The Legacy of the Englightenment
KOHN, HANS
The Legacy of the Enlightenment Liberalism: Its Meaning and History. By J. Salwyn Schapiro. Van Nostrand. 191 pp. $1.25. Consciousness and Society. By H. Stuart Hughes. Knopf. 433 pp....
...The views of the leading thinkers of the age comprehended a system of political, social, economic and cultural philosophy that we call liberalism...
...Hughes knows this and states it several times...
...Like other great emancipators of modern man, Freud was a strict moralist in his own life and a prudish puritan...
...6.00...
...Discussing Gaetano Mosca, Hughes stresses Mosca's "willingness to subject all human institutions to dispassionate scrutiny and to learn from mankind's mistakes how to make future generations a trifle less unhappy than their predecessors.' That seems to me an excellent definition of modern Western civilization...
...Max Weber is the key figure of Hughes' study...
...Some of the thinkers of that period form the subject of the new book by Professor Hughes...
...Weber's hankering after personal leadership—along with his ineradicable nationalism—is enough to make us question the whole basis of his political thinking...
...Freud was as much a scientist as an artist, an empiricist as much as a metaphysician...
...There was "a more understanding attitude toward extramarital sexual relations" in 13th-century France than there is in the post-Freudian generation...
...By the use of his faculty of observation and analysis he added more to our knowledge about humanity than any other thinker of our times...
...This attack reached philosophical depth with the reorientation of social thought which went on in France, Germany and Italy after 1890...
...He has the gift of clear analysis and gracious writing...
...He is equally familiar with modern French, German and Italian thought...
...The age of anxiety and neuroses does not bespeak a "more joyous" life...
...Hughes himself—and that is not astonishing in an American—is consciously "18th century," an heir of the liberal attitude which insists wherever possible on rational solutions and humane behavior...
...Hughes has written a work of great merit and undisputable intellectual stature...
...But Hughes goes too far when he ascribes the relaxation of sexual morality in the last decades to Freud's teachings and when he characterizes the present relations of the sexes as "more joyous...
...Fundamentally, he was in quest of a new nobility of man in an age in which many of the old approved certainties were being undermined...
...In that period, many of the concepts were developed which deeply influenced 20th century attitudes...
...Our whole contemporary view of the human mind has had its origin," Hughes writes, "in Freud's attempt at a coherent explanation of the working of the unconscious mind...
...At a time when liberalism has been under attack from many quarters, such a crisp and succinct restatement of its principles is especially welcome...
...This is brilliantly expressed, but Weber's attitude, like that of most Germans, was colored by his insufficient understanding and fundamental dislike of modern Western civilization...
...The thinkers of that period encouraged a wave of irra-tionalism...
...What counted most with Weber was the interest and power of the state and the vigor and authority of its political direction...
...As a system of thought, Schapiro points out, liberalism received its definite expression during the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment, which witnessed an intellectual revolution that spread to almost every land of the West...
...The thinkers and writers Hughes discusses represent an age of transition and doubt, and he has brilliantly succeeded in delineating its complexities, promises and perils...
...That is as true of Nietzscheans as of Freudians...
...He unravels the complex strains in the thought of men of different traditions and contradictory leanings and he treats them all with exemplary fairness...
...The legacy of the Enlightenment has been under attack, especially in continental Europe, since the second half of the 19th century...
...Reviewed by Hans Kohn Professor of history, City College of New York Professor Schapiro, one of the leading American scholars in the analysis of 19th-century British and French liberalism, has now presented in compact form the basic ideas of liberalism and the particular forms which the liberal movement has taken in the principal countries of the Western world...
...Hughes' heroes are Freud and Max Weber...
...His profound concern for reason—his distress at the paradox that made it both the highest achievement of the West and the source of the "soullessness' of contemporary life—inspired him to subject the culture of rationality itself to searching examination...
...Through the analysis of their thought he tries to catch the new style of the era, which might be summed up as the discovery of the unconscious motivation of human actions...
...Like Marx and Nietzsche, Ibsen and Sorel—whatever the value of their specific theories— he was one of the great emancipators...
...In that sense Weber, like Croce, belonged more to specific German and Italian traditions than to Western liberalism...
...In fact, they were heirs of the Enlightenment, though some of them, especially the Germans and Italians, were dubious and doubtful partners of modern Western civilization...
...Yet, as Hughes convincingly shows, most of them were rationalists...
...His disciples have confused emancipation with license...
...The writers whom he introduces are well known, with the exception perhaps of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, about whom one might have wished to know more, but even the well known thinkers are presented in a way which will make the book attractive even to specialists...
Vol. 41 • November 1958 • No. 42
