathematica in 1686 and Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding 1689) represented in its essence a challenge to the traditional reliance upon authority in religious and secular life, and carried an assertion of man’s ability to discover the secrets of the universe and exert some control over his destiny.” In turn, according to Kumar (2001:42), “behind all English social thought of this time was the fertilizing influence of the eighteenth century Scottish Enlightenment,” as exemplified by “John S. Mill,” admirer of Comte and Tocqueville, might also make a passable candidate as a “founding father of English sociology.”
- 48.
Berry (1997:12–3) observes that Presbyterianism was the “officially sanctioned form of Church government [in Scotland] and subscription to the tenets of the Westminster Confession was made the test of orthodoxy. Six years later this was put into fateful effect with the execution of a 19-year-old student Thomas Aikenhead for blasphemy (even after he had recanted of his alleged view that theology was ‘a rapsidie of feigned and ill invented Nonsense’). Here, on the face of it, is an event that represents all that the Enlightenment was fighting against.” In this account the British Union “itself should have confirmed the Church’s position since the retention of Presbyterianism was one of the articles of the Treaty. Arguably, however, this enhanced position made it the focus of political attention and this helped eventually the Scottish Church (or elements of it) and the Scottish Enlightenment to come to some sort of rapprochement” (Berry 1997:13). Further, Berry (1997:14) suggests that the Church Moderates “were the ‘Enlightenment’ party. This, together with their institutional centrality, makes the Enlightenment in Scotland very different from that typically associated with the French situation. This difference is reinforced by the close relationships between the Moderate clergy and other members of the Enlightenment, even including the notorious infidel—David Hume.”
- 49.
Foucault (1996:387) cites a German’s king’s (Frederick II) infamous anti-Enlightenment statement, “Let them reason as much as they want as long as they obey.”
- 50.
Cascardi (1999:13–5) comments that Kant “wishes to preserve a realm of moral freedom that would not be constrained by the contingencies of fact (an action as moral only when it is done out of a sense of obligation to the moral law [duty], not by merely fortuitous means)” and the Enlightenment “division of fact (nature) and value (freedom) [is] articulated in [Kant’s] first two Critiques (of Reason).” In this view, for Kant our “conceptual cognitive and moral structures fail to accommodate” the so-called “primary” aesthetic experiences of pleasure and pain and the “failure” of aesthetics to bridge fact and value has social and political implications beyond what [he] may have recognized (Cascardi 1999:17–9). Arguably, great art “alone among the socially differentiated spheres of Enlightened modernity—the cognitive, the practical, and the aesthetic—suffers the effects of that differentiation and invites us to reflect upon it as an objective and irrefutable fact” (Cascardi 1999:20). Cascardi (1999:38) infers that Kant’s “theory of aesthetic reflection marks affect (pleasure, pain) as evidence that the process of Enlightenment as a mode of systematic critical reflection is necessarily incomplete.” In passing, Kant “lived in Königsberg in Prussia (under Frederick the Great as the first of exemplars of enlightened kingship) where the dominant Lutherans coexisted with (Quakers, Mennonites, German Swiss Calvinists, Huguenots, etc.)” (Fitzpatrick 1999:49).
- 51.
Schmidt (1996:10) registers that “after the publication of Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone”, Frederick threatened Kant with future “unpleasant measures” should he continue to “misuse” his philosophy to “distort and disparage many of the cardinal and basic teachings of the Holy Scriptures and Christianity.” “In this and other works, Kant make energetic defense of the right to freedom of expression” (Schmidt 1996:29).
- 52.
This also reveals US conservatives’ calls for more “Western education” in the school system as a self-contradictory non sequitur, unless “Western” is, as they do, reductively misconstrued as “American.”
- 53.
And conversely, they were “hell and heaven” in what Weber calls the “world beyond” given conservative preferences for theological “heaven” or Calvinist-style salvation cum election of only few over liberal hope “for all” (Lemert 1999; Wuthnow 1998).
- 54.
Artz (1998:111) remarks that “a great blow had been struck at obscurantist despotism in both Church and state. The Philosophes had won! A Trojan Horse had been planted square in the middle of the Old Regime!”
- 55.
Kloppenberg 1998:26) emphasizes the “pervasiveness of Scottish common sense philosophy in the American Enlightenment. The Scottish Enlightenment was dedicated to discovering methods by which a provincial culture could create forms of social virtue without having to rely on republican political institutions unavailable to a province that was, like America, uncomfortable with its status.” However, this emphasis seems to overlook or downplay the pervasiveness or influence of (also) the French Enlightenment, including Montesquieu (Artz 1998) in the American Enlightenment; after all, all the major representatives of the latter like Franklin, Paine, and Jefferson “spent considerable time in France” (Byrne 1997:48). For instance, “Franklin was for 11 years before the French Revolution the American ambassador to Paris. In religion he quickly moved away from the Calvinism in which he was raised, thinking (like many of his contemporaries) that its rejection of good works was inimical to morality. Franklin was for a while a deist, but eventually he settled for a sort of benign and skeptical indifference in religious matters” (Byrne 1997:48).
- 56.
Byrne (1997:51–2) remarks that the “revivalism of Jonathan Edwards beginning in the mid 1730s, led to the Great Awakening, an eruption of Protestant enthusiasm which flourished mainly among the rural poor.” In this account, “their emphasis on personal commitment and inward faith demonstrated through vibrant outward expression was one of the aspects of religion which the cool detachment of the Enlightenment ideal found most repugnant; here, if more evidence was needed, was another clear example of Hume’s contention that human beings are governed by their passions much more than by their reason” (Byrne 1997:52).
- 57.
Byrne (1997:49) adds that “Jefferson became both President of the American Philosophical Society and President of the Union.”
- 58.
Byrne’s (1997:49) full statement is that “for those Europeans who too quickly assume that the French Revolution was the fulfillment of Enlightenment ideals, it is sobering to recall that the American Revolution took place 13 years earlier and owed comparatively little to those ideals.” Also, in his view, the arguably “crowning achievement of the Moderate Enlightenment was the American Constitution which enshrined the principle (of) complete separation between church and state. Many of the framers of the constitution (e.g. Jefferson and Madison) saw the separation of church and state not as a tactic to negate the influence of religion on American life but as essential to the true possibility of religious freedom. [Yet] the Constitution did not push the Enlightenment ideal as far as it could and it reflects one of the failures of this phase of the Enlightenment in America [i.e.] the belief that all issues could be settled by compromise between reasonable people” (Byrne 1997:51).
- 59.
Archer (2001:275–6) observes that in the Federal Constitution “Enlightenment ideas [influenced] American political thought. But, while key individuals (Jefferson and Madison) were personally influenced by these ideas, it was not their personal preferences that were principally responsible for establishing (Jefferson’s) wall of separation between Church and State.” Arguably, “those, like Jefferson and Madison, who were influenced by Enlightenment ideas, supported the separation of religion and politics for fear that religion would corrupt politics. Enlightenment ideology [favored] secularism, but key elements of American political culture emerged before its influence was felt [which] was largely restricted to a section of the revolutionary elite” (Archer 2001:277). A paradigmatic exemplar was the “Enlightenment-influenced Jefferson,” yet an “atypical” case in early as well as later and modern America (Archer 2001:228). In turn, some non-academics like amateur historians also argue that the “Declaration of Independence treats religion in a cool, Enlightenment sort of way [but] was an ex post facto justification of American beliefs. The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, often called the ‘first written constitution of modern democracy,’ were inspired not by democratic Athens or republican Rome or Enlightenment philosophy but by a Puritan preacher’s interpretation of a verse in the Hebrew Bible” (Gelernter 2005).
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Zafirovski, M. (2011). The Enlightenment and Western Civilization. In: The Enlightenment and Its Effects on Modern Society. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7387-0_3
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