What Is Enlightenment?

...Her avowedly “ambitious attempt”— The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments— receives an assist from recent scholarship on the multiplicity of the Enlightenment...

...Where the French attitude toward religion can be summed up in a sentence (Voltaire’s “Ecrasez l’inf?me”), it requires a number of chapters to sketch the contours of the British Enlightenment’s more welcoming stance...

...In revolutionary America, politics was primary, in both thought and deed: The formulators of the new science of politics were also its implementers...

...It is a mark of the basic rightness of these designations that readers can probably, without any help, match each general spirit with the appropriate nation...

...According to the doctrine of self-interest properly understood, it is in one’s self-interest both to do the right thing (like tell the truth) and to do good things for others (like be kind and helpful...

...America’s Enlightenment tradition, however, is flourishing...

...In ancien r?gime France, by contrast, all that was available was armchair theorizing, which contributed to the ideology of reason that had disastrous effects when action—the French Revolution— finally occurred...

...If there are plural “Enlightenments,” then aren’t there plural “modernities” as well...

...While I don’t at all quarrel with her presentation of the differences between Montesquieu and the Encyclop?distes, I must say that it makes it easier to criticize the French when you strip them of their philosophers, Montesquieu and Rousseau, and leave them only with the philosophes and poseurs...

...Gertrude Himmelfarb is certainly right in The Roads to Modernity that the “politics of compassion,” which used to be a left-wing specialty, is now (with the advent of “compassionate conservatism”) bipartisan...

...Himmelfarb devotes a chapter to the radical dissenters: Paine, Price, Priestley, and Godwin...

...She suggests, however, that we substitute “the moral sense” of the British Enlightenment for “self-interest properly understood...

...Rousseau, who also recognized the existence of natural compassion, was very aware of the problem...

...By contrast, religious liberty in America resulted in an enthusiastic multiplicity of sects...

...The territory remains recognizable as the Enlightenment, but it’s like the difference between a map based on the selfaggrandizing tales of explorers and a map based on aerial reconnaissance and ground surveys...

...In fact it will fuel the debates, since Himmelfarb argues that some roads to modernity are better than others...

...Himmelfarb offers a fascinating tour of the moral philosophers’ views on the utility of religious belief and the compatibility of “social affections and religious dispositions...

...No one, that is, except Gertrude Himmelfarb...

...The foundation of virtue is not love of God...

...Complementing that presentation is an equally fascinating examination of Methodism, especially the social effects of its “gospel of charity and good works...

...Himmelfarb’s shorthand designations for the general spirits of the three national Enlightenments are: the sociology of virtue (England), the ideology of reason (France), and the politics of liberty (America...

...Not that The Roads to Modernity will settle the question of disputed borders...

...According to Shaftesbury and his followers, man has an inborn moral sense and natural compassion...

...Himmelfarb discovers overlooked tributaries (Burke and Wesley) and a land bridge between the continents (Montesquieu...

...Although her focus is on the ideas, she acknowledges that the national differences are in part a function of differing conditions...

...The institutions established by the Founding Fathers still shape the American character...

...While most of the critics of modernity take their bearings from either the postmodern or the premodern, the eminent intellectual historian sets out in the latest of her many elegant and masterly books to reclaim the Enlightenment...

...He tells of the tyrant who sheds ready tears at the sight of suffering (when uncaused by himself...

...Tocqueville shows that you don’t need Shaftesbury and company to understand or foster virtue in America...

...To reach this goal, she subsumes the Scottish Enlightenment within the British—and grants enlightened credentials to some unlikely candidates, among them Edmund Burke and John Wesley...

...And if the rhetoric of compassion is now mandatory, it is incumbent on us to understand its intellectual genealogy...

...Gertrude Himmelfarb explores three paths to modern times By DIANA SCHAUB We must still not be enlightened—given how little we agree about the answer to the question, “What is Enlightenment...

...Himmelfarb quotes this passage, and, like Montesquieu, she seeks to understand how they did it—and particularly how religion fit into the combination...

...How do you get from benevolence to beneficence, from good will to good works...

...Together, “secular philosophers and religious enthusiasts” articulated a social ethos “that found practical expression in the reform movements and philanthropic enterprises that flourished during the century, culminating in what the Evangelical writer Hannah More described . . . as ‘the Age of Benevolence,’ and what a later historian called ‘the new humanitarianism.’” There were, of course, some outliers...

...Despite the presence of other streams of thought, these remain the dominant ones...

...These can even be conflated, as Tocqueville shows, in a chapter revealingly entitled “How the Americans Apply the Doctrine of Self-Interest Well Understood in the Matter of Religion...

...But, if the British moral philosophers were right about human nature, how are we to understand Britain’s “demoralization...

...Moreover, despite the implication of her title, she seems to argue that the roads end up at different destinations...

...and their personal example is still found worthy of study and often of emulation (as attested to by the spate of best-selling biographies read by ordinary citizens...

...The range of Methodism’s benevolent activities (hospitals, schools, libraries, mutual aid societies, poor relief, antislavery work) constituted “an Enlightenment for the common man...

...Indeed, because of Montesquieu’s prudence and Anglophilia, Himmelfarb pretty much excises the philosopher from the French Enlightenment...

...But the hard work of instilling virtue doesn’t take place on the political hustings...

...She says that America, with its combination of religious faith, capitalism, and morality, “has inherited and preserved aspects of the British Enlightenment that the British themselves have discarded and that other countries (France, most notably) have never adopted...

...What it requires is instruction in the coincidence of public and private good...

...I find this an intriguing but not altogether persuasive claim...

...The end result is a remapping of the Enlightenment that scales back some of the traditional peaks (Voltaire, Diderot, and the philosophes) while raising new ones (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Smith, and Hume...

...but just as the moderate Montesquieu gets to swim the Channel to England, the English radicals are, in effect, ostracized: “It might even be said that these radicals belong more to the history of the French and American Enlightenments than to the British...

...I wish she had said more both about the British renunciation of the sociology of virtue and about the American embrace of it...

...No one, apparently, wants to be thoroughly modern anymore...

...She would not take offense at the comparison...

...Both of these foundations of morality seem to me more efficacious than the sentiment of compassion, but then I may just be particularly unsentimental...

...Montesquieu said of the English that they were “the people in the world who have best known how to take advantage of each of these three great things at the same time: religion, commerce, and liberty...

...In the book’s epilogue, Himmelfarb briefly traces the subsequent fate of the three Enlightenments...

...And I suspect that the folks on the front lines will continue to rely on appeals to self-interest and salvation...

...A social ethic grounded in compassion was, she writes, “most appropriate to the needs of men” in eighteenthcentury Britain and twenty-firstcentury America...

...And yet, by reminding us of Tocqueville’s analysis of self-interest rightly understood, Himmelfarb perhaps undercuts her own argument...

...toriography and public opinion, hers is a partisanship that brings some balance and so furthers the cause of a fair accounting...

...In fact, America seems a compound of Locke and Christianity...

...How do you get from sympathy (which is merely passive) to charity...

...Perhaps the social success that seemed to attend the British Enlightenment was more dependent on religion (and other forms of inherited moral capital) than it thought itself to be...

...Interested in the general spirit of each nation’s Enlightenment, Himmelfarb is engaged in what might be called a Montesquieuan enterprise...

...A variety of public policy choices can bear the imprimatur of compassion...

...By taking seriously the insight that the Enlightenment was incarnated in different ways among and within different nations, Himmelfarb is able to shift the spotlight from the French (who have traditionally monopolized it) to the British and, to a lesser extent, the Americans...

...In Britain, where both a religious reformation and a political revolution preceded the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the focus of the moral philosophers was on the social virtues of sympathy and benevolence that would underwrite gradual social reform...

...British liberty followed the former course, with indifference eventually triumphing over zeal, followed by a drying-up of the wellsprings of benevolence...

...Citizens must be taught the utility of virtue: “Honesty is the best policy,” as James Madison liked to say...

...Perhaps that metaphor suggests too much impartiality on the part of the author...

...the documents they penned are the objects of our political reasoning and our partisan debates...

...Himmelfarb is forthright about her aims: “I am engaged in a doubly revisionist exercise,” she writes, “making the Enlightenment more British and making the British Enlightenment more inclusive...

...We seem not to agree even when the question is purely historical: The phenomenon that used to be called “the Age of Enlightenment” has become contested terrain, and the dissenters from the Enlightenment project have grown in number...

...The British Enlightenment, too, has suffered a slide into public irrelevance: Adam Smith, the central figure in that Enlightenment, is not a folk hero or a reference point in many political debates...

...According to Himmelfarb, not only has America kept alive its own politics of liberty, but it has imported the sociology of virtue as well...

...it takes place in families and churches and schools...

...Our virtue is usually grounded either in the calculations of self-interest or the love of God...

...It appears that even if the moral sense is innate, it requires rigorous cultivation to actualize it...

...This enlightened selfishness does not require altruism or compassion or humanitarian zeal to produce neighborly behavior and public-spirited action...

...The American approach to civic virtue is traceable to Locke, not Shaftesbury...

...Neither is it reason or selfinterest...

...Himmelfarb admits to being a partisan of the British as against the French, but, in the current state of hisDiana Schaub teaches political science at Loyola College in Maryland...

...There is another possible explanation for America’s healthier civil society that Himmelfarb alludes to but does not pursue...

...While scholarly interest in the French Enlightenment remains high, Himmelfarb finds that it has no popular resonance except as a “cautionary tale...

...In her final paragraphs, she mentions what Alexis de Tocqueville said about “self-interest properly understood”—that it was “of all philosophic theories the most appropriate to the needs of men in our time...

...This teaching about the moral sense is compatible with religious belief but not dependent on it...

...In speaking of the fate of religion in liberty-loving England, Montesquieu predicts that “what would happen is either that everyone would be very indifferent to all sorts of religion of whatever kind, in which case everyone would tend to embrace the dominant religion, or that one would be zealous for religion in general, in which case sects would multiply...

...Equally revealing as the substantive terms are the disciplinary qualifiers Himmelfarb chooses: sociology, ideology, and politics...