1 There is another “underside” of the Enlightenment: the writings of Denis Diderot, for example, which were published only posthumously and which reveal a very different persona and thinker from the familiar philosophe. Today, the author of Rameau’s Nephew may be a more interesting, complicated, and perhaps congenial figure than the editor of the Encyclopédie. The latter, however, is the public and historic Diderot, the Diderot of the Enlightenment.

2 Venturi considers the possibility that the eighteenth-century Commonwealthmen—the republicans and deists (or pantheists) who were the heirs of John Toland, John Trenchard, and their colleagues in the preceding century—constituted something like an organized group comparable to the philosophes. But according to Caroline Robbins, the great specialist on the subject, they were not an “organized opposition,” not a “coherent party,” and certainly not revolutionary. Thus, they would not qualify as an English Enlightenment by Venturi’s standards. ¹⁷

3 Gibbon presents a special problem for those historians who do not recognize the English component of the British Enlightenment. As Franco Venturi, in denying to the English any part in the Enlightenment, had to make an exception for Gibbon, an “isolated” and “solitary” figure in his country (this of the best-selling author and celebrity), so a more recent historian, Arthur Herman, making the largest claims for the Scots who “invented the modern world,” insists that Gibbon modelled his work on the Scottish historical school and was, “for all intents and purposes . . . intellectually a Scot.” ³¹

4 This is one of the more bizarre episodes of the Enlightenment. Hume, who had little in common with Rousseau intellectually or temperamentally, but who sympathized with his plight, arranged for him to take refuge in England, accompanying him on the trip and finding accommodations for him and his mistress. (She came separately, accompanied by James Boswell.) Hume even offered to solicit a pension for him from George III, a proposal Rousseau initially rejected but then agreed to reluctantly. It was not long, however, before Rousseau turned against Hume, accusing him of circulating a satirical letter about him written by Horace Walpole and of conspiring to ruin his reputation. The whole affair became public, to the great distress of Hume, who was obliged to defend himself by publishing their correspondence.

5 Shaftesbury’s “moral sense” was very different from John Rawls’s recent use of that term. For Shaftesbury it was an innate sense of right and wrong; for Rawls it is an intuitive conviction of the rightness of freedom and equality.

6 Smith was offended not only by Mandeville’s amoralism, his refusal to distinguish between vice and virtue, but also by his mercantilist views, which were a by-product of that philosophy. Because there was no natural moral sense and thus no natural harmony among men, Mandeville assumed that the government had to intervene to convert “private vices” into “public benefits.” Mandeville is sometimes taken to be an apologist for capitalism, but it was mercantilism that was the logical deduction from his philosophy.

7 Bentham himself variously attributed this principle to Montesquieu, Barrington, Beccaria, and Helvétius, “but most of all Helvétius.” Smith mistakenly attributed the origin of the “moral sense” to Hutcheson rather than Shaftesbury.²⁴

8 Newton was also for many years a zealous alchemist (and perhaps remained a crypto-alchemist for much of his life). His biographer is reminded of Nietzsche’s astute observation, two centuries later: “ ‘Do you believe then that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great if there had not beforehand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers and wizards, who thirsted and hungered after abscondite and forbidden powers?’ ”⁴⁷

9 A letter written by Smith while Hume was dying is sometimes taken as evidence that he shared Hume’s views: “Poor David Hume is dying very fast, but with great cheerfulness and good humor and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things than any whining Christian ever died with pretended resignation to the will of God.” ⁶¹

10 Smith’s argument recalls Voltaire’s almost half a century earlier: “If one religion only were allowed in England, the government would very possibly become arbitrary. If there were but two, the people would cut one another’s throats. But as there are such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace.” ⁶⁹ The Federalist later made much the same observation: “A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source.”

11 In a note appended to the memoir, Stewart explained that Smith’s posthumous reputation was somewhat under a cloud at the time. While England was at war with France, there was a tendency, “even among men of some talents and information” (the memoir was delivered before the Royal Society of Edinburgh), to confound the “speculative doctrines of political economy” with the “first principles of government.” Thus, the doctrine of free trade was seen to have a “revolutionary tendency.” Some people who had prided themselves on their intimacy with Smith and their admiration for his economics began to question the expediency of “subjecting to the disputations of philosophers the arcana of state policy.”⁴

12 There is no evidence that Hegel was inspired by Smith when he coined that phrase in his Philosophy of History. Yet he had read Smith (as well as later political economists such as Say and Ricardo), and there are echoes of Smith in the Philosophy of Right, especially in the concept of civil society, the realm intermediate between the individual and the state where individuals pursue their private interests.

13 It is by now generally accepted that Smith was not the rigorous laissez-fairist that some of his disciples (in the twentieth as well as nineteenth century) made him out to be. The whole of the final book of the Wealth of Nations, on the duties and functions of government, testifies to that. Moreover, Smith’s own life belies that view. As Commissioner of Customs for Scotland (a post he sought and conscientiously fulfilled—it was not a sinecure), he supervised the collection of revenue that was to be used for the proper functions of the state: defense, justice, public works, education.

14 Modern liberals and conservatives have been charged with the same inconsistency, liberals for granting a large measure of state intervention in economic affairs but withholding it in the social realm (family, religion . . . ); and conservatives, reversing that formula, being largely libertarian in economics and interventionist in social affairs.

15 Almost exactly the same passage appeared thirty years later as the concluding sentence of Reflections—belying yet again the hypothesis of the “two Burkes,” an early and late Burke.

16 Burke’s father, born a Catholic, had been converted to Anglicanism before Burke’s birth, and his son was brought up as an Anglican and remained one. Burke’s mother and his wife, although both converted to Anglicanism after their marriages, were thought to have been privately practicing Catholics. Burke himself was suspected of being a Catholic and was sometimes caricatured as a Jesuit.

17 Coleridge, having earlier (like Wordsworth) accused Burke of betraying his principles, later defended him for being faithful to them. The reader of Burke’s writings on the two revolutions, Coleridge wrote, “will find the principles exactly the same and the deductions the same; but the practical inferences almost opposite in the one case from those drawn in the other; yet in both equally legitimate and in both equally confirmed by the results.”³⁷

18 It is generally assumed that Paine’s famous charge that Burke “pities the plumage but forgets the dying bird”⁵⁴ referred to the poor, whom Burke had forgotten in his zeal for the queen. In fact, Paine was speaking of the prisoners in the Bastille, aristocrats as often as not, who had fallen out of favor with the king. Political tyranny, not economic misery, was the subject of Paine’s metaphor.

Burke has also been criticized for calling the populace “the swinish multitude.” Conor Cruise O’Brien points out that Burke spoke of “a swinish multitude,” a particular mob on a particular occasion, not the people as a whole.⁵⁵ Burke himself quoted Richard Price (whose sermon to the Revolutionary Society provoked the Reflections), who referred to the few thousand voters paid to vote as “the dregs of the people.”⁵⁶

19 Few contemporaries (and not many historians) paid attention, as Burke did, to one of the anti-clerical measures adopted by the Revolution, the act making marriage a civil contract, with divorce permitted at a month’s notice and “at the mere pleasure of either party.” The result, Burke noted, was a precipitous rise in the divorce rate. In the first three months of 1793, there were 562 divorces in Paris compared with 1,785 marriages, a ratio, he calculated, of almost one to three—“a thing unexampled, I believe, among mankind.” ⁵⁸

20 Pocock goes so far as to say that Burke anticipated not only the Terror but such monstrosities of our own time as Nazism, the Red Guards, and the Khmer Rouge. Burke’s Letters on a Regicide Peace, describing the “dreadful energy” of the Revolution which liberated the human intellect from all social restraints, was “the 1984 of its generation.” In that work, Pocock says, Burke “had discovered the theory of totalitarianism and was enlarging it into prophecy.” ⁶⁰

21 Jeremy Bentham is usually included among these radicals. But at this time he was neither a radical nor a public figure of note. He opposed parliamentary reform at home, to say nothing of republicanism, and derided such French revolutionary measures as the confiscation of church property and the Declaration of the Rights of Man; indeed, he ridiculed the very idea of “rights.” His own writings attracted little attention. He later claimed that his Fragment on Government, published anonymously in 1776, created a “sensation.” In fact, only five hundred copies were printed, and a large number of these were later found in a warehouse. His Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, in 1789, “passed unnoticed,” Elie Halévy remarked. And his book on the Panopticon two years later, printed at his own expense, was generally ignored. It was not until 1808, when he met James Mill, that he came into his own. “Philosophical Radicalism” was Bentham’s distinctive contribution—to the early nineteenth century, however, rather than the late eighteenth.²

22 Yet four years later, in her history of the French Revolution, she echoed Burke in criticizing the “rabble” who engaged in all manners of “barbarity.” She was especially harsh on the women who had marched on Versailles: “the lowest refuse of the streets, women who had thrown off the virtues of one sex without having power to assume more than the vices of the other.” And her sympathetic description of the queen, violated by the mob in “the chaste temple of a woman,” might almost have been written by Burke.⁴⁷

23 Living to the ripe age of eighty, Godwin had ample time to reconsider his not so youthful fantasies. Condorcet never had that opportunity, having personally fallen victim to them. His Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, written shortly after Godwin’s work, was animated by the same vision of perfectibility—moral, intellectual, and physical. Like Godwin, he anticipated a time, in the not distant future, when men would be sufficiently rational to overcome their sensuality and devote themselves to the welfare of mankind rather than “foolishly to encumber the world with useless and wretched beings.”⁵¹ Written while he was hiding from the Terror (his enthusiasm for the Revolution stopped short of regicide), the book was published posthumously in 1795 after he died in prison.

24 In the first edition of Political Justice, Godwin accepted the term “anarchy” as connoting “the likeness, a distorted and tremendous likeness, of true liberty.” In the revised edition, he distinguished anarchy from “a well conceived form of society without government,” but even then he insisted that anarchy was preferable to despotism, the first being transitory and the second permanent. Moreover, anarchy had the salutary effect of awakening thought, whereas under despotism, “mind is trampled into an equality of the most odious sort.”⁵⁴

25 These questions were immediately followed by others, making this part of a larger moral catechism: “Do you hurt nobody by word or deed? Are you true and just in all your dealings? Do you take care to pay whatever you owe? Do you feel no malice, or envy, or revenge, no hatred or bitterness to any man? If you do, it is plain you are not of God; for all these are the tempers of the devil.”

26 Roy Porter observes that the “culture of quantification” that produced such vital statistics was itself a by-product of the concern for public health on the part of physicians, actuaries, and officials. What were once regarded as accidents reflecting the arbitrariness of existence were now looked upon as physiological evidence of diseases that could be controlled.¹¹

27 They were, however, cartoons and should not be taken too literally. A modern historian, commenting on one of the more grotesque scenes in the “Industry and Idleness” series, says that it “probably gives a fair picture of the conditions in which poor people lived at the time”¹²—this of an image of the “idle apprentice” in bed with a prostitute, in a grotesquely filthy room, with a cat tumbling down the chimney in pursuit of a rat.

28 Johnson also defies the conventional Tory stereotype by being a vigorous opponent of slavery. On one visit to Oxford, he proposed a toast to “the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies.” His tract in 1775, Taxation No Tyranny, derided the Americans: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” ⁴¹

29 The two notable exceptions, as will be seen, were Montesquieu and Rousseau, who did not share the philosophes’ reverence for reason and who had therefore an uneasy and anomalous relationship with them. Montesquieu was treated with personal respect although his ideas were either ignored or rejected, while Rousseau was dismissed by Voltaire as a “Judas” and by Diderot as an “anti-philosophe.” ⁵

30 Anti-Semitism was present in Britain as well, but in a milder and less insistent form. Shaftesbury found in the Jewish heroes of the Bible the embodiment of the worst characteristics of human beings. And Burke spoke casually of “money-jobbers, usurers, and Jews,” and described Lord George Gordon, the anti-Catholic agitator responsible for the Gordon riots, who later converted to Judaism, as the “heir to the old hoards of the synagogue . . . the long compound interest of the thirty pieces of silver.” But Gordon could redeem himself, Burke added, by meditating on the Talmud until he learned to conduct himself in a manner “not so disgraceful to the ancient religion” he had embraced.²⁵ Hume, on the other hand, was notably sympathetic to the Jews and critical of the “egregious tyranny” that had been responsible for their persecution and expulsion from England in the thirteenth century.²⁶ So far from being vilified as usurers, Jews were often praised (after their readmission to England by Cromwell) for their contributions to commerce and the economy. In Britain, it was generally men of letters and public figures who were well disposed to the Jews, favoring, for example, the bill passed by Parliament in 1753 providing for the naturalization of foreign-born Jews. That bill was repealed several months later because of popular pressure.

31 It may be said that Montesquieu had a personal stake in the thèse nobiliaire, having been born into the noblesse de robe. By the same token some of the adherents of the thèse royale may also have been personally motivated, either because of their relations with enlightened monarchs or their positions, pensions, and grants, which were dependent on the court. (Thirty-eight of the Encyclopédistes belonged to the prestigious Royal Academies, which were salaried posts, and fifteen were longtime employees in the civil or military administration.) Voltaire had a special reason for resenting Montesquieu and his theories. Just as he was completing his History of Louis XIV, with its defense of the thèse royale,The Spirit of the Laws was published, undermining that thesis (which was also being discredited by the weakness of Louis XV).

32 The mathematical paradigm was compelling for most of the philosophes, which is why Isaac Newton was idolized. D’Alembert was a mathematician of some distinction, the author, at the age of twenty-six, of a Treatise on Dynamics that elaborated upon Newton’s laws of motion. So, too, Condorcet made his mark as a mathematician with his work on probability, long before he applied that mode of thought to social and political affairs.

33 The question of priority is murky. Rousseau had used the idea of the general will, although not the term, in his Second Discourse in 1754. But he had had access, the previous autumn, to a draft of Diderot’s “Natural Law” article.

34 It may be said that the English had their equivalent of the canaille in the Irish immigrants. Yet while there was much indignation over the vagrancy, drunkenness, and lawlessness of some of the immigrants, this was often accompanied by expressions of pity for the wretched conditions in which they lived in England and the more desperate conditions in their own country from which they had fled.

35 Tocqueville once made a similar statement, not about savages but about poorer countries. There were more indigent, he explained, in England than in Portugal, partly because the standard of indigence (what was regarded as necessary for bare existence) was higher in England, and partly because the English were more desirous of relieving the condition of the indigent, thus permitting more people to qualify as indigent.⁸² Diderot may have meant something like this in his statement about savages and the indigent.

36 The distinction between the political and social is reflected in the common (but not explicit or consistent) distinction between liberty and freedom, liberty being primarily a political and legal concept, freedom a social and psychological one. In his famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Isaiah Berlin denies this distinction, making a point of using both words interchangeably.² Yet much of his discussion of negative and positive liberty—in effect, liberty and freedom—would be clarified by recognizing that distinction.

37 Jefferson filled twenty-eight pages of his Commonplace Book with extracts from The Spirit of the Laws, more space than he devoted to any other author. He and Madison later became critical of Montesquieu—Jefferson because Montesquieu was too well disposed to English institutions, Madison because of Montesquieu’s insistence that a republic could be sustained only in a small territory.

38 The conflation of Lockean and Scottish views, as if they were entirely compatible, was so common at the time that it defies the attempts of historians to characterize the American Enlightenment as either Lockean or Scottish.²²

39 There might have been another religious note in the Declaration had Franklin not changed Jefferson’s phrase, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” to the more secular dictum, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”³⁸

40 The statistical evidence on churches is ambiguous and contradictory. One table actually reveals an increase in the number of churches between 1770 and 1790, with no indication of when, during that twenty-year period, that growth started.⁴³ From other statistics showing a low rate of church membership in 1776, the authors conclude that “the vast majority of Americans had not been reached by an organized faith.”⁴⁴ Another survey, however, has between 71 percent and 77 percent of people in church one Sunday in 1776, suggesting a quite respectable degree of religious observance. ⁴⁵

41 As Tocqueville had no illusions about democracy, so he had none about religion. Even in its excesses and perversions, he saw religion as preferable to its alternative. “I would judge that its citizens risk brutalizing themselves less by thinking that their soul is going to pass into the body of a pig than in believing it is nothing.”⁵⁸

42 Washington went further than Madison in favoring the public recognition and practice of religion, but he was careful to preserve the principles of religious liberty and pluralism. Thus, he provided for military chaplains to be paid by the government, but specified that there were to be chaplains for each denomination. And while he did not hesitate to invoke the deity in his public declarations, he did so in non-denominational language—“Almighty Being,” or “Great Author.” ⁶⁰

43 Before the war and in its early stages, many Methodists were loyalists, perhaps out of deference to Wesley, who, as a good Tory, supported his country in the struggle against the colonies. By the end of the war, however, they had rallied to the American cause and were respected as good citizens and patriots.

44 Yet Franklin was not so overawed by Whitefield’s oratory as to be unmindful of its more mundane aspects. Listening to him preach one evening in Philadelphia, Franklin was curious about the number of people who were present and could hear him. By walking through the streets, Franklin determined how far he could be heard, and then, allowing for two square feet for each person within that area, he computed that Whitefield could be heard by more than thirty thousand people. This satisfied Franklin that the newspaper accounts of his preaching to twentyfive thousand people in the fields were accurate.⁶⁵

45 In his “revisal” of the laws of Virginia, however, Jefferson proposed an ambitious plan of poor relief (which was never acted on), including provisions for the apprenticeship of poor children and for schools much like the pauper schools in Britain.⁷⁴

46 Many years later, speaking of the War of 1812, Jefferson repeated the charge that England had “seduced” the Indians to massacre the whites, thus preventing the amalgamation of the two peoples and leading to “the brutalization, if not the extermination of this race in America.” This was yet another instance, Jefferson bitterly noted, of the “Anglo-mercantile cupidity” that had deluged the earth with blood, in Ireland and Asia as well as America.⁷⁷

47 Bernard Bailyn estimates that in the 210 years of the Supreme Court’s existence (to January 2000), The Federalist was cited 291 times: once in the eighteenth century, 58 times in the nineteenth, 38 in the first half of the twentieth, and 194 in the second half.¹