Titans of the Enlightenment
SCHAPIRO, J. SALWYN
Titans of the Enlightenment The Age of Ideas. By George R. Havens. Holt. 474 pp. $6.00. Reviewed by J. Salwyn Schapiro Professor Emeritus of History, CCNY: author, "Condorcet and the Rise of...
...The central doctrine of Rousseau's political philosophy is what he calls the "general will...
...Havens states in another connection, Voltaire's indignation "comes quivering down the centuries to our time...
...Mr...
...And the hero was Diderot...
...And we must "arm our minds" with the insight of these great thinkers in order to solve these problems...
...They were based on two fundamentals: reason as the universal solvent of human problems, and nature as the source of justice, virtue and beneficence...
...Havens gels into his real stride in the chapters on Voltaire...
...One and all...
...It alone gives coherence to the people, direction to the state, and legitimacy to all laws...
...Every thing that was pulsating with new life gravitated toward them...
...How did they come into existence...
...They constituted a literary movement which for the first time put social and political problems to the very forefront of man's intellectual life...
...For a quarter of a century, he fought almost single-handed against the established censorships, of the church, state, courts, and the Sorbonne...
...the philosophes declared war a outrance against the system...
...An ominous note is sounded in this most influential treatise on politics...
...His right to be included with the great figures of the Age of Ideas rests on his editorship of the French Encyclopedia, the most important rationalist work of the period...
...Its author, George R. Havens, presents an interpretation of the Age of Ideas "in terms," as he states, "of the varied and colorful men who gave them expression...
...hence man's naturally good instincts have been perverted and misdirected...
...The theologians believed both in God and in the devil, but the philosophes believed only in God...
...Christianity viewed man as naturally sinful who could be saved only through divine grace...
...As the author puts it, "humanity too often knows the better and follows the worse...
...Perhaps the theologians were right after all...
...Fanaticism, born of religious intolerance, they considered as the greatest of evils, "the malady of nearly all centuries," according to Voltaire...
...Their solutions were all too simple, all too logical, all too rational...
...New studies of the Enlightenment and of its great figures have been appearing recently, the latest being the book under review...
...In the opinion of the present reviewer, their insight consisted more in posing than in solving the problems of modern times...
...Never before had literature been so intensively and so widely used as propaganda for the reform of the existing order...
...A Bill of Rights is out of place in Rousseau's concept of democracy...
...In a series of well integrated chapters, the author analyzes the ideas of the four leading philosophes...
...The inhumanity of the Nazis and the Communists would have appalled the cruel Assyrians of ancient times...
...His sentences flow into each other so easily and so gayly, exposing the human elements that perforce create these human problems...
...How is it expressed...
...To Voltaire, the root of all evil in the world was revealed religion, which creates a psychology of consent among people to every established order that violates human rights...
...With him "outdoor nature enters the pages of the novel," and childhood makes "its definite appearance as a theme in literature, never to leave it...
...Though few in number and concentrated in Paris, they became the dominant intellectual influence in eighteenth-century France...
...Skeptic that he was, Voltaire was yet all aflame with hatred of inhumanity, wherever and whenever practiced...
...Those who refuse to accept it are too be banished: and those guilty of violating it are to be put to death...
...which led them to conclude that the Old Regime constituted a mass of abuses, that persisted because of the selfishness of those who benefited from it and of the blind acquiescence of those who suffered from it...
...Bayle, Fenelon and Fonte-nelle...
...But the author is more at home in literature than in political science...
...The only other philosophe considered in the book is Diderot...
...Rousseau had his answer to the question, "What is the matter with mankind...
...As the general will was not vested by Rousseau in any integrated body, the door was left open for any political party that claimed to represent it, and was willing and able to use force to suppress the opposition...
...His famous doctrine of separation of powers, long severely handled by political scientists, has in our day regained something of its old authority...
...To that strange, enigmatic genius may be ascribed winds of doctrine that are still blowing in the fields of education, politics, religion and literature...
...He left a moral heritage to his nation, that it was the special duty of the intellectual to defend those who suffer from persecution...
...Most of the book is devoted to a study of the Big Four of the philosophe movement in France: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot...
...But they did not foresee an even greater evil when, as in our day, the spirit of fanaticism would migrate from the body religious to the body politic...
...rationalist, satirist and philosopher, he gives the reader an idea of the unique genius of the philosophe...
...True, the author has highly interesting personalities to deal with, but he succeeds in convincing the reader that these men of letters also played a decisive role in the making of modern history...
...The philosophes created a new universality, the natural order, which was to displace the old universality...
...No private interest, whether that of an individual or a class, should be permitted to contaminate it...
...In this rather paradoxical way, Rousseau glimpsed the now oft debated problem concerning the slowness of man's moral progress in contrast to the rapidity of his intellectual progress, especially in science...
...A majority vote is only an approximation to this political ideal, hence an incomplete expression of it...
...A "civil religion" is to be established by the state, which everyone must accept...
...all evil comes from "civilization," an artificial product out of harmony with nature...
...It also deals with famous thinkers of the seventeenth century...
...A state responsive to the general will has not, and cannot have, interests contrary to those of the individual citizen, hence it need not give guarantees of civil rights to protect individual liberty...
...In a well considered chapter on Montesquieu and America, the author takes up the question of whether the Founding Fathers were directly influenced by Montesquieu's doctrine...
...No one has excelled Voltaire in his capacity to write on difficult and perplexing social problems in a style of compact clarity and dazzling simplicity...
...The battle over the publication of the Encyclopedia is a great landmark in the never-ending war for freedom of thought...
...was a question persistently asked by the thinkers of the Enlightenment...
...who prefigured the movement...
...which means nothing else than that he shall be forced to be free...
...To the philosophes, the settled, familiar arrangements of the social order took on a malevolent aspect...
...With the new universality came a new concept of man...
...As Mr...
...The philosophes may be described as the pioneers of today's "intelligentsia...
...Of all the philosophes, Rousseau is the most alive today...
...Moreover, his style is lively even sprightly at times...
...Diderot was responsible for its conception, for its continuance, and for its completion...
...He comes to the conclusion that, without the aid of the Spirit of Laws, "the uncertain task of drawing up the new Constitution would certainly have been more difficult, perhaps even impossible, in the midst of the violent struggle between divergent opinions...
...His "backbreaking labor, his ardor, courage, and persistence" finally won the long battle...
...There began a delving into origins???of government, of religion, of morality, of institutions...
...His analysis of the Social Contract is brief and quite inadequate...
...In willing of Voltaire as historian...
...Voltaire's defense of the Protestant, Calas, unjustly accused of murder, was the great precedent for Zola's defense of the Jew, Dreyfus, unjustly accused of treason...
...Havens tells this epic tale fully and vividly, stressing its importance not only for that day but also for ours...
...Only by the unanimous vote of all the citizens, and only when each and every one is motivated by an unquestioning desire to promote the public interest...
...Abstract, paradoxical, even mystical, the general will is "always constant, unalterable, and pure" in its regard for the public welfare...
...Voltaire was consumed with an intellectual passion for "naked reason...
...Reviewed by J. Salwyn Schapiro Professor Emeritus of History, CCNY: author, "Condorcet and the Rise of Liberalism'' The French Enlightenment, like the Italian Renaissance, constitutes an inexhaustible source of historical interest...
...hence the issue of "moral progress, difficult as it is, appears to bear within it the ultimate fate of civilization and of humanity itself...
...The solution, and the only solution, therefore, was to strengthen the power of reason through a complete toleration of all beliefs, religious and secular...
...From the day that it appeared to the present, the Social Contract has been the subject of ardent admiration and of heated denunciation...
...The problems posed by the great French authors of the eighteenth century," concludes the author, "are still the subtle, difficult, human problems of the present troubled day...
...This actually happened during the Reign of Terror with the dictatorship of the Jacobin party...
...The author gives a sense of reality to the ideas of the Enlightenment by discussing them in relation to the political and social life of the period...
...Christianity...
...The solution was a return to nature, by which Rousseau meant not a return to primitive life, but the creation of a new order based on man's natural instincts...
...To him...
...What is the matter with mankind...
...In the light of the present, the exuberant optimism of the latter concerning man's natural goodness and his inevitable progress seems like mordant satire...
...By contrast...
...The two World Wars that took place within one generation were far more devastating than any previous wars in modern times...
...Practically all books on Rousseau are controversial in character, largely because, both as a personality and as a thinker, he invited controversy...
...And with good reason...
...Havens brings out forcefully, sometimes eloquently, Rousseau's contribution to literature...
...Is he also the father of what J. L. Talmon, in his recent study of the French Revolution, calls "totalitarian democracy...
...Havens excels in his method of interweaving ideas with the personalities of the thinkers who propounded them...
...The philosophes had little inkling of the "vasty deep" of the unconscious, discovered by modern psychology, as the complicated yet decisive non-rational motive force in human conduct...
...This method gives a vivacity to abstract thought seldom found in books of intellectual history...
...Just compare Candide with a current sociological treatise...
...namely that he was naturally good and would progress toward "perfectibility" in the good society that was to be established...
...His gill of blending the personality with the ideas of the thinker stands the author well when he deals with the "creature of air and flame" that was Voltaire...
...Montesquieu is presented as a profound, original thinker "whose constant search for bold generalization" sometimes led him astray but often to the formulation of sound principles of government and society...
...Rousseau is admittedly the father of the doctrine of popular sovereignty, the basic principle of democratic government...
...therefore, in the view of the author, he "could not project his imagination beyond the skepticism of his time...
...Whoever "refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body...
Vol. 38 • June 1955 • No. 25
