The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments

Light sources - Paris, Washington, London: departure points for the modern world

Postmodernists dislike grand narratives; and here is a grand modernist narrative indeed, wearing its wide learning with a deceptive grace. For Gertrude Himmelfarb, a distinguished American historian of Victorian Britain, this book is an attempt to "reclaim the Enlightenment. . . from postmodernists who deny its existence and historians who belittle or disparage it". It seeks to do this by reinterpreting the Enlightenment in Britain, America and France to create a scenario for Western history.

The Enlightenment begins the book in the singular but soon divides into three national examples, linked because "the three Enlightenments ushered in modernity", a modernity of which the French Revolution was "one of the most dramatic events". Whatever the claims of the postmodernists, for Himmelfarb the achievements of the people she writes about are still current: "We are, in fact, still floundering in the verities and fallacies, the assumptions and convictions, about human nature, society, and the polity that exercised the British moral philosophers, the French philosophes, and the American Founders". To establish this scheme, the French must be disabused of the idea that they alone had an Enlightenment. The "British" had it first, handed it to colonial Americans (Henry Steele Commager's The Empire of Reason: How Europeans Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment lurks in the footnotes), but later lost it. Recent Scots claims to have had an Enlightenment while England did not are gently deflected: the Scottish Enlightenment "was not as parochially or exclusively Scottish as might be thought".

To bring the British Enlightenment "center stage" is "to redefine the very idea of Enlightenment", for in Britain, virtue (especially compassion, benevolence and sympathy) rather than reason topped society's list of ideals. This vindicates Britain's unrevolutionary track record from the charge of being "a species of counter-Enlightenment"; in turn, it allows Himmelfarb to rescue 1776 from being "a prelude to or a minor version of" 1789, and to make the American Revolution a moderate, pragmatic, limited event. Indeed, the French Revolution, like the French Enlightenment, threatens to become the odd man out: clearly on the correct side in the clash between pre-modernity and modernity, but hinting at sensationally unacceptable causes. So the American Revolution comes last, not second, in her analysis. Colonial Americans drew the right lesson from Britain; the French Revolutionaries failed to do so.

But can we characterize "Enlightenments" like this? Himmelfarb writes that "To redefine the Enlightenment in this fashion is also to redefine, in a sense, the British Enlightenment itself, expanding it to include thinkers and actors not normally identified with it". Certainly, if membership can be reset at the historian's will, the resulting group's common characteristics can be whatever the historian chooses. But the question then becomes why the historian constructs the scenario as she does.

She does so to vindicate a politics of libertarian capitalist virtue in our own age. For Himmelfarb, Das Adam Smith Problem (centring on discrepancies between Smith's two great works) is a misconception, for The Wealth of Nations rests on the same moral foundations as Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments. She also rescues Burke from Isaiah Berlin's charge of belonging to the "Counter-Enlightenment": Burke "never attacked the Enlightenment as a whole". Burke was a disciple of Smith, "a proponent of free trade and a free market economy", and, like Smith, upheld "the commonality of human nature", accessed by "sympathy". As with Smith, there was no "early liberal Burke superseded by a later conservative one". Burke's Enlightenment credentials were established by his support for the American Revolution, which, insists Himmelfarb, was "fundamentally, qualitatively different from the French". Burke's Speech on Conciliation, she claims, rightly depicted "an enlightened America". But if this is a misreading of Burke, there is a problem.

The problem leads Himmelfarb steadily to distance these Enlightenments: the British was latitudinarian and religiously plural, while the French was a second Reformation aimed against religion as such. She also separates America's: "The driving force of the British Enlightenment was not reason but the 'social virtues' or 'social affections'. In America, the driving force was political liberty, the motive for the Revolution and the basis for the republic". Why they should have diverged in the eighteenth century is never quite clear; colonial America's different attitude to "liberty" is assumed rather than explained.

The French case was unique, for there it was not benevolence but "reason" that "served almost as a mantra"; reason "was not just pitted against religion, defined in opposition to religion; it was implicitly granted the same absolute, dogmatic status as religion". Morality, argued Diderot in the Encyclopedie, was independent of religion. Among the philosophes, deism and even atheism were the norm; contempt for revealed religion led Voltaire and others into strident anti-Semitism. In France, the idea of liberty "did not elicit anything like the passion or commitment that reason did".

The preference of the philosophes for "enlightened despotism" rested on a prevalent contempt for the irrational canaille quite different from the British moral philosophers' attribution to the people of "a common humanity and a common fund of moral and social obligations". Compassion, argues Himmelfarb, did not feature in the philosophes' social vocabulary. Even in a work like Rousseau's Emile, "the common man figured not at all". Diderot's image of the people, in the Encyclopedie, was of the "ignorant and stupefied" multitude, whose voice was that of "wickedness, stupidity, inhumanity, unreason, and prejudice". Without reason, the people were incapable of enlightenment, and mired in superstition.

The philosophes were not revolutionaries, argues Himmelfarb, "Yet the ideas of the Enlightenment did have resonance in the Revolution, if not quite that which their creators might have desired". She lists anticlericalism and the abolition of church-run charities and schools. But is this enough? If the Enlightenment was as great a formative episode as its admirers think, can its consequences have been so trivial?

In the American colonies, Himmelfarb concludes, the consequences of the Enlightenment were very great indeed. But was the American case so very different from the French? Himmelfarb censures 1789: "the idea of a civil religion, with all the solemnity and strictures attached to it, was anything but innocent, for it was meant to carry out the purpose of the new regime, as Rousseau understood it, which was nothing less than the radical reshaping not only of society but of humanity". But a "civil religion" is precisely the idea that Robert Bellah has coined to explain the coercive, high-minded public purposefulness of the United States. For Crevecoeur in 1782, asking "What . . . is the American, this new man?", the American Revolution indeed anticipated Robespierre's aim of transforming human nature.

The more Himmelfarb reflects on it, the more different the three cases become. "The three Enlightenments had profoundly different social and political implications and consequences." The British Enlightenment's "sociology of virtue" (benevolence, compassion, sympathy) was linked to Britain's "non revolutionary, reformist temper". There was an "immediate and obvious" link between the American Enlightenment's "politics of liberty" and the "pragmatic, cautious temper" manifest in the Constitution. The French Enlightenment's "ideology of reason laid the groundwork" for the French Revolution. But if the outcomes were so dissimilar, was the same cause really at work in each case?

Himmelfarb's problem is that she needs to depict the American Enlightenment as essentially like the British in order to distinguish the American version from the French, which ended in the disaster of 1789, and to explain the American Revolution as a sensible, pragmatic event, conducive to "liberty", politically revolutionary while socially conservative; yet she has also to distinguish the American Enlightenment from the British in order to explain why 1776 happened at all, and happened, as she must believe, for good reasons.

So she argues thus: "In Britain, the social virtues were in the forefront of philosophical speculation and social policy, the primary condition of the public good. In America, they were in the background, the necessary but not sufficient condition. What was in the forefront was liberty". But why? And were not the English-speaking polities on both sides of the Atlantic equally preoccupied with both virtue and liberty? If in 1776 they came to implement different understandings of those elastic terms, then that is the historical problem to be explained; and it is not clear that different characteristics of a shared "Enlightenment" are sufficient to explain it. To argue that the American version was about liberty while the British was not begs the question at issue: American colonists, for decades until the 1770s, had praised the British Empire for securing their liberties. For American colonists, writes Himmelfarb, "It was only because virtue . . . was insufficient to maintain liberty that politics had to perform that function". Does this mean that eighteenth-century Britain was free because it was more virtuous?

On what, ultimately, did "virtue" depend? The various and clashing sectarian commitments of colonial Americans are homogenized in Himmelfarb's pages into "religion": "religion" in general continued to be a powerful support for republicanism". She quotes Tocqueville: "All differ in the worship one must render to the Creator, but all agree on the duties of men toward one another". If so, one might reply, the two civil wars of the 1770s and 1860s would never have happened. Himmelfarb claims that "the Founders did not look upon religion as the enemy of liberty"; what, then, of the denunciation of "popery and arbitrary power" over many decades, a critique turned against the Church of England from the 1740s and with destructive effect in the 1770s?

But hers is an intellectual, not a practical, point. For both the British moral philosophers and the American Founding Fathers, "religion was an ally, not an enemy". Again, much depends on whom we include: for Arians or Socinians from Newton and Locke to Price, Priestley and Adams, or for Deists from Matthew Tindal and John Toland to Franklin and Jefferson, the trinitarianism of the Church of England did indeed provide common cause for those whose French soulmates' slogan was ecrasez l'infame. And to say that the American Revolution was caused by a search for "liberty", while not untrue, is hardly sufficient to grasp the essence of that episode. Liberty to do what?

Gertrude Himmelfarb's scenario, long meditated, indeed a masterly reinterpretation of modernist scholarship on three countries, is meant to depict a pattern of historical evolution that leads us to the point at which we now stand: modernity. The Federalist, like the Constitution of 1787, was "a consciously modern document". This scenario casts the USA, not France or Britain, as, in a general sense, The Answer (although France and Britain might have roles as allies, in so far as they agree). Today, the pressures to accept this scenario as a self- evident truth are immense.

Yet here is another scenario, not indebted to the postmodernists that she repudiates. In this scenario, the "Enlightenment" was not an eighteenth-century term in any European society (even apparent synonyms like "die Aufklarung" or "le siecle des lumieres" were not the same as our notion). The spread of light as a metaphor for truth was long familiar from Scripture, and a British use of the adjective, as in "this enlightened age", did not generate a reified "Enlightenment". That word was a term of late nineteenth-century historical art, designed to be projected back onto the eighteenth century to provide retrospective validation for certain nineteenth-(and, later, twentieth-) century commitments. Like other such anachronistic terms, it obscures much and reveals nothing. Since it is anachronistic, one cannot (except arbitrarily) assign some eighteenth-century people to the Enlightenment while consigning others to outer darkness.

"The Enlightenment", in this alternative scenario, was not among the causes of the American Revolution, which drew on genuine revolutionary antecedents within the British Isles but went far beyond them in the profundity of its social upheaval; the scholarship of the past thirty years has appropriately moved the American Revolution much closer to the French in the virulence of its revolutionary character. Yet although contemporaries like Richard Price certainly claimed to discern some sacred flame leaping the Atlantic to ignite France, others (notably Thomas Paine) remarkably failed to see 1789 coming, so that the explanation of the French Revolution is still as difficult a task as the explanation of the American: R. R. Palmer's conceptualization of an "Age of the Democratic Revolution" as an attempted integration of them now seems desperately typical of the 1950s.

As for modernity, it too was a project of the late nineteenth century, urged for many powerful reasons but not because its claims were in any simple sense true. There was indeed a domino effect in the long eighteenth century, but it was not produced by one Enlightenment virtuously triggering another; it was a domino effect of war and revolution that severely damaged most of the ideals that "Enlightenment" was later devised to encapsulate. Paine's claim in 1776 that "We have it in our power to begin the world over again" was political rhetoric: no society can do that. The USA was never exceptional; it was always a state like any other state, as world opinion increasingly appreciates.

In an age in which the slogan ecrasez l'infame has in effect been turned against the United States itself, we need a better understanding of its nature than its public myth of origins allows. Is it still sufficient to present that republic as the apotheosis of enlightenment and modernity? "In America today", writes Himmelfarb, "the Enlightenment is alive and well . . . . There is nothing like it in France or Britain . . . . America was exceptional at the time of its founding, and continues to be so today." Britain "discarded" the Enlightenment of Adam Smith and David Hume when it adopted the economics of Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo; the United States preserves the best of that earlier British Enlightenment, making the USA notably "individualistic, religious and moralistic". Margaret Thatcher, writes Himmelfarb, should have appealed beyond "Victorian values" to the "social virtues" of Hume and Smith.

Perhaps; but, in Himmelfarb's scenario, the USA seems exceptional not in the sense of being exemplary for kindred societies but in the sense of being unique, inapplicably different from neighbouring nations. Hostile world opinion may find in this eloquent, heartfelt book a clarification of just what it is in the United States of which it so deeply disapproves; but in the United States itself, this volume, which apparently offers a comparative analysis of the USA, France and Britain as a route to self-knowledge, will probably be read as a reassuring paean of praise for the homeland. The United States, Himmelfarb writes, has recently "superimposed on the politics of liberty something very like a sociology of virtue. After decades of disuse, virtue is once again a respectable part of the political and social vocabulary". We seem destined to live in interesting times.

Jonathan Clark is Hall Distinguished Professor of British History at the University of Kansas. His books include Our Shadowed Present: Modernism, Postmodernism and History, published last year.

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