'The Roads to Modernity'

Ever since Immanuel Kant posed his famous question in 1784--"What is Enlightenment?"--critics and commentators have searched for an answer, and they still do. For it is to the Enlightenment--a particular set of 18th-century ideas--that many thinkers trace the political and intellectual origins of the modern world. To pose Kant's question is to ask nothing less than who we are.

The respected historian Gertrude Himmelfarb is the latest critic to take up this challenge. But she gives the question a plural form, asking "What are Enlightenments?" Surveying the experiences of England, France and America, she follows three different "roads to modernity."

Ms. Himmelfarb understands that the paths have sometimes crossed. A "respect for reason and liberty, science and industry, justice and welfare" were among the values embraced on both sides of the Atlantic and either side of the Channel. Yet she notes that these ideas "took significantly different forms and were pursued in different ways in each country." In Ms. Himmelfarb's reckoning, not all Enlightenments are equal.

not all Enlightenments are equal

Certainly the Franco-Prussian "enlightenment" was simply wrong.

To quote Friedrich Hayek:

What we have called the "British tradition" was made explicit mainly by a group of Scottish moral philosophers led by David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson, seconded by their English contemporaries Josiah Tucker, Edmund Burke, and William Paley, and drawing largely on a tradition rooted in the jurisprudence of the common law. Opposed to them was the tradition of the French Enlightenment, deeply imbued with Cartesian rationalism: the Encyclopedists and Rousseau, the Physiocrats and Condorcet, are the best-known representatives. [...]
Though these two groups are now commonly lumped together as the ancestors of modern liberalism, there is hardly a greater contrast imaginable than that between their respective conceptions of the evolution and functioning of a social order and the role played in it by liberty. The difference is directly traceable to the predominance of an essentially empiricist view of the world in England and a rationalist approach in France. The main contrast in the practical conclusions to which these approaches led has recently been well put, as follows: "One finds the essence of freedom in spontaneity and the absence of coercion, the other believes it to be realized only in the pursuit and attainment of an absolute collective purpose"; and "one stands for organic, slow, half-conscious growth, the other for doctrinaire deliberateness; one for trial and error procedure, the other for an enforced solely valid pattern." It is the second view, as J.L. Talmon has shown in an important book from which this description is taken, that has become the origin of totalitarian democracy.
The sweeping success of the political doctrines that stem from the French tradition is probably due to their great appeal to human pride and ambition. But we must not forget that the political conclusions of the two schools derive from different conceptions of how society works. In this respect the British philosophers laid the foundations of a profound and essentially valid theory, while the rationalist school was simply and completely wrong.

- F.A. Hayek, "The Constitution of Liberty"

"One finds the essence of freedom in spontaneity and the absence of coercion, the other believes it to be realized only in the pursuit and attainment of an absolute collective purpose"; and "one stands for organic, slow, half-conscious growth, the other for doctrinaire deliberateness; one for trial and error procedure, the other for an enforced solely valid pattern."

This statement is definitive. Friedrich Hayek's the guy. I've read some of Hume and Smith, but none of Ferguson. Burkes a hero, but I'm not familiar with Paley or Tucker. I'm going to have to get to it. This is the family tree.

So is there a distinction between the classical philosophic quest for Wisdom and the search for Enlightenment? If so, what is it?

I'm pretty sure I read this article somewhere else. A web search doesn't turn anything up though.

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