EPILOGUE

In America today, the Enlightenment is alive and well. Biographies—by reputable historians, not hagiographers—of the Founders (“Founding Fathers,” as they were once known) have become a virtual industry, flooding the bookstores and appearing regularly on the best-seller lists. The Federalist, available in several editions, is assigned as a textbook in political science courses, and cited regularly, and more frequently as time goes on, in legal debates and decisions, by liberals and conservatives alike.⁴⁷ The Revolution that was the culmination of the Enlightenment is celebrated as a national holiday, as is the birthday of George Washington, whose Farewell Address is read annually on that date in the U.S. Senate. These tributes to history are not the ceremonial rites of a sentimental or romantic people. They are part of a living history, as is evident from the Constitution itself, which, more than two centuries later, is the unchallenged basis of the law and government of the oldest republic. Even that other most notable, and far more bloody, event, the Civil War, is seen as a sequel to the Revolution, fulfilling the premises of the Enlightenment and the founding.

Tocqueville, that most perspicacious of all commentators, had a momentary lapse when he confessed doubts about the permanent viability of the American republic:

I want very much to put faith in human perfectibility; but until men should have changed in nature and have been completely transformed, I shall refuse to believe in the longevity of a government whose task is to hold together forty diverse peoples spread over an area equal to half of Europe, to avoid rivalries, ambition, and conflicts among them, and to unite the action of their independent wills toward the accomplishment of the same designs.²

Toward the end of this chapter, however, after expounding on the diverse nature of the component parts of the Union, Tocqueville came to exactly the opposite conclusion:

A time will arrive, therefore, when one can see one hundred fifty million men in North America, equal among themselves, who all belong to the same family, who have the same point of departure, the same civilization, the same language, the same religion, the same habits, the same mores, and through whom thought will circulate in the same form and be painted in the same colors. All the rest is doubtful, but this is certain.³

Tocqueville was being unduly pessimistic in the first instance, and perhaps excessively optimistic in the second. Successive waves of immigration, as well as a population almost double that anticipated by him, have diminished the sameness of civilization, language, religion, habits, mores. But in spite of all the pressures toward a multiculturalist society, the social and political institutions of the country have remained intact. All the rest, as Tocqueville said, may be doubtful, but this is certain. It is surprising, however, to find him saying that only a “faith in human perfectibility” could have persuaded him of the longevity of the United States. No one knew better than he that it was precisely a belief in human imperfectibility, and the civic and political arrangements deriving from that belief, which sustained the country—a united country—through all the turmoil of its history.

As the founding was unique to the United States, so was the Enlightenment upon which it was based. And so is the enduring commitment to the Enlightenment, the “habits of the mind” and “habits of the heart” that inspired the Founders and that are still a source of inspiration today. There is nothing like it in France or Britain. The literature on the French Enlightenment is vast, but it is largely an academic literature, of passionate interest to historians but of little relevance to contemporary affairs—except, perhaps, as a cautionary tale. If the French Enlightenment did inspire the French Revolution, and the Revolution the Terror, that is cause for disquiet rather than satisfaction. Indeed, the republic that came in the wake of the Enlightenment—the First French Republic, as it has gone down in history—has long since been superseded by other republics and even by monarchies, so that it can hardly be the subject of celebration or veneration. Today, in the early years of the new millennium, the office of the French foreign minister is adorned with portraits not of Voltaire or Rousseau but of Napoleon, who transformed the republic into an empire and then presided over its ignominious downfall. The “glory” of military adventure and defeat—that is hardly the spirit of the French Enlightenment, to say nothing of being a curious ideal for a minister of state.

The fortunes of the British Enlightenment have been no less strange. Finally, after centuries of neglect, it has come into its own as a historical subject—but only as that. Adam Smith is much admired, even revered in some circles, but his authority is rarely invoked in Britain today. That authority, indeed, was undermined within a decade after his death, with the publication in 1798 of Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus’s “principle of population,” asserting that population is always kept down to the level of the means of subsistence, was presented as a law of nature with all the inevitability of a biological law (it was derived from the two primary characteristics of human beings: sexual passion and the need for food), and with all the certainty of a mathematical law (the geometric increase of population compared with the arithmetic increase of subsistence). Malthus wrote his book as a refutation of the idea of perfectibility advanced by Godwin and Condorcet. But it was as effective a refutation of Smith’s more modest idea of progress. Where Smith’s system of natural liberty promoted the well-being of “the lowest ranks of the people,” the principle of population condemned those lowest ranks to perpetual “misery and vice.”⁴

Malthus’s principle was soon followed by David Ricardo’s “iron law” of wages, the combination of the two having the effect of de-moralizing political economy and vitiating the moral philosophy once associated with it. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Alfred Marshall, who had been a lecturer in “Moral Science” before taking up the study of economics, tried to restore the moral dimension of economics by basing it upon a Kantian conception of man, a man possessed, by nature and by reason, of a moral instinct akin to the golden rule. “It’s all in Adam Smith,” Marshall is reported to have said of his own work.⁵ But Marshall, and Smith still more, were soon overwhelmed by the very different ethos expressed in the famous remark of a Liberal member of Parliament, cynically echoed by the Prince of Wales, “We are all socialists now.”⁶

Almost a century later, Margaret Thatcher tried to restore an old ethos by reviving the idea of “Victorian values.” She was accused of glorifying the individual at the expense of society, indeed, of denying the reality of society. Had she gone back further in time, to Smith and the moral philosophers, she would have come upon the moral sense that was the genesis of those values and that gave them an undeniably social character.

The British moral philosophers, even the better known of them, Smith and Hume, do not enjoy today the reputation or stature of their predecessors, Hobbes and Locke, let alone of the classical philosophers. And for good reason. Their works are surely wanting in the profundity and gravity of great philosophy. And the social virtues they esteemed— sympathy, compassion, benevolence—lack the grandeur of the classical virtues: heroism, courage, wisdom. Yet their moral philosophy is deserving of serious consideration and respect. It was, as Tocqueville said in another connection, “of all philosophic theories the most appropriate to the needs of men in our time.” Tocqueville made that comment about self-interest “properly understood,” but it applies as well to the moral sense, again, properly understood.

[It] is a doctrine [Tocqueville said of self-interest] not very lofty, but clear and sure. It does not seek to attain great objects; but it attains all those it aims for without too much effort. . . . [It] does not produce great devotion; but it suggests little sacrifices each day; by itself it cannot make a man virtuous; but it forms a multitude of citizens who are regulated, temperate, moderate, farsighted, masters of themselves; and if it does not lead directly to virtue through the will, it brings them near to it insensibly through habits. . . .

If [it] came to dominate the moral world entirely, extraordinary virtues would without doubt be rarer. But I also think that gross depravity would then be less common. . . . [It] perhaps prevents some men from mounting far above the ordinary level of humanity; but many others who were falling below do attain it and are kept there. Consider some individuals, they are lowered. View the species, it is elevated.

I shall not fear to say that [it] seems to me of all philosophic theories the most appropriate to the needs of men in our time. . . . The minds of the moralists of our day ought to turn, therefore, principally toward it. Even should they judge it imperfect, they would still have to adopt it as necessary.⁷

Like self-interest, the idea of a moral sense, innate or habituated in human beings, was “not very lofty, but clear and sure.” It did not elevate a few individuals “far above the ordinary level of humanity,” but it did permit many more who might have fallen below it to attain and retain that level. It did not encourage individuals to “extraordinary virtues,” but it did encourage them to ordinary virtues and discouraged them from “gross depravity.” It was, in short, an eminently human and humane idea. Especially 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.”

It is ironic that that philosophy has more resonance in the United States today than in Britain. Having derived a good deal of its own Enlightenment from the mother country, the United States is now repaying Britain by perpetuating the spirit of her Enlightenment. We are often reminded of the theme of American “exceptionalism.” America was exceptional at the time of its founding, and continues to be so today. Europeans complain that the United States is unduly individualistic, religious, and moralistic (the last meant invidiously). And so it is, by European standards, including British standards, today. But not by British standards of old. If America is now exceptional, 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 adopted.

The United States, more than any other country, has retained Adam Smith’s vision of political economy, a system of natural liberty that governs the polity as well as the economy. Libertarians protest that the United States is insufficiently liberal, in their rigorous, 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, the United States is far more religious today— religious in observance and in conviction—than any European country. A wise French historian, François Furet, once told me that France had become so secular that it was no longer anti-clerical. (This was before the Muslim immigrants were seen as a threat to French laicisme.) The same might be said of Britain today, which has no disestablishment movement because the established church has accommodated itself so entirely to the popular ethos that there is no incentive for disestablishment. So, too, the Dissenting churches are a shadow of their former selves, not a power to be reckoned with or to be resisted. In the United States, by contrast, evangelicalism is a serious social as well as religious force.

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, accepted as an idea and ideal even when, as often happens, it is violated in practice. And the revival of the idea of virtue in the private sense has been accompanied by its revival in the public sense—the social virtue of compassion. That idea was the unique contribution of the British Enlightenment. What had been a religious virtue was transmuted into a secular one, and a private duty became a public responsibility. This was the achievement not only of the British philosophers who made so much of the idea of compassion but also of the Methodists and Evangelicals who put that idea into practice in the form of philanthropy and good works. It was in Britain that the “passion for compassion” (in Hannah Arendt’s memorable phrase) first arose. In France, Peter Gay explains, the campaign to abolish torture, like that to expel the Jesuits, was part of “the struggle to impose man’s rational will on the environment.”⁸ In Britain, the campaign to abolish slavery, like the other reform movements, was motivated not by “rational will” but by humanitarian zeal, by compassion rather than reason.

Revived in the United States today, this ethic has crossed political party lines. Long the preserve of liberals, for whom it served to justify every act of social engineering, the “politics of compassion” was derided by conservatives as 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—all having the effect of enlarging the scope of government and the state. Yet today, “compassionate conservatism” has been embraced not only by many conservatives (indeed, the reigning party of conservatives) but by many liberals as well, who seek to strengthen civil society and thus reduce the role of the state by channeling the sentiment of compassion into voluntary and communal endeavors. This is the purpose of the much-publicized proposals to replace welfare with “workfare” and 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 sociology of virtue, the ideology of reason, the politics of liberty—the ideas still resonate today. But they carry with them the accretions of more than two centuries of historical experiences and memories. And other ideas now compete for our attention: equality, most notably, but also nationality and ethnicity, class and gender, cultural diversity and global homogeneity. If the three Enlightenments ushered in modernity—or at least a new stage in modernity, or new variations on modernity—the postmodernists may be justified in calling this a postmodern age. Yet the ideas of virtue, liberty, and reason did not originate in modernity; nor have they been superseded or superannuated by postmodernity. 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.