Three Paths to Modernity - The British, American, and French Enlightenments

Three Paths to Modernity The British, American, and French Enlightenments By Gertrude Himmelfarb Posted: Tuesday, May 11, 2004

The Enlightenment has come upon bad times. In some circles, it is denigrated as the “Enlightenment Project”--a peculiar illusion, or delusion, of modernity, a time when such terms as “reason,” “nature,” “rights,” “truth,” “morality,” were used without benefit of quotation marks, and without the sense of irony befitting those “privileged” concepts. The Enlightenment project, one writer says, supposes, “a universal emancipation and a universal civilization,” which is nothing more than an embodiment of “Western cultural imperialism.” Other historians take exception not to the particular ideas themselves but rather to a conception of the Enlightenment that is unduly focused upon ideas. For them the Enlightenment is a social and cultural movement more than an intellectual or philosophical one.

If these are revisionist views of the Enlightenment, mine is a counter-revisionist view. It is unapologetic, and un-ironic, in dealing with those ideas about reason and religion, liberty and virtue, which shaped the distinctive Enlightenments of France, Britain, and America--ideas that spilled over from philosophers and men of letters to politicians and men of affairs, penetrating into what Tocqueville called the “habits of the mind” and “habits of the heart” of the people. At a critical moment in history, these three Enlightenments represented alternative approaches to modernity, alternative habits of mind and heart, of consciousness and sensibility.

The focus of my book is on the British Enlightenment, with the American and French Enlightenments serving as foils for the British. I have encapsulated the three Enlightenments in phrases borrowed from others and adapted for my purposes. The British Enlightenment represents “the sociology of virtue,” the French “the ideology of reason,” the American “the politics of liberty.” The British moral philosophers were sociologists as much as philosophers; they looked to the social virtues (or “social affections,” as they said) as the basis of a healthy and humane society. The Americans had a political mission: to create a new “science of politics” that would establish the new republic upon a sound foundation of liberty. The French had a more exalted purpose: to make reason the governing principle not only of mind but of society and the polity as well--to “rationalize,” as it were, the world. This is not to deny the role of virtue, reason, and liberty in all the Enlightenments--only to suggest a very different set of priorities in each of them.

Within each of these Enlightenments there were important differences. Montesquieu, in a sense, belonged more to the British than to the French Enlightenment (and so was regarded by the other French philosophers). Yet the national distinctions do, by and large, hold. And their legacy may be seen in the distinctive national cultures today.

The Enlightenment has always been identified with the French. I want to restore it, in good part, to its progenitor, the British. The French themselves credited the English trinity, Bacon, Locke, and Newton, with the ideas that inspired their own Enlightenment. I go beyond that in directing attention not to these 17th century forerunners of the Enlightenment, but to the 18th century itself, thus challenging the French on their terrain, the time and space that they have taken for their own.

To bring the British Enlightenment on to the stage of history, indeed, the center stage, is to redefine the very idea of Enlightenment. In the usual litany of traits associated with the Enlightenment--reason, rights, nature, liberty, etc.--reason invariably heads the list. For the British, however, it was virtue, not reason, that took precedence. And not personal virtue but the “social virtues”– compassion, benevolence, sympathy--which bound people to each other, naturally, instinctively, habitually. The British did not deny reason; they were by no means irrationalists. But they gave reason a secondary, an instrumental or functional role, rather than the primary, determinant one that the French philosophers gave it. To restore the British to prominence, therefore, is to direct attention to a subject not usually associated with the Enlightenment--that is, the social ethic explicit or implicit in each of these Enlightenments.

The British did not have “philosophes” (the generic word for philosopher, but applied to the Enlightenment philosophers particularly); they had “moral philosophers,” a very different breed. This is not a term bestowed upon them retroactively, by historians. It was their official title: Adam Smith was the Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, as Francis Hutcheson had been before him and Thomas Reid was to be after him; and Dugald Stewart succeeded Adam Ferguson in the chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.

The founder of this school, to be sure, did not have that formal title, indeed, was not a professor at all--nor, for that matter, was he Scottish. It was the third Earl of Shaftesbury who first formulated the principle that was at the heart of this philosophy: the idea of the “moral sense,” the “sense of right and wrong” that was “implanted in our nature.” This moral sense, he insisted--not reason or religion, not sensation or self-interest –was the source of virtue. And virtue itself was not a personal or private matter, but rather a “social affection,” an affection for “society and the public” (again, Shaftesbury’s terms), which was as natural as “self-affection.” The essay in which Shaftesbury developed this theme, “An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit,” was first published in 1699 and reprinted in 1711 in his three-volume collection of essays, which went through a dozen editions in the course of the century, rivaling Locke’s Second Treatise on Government as the most frequently reprinted work of the time.

It was, in fact, a distinctly non-Lockean (or anti-Lockean) message that Shaftesbury put forward. Where Locke made a large point (not in the Second Treatise but in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding published the same year) of denying any innate principle, moral or metaphysical, Shaftesbury, writing only nine years later, insisted upon just that. A later generation of philosophers qualified the “moral sense” in one respect or another. If it was not, for some of them, literally innate in the human mind, it was so entrenched in the human sensibility, in the form of “sentiment,” “sympathy,” “compassion,” “benevolence,” or “fellow-feeling” (these are their terms) as to have the same compelling force as innate ideas. Even David Hume, who had a notably unsentimental view of human nature, spoke of a “moral sense,” “moral taste,” or “sympathy” as the source of “the public good.” When he was criticized for not recognizing benevolence as an innate quality of human nature, he responded that “disinterested benevolence,” benevolence divorced from both interest and reason, was a “tendency” in human beings, which always “engage[s] us on the side of the social virtues.” “There is some benevolence,” he wrote, “however small, infused into our bosom; some spark of friendship for human kind; some particle of the dove kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and serpent.”

The most nuanced statement of this creed, and the most influential, was Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, which was as well known, at home and abroad, as the Wealth of Nations. Published in 1759, it went through four editions before the Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776, another edition a few years later, and was revised and expanded by Smith in the last year of his life. The opening sentences of the book set its tone and theme: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others....” And, later in the book, more eloquently: “Man naturally desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely.… He naturally dreads not only to be hated but to be hateful…. He desires not only praise but praiseworthiness…. He dreads not only blame but blame-worthiness.”

As if to anticipate a still common misinterpretation of his views, Smith denied that sympathy was rooted in self-love. It was not “a selfish principle,” he said, for it comes not by imagining oneself in another’s piteous condition, but imagining the other in it. Thus a man might sympathize with a woman in childbirth, although he could not conceive himself suffering her pains in “his own proper person and character.” Moreover, sympathy cannot be sufficiently accounted for by reason. Reason was, to be sure, the source of the general rules of morality, but it was “altogether absurd and unintelligible to suppose that the first perceptions of right and wrong can be derived from reason.” Virtue “necessarily pleases for its own sake,” and vice “as certainly displeases,” not because of reason and reflection but because of “immediate sense and feeling.”

“Immediate sense and feeling”--not reason, and, by the same token, not religion. Religion, like reason, reinforced the moral sentiments but was not the essential source of them. All of the moral philosophers (with the possible exception of Bishop Butler) agreed with this. They also agreed that while religion was not the source of the moral sense, neither was it its enemy. Shaftesbury was more irreverent than most when he called for a “good humored religion.” His witticism has often been quoted (generally misattributed to other men). “All wise men,” he is reputed to have said, “are of the same religion.” Asked what that religion was, he replied, “Wise men never tell.” Even Hume, the most skeptical of the philosophers, had a good word to say about religious “enthusiasm,” as distinct from “superstition.” He supported the church establishment, in part as a corrective to zealotry, but also because the belief in God and immortality had a salutary effect on people’s lives. Those who denied this, he said, might be “good reasoners, but I cannot allow them to be good citizens and politicians.”

Smith too, who was a deist at best (or, some suspected, a skeptic), had a benign view of religion, regarding it as the ally of the morality inherent in man. “Religion, even in its rudest form,” he wrote, “gave a sanction to the rules of morality, long before the age of artificial reasoning and philosophy. That the terrors of religion should thus enforce the natural sense of duty was of too much importance to the happiness of mankind for nature to leave it dependent upon the slowness and uncertainty of philosophical research.”

Even Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was vilified for its scathing account of early Christianity, had a more complicated, and favorable, view of religion than one might think. Recalling his visit to Paris in 1763, he said that he had been disturbed by “the intolerant zeal” of the philosophes, who “laughed at the skepticism of Hume, preached the tenets of atheism with the bigotry of dogmatists, and damned all believers with ridicule and contempt.” Like Hume, Gibbon distrusted the zealotry of atheists more than that of believers or clerics.

It is often said--and it is quite true--that it was easy for enlightened Englishmen to be tolerant of religion, even of an established church, because the Anglican Church itself was so latitudinarian and so tolerant of dissent. But there was more to the issue than this. The British moral philosophers were tolerant, even respectful of religion, because they were respectful of the common man, who was more likely than not to be religious. And they were respectful of the common man because they attributed to all men the same natural quality, the “moral sense” and “common sense” that defined them as human beings, as moral creatures within the same moral community. This made for a social ethic that was populist and, in a profound sense, egalitarian, for the moral sense and common sense were the common denominators of rich and poor alike, the believer and non-believer, the educated and uneducated, the enlightened and unenlightened.

This social ethic was encapsulated in what I take to be one of the most remarkable passages in the Wealth of Nations. It follows the much quoted sentence about the “propensity” in human nature to “truck, barter, and exchange”--a propensity that was “common to all men.” Smith then went on to reflect upon the implications of that commonality of human nature. The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of ... The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education…. By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound, or a greyhound from a spaniel, or this last from a shepherd’s dog.

A philosopher not so very different from a street porter!--this from one of Britain’s most eminent philosophers. Another of Britain’s eminent philosophers (and Smith’s best friend) made much the same observation on another occasion: “How nearly equal,” Hume observed, “all men are in their bodily force, and even in their mental power and faculties, till cultivated by education.”

One cannot imagine France’s eminent philosophers--Voltaire, Diderot, or even Rousseau--likening themselves to a street porter, or declaring their natural mental powers and faculties “nearly equal” to that of all other men. Rousseau did attribute equality to man in the state of nature, but not in society, which inevitably corrupted equality. When another philosophe, Helvétius, suggested to Diderot that circumstance, education, and interest accounted for differences in “l’esprit” (in mind), Diderot protested. “He has not seen the insurmountable barrier that separates a man destined by nature for a given function, from a man who only brings to that function industry, interest and attention."

This view of human nature derived from the animating principle of the French Enlightenment and was reflected in the Encyclopédie, which was the summa philosophica of the Enlightenment,. “Reason is to the philosophe,” the Encyclopédie declared, “what Grace is to the Christian. Grace moves the Christian to act, reason moves the philosopher.” The essence of the French Enlightenment--literally, its raison d’être--was reason. In a sense, the French Enlightenment was a belated Reformation, a Reformation fought in the cause not of a higher or purer religion but of a still higher and purer authority, reason. It was reason, as the philosophers understood it, that illegitimized not only the Catholic Church but any form of established or institutional religion, and beyond that any faith dependent on dogmas that violated the canons of reason. The philosophes, to be sure, were reacting to a church that they saw as repressive and regressive--and, worse, that lent its authority to an equally repressive and regressive state. But this does not entirely account for the “studious ferocity,” as Tocqueville put it, of their attack on religion: Voltaire’s famous declaration of war, “Ecrasez l’infâme,” or Diderot’s proposal to “strangle the last king with the entrails of the last priest.”

The animus against religion is a familiar theme in the French Enlightenment. What is somewhat less familiar--but emerges sharply by contrast to the British Enlightenment--is the social ethic implicit in this idea of reason. Reason itself is an inherently subversive idea. It looks to an ideal future and is contemptuous of the deficiencies, the irrationalities, of the present, to say nothing of the past. It is also contemptuous of those people who seem to be deficient in reason, who are so unenlightened as to be still in thrall to religion.

“Every sensible man, every honorable man,” Voltaire wrote, “must hold the Christian sect in horror.” The common people did not share that horror, and thus were neither sensible nor honorable. Diderot, the guiding light of the Encyclopédie, in the article celebrating the new “philosophical age,” was candid in excluding the common man from this enterprise: “The great mass of men,” he wrote, “are not so made that they can either promote or understand this forward march of the human spirit.” In another article, he was much harsher: “Distrust the judgment of the multitude in matters of reasoning and philosophy; its voice is that of wickedness, stupidity, inhumanity, unreason, and prejudice…. The multitude is ignorant and stupefied…. Distrust it in matters of morality; it is not capable of strong and generous actions…; heroism is practically folly in its eyes.” Again, writing to Voltaire: The poor are “too idiotic--bestial--too miserable and too busy [to enlighten themselves].” Voltaire responded in kind, with a typically Voltairean proviso. Religion, he replied, “must be destroyed among respectable people and left to the canaille [the rabble] ..., for whom it was made.” This was the point of his famous witticism: “I want my lawyer, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God, because it means that I shall be cheated and robbed and cuckolded less often…. If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”

It is extraordinary that the philosophes, making so much of reason as the essence of enlightenment, did not look to education to instruct and enlighten the masses. Again, this is especially striking in contrast to the British, who were so enterprising in establishing all kinds of schools--pauper schools, charity schools, and Sunday schools. Adam Smith went so far as to propose a state-administered, state-supported system of education for those “bred to the lowest occupation.” The French philosophers, on the other hand, were notably uninterested in, even hostile to, popular education. Voltaire rebuked the author of a book recommending a national system of education. The people, he told him, did not have the capacity to learn: “They will die of hunger before they become philosophers. It seems to me essential that they be ignorant beggars.” To d’Alembert, another editor of the Encyclopédie, Voltaire wrote, “We have never pretended to enlighten shoemakers and servants; that is the job of the apostles.” If some of the poor under the Old Regime did acquire some literacy, a recent French historian concludes, it was not because of the philosophes but in spite of them. “Most Enlightenment thinkers,” he writes, “opposed teaching peasants how to read and write, while the Church and especially the lower clergy favored it.”

Even Rousseau, who might be thought to be more sympathetic to the common man, and whose Emile was, in effect, a tract on education (the education of Emile, a young man of “noble birth”), made it clear that he was not recommending any kind of education for the masses. “The poor man does not need to be educated. His station gives him a compulsory education. He could have no other.” The same message appears in his novel Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloise: “Those who are destined to live in country simplicity have no need to develop their faculties in order to be happy…. Do not at all instruct the villager’s child, for it is not fitting that he be instructed; do not instruct the city dweller’s child, for you do not know yet what instruction is fitting for him.” In the Encyclopédie, Rousseau did speak of the need for a “public education,” in order to imbue children with “the laws of the state and the maxims of the general will.”

The “general will”--it was by this means that the common good was to be realized. The concept is always identified with Rousseau, but it was not unique to him. He himself attributed it to Diderot, who had introduced it, under just that name, in an article in the Encyclopédie seven years before the publication of Rousseau’s Social Contract.

Diderot’s invocation of the general will is especially interesting because he associated it, as Rousseau did not, with the idea of reason. “We must reason about all things,” Diderot wrote, “because man is not just an animal but an animal who reasons.” Whoever refuses to reason or to accept the results of reason renounces the very nature of man; he is “either insane or wicked and morally evil” and “should be treated by the rest of his species as a wild beast.” It is not, however, the individual who has “the right to decide about the nature of right and wrong.” Only “the human race” has that right because only it expresses the “general will.”

Individual wills are suspect; they can be good or evil. But the general will is always good. It is never wrong, it never will be wrong…. It is to the general will that the individual must address himself to know how far he ought to be a man, a citizen, a subject, a father, a child, and when it is suitable to live or to die. It is for the general will to determine the limits of all duties…. The man who listens only to his individual will is the enemy of the human race...

The idea of the general will was, in a sense, an analogue of the idea of the enlightened despot. The predilection of some of the leading philosophes for enlightened despotism is sometimes regarded as a curiosity or anomaly--perhaps the result of personal vanity, of being flattered, feted, even financially supported by a monarch. In fact, it was a serious philosophical idea. Enlightened despotism represented the realization--the enthronement, as it were--of reason in the person of an absolute monarch.

Voltaire was never disabused of the idea of enlightened despotism. Even after Frederick the Great had had him removed from his court (among other reasons, for illegally speculating in government bonds), Voltaire continued to defend not only Frederick but also Catherine, the czarina of Russia. Diderot, a friend and admirer of Catherine, later had second thoughts about enlightened despotism, not out of any principled objection to it, but only because enlightened despots were, unfortunately, so rare. So too, another prominent philosopher, the Baron d’Holbach, who had dedicated one of his books to Louis XIV and praised his “absolute power,” later reconsidered. “Despotism would be the best of governments,” he wrote, “if one could be promised that it would always be exercised by a Titus, a Trajan, or an Antoninus; but it usually falls into hands incapable of using it wisely.” It was yet another philosopher, Mercier de la Rivière, who coined the famous epigram that is the rationale of enlightened despotism:

“Euclid is the true type of despot. The geometrical axioms which he has transmitted to us are genuine despotic laws; in them the legal and the personal despotism of the legislator are one and the same thing, a force evident and irresistible; and for that reason the despot Euclid has for centuries exercised his unchallenged sway over all enlightened peoples.”

There were a few philosophers who resisted this mode of thought, but only a few--Montesquieu, of course, most notably. But Montesquieu was very much an odd man out among them. They objected not only to his principle of the separation of powers, because it permitted an unenlightened aristocracy to prevail over an enlightened monarch, but also to his mode of reasoning, which was sociological rather than philosophical, emphasizing not reason but the “spirit” of a nation. That spirit, according to Montesquieu, was influenced by various causes: “by the climate, by the religion, by the laws, by the maxims of government, by precedents, morals, and customs.” Conspicuously absent from this list was reason. And conspicuously present was religion.

Helvétius, reading the manuscript of the Spirit of the Laws, thought so ill of it that he urged Montesquieu not to publish it, warning him that it would hurt his reputation. Condorcet protested against the absence in it of any rational, universal principles for the conduct of social affairs. “A good law,” he insisted, “ought to be good for all men, just as a true proposition is true for all.” Rousseau objected that Montesquieu dealt with the “positive right of established government” instead of the “principles of political right.” Voltaire complained: “Hardly has he established a principle, when history opens before him and shows him a hundred exceptions.” When Montesquieu died (in 1755), only Diderot attended his funeral, and then as a mark of personal respect rather than any sympathy for his ideas.

It was in Britain, of course, but even more in America that Montesquieu was genuinely admired and seriously studied. He was by far the most often quoted writer in the Federalist Papers, on the subject of the separation of powers especially. But he was also quoted by the Anti-Federalists, who approved of his conception of a republic--small, homogeneous, and primarily agrarian--as well as his idea of virtue as the animating spirit of a republic: “the love of the laws and of one’s country,” the “constant preference of public to private interest.”

Together, the Federalists and Anti-Federalists illustrate the two motifs that dominated the American Enlightenment: liberty and virtue. A commercial society in a large republic, the Anti-Federalists feared, would inevitably “beget luxury, the parent of inequality, the foe to virtue, and the enemy to restraint.” The Founders, for their part, addressed just that concern in their “new science of politics,” which was designed not only to ensure liberty in the new political order, but also to provide a political surrogate, so to speak, for virtue. This was the meaning of that memorable epigram in Federalist 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

Because men were not angels, because they could not always be relied upon to act virtuously--that is, in the public interest--government had to exploit their lower nature to achieve the same end, by pitting interest against interest, faction against faction, ambition against ambition. This was to be “the republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.” But the Founders went further, insisting that virtue itself was a precondition of a successful republic. “I go on this great republican principle,” Madison said in the debate on the Constitution, “that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom…. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.”

For both the Federalists and Anti-Federalists, the corollary of liberty and virtue was religion. It has often been observed that religion made fleeting appearances in the Declaration of Independence, but had only a negative role in the Constitution, in the prohibition of religious tests and an established church. The reason was obvious: to avoid a controversial and divisive subject. But behind that was another reason: the conviction that religion was so “self-evident,” so firmly embedded in human nature and society, that it did not require the imprimatur of government--indeed, might be tainted by that imprimatur.

For Tocqueville, this was one of the crucial differences between France and America. Whereas the French philosophers believed that “religious zeal ... will be extinguished as freedom and enlightenment increase,” America proved exactly the opposite. In France, “the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions,” while in America “they reigned together on the same soil.” Thus the country where Christianity was most influential [that is, America] was also “the most enlightened and the most free.”

It is curious that Tocqueville did not quote the Founders to the same effect: Washington’s Farewell Address, for example, which explicitly warned that enlightenment was no substitute for religion, and that “national morality” could not prevail “in exclusion of religious principle”; or John Adams, who asserted that the Constitution was made “only for a moral and religious people”; or, his famous comment about the French Revolution: “I know not what to make of a republic of thirty million atheists.” Even those Founders who were not notably pious were respectful of religion, not only as a private faith but as a public and civic institution. Benjamin Franklin, for example: “If men are so wicked as we now see them with religion, what would they be without it?” Or Thomas Jefferson, more famous for his principle of the separation of church and state, who, as President, regularly attended religious services in the hall of the House of Representatives. A friend met him as he was walking to church one Sunday carrying his large red prayer book. “You going to church Mr. Jefferson,” his friend said. “You do not believe a word in it.” “Sir,” Jefferson replied, “No nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man and I as chief Magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example. Good morning Sir.”

It is sometimes said, disparagingly, that some of the Founders had a utilitarian or functional view of religion, valuing it only as a social and political asset. But this view of religion, it seems to me, is not in itself unworthy. To look upon religion as the ultimate sanction of morality, and hence of a good society and a sound polity, is not demeaning to religion. On the contrary, it pays religion--and God--the great tribute of being essential to the welfare of mankind. And it does credit to man as well, who is deemed capable of subordinating his lower nature to his higher, of venerating and giving obeisance to someone and something above himself.

In my hasty attempt this evening to distinguish some of the essential features of the three Enlightenments, I have obviously omitted not only a host of qualifications and reservations, but also important parts of the thesis itself: the practical manifestations of the social ethic in Britain, for example, where philanthropy was a respected profession, a full-time occupation for men and women. In the course of the 18th century, over a hundred societies and institutions were created to support various charities, schools, hospitals, and almshouses, and to promote specific reforms--all of this supplementing the system of public relief, which was itself being expanded. One contemporary called the period an “Age of Benevolence”; one historian labeled it “the new humanitarianism.” No contemporary, or historian, would apply those labels to the French Enlightenment. The French philosophers aspired not to an Age of Benevolence but to nothing less than an Age of Reason.

It is ironic that the British Enlightenment has more resonance today in the United States than in Britain. We are often reminded of the theme of American “exceptionalism.” America was exceptional at the time of its founding, and it continues to be so today. Europeans complain that we are unduly religious and “moralistic” (the latter meant invidiously). And so we are, by European--and British--standards today. But not by British standards of old. If America is now “exceptional” in these respects, it is because it has inherited and preserved aspects of the British Enlightenment that the British themselves have discarded and that other countries (France, most notably) have never embraced.

It is the United States, more than any other country, that has retained Adam Smith’s vision of political economy, a “system of natural liberty” that governs the polity as well as the economy. Some libertarians protest that we are insufficiently liberal, in the rigorously individualistic sense of that word. But Smith was never a libertarian in that sense. He was a moral philosopher as well as a political economist, and it is this amalgam that characterized Britain then, as it does the United States today. Americans take for granted what Europeans regard as an inexplicable paradox: that the United States is the most capitalistic and at the same time the most moralistic of countries.

So too, America is far more religious today--religious in observance and belief--than any European country. A wise French historian, François Furet, once told me that France had become so secular that it could no longer be bothered to be anti-clerical. (This was before the Muslim immigrants became a threat to French secularism.) The same might be said of Britain today, where the established church has accommodated itself so entirely to the popular ethos and culture that there is no incentive for disestablishment. In the United States, by contrast, evangelicalism is a serious social as well as religious force--as Methodism was in eighteenth-century Britain.

America has, in effect, 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. As a public idea, it now goes under the name of “compassion.” The “politics of compassion” was once derided by conservatives as a liberal ploy for an aggrandized state, a softhearted and, worse, soft-minded approach to social problems, in which sentiment prevails over reason, intentions over results, and feeling good over doing good. Yet today the idea of “compassionate conservatism” has been embraced not only by many conservatives but by many liberals as well, who see the wisdom of strengthening civil society and reducing the role of the state by channeling the sentiment of compassion into voluntary and communal endeavors. This is the rationale behind the proposal, for example, to integrate faith-based charities into the larger system of relief. The ultimate purpose is to enhance the “moral sense” of giver and receiver alike, to encourage the “social affections” of the one, while respecting the moral dignity and integrity of the other.

The moral philosophy of the British Enlightenment, I readily concede, lacks the profundity and gravity of great philosophy. And the virtues derived from that philosophy--sympathy, compassion, and benevolence--lack the grandeur of the classical virtues: heroism, courage, and wisdom. But I am reminded of what Tocqueville said in another context. The principle of self-interest, properly understood, he said, is “not very lofty,” but it is “clear and sure”; it does not seek “great objects,” but it attains those it does seek without too much effort; it cannot make “a man virtuous,” but it can make a citizenry “regulated, temperate, moderate, farsighted, masters of themselves”; it does not lead men “directly to virtue through the will,” but it does bring them near it “insensibly through habits”; it does not encourage “extraordinary virtues,” but it does discourage “gross depravity”; it may prevent some men from “mounting far above the ordinary level of humanity,” but it helps many others to attain that ordinary level and prevents them from falling below it. “Of all philosophic theories,” Tocqueville concluded, it was “the most appropriate to the needs of men in our time.”

What Tocqueville said of self-interest I would apply to the moral philosophy of the British Enlightenment--“not very lofty, but clear and sure,” an inducement not to “extraordinary virtues” but to ordinary virtues, at the very least a deterrent to “gross depravity,” above all, a philosophy intended to create, by habit if not by will, a citizenry that is temperate, moderate, “masters of themselves.” It was, in short, an eminently human and humane ethos. At a time of great economic, social, and political turmoil, it was, as Tocqueville said of self-interest, “most appropriate to the needs of men.” And, I would suggest, it may still be appropriate today, in another very different time of turmoil.

Gertrude Himmelfarb is professor of history emeritus at the City University of New York.

Excerpted from above:

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire... France's "celebrated" Author and Philosopher.

Thanks for the article. This is really an interesting exploration of the foundations of what we see in these three cultures today. It's not very surprising to see how Voltaire's thinking eventually lead to what we sees as the depraved and corrupt actions of the people of France today.

It was the third Earl of Shaftesbury who first formulated the principle that was at the heart of this philosophy: the idea of the “moral sense,” the “sense of right and wrong” that was “implanted in our nature.”

Or maybe it was St. Paul:

Romans 2
13 For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God's sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous.
14 (Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law,
15 since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.)

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.