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Introduction

The eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, moved reason and logic to a universal plane. Whereas the scientists of the seventeenth century sought the freedom to explore matter and the cosmos without the interference of the Church, the eighteenth century philosophes sought to apply rational rules to all aspects of human life.

Everyone who has studied the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment is familiar with the phrase the age of reason. Scholars of the period have suceed in construction a picture of a movement that dispelled the mists of tradition and superstition, replacing them with analytical rigour. The scientific canons first developed in the seventeenth century were applied now in an attempt to bring clarity and order to a wide variety of individual and social experience including: economics, ethics, language, and the workings of the human mind. The concept of nature itself was broadened to include ‘human’ behaviour whose laws, enlightened thinkers believed, could be discovered through the penetrating light of reason. Operating both empirically and deductively, reason would identify the laws that governed individual and social behaviour and would provide a firm foundation for future human progress.

An Interpretation of Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was a movement encompassing a number of complex strands of thought. It was most powerful in societies like Scotland, France, Italy and Spain, where thinkers were concerned about economic backwardness or decline. As an identifiable movement, it began somewhere around the 1730s and only really ended with the increasing specialization of intellectual life during the nineteenth century. The Enlightenment helped to create and shape the specialized academic disciplines, but Enlightened thinkers were distinctly cosmopolitan multidisciplinary, to use a modern term. They were comfortable making connections between ethics, economics, philosophy and cosmology.

England did not have an Enlightenment. It did not need to have one. England was already well on its way to becoming a modern commercial state during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, a fact which is confirmed by the Glorious Revolution that took place in the seventeenth century and established the commercial, tolerant, and socially mobile nature of British society. This gradual and benign progress towards modernity meant that England did not require the religion of reason in order to build a more efficient and homogeneous society.

And that is precisely what the enlightenment was – the religion of reason – an optimistic movement that focused on the power of reason to change the world, to ensure social harmony, and to put nations firmly on the path to continued progress. It was a religion of heaven on earth with the godess of reason or a Deist god at its head. During the Revolution in France, self-proclaimed citizens actually erected statues of the godess of reason in the public squares and artists painted her leading France to a brighter future. It was only after the Terror that followed the early days of the French Revolution that citizens began to wonder if reason was all that it was cracked up to be.

Why did countries like France and Scotland adopt the religion of reason – the kind of secular religion preached by Voltaire in his many books and pamphlets and described in the world’s first Encyclopedia compiled by Diderot and D’Alambert? Why were these enlightened philosophes writing elegant essays criticizing the medieval past and designing future rational societies and institutions. It was precisely because these countries were not like England. France still had a basically feudal social structure and was collapsing under the weight of fantastic debts. Scotland, after the failure of the Darien scheme to create a colony in the West Indies, was also hopelessly behind John Bull (the nickname for England) in terms of economic development. Both France and Scotland were concerned to break through the bonds of economic backwardness; the thinking people in these countries were amazed at the spread of commerce, freedom and toleration in England. They desperately wanted to catch up, and they wanted to catch up fast. They had no time for the gradual change that had transformed England. Thus, they created a philosophical religion that justified rapid rational change.

What French and Scottish thinkers wanted to achieve was the creation of a liberal commercial state as rapidly as possible. They looked to the aristocracy and gentry (Scotland) or the King and his chief ministers (France) to implement rapid change. The Enlightenment implied improvement from the top down. We must emphasize this point all the more strongly because many writers, such as Peter Gay, have mistakenly described the Enlightenment as the platform of the middle classes or what the French called the bourgeoisie. Ultimately, this viewpoint has its starting point in Karl Marx’s view that the eighteenth and nineteenth century were characterized by class conflict between the middle and upper classes. Theories of class warfare tend to obscure the character of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

It’s easy to be confused. The enlightened philosophes did want to create a commercial and liberal society. However, they wanted reform to be initiated and guided from above. They were characteristically suspicious of those people who were primarily engaged in trade and commerce. Adam Smith, for example, warned government against trusting the merchants, because these urban dwellers had few scruples and routinely put their own profits ahead of the well being of society. Enlightened ministers, educated aristocrats and the respectable and independent members of the gentry were the best custodians of the nation’s interest.

Whether or not we view the Enlightenment as imposed from above, or the ideological platform of the middle class, is not critical to the analysis that follows. More interesting is figuring out exactly what the enlightened philosophes meant by the reign of reason. Eighteenth-century writers didn’t usually talk about reason in isolation. When they talked about reason, they typically coupled it with nature. Drawing upon the discoveries of scientists a century earlier, they believed that nature was organized by intelligible laws. Nothing in nature was chaotic or superfluous. Nature was orderly; nature was economical; nature was efficient; nature was balanced; nature made sense. Human societies, in contrast, often were traditional, cumbersome, wasteful, irrational, emotional, factional and warlike. Whereas nature represented order, human society represented disorder.

The scientists of the seventeenth-century enabled us to understand nature. Newton cut through the red tape of data to describe a clockwork universe and the laws of matter and motion. It made little difference whether one was a rationalist like Descartes or an empiricist like Bacon. The end point of the scientist was the same – the discovery of the fixed and immutable laws that governed nature. Newton was a hero to both the French rationalists and the English empiricists.

It is not easy for us to appreciate the impact that the idea of nature’s order had on the minds of eighteenth-century thinkers. We can appreciate some of its characteristics by looking at the gardening fad during the period. Aristocrats and members of the gentry began to grow their own little orderly gardens where they could sit and speculate on the orderliness and progress of a more natural society. They replaced the chaotic mazes of earlier times with rectangular sections and they favoured a more natural arrangement of plants and fountains than the more ceremonial and artificial past. Some gardeners were adapt at positioning plants in such a way that one might think they had grown there naturally. But this was nature controlled, orderly and rational.

Nature was to be a mirror for man. Just as nature’s laws were open to the searches of men like Newton, so too the laws of human social, economic and cultural life were waiting to be discovered by those whose minds were not polluted by superstition, dogmatic region or vested interests. For the first time, writers argued that society could be reshaped along more rational and natural lines. An amazing example of the rational revolution is found in the city of Edinburgh, Scotland. Juxtaposed next to one another are two different worlds, two distinct mentalities. The old medieval town of Edinburgh – auld Reekie – remains in the form of the Royal Mile from Edinburgh castle to Holyrood Palace. The buildings and homes where people like the Protestant Reformer John Knox once lived are a highly irregular jumble of architectures. One can walk down many complex little roads or wynds that weave in and out of these structures. Two blocks away is the New Town of Edinburgh, Georgian structures elegantly laid out in mathematical rectangles fronting private parks what were once the preserve of their well-heeled owners. Enlightened and rational Edinburgh on one side; quaint medieval structures on the other. Two different worlds formerly inhabited by people with two entirely different world views.

Given that the enlightened philosophes (practical philosophers) firmly believed in the need to rationally reorder society, we can learn a great by looking at those they regarded as their enemies. They believed that social change and order had been impeded by tradition, superstition, vested interests and religion. The Roman Catholic Church was the chief target of the French liberal thinkers. They claimed that the Church had fostered superstitious and irrational notions in the minds of people, thereby obscuring the light of reason. The medieval Church ushered in the dark ages by focusing attention on an otherworldly hereafter and ignoring God’s earthly creation. The French thinkers also distrusted the peasantry, who had considerable power to block change in France, as highly traditional, superstitious and backward looking communities. Finally, the philosophes attacked the vested interests that existed in French society and were characterized by a complex array of government officials, baronets, tax collectors, tollgates and feudal rights and tithes.

Following the English thinker John Locke, the enlightened liberals argued that all men and women were rational beings who should be able to understand the laws of nature and society. The problem was that their minds – blank slates at birth – had been filled will all kinds of nonsensical concepts by the Church and other agencies of social control. Only greater freedom and human rights would liberate people’s minds from the heavy chains of the past and allow them to appreciate the possibility of a more rationally ordered society. A tolerant government and a literate society would allow the process of re-education to begin and would lead to greater progress.

The concept of unlimited progress was an Enlightenment invention. The vision of enlightenment theorists was that of a society continually progressing towards rationality and happiness. Science would be more liberated, would discover nature’s laws, and would us to harness nature for our own ends. Government would become more systematic and would create citizens who were equal under the law and encouraged to develop their potential. A knowledgeable citizenry would add to the store of knowledge, that would be exchanged freely for the benefit of all. Commerce in the form of international trade would bring nations more closely together and, eventually, usher in an era of perpetual peace. Human relations would improve as free, rational, and equal individuals discovered that their interests were similar.

Today, it may be difficult for us to reproduce the incredible optimism of the Enlightenment. We are certainly a lot more cynical than they were. It would be a serious mistake, however, to view these reformers as naïve or seriously out of touch. Their positive attitude and confidence was created in a European society characterized by continual warfare. Many of them lived in subsistence economies where famine and disease were constant facts of life. They witnessed and reported on injustices, and they were well acquainted with the ironies involved in trying to maintain an optimistic stance in a world characterized by injustice. They fully recognized the potential pitfalls involved in progress – Adam Smith and Diderot were the first to point out the potential for individual alienation is a specialized advancing economy. Rousseau pointed out that progress could create men and women who continually wore ‘masks’ and who we could never really trust.

That’s why the Enlightenment was a movement, a stance and an attitude, rather than simply the discovery of nature’s laws. It was also a movement that was characterized by internal contradictions. Jean Jacques Rousseau, in particular, cut to the heart of the enlightened faith in progress. Rousseau believed in reason; he loved Newton and Locke; he developed the first recognizably modern political constitution; and he attacked the chain of tradition, superstition and vested interests with as much vehemence as any philosophe. But he was not sanguine about scientific and social progress. He wrote prize winning essays against the inequalities and artificiality that would characterize a more commercial and capitalist society. His ideal society was composed of small independent farmers living within something like Plato’s city state. He valued poverty over wealth, because he firmly believed that wealth corrupts morals.

Many other enlightened thinkers appreciated Rousseau’s brilliance, but they did not agree with his conclusions. Most were concerned to shape modern nations consisting of equal citizens who were able to pursue the commercial opportunities that would improve themselves and strengthen the nation. The modern nation state was the critical concept in much enlightened thinking. Only a unified nation could eradiate the senseless traditions and irrational jurisdictions that characterized early modern societies. Only the nation could institute the rule of law, and transform isolated villagers into citizens. Man as citizen played an important role in French thought. It did away with the notion of peculiar rights, privileges and vested interests that characterized the ancien regime in France.

Rousseau was not the only critic of some of these key enlightenment ideas. In a different way, the Marquis de Sade used enlightened tools to cut enlightened optimism to ribbons. He was quick to point out that the laws of nature did not imply peace, progress and profitability. If we look at the balance of nature, he suggested, we see that it is maintained by a state of constant warfare. Animals, the closest objects to us in nature, are creatures who are governed by their appetites. Their instincts lead them to tear one another apart. They are naturally cruel and bloodthirsty.

What makes us different from these animals, says Sade? Not a lot, except that we explore our appetite for destruction and sexual domination much more than animals can because we have reason and imagination. We can reflect and conduct research on our vicious natures and try to understand them better. De Sade’s novels are not really pornographic. They relentlessly and clinically describe human beings engaging in bestial sexual and physical acts, followed by lengthy philosophical analyses about human nature. De Sade carried the naturalism of the Enlightenment to its horrible and tragic conclusions by encouraging men and women to pursue their natures to the hilt. Fortunately, De Sade conducted his relentless pursuit in literature rather than real life. But the literary result would be the same as the social result – one person left standing in a blood soaked nature.

The Scottish Enlightenment

These, then, were intellectual issues and contradictions with which the enlightened theorists had to deal. What makes them so fascinating for us is the fact that so many of these same issues, attitudes, dilemmas and contradictions are ingrained in modern thought and social institutions. In terms of his impact on the history of ideas, one thinker was perhaps more crucial than all the rest. He was a very jovial, chubby and popular Scotsman and his name was David Hume. And since Hume was a Scotsman, it is appropriate for us to consider the characteristics of the Scottish Enlightenment.

The Scottish Enlightenment differed from its French counterpart in that it was much more institutionally grounded and conservative. In Calvinist Scotland, for example, the lines between the enlightenment and the church were not so clearly drawn as they were between the Roman Catholic Church and the deist French court. Similarly, Scotland did not have as many institutional impediments to reform as more feudal France. It had no court, no indigenous government, and the society was basically run by, and looked up to, landed society. Estate owners in Scotland compared themselves to their English neighbours and were much more open to practicing agricultural improvements on their estates and playing a leadership role in the reform movement.

Because their were fewer fixed institutions and no fixed constitution in Scotland, the Scots had always stressed the role of landed society (aristocrats and gentry) on manners, habits and attitudes. In conservative Scotland, the emphasis was on slow and steady progress, monitored closely for any signs of social breakdown. Scottish writers, therefore, advocated a program of gradual improvement rather than social restructuring. The lack of radicalism encouraged university professors, lawyers and members of the Moderate Party in the Church of Scotland to make contributions to Scottish Enlightenment. Whereas the French Enlightenment was opposed to the Church, and took place outside the universities, it would be impossible to write about the Scottish Enlightenment without discussing the many contributions of clerics, lawyers, and professors. The unusual degree of consensus in Scotland, that only broke down during the Terror following the French Revolution, was considered remarkable. The centre of the Scottish Enlightenment was the city of Edinburgh which garnered the enviable title the Athens of the North from the enlightened European community.

Enlightened Scottish writers did not anticipate any great political or social transformation, but that did not make their work any the less significant. Adam Smith was the father of modern economics; Adam Ferguson is considered by many to be the first sociologist and anthropologist; Hume is recognized as the originator of modern philosophy. All were Scots and like other Scottish writers they emphasized the organic nature of society and emphasized the need to maintain community when contemplating change. Hume himself was a political conservative, but an enlightened one, who sought progress, but not at any cost. Progress had to occur within the framework of the existing sentiments of the Scottish people as a whole. A similar message was preached by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). For Smith, moral attitudes grow and change slowly; they cannot be imposed upon communities. Simply because behaviours conformed to the so-called laws of reason did not mean that they would be socially beneficial. If they disrupted the natural sentiments or common sense of the community, they would actually be harmful.

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) is often misunderstood because so few scholars have ever read Smith’s earlier work. Smith developed the law of laissez-faire in the economy because it conformed to his idea that significant social change could and should never be imposed from above. The mercantilist state gave contracts to merchants whose only interest was in profits and who were relentless government lobbyists. These uncompetitive contracts were neither in the interest of the nation or its inhabitants. They lined the pockets of the merchants at the expense of the gentry and working people. It would be far better, Smith argued, for the government to get its ass out of the economy. Only when the merchants and industrialists were forced to compete with one another would prices fall to the correct level and the wealth of the nation, in the form of rents and wages, rise accordingly.

Smith never argued that society at large should be subject to the invisible hand of the market. Society for him was so much more than an economic relationship. It embodied the moral sentiments of its members. The common sense and common sentiments of the community acted as a brake on the greed of the capitalist. These natural controls were weakened, however, when governments tried to control the economy.

The Wealth of Nations is much more than a simple apology for capitalism. What is more, it did not anticipate drastic structural changes in society. Rather, Smith’s famous work presented a model of slow progress based on the self control and deferred gratification Smith believed that society operated on the basis of habit, custom and, above all, feeling. The merchant or industrialist, if he wanted to keep his customers, would need to be honest, reasonable and to respect the wishes of his clients. The market economy, in other words, did not supplant the moral sentiments or the moral economy of communities. There is much more to Adam Smith’s view of the community than the simple slogan that it is human nature to “truck, barter and trade.” It is also human nature to sympathize with others and to resent injustice.

Smith and Hume were as close as two lifelong friends can be. Both clearly belonged to the movement we call the Enlightenment because they were proponents of “improvement”. Their writings implied commercial society, political toleration, and the leadership of polite and civilized landowners. Both were also common sense theorists to the extent that they privileged the living breathing community above any abstract concepts of nationhood and constitution. That is also what makes them different from many of their counterparts in the French Enlightenment.

For Hume and Smith, the big problem with French thinking was that it places far too much emphasis on rationalism. Hume would attack the concept of reason, not because he himself was not a very rational fellow, but because he appreciated the negative consequences that could result from an excessive reliance on logic and science. In particular, he was concerned that rationalist philosophers, Helvetius and Condorcet in particular, were trying to circumscribe human social life in the Procrustean Bed of scientific axioms. Human life, Hume maintained, could not be subsumed under the laws of science. It had its basis as much in sentiment and habit than in reason.

This approach made good sense in the Scottish context, where rapid and revolutionary change simply was not on the cards. Few Scottish thinkers, at least among the leading Edinburgh literati, countenanced the idea of radical transformation. This helps to explain something that would otherwise be fairly puzzling. Hume loved Rousseau, at least until he discovered what a paranoid guy Rousseau was. The reason was because Rousseau, more than any other French writer, showed that there were problems with having a blind faith in progress and reason. Rousseau’s paradoxical accounts struck Hume as just right. So, it isn’t surprising that Hume brought the political exile Rousseau over to Great Britain to live. Rousseau, as Diderot had warned Hume, was more than a bit touched; he alternately accused Hume of trying to kill him or wept and begged forgiveness at an astonished Hume’s knees. Much to David’s relief, Hume eventually returned to the Continent.

Rousseau’s most important work, of course, was The Social Contract. Hume considered this a terrible book. Rousseau called for a return to a more primitive society in order to avoid the luxury and corruption of the modern state. Hume thought that this was nonsense, and overlooked the brilliance of Rousseau’s concept of the General Will. Hume did not worship reason or progress, but he was an improver. Le Bon David (the nickname the French gave to Hume) did not appreciate Rousseau’s call for what Hume called “a society of mud huts”. Smith had a clearer sense of the Rousseau’s brilliance, but he too said that Rousseau seemed to want all human beings to return to “walking on all fours” and foraging for an existence. Hume simply regarded The Social Contract as a practical joke.

The British Empirical Tradition

David Hume, Adam Smith and many Scottish writers reflected a distinctive point of view that helps to explain their differences with French counterparts. But Hume went much further by demolishing the rational edifice of the French Enlightenment. Hume relied on a particularly British philosophical approach to attack enlightenment ideas of science and reason. England’s transition to modernity, as we have seen, was relatively painless. Its philosophic tradition was also far less rationalistic and more empirical than continental thought, a tradition that continues into the present.

Empiricism argued that human knowledge is built gradually, by mentally manipulating the bits of sense data that strike the senses. As opposed to Descartes and the entire rationalist tradition, the empiricists argued that the way to obtain knowledge is to make the senses one’s starting point. The job of the mind is to organize these sense impressions carefully. There is no such thing, for example, as innate ideas. The mind is a tabula rasa or blank slate, to use a concept developed by John Locke. The environment writes on this blank slate. Ideas are nothing more than relationships and connections made between bits and parcels of sense impressions.

The approach of the empiricists, as adopted by Locke and other British philosophers, leads one to wonder about the nature of mind itself. If one can discover the way that the mind works, rather than by speculating about those mysterious things that the rationalists would call mental axioms or innate ideas, one can find the attributes and the limits of human reason. The British philosopher, Berkeley, pushed the empirical approach even further than Locke, and made the case for exploring the nature of the mind. Berkeley pointed out that, if there was no knowing apart from the senses, then we could never know for sure that matter really existed. All that we could ever know was our own perceptions. We could not even know clearly and distinctly the things that Descartes thought we could know about matter, such as extension and motion in space. Our only real knowledge is of our own impressions.

Does a tree fall in the forest if no human mind perceives it? That is precisely the question that Berkeley asks, and his answer is negative. There is no knowledge without perception of that knowledge. Mind or spirit is the only thing that is real; matter is not real. Only mental substances exist. Berkeley, an Anglican Bishop, believed that the reality of mind was the best proof for the existence of a spiritual universe and a God.

Berkeley’s concentration upon mental substances leads us back to the mind and its workings again. Hume would seize upon this point and make it his task to try to show exactly how the mind, from the position of an empiricist, works. Much more rigorous than either Locke or Berkeley, Hume went on to deny both the existence of God and mental substance. In addition, his outline of the way that the mental process worked would have a devastating impact upon enlightened optimism as well as about what we humans can ever really know.

Both Locke and Berkeley reduced our ability to answer many of the big philosophical questions or to construct huge metaphysical systems like those of Plato or Descartes. By refusing to accept any sort of knowledge that could not be verified through the senses, they made human knowledge something that could only ever be induced through observation and experiment. Of course, this methodology is still clearly scientific. It may not have been the method favoured by Descartes and the rationalists, but it still assumed the existence of scientific laws and encouraged scientific research. Scientists now had two working strategies. They could choose either the empiricists or the rationalists, or both, as their intellectual mentors. A good scientific law (i.e. one that seemed to work and allowed research to proceed) was useful, however derived.

Hume’s point was that scientific laws were not logical at all. The central mechanism of Newtonian physics or Cartesian cosmology was faulty in some very important respects. The mind simply was not equipped to create laws of any logical validity. This was what Hume demonstrated by applying empiricist principles rigorously to the workings of the mental process. What Hume did was nothing short of phenomenal. He didn’t merely destroy the social theories of the French Enlightenment writers but also the foundation of eighteenth century science. He denied the ability to create any laws that had significance apart from the faulty human mind that created them.

Hume accomplished this intellectual tour de force in his inimitable elegant and ironic style. This playful style has misled modern philosophers about Hume’s message. Many philosophers, for example, present a picture of Hume as a mischievous and gleeful provocateur who delighted in the destruction of the most powerful rationalistic and scientific edifices of his time. He is like a child playing with ideas merely for their own sake. Far from it. Hume wants to make a very important social comment. If his analysis of knowledge and its fundamental weakness is correct, then it is a grave mistake for those in positions of power — scientists, economists or politicians – to attempt to dictate radical solutions in those societies in which they play a leadership role. All “excessive” interference in the life of a community is not only socially dangerous but also artificial and wrong-headed. Radical change only weakens the social fabric without providing any real or lasting solution to the problems facing human communities.

Hume was no elitist. He hated those who, like Plato, attempted to impose patterns of behaviour and thinking on others. He had tremendous respect for common sense and the integrity of the human community. That is precisely why he confronted the excessively rational and systematic philosophers of the eighteenth century. That is why he wanted to put the brakes on human knowledge and progress. Too much knowledge is a dangerous thing. We need to appreciate the role of habit and custom in human affairs.

The philosophical impact of Hume went well beyond these aims. After Hume, we become much more humble about what we can ever really know in philosophical and scientific terms. Hume’s philosophy represents a real watershed in the history of ideas.

Hume’s writings are difficult and we will put off tackling them until the next module. Before we leave the Enlightenment and move into the more recognizably modern philosophy of Hume, however, I’d like you to take a look at a little essay that is one of the most fascinating products of the Enlightenment period. Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew takes the form of a discussion/debate between the optimistic and rationalistic philosopher (Diderot) and the decidedly cynical nephew of one of France’s most important composers, Rameau. Rameau was also a high profile representative of the French Enlightenement, who composed music along orderly mathematical lines. The nephew lacks the talent of the uncle but has an excellent and very painful understanding of his own perdicament in a highly rationalized, enlightened society. He paints a very ugly picture of Enlightenment and one that clearly flummoxes Diderot.

Conclusion

The aim of the Enlightenment was to reform a society based on privilege and tradition and to make it conform to the laws of nature and reason. It had its own artists and musicians, such as Mozart and Rameau, whose optimistic and orderly harmonies still have enormous appeal for us today. It had its own cultural heroes and propagandists – the philosophes – who were only to willing to give social leaders and politicians advice on how to get rational, modern and progressive. They attacked the superstition of the peasants and the fanaticism of dogmatic religion, particularly the Roman Catholic Church. And they put in its place reason, the goddess of Reason or a rational Deity. Reason was the vehicle for creating a heaven and earth.

Alongside reason, enlightened men and women worshiped nature. Nature to them was something that conformed to rational laws. If one properly understood the laws of nature, and applied them to human society, one could reform the messy, hodge-podge, particular, intolerant, and stupid world of feudal society. Once out of the dark ages, society would slowly but irrevocably move towards greater and greater improvement, understanding, peace and pleasure.

The optimism that Voltaire personified in his description of the culture and court of the sun king – Louis XIV, and that characterized Rameau’s, represented the Enlightenment’s deepest hopes and ideals for an orderly world run by law and by reason. But Enlightened theorists were not immune to occasional reality checks. In his famous novel Candide, for example, Voltaire described a far less perfect and often violent world than typified enlightened progaganda. Some of Mozart’s later music revealed a sense of loss, doubt and return to old time religion. Rousseau’s essays warned that modern civilization had such serious drawbacks that it might not constitute a framework for an ethical community. And in Rameau’s Nephew, Denis Diderot applied his brilliant mind to the negative effects that economic and cultural improvement might have upon individuals. Some of the greatest works of the Enlightenment, therefore, revealed the tensions that could result from rapid social change.

By and large, these reservations tended to get swallowed up by the notion that progress was real and that it would continue. When continental writers grew worried, they only had to look over the channel to feel better. Voltaire described England as a society that was tolerant, progressive, open and rational. England was a society where superstition was in decline and no one had been burned as a witch for over a century. This was the society that gave us the new psychology of Locke, the scientific method of Bacon, and Newtonian physics. Above all, it was a society that was economically stable and had finally beat the struggle for mere survival.