Western Civilization Topic Five


The Enlightenment

The flowering and popularization of European intellectual life in the eighteenth century - what we call the Enlightenment - had as its seed the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As the impact of Newtonian discoveries spread throughout Europe, many members of the educated elite began to show great interest in the laws of science. Confidence shifted further from faith and tradition as intellectuals highlighted the powers of reason and free inquiry. People asked themselves: if Newton was able to unlock the natural laws of the universe, can we not discover the natural laws of politics, economics, and society?

Three Themes of the Enlightenment

The Fundamental Belief in Natural Law
Enlightenment thinkers based their most fundamental beliefs on the presupposition that the universe was set up around natural laws, which governed every action and reaction. They sought to extend natural laws to the human world of affairs: politics, economics, and social theory. The discovery of the natural laws that controlled these systems would enable men and women to live better lives they believed.

The Stress of Reason and Logic
Enlightenment thinkers believed that through human reason the natural laws of society could be discovered. Scientific inquiry through empirical experimentation and logical extrapolation could unlock the doors to the laws of our social framework.

The Belief in the Perfectibility of Humankind
If the natural laws of human society could be discovered, Enlightenment thinkers reasoned that social progress would be limitless. The perfectibility of the individual human and of human society was possible.


Enlightenment Leaders and
the Rejection of Religion
The Enlightenment was led by a group of individuals collectively known as the philisophes. These intellectuals were not usually systematic philosophers, but were instead social theorists who tried to develop scientific guidelines for politics and the other social sciences. Most of them rejected arguments made on faith and tradition, and looked to reason as the ultimate tool for understanding our universe. They argued that freedom of thought and education were the key factors in the spread of human progress and liberation.

The philisophes were different from the leaders of the scientific revolution in their approach to religion. Most of the sixteenth and seventeenth century leaders of the Scientific Revolution believed that the Christian God controlled the universe. Humans might be able to unlock some of the mysteries of the universe, but God was never comprehensible - He was above and beyond the powers of the mind. Enlightenment thinkers, on the other hand, believed that human beings were the highest power in the universe. Faith in rationality replaced faith in God. The philisophes believed that reason was infallible, and that everything in the universe could be explained through the laws of science.

To most of the Enlightenment thinkers, then, religion was the enemy of progress. It represented oppression because it held humans to irrational, superstitious, unexamined beliefs simply because they were declared to be the orders of God. They argued that men and women should release themselves from the shackles of Christian "original sin," which had tied medieval men and women to their focus on the otherworldly. Humans were fundamentally good, the philosophes argued. An outside force, like religion, was not needed for humans to achieve utopian civilization.

Based on these premises, many of the philosophes rejected traditional standards of belief. They questioned "absolute" authorities like the church and the crown, and tried to replace them with more contingent, but reasonable, leadership.

Enlightened Thinkers

Although their ideas were radical, the philosophes were not revolutionaries. Men like Voltaire and Montesquieu wanted substantial social change, but they did not call for the leveling of society or the armed overthrow of political regimes. Instead, they hoped to promote the freedom of thought and expression. They wanted people to question the legitimacy of powerful people and institutions, and come up with their own understanding of the world.


John Locke (1632-1704)

My presentation of Locke is drawn from Wallace I. Matson, A New History of Philosophy, Volume II, Modern.

John Locke was born near Bristol in England in 1632. He attended Oxford University, and received a degree in medicine. After his training, he became the personal physician and confidant to the Earl of Shaftesbury, whom introduced him to the cultural elite of European society.

However, there was great conflict in England in the 1680s. Lord Shaftesbury was the most outspoken advocate of the Exclusion Bill to keep James II from the throne in England (because James was a Catholic). After the Lords defeated the Exclusion Bill in 1683 - in response to Charles II strenuous opposition - Shaftesbury was forced to flee to Holland where he died.
Locke also went to Holland in 1683. He wrote most of his important works - the Letter Concerning Toleration, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and the Two Treatises on Civil Government - while he was in there. In 1689, when William and Mary became the new joint sovereigns of England - overthrowing James II - Locke returned to England on the same ship as Mary. He was favored by the new monarchs, and from 1691 to his death in 1704, he lived as a paying guest at the country estate of his friend Sir Francis Masham.

We are going to examine in brief his two most important works: the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and the Two Treatises on Civil Government, which were both completed in 1690.

Essay Concerning Human Understanding
While Descartes had set about establishing a complete system of understanding based on "clear and distinct" ideas arrived at through introspection and deduction, John Locke took a wholly different course. He began what has come to be known as the empirical school of philosophy - or simply empiricism.

Locke argued that at birth the human mind was a tabula rosa - a blank slate - that was unfettered by preconceived notions. All human knowledge, he argued, was the result of experience. The range of human knowledge was thus limited by Locke to he areas of human sensation. But, this was a broad and ever-growing field. From Locke's position, then, we can also see that the technological innovation, education, and moral guidance were absolutely vital for human progress.


Two Treatises on Civil Government
Locke won his passage from Holland back to England because of his work in the Two Treatises on Government, which was a justification of the Glorious Revolution. People in England did not deny that James II had a legitimate claim to the hereditary throne of England, but they did believe that his Catholicism was intolerable. (Matson, 321).

Locke's work justified the overthrow of James II. In the Second Treatise - entitled An Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government - he put forth his reply to Hobbes's Leviathan, which gave absolute power to the King.

In response to Hobbes's contention that the sovereignty of the ruler was absolute, Locke wrote:

Although Locke disagreed with Hobbes's formulation of government, he also went back to the "state of nature" to begin his project. Locke believed that the state of nature had been a real place, but his picture of humankind was more optimistic than Hobbes - war was not the natural state of the equal and reasonable men of nature. Instead, Locke argues that humans, realizing their equality, recognize the rights of others to be secure in life, liberty, and possessions. Only evil men will invade the rights of others.

Unlike Hobbes, Locke argues that men in the state of nature will work to make their own property. For an individual to make the fruit of the earth his own property requires him to labor. When he picks fruit, or cuts down a tree and builds a house, it becomes his property. If an individual picks more than he and his family can use, then he can trade it for other goods. It is not right to hoard perishable items (like foodstuffs) until they rot, however, and so non-perishable items, like stones and bright metals become money in the state of nature. Money works against natural equality (whoever has more in this system can acquire more goods), but it also gives men something to work for.

There are problems - or in Locke's words, "inconveniences" - in the state of nature though. For instance, the punishment of criminals cannot be certain. People therefore join together to form civil society so that the preservation of their own life, liberty, and property will be secure. Locke's version of the social contract between members of the society holds that individuals do not give up their natural rights, but only enter into agreement to secure those rights that already existed. The power of the government is therefore derived from the consent of the governed, who retain their absolute and natural rights to life, liberty, and property. If the government acts arbitrarily or unjustly (that is contrary to Natural Law), then the people may rebel against that government and set up a new one.

"If a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going, 'tis not to be wondered that they should then rouse themselves, and endeavor to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected, and without which, ancient names and specious forms are so far from being better, that they are much worse than the state of Nature or pure anarchy. . . ."(Quoted in Matson, 323).

Voltaire (1694-1778)

Voltaire was born Francois Marie Arouet in Paris. His style, wit, intelligence and keen sense of justice made him the leader of the French Enlightenment. Following his Jesuit education, which ended when he left school at 16, Voltaire spent most of his life fighting the Catholic Church and other forms of intellectual absolutism. He wanted to "crush infamy" whenever he found it. Bigotry, fanaticicm, and repression were his declared enemies, while he demanded the freedom of speech and thought.
Although Voltaire believed that a God had created the universe, he did not believe God was directly running it. Voltaire was a deist. He argued that God was like a clock-maker who had made a clock, and wound it up, but then let it run of its own power. God's creation, like the clock-maker's clock, ran according to specific laws.
From these presuppositions, certain inferences can be made. Voltaire did not believe God was active in human lives. Prayer was useless, and the fundamental doctrines of the Christian church (like the divinity of Jesus Christ) were denied. In fact, Voltaire argued that all beliefs that did not seem "reasonable" should be rejected if they lacked proof. He wanted to take nothing on faith.
Parisian society sought Voltaire's company for his cleverness, humor and scathing critique of popularly held beliefs. However, in 1717, he was arrested for writing a series of satirical verses ridiculing the French government, and was imprisoned in the Bastille for eleven months.
In 1726, after spending a few years more in the Parisian salons, Voltaire was forced to flee France for insulting a powerful young nobleman. He went to England where he lived until 1729. While there, he studied the works of John Locke and Newton, and he wrote one of the first biographies of Newton. Upon his return to France, he wrote his Letters on the English (1732), which was a slightly veiled criticism of French absolutism based upon the comparative greatness of English freedoms. After the French government burned the book, Voltaire left the country again. He did not return until 1759, when he purchased an estate called Ferney near the French-Swiss border, where he lived until just before his death.
It was also in 1759 that Voltaire published his most famous work, Candide. In this story of misfortune and disaster, Candide is driven by his overly optimistic tutor, Dr. Pangloss, to travel all over the world looking for satisfaction. After storms, earthquakes, and wars drive him to settle down at a modest farm, Candide responds to Pangloss's repetitive statement that "this is the best of all possible worlds," by saying that as that might be "we must cultivate our garden." Voltaire meant that this life is not perfect, and instead of relying on some vapid theory of life, people should get down to serious and productive work.
In 1777, Voltaire returned to a hero's welcome in Paris at the age 83. The excitement of the move proved too much for him, however, and he died in Paris.

Montesquieu (1689-1755)

Charles Louis de Secondat, the Baron de Montesquieu was born into the French nobility. He inherited his father's seat in the Parliament of Bordeaux, and his wealth enabled him to devote most of his life to traveling and writing.

Montesquieu is known primarily as a political philosopher. His main work, The Spirit of Laws was published in 1748.

The Spirit of Laws is important for a number of reasons. First, Montesquieu realized that different environments and values caused different political institutions and formulations to become popular. This being said, Montesquieu did not believe that every political system was as good as another.

He was an idealist, and his political ideal was the English Constitutional Monarchy. He said that in England the separation of powers between the one, the few, and the many had provided political stability and fostered freedom.

Diderot (1713-1784)

Denis Diderot was the most representative philosophe of the Enlightenment. He wrote novels, plays, histories, and poems, but his most outstanding achievement was serving as the editor of The Encyclopedia, which was the culminating work of the Enlightenment. The Encyclopedia was published in 35 volumes between 1751-1780. It contained articles on everything from birds and plants to politics and technology.

The aim of Diderot and the many contributors to The Encyclopedia was to put forth the most up-to-date and useful information on the topics considered. The volumes were meant to push forward social reform by overcoming the limitations of superstition and repression. The people behind the work believed that reason and understanding would enable men and women to a live a better lives.

Although the two great absolutists of the day - the Catholic Church and French government - sought to censor the book, or halt its publication altogether, Diderot and the other contributors pushed forward and published the great work after much hardship. It stands today as the greatest example of Enlightenment thinking.



Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
Information on Rousseau is taken directly from Wallace I. Matson's A New History of Philosophy, Volume II, Modern., 376-79 and Lerner, Meacham, Burns, Western Civilizations, Volume II, Thirteenth Edition, 648.

Rousseau belongs only chronologically to the Enlightenment. Most of the other philosophes considered him a boor and near madman because of his mystical reverence for "nature" as opposed to reason.

After serving in a series of odd jobs - from secretarial assistant to music copier - Rousseau heard one day that a learned society was offering a prize for the best essay on the question "Has the progress of the arts and sciences had a purifying effect on morals?" He decided to enter the contest with a defense of the affirmative; but a friend persuaded him that the more paradoxical and sensational negative would stand a better chance of winning. This strategy was correct. Not only did Rousseau's essay win the prize, it made him famous overnight.

The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences is anti-intellectual in form and in content. It contains no argument, or even consecutive presentation of ideas, but only magnificently rhetorical reiteration of contrasts between the rough, unlettered, unadorned, vigorous, and virtuous Spartans, early Romans and Iranians, and North American Indians - and on the other hand the luxurious, learned, vicious, and flabby populaces of late Rome, Byzantium, and eighteenth-century France. No attempt is made to show that the arts and sciences are responsible for enervation and corruption, or even that individual learned men are more wicked than individual ignoramuses; it is enough for Rousseau that learning and vice coexist. He criticizes the origins of the sciences too.

Astronomy was born of superstition, eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride.

And they are useless.

Tell me, then, illustrious philosophers, of whom we learn the ratios in which attraction acts in vacuo; and in the revolution of the planets, the relations of spaces traversed in equal times; by whom we are taught what curves have conjugate points, points of inflexion, and cusps; how the soul and body correspond, like two clocks, without actual communication; what planets may be inhabited; and what insects reproduce in an extraordinary manner. Answer me, I say, you from whom we receive all this sublime information, whether we should have been less numerous, worse governed, less formidable, less flourishing, or more perverse, supposing you had taught us none of all these fine things.


Artificiality and debauchery had been raised to such a pitch in the eighteenth century that there was bound to be a revulsion in favor of plainness, sincerity, and natural decorum. Rousseau's discourse appeared at just the right time to articulate this feeling. Five years later, in 1755, he published a Discourse on the Origin of Inequality in which he advocated a return, not to utter savagery, but to the presumed transitional stage between the purely natural man, who did not even have language, and the civilized man. There were some who saw through Rousseau's sentimentality and scorned it, notably Voltaire, who when Rousseau sent him a copy of his book replied:

I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours.

But as appeals to stop thinking and let feeling take over are perennially popular, Rousseau and his noble savage became a major fad.

In 1762, Rousseau's principal work on education, Emile, was published. The author advocated a natural and permissive approach to education. Children should not be forced by fear to memorize information that does not interest them; they are naturally curious and if let alone will at the proper time beg to be taught.

The other book of 1762, The Social Contract, is one of the most influential books ever written. In it, Rousseau sought to solve the dilemma of his electrifying opening sentence: "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." He was concerned with the legitimacy of governments. How and why do governments have the power to rule?

Rousseau argues that in the state of nature men had been equal (Rousseau is notorious because he believed men were superior to women, and that women should stay home to serve their husbands). However, it was clear to him that in his age men were not free. States had created laws, police forces, and slavery codes to carry out various forms of repression.

To fix the problem of governmental tyranny, Rousseau argues that men should form societies based on a social contract in which government is carried out by the "general will."

In this type of society, sovereignty would be held by the people, who would participate in direct democracy, not representative rule. Rousseau considered the people in this type of society to be one body with one interest.

"The people would act together as legislators, executors, and judges, and in doing so would become transformed into more than the sum of their parts. With the "general will" thus creating a "moral and collective person," individuals would surrender all their rights to the collectivity, yet they would be perfectly free since the general will inevitably would be just and would express their own will"(Lerner, Meacham, Burns, Western Civilizations, Volume II, Thirteenth Edition, 648).

By the general will, then, Rousseau was trying to reconcile the conflict between government and individual liberty. True liberty consisted in obeying the laws established by the general will.

It is not so grotesque, then, for Rousseau to claim that the general will is always right, that laws expressing it cannot be unjust, and that if I vote against it I am making a mistake about my own interest. Nor is it intolerable paradox when we are told that when the citizen who refuses to obey the general will is compelled to do so, he is only being "forced to be free." However, though the theory is perhaps innocent enough, it is extraordinarily vulnerable to perversions. For whether intentionally or not it sets up the State as an entity with a will of its own, over and above the citizens who compose it. From the claim that the State's will is always right, it follows that opposition to it is always wrong, either through ignorance or through malice. Hence there is no need to safeguard the rights of dissenters; they need rather to be "forced to be free." And since nothing so straightforward as a vote can determine what the general will is, the way is open for all sorts of parties and strong men and women to proclaim themselves its incarnation. In Rousseau's theory sovereignty, resting in the whole people, is inalienable; government officials, even kings and dictators, only have a commission from it, revocable at any time. Again, in practice this has proved difficult.

The government of Louis XV banned Rousseau's books of 1762 and issued a warrant for his arrest. He fled to his native Geneva, which however also outlawed him. He found, as everyone did in those days, refuge for a while in a territory under the control of Frederick the Great. Hume had offered him his protection, and in 1766 Rousseau accepted the invitation. In England Hume was warmly hospitable, the literary world honored Rousseau, and he even received a pension from George III's government! But his fears of persecution had become pathological. At length he accused Hume of plotting against him, and left England in 1770 after a bitter and unseemly quarrel which became public. He wandered around France-the government appeared no longer interested in prosecuting him - and died in 1778, in poverty and obscurity. In the same year Voltaire died, in the midst of the triumphs of his return to Paris. The Revolution was not far off.

Rousseau has been viewed differently throughout history. He had an impact on the most radical of French Revolutionaries, he was an advocate of pure democracy. He emphasized equality, but many see him as the father of totalitarianism because he provided no protection for the individual against the general will.


Adam Smith (1723-90)

Adam Smith was a Scottish economist whose work in The Wealth of Nations (1776) is recognized as the leading expression of "laissez-faire" capitalism. Smith argued against "mercantilism" - a word he coined to describe government intervention in economics, like that happening in all the eighteenth century colonial systems. He said that widespread prosperity would be most likely if the government stayed out of economics and allowed people to pursue their own economic interest. He believed that even as individuals went after their own interests, they could live harmoniously if the "invisible hand" of competitive, free market forces (supply and demand) were allowed to balance the economic system out.