NOTES

PREFACE

1. The Castel Gandolfo lecture, delivered August 10, 1996, was printed in German in Klett-Cotta Sonderdruck (1997). The British Academy lecture, of May 15, 2001, was published in the Proceedings of the British Academy (2001) under the title “Two Enlightenments: A Contrast in Social Ethics.” A much revised version of the British Academy lecture, “The Idea of Compassion: The British vs. the French Enlightenment,” appeared in The Public Interest (Fall 2001).

PROLOGUE

1. I capitalize “Enlightenment” when it refers to the historical schools or movements of thought associated with the eighteenth century, and lowercase it when speaking of it in a non-historical context.

2. John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London, 1995), p. viii.

3. Daniel Gordon, introduction to Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century French History, ed. Gordon (New York, 2001), p. 1. Gordon, and the contributors to this volume, defend the Enlightenment against the postmodernists, but always in the shadow of the postmodernist critique. There is by now a considerable literature on the “Enlightenment project,” as it is called (generally pejoratively), starting with one of the sources of this critique, Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1984). For more recent contributions to this debate, see What’s Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question, ed. Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill (Stanford, Calif., 2001); Nicholas Capoldi, “The Enlightenment Project in Twentieth-Century Philosophy,” in Modern Enlightenment and the Rule of Reason, ed. John C. McCarthy (Washington, D.C., 1998); James Schmidt, “What Enlightenment Project?” Political Theory (December 2000), and the ensuing exchange between Christian Delacampagne and Schmidt, Political Theory (February 2001). Richard Rorty distinguishes between the politics of the Enlightenment, which he endorses, and its metaphysics, which he repudiates (Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers [Cambridge, 1991], I, 21 ff.).

4. A sophisticated version of this approach is Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).

5. Robert Darnton, “The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature,” in The Literary Underground of the Old Régime (Cambridge, Mass., 1982). The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie (Cambridge, Mass., 1979) is Darnton’s pathbreaking book on the publication of the Encyclopédie, but his mode of cultural history is best exemplified in his volumes of essays, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984); The Kiss of Lamourette (New York, 1990); and The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, with its companion volume The Corpus of Clandestine Literature in France, 1769–1789 (New York, 1995). For a spirited critique of Darnton and defense of intellectual history, see Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), pp. 87–94.

6. I have not attempted to deal with the Enlightenments in Italy, Germany, Spain, Russia, and elsewhere. Excellent brief accounts of these appear in The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).

7. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago, 2000 [1st French ed., 1835, 1840]), p. 275 (vol. I, pt. 2, ch. 9). The concept of moeurs, Tocqueville said, was foremost in his mind, the “common truth,” the “central point,” the “end of all my ideas” (p. 295).

8. Ira O. Wade, The Intellectual Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton, 1971), dates the Enlightenment from the Renaissance. In his later book, The Structure and Form of the French Enlightenment, Vol. I: Esprit Philosophique (Princeton, 1977), he modifies this by recognizing a “turning point, though not a break” at the time of the death of Louis XVI (p. xii). Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001), also takes the Enlightenment back to the seventeenth century, giving Spinoza a major role. I take a narrower view of the Enlightenment, confining it to the eighteenth century, where it emerged not only as an episode in the history of philosophy but as an intellectual and social movement, a historic event with political and social consequences.

9. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Vol. I: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York, 1975 [1st ed., 1966]), pp. x, 3, 7–8, 10. See also Gay’s The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (New York, 1971).

10. The criticism of this view of the unity of the Enlightenment was first voiced by Betty Behrens in the Historical Journal (1968). For a pluralistic view of the Enlightenment, emphasizing the national differences, see The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge, Mass., 1981); Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York, 2000); J. G. A. Pocock: “Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment,” in Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. P. Zagorin (Berkeley, 1980); J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. I of The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon (Cambridge, 1999); Charles R. Kesler, “The Different Enlightenments: Theory and Practice in the Enlightenment,” in The Ambiguous Legacy of the Enlightenment, ed. William A. Rusher and Ken Masugi (Lanham, Md., 1995); and Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It (New York, 2001).

11. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York, 1944 [1st trans. by Sibree, 1899]), pp. 436–37.

12. Ibid., p. 86.

13. Ibid., pp. 453–54.

14. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York, 1963), p. 49.

15. Jean le Rond d’Alembert, “Preliminary Discourse,” in Denis Diderot’s The Encyclopedia: Selections, ed. and trans. Stephen J. Gendzier (New York, 1967), p. 12. (In citing the texts of the French Enlightenment, I have used translations where available.)

16. Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 126–27, 132–33.

17. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthmen: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II Until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), pp. 3, 381, 383.

18. Quoted in Porter, “The Enlightenment in England,” p. 5.

19. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (1781, 1788), trans. and ed. M. Hedouin (London, n.d.), p. 98 (bk. III).

20. Rousseau, Emile (1762), trans. Allan Bloom (New York, 1979), p. 450.

21. John Morley, Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (New York, 1878), p. 163.

22. Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Philosophy of Kant: Immanuel Kant’s Moral and Political Writings, ed. Carl J. Friedrich (New York, 1949), p. 138. For the context of this debate, see What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley, 1996).

23. James Schmidt, “Inventing ‘the Enlightenment’: Stirling, Hegel, and the Oxford English Dictionary,” Journal of the History of Ideas (forthcoming).

24. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York, Dolphin ed., 1961 [1st ed., 1790]), pp. 86, 155, 208, 259. For other references to “enlightened,” see pp. 78, 100, 101, 129, and 155. The word appeared in Burke’s very first work, A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), in The Works of Edmund Burke (London, 1909), I, 38.

25. Schmidt, “Inventing ‘the Enlightenment,’ ” p. 7.

26. Morley, Diderot and the Encyclopaedists, pp. 6, 117. “Enlightenment,” not capitalized and not in the sense of a school of movement, appeared once, in a quotation from Friedrich Grimm, the German philosopher and friend of the philosophes (p. 373). Morley occasionally used the adjective “enlightened” (pp. 87, 401).

27. Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 438. The Oxford English Dictionary records the earliest usage of “Enlightenment,” as translations of Aufklärung, in books on Hegel by J. H. Sterling in 1865 and on Kant by Edward Caird in 1889 (A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles [Oxford, 1897], vol. III, pt. 2, p. 191). See Schmidt, “Inventing ‘the Enlightenment,’ ” for an analysis of the controversy over this entry in the OED, particularly the misrepresentation of the quotation from Caird. A rare instance of “Enlightenment” appears in 1894 in the translation of Wilhelm Windelband’s Geschichte der Philosophie. That work also has the distinction of paying tribute to England as the progenitor of the Enlightenment (Schmidt, “Inventing ‘the Enlightenment,’ ” p. 7).

28. Schmidt, “Inventing ‘the Enlightenment,’ ” p. 15.

29. Encyclopaedia Britannica: A New Survey of Universal Knowledge (14th ed., London, 1929), VIII, 613.

30. Paul Wood, “Introduction: Dugald Stewart and the Invention of ‘the Scottish Enlightenment,’ ” in The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Re-interpretation, ed. Wood (Rochester, N.Y., 2000), p. 1. Wood attributes the term to William Robert Scott in 1900, but points out that the idea of such a school originated with Dugald Stewart, himself a member of that school. (Stewart succeeded Adam Ferguson to the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh, and was the biographer and editor of Adam Smith.) John Lough has the term originating with Hugh Trevor-Roper as late as 1967 (Lough, “Reflections on Enlightenment and Lumières,” British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies [Spring 1985], p. 9). Reflecting on the confusion in the use of the terms “Enlightenment” and Lumières, and on the disparate thinkers and ideas embraced in those terms, Lough proposes abandoning them entirely, for France as well as other countries (p. 14).

31. Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 126–27, 132–33 (see above, p. 9); Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, pp. 225–26.

32. Alfred Cobban, In Search of Humanity: The Role of Enlightenment in Modern History (London, 1960), p. 7. I am indebted to Arthur M. Wilson, “The Enlightenment Came First to England,” in England’s Rise to Greatness, 1660–1763, ed. Stephen B. Baxter (Berkeley, 1983), for this and the following quotations. Wilson’s own essay, however, entitled “The Enlightenment Came First to England,” focuses entirely on such thinkers as Locke, Hobbes, Milton, and the deists, arguing that its existence has been obscured because “almost all of it occurred during the seventeenth century” (p. 4). Thus, he, too, leaves the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to the French.

33. Wilson, “The Enlightenment Came First,” p. 3, quoting Robert R. Palmer, article on Turgot in Journal of Law and Economics (1976).

34. Ibid., p. 17, quoting Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (Garden City, N.Y., 1977), p. 242. Yet Commager himself, in that same book, dates “the Old World Enlightenment” from the founding of the Royal Society in 1660 and the publication of Newton’s Principia in 1687 (p. 4).

35. See the articles and books by Pocock and Porter in note 10 above. One critical review of Porter’s book, under the title “Unenlightened England,” argues that there was no Enlightenment in England because there was no understanding of “modern, commercial societies” (this of a country whose statesmen and thinkers revered Adam Smith), and no group of philosophers notable for their views of “government, economy and society” (pace Burke and Gibbon, Paine and Price) ( John Robertson, “Unenlightened England,” Prospect [January 2001], p. 62).

36. Edmund Burke, An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), in Works, III, 113.

37. Venturi, Utopia and Reform, p. 73.

38. John Lough, The Encyclopédie in Eighteenth-Century England and Other Studies (Newcastle, 1970), p. 14. On the subject of the relations between English and French intellectuals, see also Wade, Structure and Form of the French Enlightenment, I, 120–71.

39. On Moral Sentiments: Contemporary Responses to Adam Smith, ed. John Reeder (Bristol, 1997), p. 5.

40. Adam Smith, “Of the Nature of That Imitation Which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts,” in Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (Oxford, 1980), p. 198.

41. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford, 1976 [reprint of 6th ed., 1790]), pp. 214–15 (pt. VI, sect. 1).

42. “Philosophe,” in Encyclopédie, XII, 509. By giving Spinoza a major role in his book Radical Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel identifies the “Radical Enlightenment” with the attack on religion.

43. Ernst Cassirer, in his seminal work on the Enlightenment, saw reason as the “homogeneous formative power” of the time: “ ‘Reason’ becomes the unifying and central point of this century, expressing all that it longs and strives for, and all that it achieves. . . . The eighteenth century is imbued with a belief in the unity and immutability of reason. . . . Reason is the same for all thinking subjects, all nations, all epochs, and all cultures.” In this context, the Enlightenment “mind” was essentially French, taking its model from Newton but finding expression most coherently in the Encyclopédie. (See Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove [Princeton, 1951 (1st German ed., 1932)], pp. 5–6.)

44. William Kristol, “The Politics of Liberty, the Sociology of Virtue,” in Mark Gerson, ed., The Essential Neo-Conservative Reader (Reading, Mass., 1996), pp. 434ff. The expression “sociology of virtue” is more often associated with the late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century French syndicalist philosopher Georges Sorel. See, for example, John L. Stanley, Sociology of Virtue: The Political and Social Theories of Georges Sorel (1981), and Arthur L. Greil, Georges Sorel and the Sociology of Virtue (1981). The sociologist Robert Nisbet blended the two terms when he described conservatism as the “politics of liberty” or the “search for political virtue.” (Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality [Minneapolis, 1986], p. x). “Ideology of reason” is my own formulation.

45. Quoted by Terence Marshall, “Rousseau and Enlightenment,” in Rousseau Papers, ed. Jim MacAdam, Michael Neumann, and Guy La France (Montreal, 1980), p. 39.

46. See note 9 above.

THE BRITISH ENLIGHTENMENT: THE SOCIOLOGY OF VIRTUE

1. “SOCIAL AFFECTIONS” AND RELIGIOUS DISPOSITIONS

1. David Hume, The History of England: From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 (4 vols., Philadelphia, 1828 [1st ed., 1754–62]), IV, 434. Some commentators on Adam Smith find in his work a Newtonian mode of analysis. One claims that Smith “self-consciously” set out to apply Newtonian principles by the use of mechanical analogies and metaphors (Alan Macfarlane, The Riddle of the Modern World: Of Liberty, Wealth and Equality [New York, 2000], p. 82; see also Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith [Oxford, 1995], p. 179). Yet there is only one passing reference to Newton in the Theory of Moral Sentiments (on the initial public neglect of him), and none in Wealth of Nations.

2. See A. R. Humphreys, The Augustan World: Society, Thought, and Letters in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1963), p. 207.

3. On the aesthetic influence of Newton, see the elegant and powerful little book by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton’s Opticks and the Eighteenth-Century Poets (Hamden, Conn., 1963 [1st ed., 1946]).

4. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Chicago, 1952 [1st ed., 1690]), pp. 95, 103, 105 (bk. I, chs. 1 and 2); p. 176 (bk. II, ch. 20).

5. Lawrence E. Klein suggests that Shaftesbury’s personal relationship with Locke accounts for the “emotional intensity” of his search for his own “philosophical identity” and thus his attack on the Lockean principles (Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England [Cambridge, 1994], p. 15).

6. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (3 vols., Indianapolis, 2001 [1711; reprint of 6th ed., 1737–38]), II, 27 (bk. I, pt. 3, sect. 2); p. 18 (bk. I, pt. 2, sect. 3, and passim). “Moral sense” appears only once in the text of the essay (p. 27), but it is clearly meant to be synonymous with “the sense of right and wrong,” which appears repeatedly. In the 1714 edition, “moral sense” also appears in the marginal notations and in the index. (Here, and throughout this book, I have modernized the capitalization, punctuation, and spelling of these eighteenth-century writers. To retain the original is distracting and, in the case of the capitalization of common nouns, deceptive because it gives an unintended emphasis to the words.)

7. Ibid., p. 80 (bk. II, pt. 2, sect. 1); p. 25 (bk. I, pt. 3, sect. 1).

8. Ibid., p. 45 (bk. II, pt. 1, sect. 1); p. 57 (bk. II, pt. 1, sect. 1).

9. Ibid., p. 14 (bk. I, pt. 2, sect. 2).

10. Ibid., p. 16 (bk. I, pt. 2, sect. 2).

11. Ibid., p. 100 (bk. II, pt. 2, sect. 3). On “common nature,” see pp. 45–46 (bk. II, pt. 1, sect. 1).

12. Other historians dispute this interpretation of the relation of Locke and the moral philosophers. Frank Balog, for example, argues for the “pivotal position of Locke” in the Scottish Enlightenment. He quotes the first English work on the subject, James McCosh’s Scottish Philosophy from Hutchinson to Hamilton (1875): “The Scottish metaphysicians largely imbibed the spirit of Locke, all of them speak of him with profound respect; and they never differ from him without expressing a regret or offering an apology.” But Balog admits that the Scottish philosophers differed with Locke on “one fundamental issue, the nature of conscience and morality”—for moral philosophers, a fundamental issue, indeed. And he cites Hume as criticizing Locke for being “unhistorical and subversive” (Balog, “The Scottish Enlightenment and the Liberal Political Tradition,” in Confronting the Constitution, ed. Allan Bloom [Washington, D.C., 1990], pp. 193, 207, 205).

13. Quoted in Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, p. 65.

14. One editor of the Fable says that Mandeville had not read Shaftesbury when he published the first edition of the book in 1714 ( The Fable of the Bees, ed. Philip Harth [London, 1970 (reprint of 1723 ed.)], p. 32). But the book has so many echoes of Shaftesbury—in reverse—that this seems improbable. It is unlikely that Mandeville would have failed to read a book published three years earlier which was so much discussed and praised. The editor also suggests that the Fable may be understood as a satire, “an outstanding ornament of the greatest age of English satire” (p. 43). But this is to take the book far less seriously than contemporaries did.

15. Ibid., pp. 67, 75.

16. Ibid., pp. 158, 165, 264.

17. Ibid., p. 329.

18. Ibid., p. 370.

19. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford, 1976 [reprint of 6th ed., 1790]), pp. 306, 308 (pt. VII, sect. 2, ch. 4). Many years later, Gibbon commended William Law for attacking “the licentious doctrine” that private vices are public benefits (see Harth, introduction to the Fable, p. 14).

20. See Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), especially the discussion of why children should be taught not to be cruel to animals.

21. The Life, Unpublished Letters and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Benjamin Rand (London, 1900), p. 158.

22. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning the Original of Our Ideas of Virtue or Moral Good (2nd ed., 1726), reprinted in British Moralists, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1897), I, 107.

23. Ibid., p. 118. See also Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy in Three Books (5th ed., Philadelphia, 1788 [1st ed., 1747]), pp. 12–13, 21–22. The theme reappears in his Observations on the Fable of the Bees (1726) and in An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (1728).

24. The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, ed. Timothy L. S. Sprigge (London, 1968), I, 134n., and II, 99 (letter to John Forster, April–May 1778); Smith, Moral Sentiments, p. 321 (pt. VII, sect. 3, ch. 3).

25. Hutcheson, Inquiry, pp. 86, 93, 140–43; Short Introduction, pp. 9, 12.

26. Hutcheson, Inquiry, p. 156.

27. Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy (London, 1755), I, 69–70.

28. Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (London, 1970 [1st ed., 1726]), p. 86 (sermon 5); p. 101 (sermon 6).

29. Ibid., pp. 19–20 (sermon 1). See also sermon 11.

30. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788) in The Scottish Moralists: On Human Nature and Society, ed. Louis Schneider (Chicago, 1967), p. 105.

31. Adam Ferguson, Principles of Moral and Political Science (1792), in Schneider, ed., Scottish Moralists, p. 88.

32. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (Baltimore, 1969 [1st ed., 1739–40]), p. 632 (bk. III, pt. III, sect. 1); p. 522 (bk. III, pt. I, ch. 2); p. 652 (bk. III, pt. III, ch. 3).

33. Ibid., p. 507 (bk. III, pt. 1, sect. 1); p. 522 (bk. III, pt. 1, sect. 2).

34. Ibid., p. 668 (bk. III, pt. 3, sect. 6); p. 635 (bk. III, pt. 3, sect. 1).

35. Ibid., pp. 626–27 (bk. III, pt. 3, ch. 1).

36. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (LaSalle, Ill., 1938 [reprint of 1777 ed.; 1st ed., 1751]), pp. 138–43 (appendix II, “Of Self-Love”).

37. Ibid., pp. 67, 109.

38. Smith, Moral Sentiments, p. 9 (pt. I, sect. 1, ch. 1). Smith used the words “pity,” “compassion,” and “sympathy” almost interchangeably, although he did at one point distinguish sympathy from the others (p. 10).

39. Ibid., p. 25 (pt. I, sect. 1, ch. 5).

40. Ibid., pp. 113–14 (pt. III, ch. 2).

41. Ibid., p. 62 (pt. I, sect. 3, ch. 3).

42. Smith’s distinction between “positive” and “negative” virtues was similar to Hume’s distinction between “natural” and “artificial” virtues— ethics and justice. These are not quite how the terms are used in some recent commentaries, where “virtue” is said to characterize the discourse of the civic humanists and “justice” that of Smith and Hume. See, for example, the essays by Ivan Hont and Michael Ignatieff and by J. G. A. Pocock in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Hont and Ignatieff (Cambridge, 1983). For the concept of “civic humanism,” see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975).

43. Smith, Moral Sentiments, pp. 81–82 (pt. II, sect. 2, ch. 1).

44. Ibid., p. 317 (pt. VII, sect. 3, ch. 1).

45. Ibid., p. 320 (pt. VII, sect. 3, ch. 2). It is interesting that in a brief survey of moral philosophy from the ancients to the moderns, Smith mentions Locke only once, contrasting Locke’s view of “reflection” with Hutcheson’s “moral sense,” to the advantage of Hutcheson, p. 322 (pt. VII, sect. 3, ch. 3). There is only one other passing reference to Locke in the entire book (p. 241).

46. James Gleick, Isaac Newton (New York, 2003), p. 108.

47. Ibid., p. 104.

48. Shaftesbury, “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm” (1708), in Characteristics, I, 21, 26.

49. B. W. Young, “ ‘Scepticism in Excess’: Gibbon and Eighteenth-Century Christianity,” The Historical Journal (1998), p. 181 (citing essay by John Toland published in 1720). Leslie Stephen quotes this witticism, applying it to Hume, in his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1962 [1st ed., 1876]), I, 289.

50. David Hume, “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm,” in Schneider, ed., Scottish Moralists, pp. 173–77.

51. The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, ed. John Murray (London, 1896), p. 127. (This is an edition of the six sketches left by Gibbon as the raw material for his memoirs. It varies somewhat from the Autobiography of Edward Gibbon, edited by his friend and executor, Lord Sheffield, and published in 1796; cf. note 72 below.)

52. Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of Hume (London, 1954), p. 485, quoting a letter by James Macdonald, June 6, 1764.

53. Will R. Jordan, “Religion in the Public Square: A Reconsideration of David Hume and Religious Establishment,” Review of Politics (Fall 2002), p. 693.

54. Hume, History of England, III, 134–35.

55. Mossner, Life of Hume, pp. 239–40. See also Jordan, “Religion in the Public Square”; Ingrid A. Merikoski, “A Different Kind of Enlightenment,” Religion and Liberty (November–December 2001); and Ingrid A. Merikoski, “The Challenge of Material Progress: The Scottish Enlightenment and Christian Stoicism,” Journal of the Historical Society (Winter 2002).

56. Mossner, Life of Hume, p. 110.

57. Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (London, 1900 [1st ed., 1736]), p. 5.

58. Butler, Sermons, p. 109 (sermon 11).

59. Hutcheson, Inquiry, pp. 176–77 (sect. 7, XIII).

60. Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy (New York, 1968 [reprint of 1755 ed.]), p. 313 (vol. II, bk. 3, ch. 9).

61. Smith, Moral Sentiments, p. 19 (letter to Alexander Wedderburn, Aug. 14, 1776, quoted in the editor’s introduction). Some commentators have seen a diminution of religiosity in some of the changes in the several editions of this work, e.g., pp. 91–92 (pt. II, sect. 2, ch. 3); pp. 383–87 (appendix II). I think too much has been made of these revisions.

62. Ibid., pp. 163, 166 (pt. III, ch. 5).

63. Ibid., pp. 169–70.

64. Ibid., p. 164.

65. Ibid., p. 214 (pt. VI, sect. 1).

66. Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford, 1995), pp. 339–40.

67. Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 168 n. 4.

68. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York, 1937 [1st ed., 1776]), pp. 740–46.

69. Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation (New York, 1974), p. 35 (letter 6); The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States, ed. Robert Scigliano (New York, 2001), p. 61 (Federalist 10).

70. Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 746.

71. Ibid., pp. 746–47.

72. Autobiography of Edward Gibbon (1796), ed. Lord Sheffield (Oxford, World’s Classics, 1950), p. 181 (letter from Hume to Gibbon, March 18, 1776).

73. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Chicago, 1952 [1st ed., 1776–88]), pp. 190–91, 205–6.

74. Ibid., p. 233.

75. Gibbon, Autobiography, pp. 180, 185.

76. Ross, Life of Smith, p. 285.

77. The subject has been a matter of much controversy. An excellent account is that by Young, “ ‘Scepticism in Excess,’ ” pp. 179–99.

78. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, p. 179.

79. Shaftesbury, “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm,” in Characteristics, I, 34.

80. See above, p. 40.

81. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion (Cambridge, 1999), I, 151. Pocock describes Gibbon’s response to d’Alembert’s Discours Préliminaire, in 1761, as “instantly hostile” (p. 139). But there Gibbon’s quarrel was not with d’Alembert’s religious views but with his denigration of “erudition.” (See also Pocock, pp. 67 and passim.)

82. Young, “ ‘Scepticism in Excess,’ ” p. 199.

83. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, p. 634.

84. H. R. Trevor-Roper, “The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment,” in his The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (New York, 1968), pp. 193–236 (esp. p. 203).

85. J. G. A. Pocock, “Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment,” in Culture and Politics: From Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. Perez Zagorin (Berkeley, 1980), pp. 103, 106. See also J. G. A. Pocock, “Gibbon and the Primitive Church,” in History, Religion and Culture: British Intellectual History, 1750–1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 59–60.

86. Roy Porter, “The Enlightenment in England,” in The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge, 1981), p. 6.

87. J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure, and Political Practice During the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, 1985).

88. Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent (New York, 1949 [1st French ed., 1750]), p. 321 (vol. I, bk. 20, sect. 7).

89. Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville (London, 1861), II, 397 (letter to M. de Corcelle, July 2, 1857).

2. POLITICAL ECONOMY AND MORAL SENTIMENTS

1. On this “problem,” see, for example, Richard Teichgraeber III, “Rethinking Das Adam Smith Problem,” Journal of British Studies (Spring 1981); Teichgraeber, “Adam Smith and Tradition: Wealth of Nations Before Malthus,” in his Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History, 1750–1950 (Cambridge, 2000); and the introduction to Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford, 1976 [reprint of 6th ed., 1790]), pp. 20–25 and passim. The literature on Smith has always been vast, but it has taken on a new character since the centenary celebrations of the Wealth of Nations. Much of it derives from the concept of “civic humanism” as developed by J. G. A. Pocock in The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975). For Smith’s relation to that tradition (and his departure from it), as reflected in the Wealth of Nations as well as the Theory of Moral Sentiments, see the essays by Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, Nicholas Phillipson, and Donald Winch in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983), and the essay by John Dwyer in Adam Smith Reviewed, ed. Peter Jones and Andrew S. Skinner (Edinburgh, 1992).

2. Dugald Stewart, Biographical Memoir of Adam Smith (New York, 1966 [1st ed., 1793]), pp. 67–68.

3. Ibid., p. 52.

4. Ibid., p. 87 (note G).

5. John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, in Works, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London, 1907 [1st ed., 1871–84]), XXVIII, 516, 764.

6. E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present (1971), pp. 89–90.

7. Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, ed. Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter (New York, 1974 [1st ed., 1954]), pp. 141, 182, 185.

8. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York, 1937 [1st ed., 1776]), p. 250.

9. Ibid., p. 98.

10. Ibid., pp. 128, 460–61, 463, 577, 609.

11. Ibid., p. 14.

12. Ibid., p. 651.

13. Ibid., p. 14.

14. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 184–85 n. 7. The editors point out that Smith had used the expression still earlier in his essay “The History of Astronomy,” where he said that the ancients did not see the “invisible hand of Jupiter” in such natural agencies as fire, water, or gravity. See also A. L. Macfie, “The Invisible Hand of Jupiter,” Journal of the History of Ideas (1971), pp. 595–99.

15. Wealth of Nations, p. 423. (This is the only use of the phrase in this book.)

16. Ibid., p. 11.

17. Ibid., pp. 78–79.

18. Arthur Young, The Farmer’s Tour Through the East of England (London, 1771), IV, 361.

19. Arthur Young, A Six Months’ Tour Through the North of England (London, 1770), I, 196.

20. Wealth of Nations, p. 81.

21. Ibid., p. 141.

22. Ibid., p. 683; see also pp. 777, 821.

23. Ibid., p. 11.

24. Robert Heilbroner attributes to Smith something like the Malthusian theory. So far from positing a progressive, expanding economy, Heilbroner maintains, Smith foresaw an eventual decline and decay. See Heilbroner, “The Paradox of Progress: Decline and Decay in the Wealth of Nations,” Journal of the History of Ideas (1973), p. 243, reprinted in Essays on Adam Smith, ed. Andrew S. Skinner and Thomas Wilson (Oxford, 1975). See also the reply by E. G. West, “Adam Smith and Alienation: Wealth Increases, Men Decay?” in Essays on Adam Smith. (In his earlier work, The Worldly Philosophers [New York, 1953], Heilbroner had presented the conventional “optimistic” Smith.) Alan Macfarlane, in The Riddle of the Modern World: Of Liberty, Wealth and Equality (London, 2000), describes Smith’s view as “short-term optimism and long-term pessimism” (p. 145).

25. Wealth of Nations, pp. 734–35. Similar remarks about the “inconveniences . . . arising from a commercial spirit” (i.e., the division of labor) appear in Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Oxford, 1978), pp. 539–41 (“Report of 1766”). Smith was working on the Wealth of Nations at this time, so it is not surprising to find much the same sentiments expressed here.

26. Wealth of Nations, p. 3.

27. Ibid., p. 735.

28. Ibid., p. 737.

29. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York, 1936 [1st German ed., 1867]), p. 398 (pt. IV, sect. 5).

30. Ibid., pp. 528–29, 534 (pt. IV, sect. 9).

31. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Samuel H. Beer (New York, 1955 [1st German ed., 1848]), pp. 28, 32.

32. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), pp. 101 ff.

33. At one other point, Smith compared the industrial worker with the agricultural laborer, to the advantage of the latter—the agricultural laborer having to perform many tasks in the course of the day, unlike the factory worker, who was confined to one. Here, too, the context is interesting, for the paragraph appeared in the course of his criticism of manufacturers and tradesmen who found it easy to “combine together” to further their own interests against those of the public (and of the workers), whereas farmers were too dispersed to engage in such practices (Wealth of Nations, p. 127).

34. See above, p. 59.

35. Wealth of Nations, pp. 324–25, 326.

36. Joseph Cropsey, Polity and Economy: An Interpretation of the Principles of Adam Smith (The Hague, 1957), p. 95. See also Cropsey, “Adam Smith,” in History of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago, 1987 [1st ed., 1963]).

37. Wealth of Nations, p. 385.

38. Ibid., pp. 248–49.

39. Ibid., pp. 121–22.

40. Ibid., p. 13.

41. Ibid., pp. 15–16.

42. David Hume, “Of the Original Contract,” in Hume, Political Essays (Indianapolis, 1953 [1st ed., 1741–42]), p. 44.

43. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Chicago, 1952 [1st ed., 1690]), p. 390.

44. John Morley, Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (New York, 1978), p. 338.

3. EDMUND BURKE’S ENLIGHTENMENT

1. Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (Princeton, 2001 [1st ed., 1955]), pp. 13–14. Berlin was not entirely consistent. In his essay on the Counter-Enlightenment, he described Burke’s idea of an organic society as having “strongly conservative and, indeed, reactionary implications.” Elsewhere he placed Burke in a chain of anti-Enlightenment thinkers including Hamann, Fichte, de Maistre, and Bonald, culminating in the Fascist writers of World War II. Yet in still another essay, he located Burke’s roots in Richard Hooker, Montesquieu, and Hume, who have good liberal and Enlightenment credentials (pp. 151, 185, 250, 344). I have come across only one anthology on the Enlightenment ( The Enlightenment, ed. David Williams [Cambridge, 1999]) that includes an excerpt from Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke’s The Sublime and Beautiful (1757) is occasionally excerpted or mentioned respectfully, almost invariably attributed to the young Burke in contrast to the Burke of the Reflections.

2. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Vol. I: The Enlightenment of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 7. See also p. 109: “It is important to understand that Burke spoke as a philosopher of Enlightenment, not of Counter-Enlightenment.”

3. Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (Chicago, 1992), pp. 608, 595 n. 1. The appendix has extracts from O’Brien’s review of Berlin’s The Crooked Timber of Humanity (1991) and an exchange of letters with Berlin on the subject of Burke (pp. 605–18). Jerry Z. Muller, in The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought (New York, 2002), implicitly places Burke within the Enlightenment (pp. 104–38).

4. Autobiography of Edward Gibbon (1796), ed. Lord Sheffield (Oxford, World’s Classics, 1950), p. 216.

5. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York, 1983), p. 66. The quotation first appeared in a biography of Burke by Robert Bisset in 1800.

6. Burke, “Letter to a Noble Lord” (1796), in The Works of Edmund Burke (London, 1909), V, 124. Although one editor has Smith consulting Burke and paying “great deference” to him while he was writing the Wealth of Nations, they did not, in fact, meet until 1777, and their only communication before that, in 1775, was on a trivial matter. See Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, pp. 275–76 nn. 77 and 81.

7. Burke, “Speech . . . on the Economical Reformation of the Civil and Other Establishments” (Feb. 11, 1780), in Works, II, 109–10.

8. Burke, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, in Works, V, 83–109. (The pamphlet was written and circulated in 1795 but published only posthumously.) See also Letters on a Regicide Peace (third letter, 1797), in Works, V, 321–22. In my Idea of Poverty (pp. 61–73), I overemphasized, I now believe, the differences between Burke and Smith. I said that Smith opposed the law of settlement but not the Poor Laws themselves, whereas Burke rejected the very principle of the Poor Laws. In this essay, however, Burke was discussing not the Poor Laws as such but the regulation and supplementation of wages. On this issue the two were in substantial agreement.

9. Donald Winch alludes to this “Problem” (a “mésalliance,” he calls it) in Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 128 and passim. Winch himself does not think that the inconsistencies, either in Smith or in Burke, are significant. Nor does he think that the differences between Smith and Burke are great: “Those who stress the connections between Smith and Burke are on safer ground than those who wish to emphasize the ‘liberal,’ radical, or pro-revolutionary affiliations of some of Smith’s English and French admirers” (p. 175). A more ingenious resolution of this “problem” is that of C. B. Macpherson, who regards Burke as essentially laissez-fairist. If he posed as a “traditionalist,” it was because by his time “the capitalist order had in fact been the traditional order in England for a whole century” (italics in original). And when Burke attacked the French Revolution, it was because he did not realize that it was a “bourgeois revolution” (Macpherson, Burke [New York, 1980], pp. 51 ff.).

10. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York, 1961 [1st ed., 1790]), pp. 92, 89.

11. Ibid., p. 93.

12. Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, in Works, I, 52.

13. Ibid., 52, 56.

14. Burke, Reflections, pp. 93–94, 70.

15. Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society: or, a View of the Miseries and Evils Arising to Mankind from Every Species of Artificial Society, in Works, I, 3–5.

16. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, in Works, I, 127.

17. Ibid., 79.

18. Burke, review of The Theory of Moral Sentiments in the Annual Register (1759), in On Moral Sentiments: Contemporary Responses to Adam Smith, ed. John Reeder (Bristol, 1997), p. 52.

19. Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (April 1770), in Works, I, 351, 354. In private letters, Burke doubted whether Wilkes was a man of prudence or principles. See J. C. D. Clark, “Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in America (1777); or, How Did the American Revolution Relate to the French?” in Faith, Reason, and Economics: Essays in Honour of Anthony Waterman, ed. Derek Hum (Winnipeg, Canada, 2003), pp. 36 and 45 n. 95.

20. Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, in Works, I, 368–69.

21. Ibid., 310.

22. Burke, “Speech on Mr. Fox’s East India Bill” (1783), in Works, II, 176.

23. Ibid., 195, 226.

24. John Morley, Burke (London, 1904), p. 134. Burke’s attention was first drawn to India many years earlier by the disastrous financial speculations of his brothers in East India stock. But his subsequent concern with this issue went well beyond that personal episode (he himself had no stake in those failed investments), and his actual views of the Indian situation were very different from those of his brothers. On this last point, see Stanley Ayling, Edmund Burke: His Life and Opinions (New York, 1988), pp. 167–68.

25. A very different interpretation of Burke on the American Revolution appears in the essay by J. C. D. Clark (see note 19 above). In an ingenious (and, of course, fictitious) “Reflections on the Revolution in America,” Clark has Burke applying to America the principles he enunciated in connection with France. Clark minimizes Burke’s interest in America and criticizes him for not realizing that the American Revolution was as profoundly revolutionary as the French. My own view is the conventional one, that the American Revolution was fundamentally, qualitatively different from the French, and that Burke recognized it as such.

26. Burke, “Observations on a Late Publication Entitled ‘The Present State of the Nation’ ” (February 1769), in Works, I, 277, 280.

27. Burke, “Speech on Moving his Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies” (March 22, 1775), in Works, I, 456, 462.

28. Ibid., 464–69.

29. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York, 1937 [1st ed., 1776]), pp. 586–87.

30. Winch, Riches and Poverty, pp. 142–43.

31. Burke, “Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on the Affairs of America” (April 3, 1777), in Works, II, 30–31 (italics in original).

32. Burke, “Speech on Conciliation,” in Works, I, 466. Roy Porter says that Burke “jeered” at the “dissidence of dissent” (Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment [New York, 2000], p. 480). I think this is a misinterpretation of this passage.

33. Letters of Edmund Burke: A Selection, ed. Harold J. Laski (Oxford, 1922), p. 195 (letter to William Burgh, Feb. 9, 1775).

34. Burke, Reflections, p. 266.

35. Burke, “Speech on Conciliation,” in Works, I, 456.

36. Burke, Reflections, p. 19.

37. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London, 1939 [1st ed., 1817]), p. 97.

38. Burke, Reflections, pp. 15, 28, 39.

39. Ibid., pp. 36, 44–45.

40. Ibid., pp. 43, 47, 50.

41. Ibid., p. 62. See Harvey Mansfield, Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke (Chicago, 1965), pp. 201 ff.

42. Burke, Reflections, p. 100.

43. Ibid., p. 174.

44. Ibid., p. 104.

45. Ibid., p. 115.

46. Ibid., p. 105.

47. I have been one of those who made this charge, and have since rebutted it. See the two essays on Burke in my Victorian Minds (New York, 1968), pp. 4–31.

48. Burke, Reflections, p. 106.

49. Ibid., p. 110.

50. Ibid., p. 89.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid., p. 90.

53. Ibid.

54. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (New York, Dolphin ed., 1961 [1st ed., 1791–92]), p. 288.

55. Burke, Reflections, p. 92; Conor Cruise O’Brien, ed., Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1968), pp. 173, 385 n. 66.

56. Burke, Reflections, p. 68.

57. Ibid., pp. 50–51.

58. Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), in Works, V, 210–11.

59. Burke, Reflections, pp. 93, 95.

60. J. G. A. Pocock, ed., Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis, 1987), p. xxxvii. Elsewhere Pocock places Burke in the Enlightenment tradition. Here he makes of him a counsel and prophet for our times. In yet another book, however, Pocock describes Burke’s Letters on a Regicide Peace as “that wild jeremiad of a mind at the end of its tether” (Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century [Cambridge, 1985], p. 205).

4. RADICAL DISSENTERS

1. Richard Price, A Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals (1757); Joseph Priestley, Examination of Scottish Philosophy (1774).

2. See Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism, trans. Mary Morris (Clifton, N.J., 1972 [1st French ed., 1901–4]), pp. 153, 178, 251.

3. Roy Porter applies this term to Price and William Frend (an actuarian) (The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment [New York, 2000], p. 208).

4. Edmund Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), in The Works of Edmund Burke (London, 1909), I, 3.

5. J. C. D. Clark makes a large point of this in his English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice During the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 277 ff.

6. Clark stresses the Arian aspect of Price’s thought (ibid., p. 330); Donald Winch the Lockean aspect. See Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 145–46.

7. Joseph Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles of Government and on the Nature of Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty (1768) and The Present State of Liberty in Great Britain and Her Colonies (1768), in Political Writings, ed. Peter N. Miller (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 32, 134, and passim.

8. Burke, “Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol” (1777), in Works, II, 29–30. (Donald Winch calls attention to this passage in Riches and Poverty, pp. 145–46.)

9. Richard Price, “A Discourse on the Love of Our Country,” in The Debate on the French Revolution, 1789–1800, ed. Alfred Cobban (London, 1950), pp. 63–64. It is odd that Burke should have quoted a previous paragraph of the peroration, but not this final incendiary passage. See Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York, Dolphin ed., 1961), p. 78.

10. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford, 1976 [reprint of 6th ed., 1790]), p. 318 (pt. VII, sect. 3, ch. 2); p. 229 (pt. VI, sect. 3, ch. 2).

11. Ibid., p. 229 n. 2.

12. Quoted by Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (New York, 1977), p. 14.

13. Priestley, Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768), in Political Writings, p. 51.

14. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (New York, 1992 [reprint of 1791 ed.]), p. 5.

15. Ibid.

16. Paine, The Rights of Man (New York, Dolphin ed., 1961 [1st ed., 1791–92]), p. 400. (This edition, like many others, gives the title, incorrectly, as The Rights of Man. The common article was added to an edition in 1817, eight years after Paine’s death.)

17. Ibid., p. 433.

18. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York, 1937 [1st ed., 1776]), pp. 669, 681.

19. Paine, Rights of Man, pp. 418, 429, 315.

20. Ibid., p. 304.

21. Ibid., pp. 400–401.

22. Ibid., p. 448.

23. Ibid., p. 480.

24. Ibid., p. 482.

25. On the “welfare state,” see, for example, Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York, 1976), p. 218, and Francis Canavan, “The Burke-Paine Controversy,” Political Science Reviewer (1976), p. 403; on “social security,” Henry Collins, introduction to Paine, Rights of Man (London, Penguin ed., 1969), p. 37; and on “social democracy,” S. Maccoby, English Radicalism, 1786–1832 (London, 1955), p. 53. E. P. Thompson hails Rights of Man as the “foundation-text of the English working-class movement,” setting “a course towards the social legislation of the twentieth century” (The Making of the English Working Class [New York, 1964], pp. 90, 94).

26. Collins, introduction to Penguin ed. of Rights of Man, p. 43. Collins concedes that Paine never crossed that threshold, but this implies that any redistribution scheme approaches the “threshold of socialism.” On Rights of Man compared with Agrarian Justice Opposed to Agrarian Law and to Agrarian Monopoly (1797), see Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York, 1983), pp. 86–99.

27. Paine, Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology (New York, 1975 [1st ed., 1794–95]), pp. 5–6.

28. For a serious discussion of the millenarian views of Price and Priestley, see Jack Fruchtman, Jr., The Apocalyptic Politics of Richard Price and Joseph Priestley: A Study in Late Eighteenth-Century English Republican Messianism (Philadelphia, 1983), and Iaian McCalman, “New Jerusalems: Prophecy, Dissent and Radical Culture in England, 1786–1830,” in Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, 1996). Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (Oxford, 1976), recognizes the millenarianism of Price and Priestley but does not dwell on it in any detail.

29. Cited by Alan Tapper, “Priestley on Politics, Progress and Moral Theology,” in Haakonssen, ed., Enlightenment and Religion, p. 272.

30. See Fruchtman, Apocalyptic Politics, p. 1.

31. Ibid., p. 35.

32. See Clark, English Society, 1688–1832, pp. 333, 335.

33. Ibid., p. 335.

34. Porter, Creation of the Modern World, p. 414.

35. Fruchtman, Apocalyptic Politics, p. 42.

36. William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (London, 1793), I, 237. (In the second edition, General Virtue in the title was changed to Morals.)

37. Halévy spoke of Godwin as a disciple of Smith, quoting passages suggesting that he shared Smith’s view of the “identity of interests” (Philosophic Radicalism, pp. 209–12). Yet Godwin rejected the very idea of interests.

38. Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, II, 846–47.

39. Ibid., I, 163.

40. Ibid., 83.

41. Ibid., II, 862–71.

42. Ibid., I, 1–2.

43. Ibid., II, 870–72.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid., I, 43.

46. Ibid. (3rd ed., 1798), II, 510.

47. Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), p. 149.

48. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge, 1995), p. xxvi.

49. Quoted in Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven, 1984), p. 324.

50. Ibid., p. 359.

51. Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, trans. J. Barraclough (New York, 1955), pp. 188–89.

52. C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries (London, 1876), I, 80.

53. Price, Review of the Principal Questions in Morals (New York, 1974 [reprint of 3rd ed.]), p. 121.

54. Godwin, Political Justice (1st ed.), II, 738–39; (3rd ed.), II, 366–69.

55. See M. G. Jones, The Charity School Movement: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Puritanism in Action (Cambridge, 1938), p. 3. See chapter 6 below on philanthropy).

5. METHODISM: “A SOCIAL RELIGION”

1. Most writers on the Enlightenment simply ignore the Methodists. Frank E. Manuel, for example, in The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (New York, 1959), makes no mention of them—as if they were not doing just that, confronting the gods (or rather, God). Other writers explicitly write them out of the Enlightenment. See, for example, Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World (New York, 2000), pp. 128, 224–25, 409, and J. G. A. Pocock, “Conservative Enlightenment and Democratic Revolutions: The American and French Cases in British Perspective,” in Government in Opposition (1989).

2. Quoted in Stuart Andrews, Methodism and Society (London, 1970), p. 64. Today, the label “Methodist” is often applied to those who left the Church of England after John Wesley’s death, as distinct from the Evangelicals who remained in the church. In fact, the word was used of the Wesleyans from the beginning—indeed, from before the beginning—to describe the religious society in Oxford frequented by the Wesley brothers and George Whitefield several years before the revival itself.

3. Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought (New York, 1962 [1st ed., 1876]), II, 361, 364.

4. W. E. H. Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (London, 1946 [1st ed., 1865]), p. 3; Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1891), II, 687.

5. Elie Halévy, The Birth of Methodism in England, ed. and trans. by Bernard Semmel (Chicago, 1971 [French ed., 1906]), p. 51. Semmel points out that Halévy did not claim that this theory was original with him. He certainly knew of Hippolyte Taine’s History of English Literature, published in 1874, which propounded a similar thesis (Taine was a friend of the family), and of W. E. H. Lecky’s History of England in the Eighteenth Century, published a few years later. (See Semmel, introduction to Birth of Methodism, pp. 12–18.)

6. J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1950), p. 90. See also A. R. Humphreys: “There are few greater Englishmen than John Wesley, and to compress his achievement into a paragraph is like trying to see the world in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour” (The Augustan World: Society, Thought, and Letters in Eighteenth-Century England [New York, 1963 (1st ed., 1954)], p. 145).

7. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 95–96.

8. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1964), pp. 738, 368 (italics in the original).

9. Ibid., pp. 355, 41, and passim.

10. The Halévy thesis is still being debated. See, for example, Gerald W. Olsen, ed., Religion and Revolution in Early-Industrial England: The Halévy Thesis and Its Critics (Lanham, Md., 1990).

11. Bernard Semmel, The Methodist Revolution (New York, 1973), pp. 87 and passim. See also Gertrude Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds (New York, 1968), pp. 292–99; D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London, 1989), p. 52; and Frederick Dreyer, “Faith and Experience in the Thought of John Wesley,” American Historical Review (1983), pp. 29 and passim.

12. Semmel, Methodist Revolution, pp. 88–90.

13. Porter, Creation of the Modern World, p. 96.

14. Dreyer, “Faith and Experience in the Thought of John Wesley,” p. 26. Dreyer sees Wesley’s “spiritual sense” as a “theological counterpart” to Hutcheson’s “moral sense.”

15. J. D. Walsh, “Elie Halévy and the Birth of Methodism,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1975), pp. 14–15.

16. Robert Wearmouth, Methodism and the Common People of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1945), p. 229.

17. M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1965 [1st ed., 1925]), p. 12. See also W. J. Warner, The Wesleyan Movement in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1930), p. 163.

18. John Wesley, Works (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1872), VI, 126–36.

19. Semmel minimizes this tension, finding Wesley essentially in accord with the “individualistic, entrepreneurial mood of a commercial England.” Upon all the critical economic issues, Semmel says, Wesley agreed with Smith (Semmel, Methodist Revolution, p. 75).

20. Quoted by Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Chicago, n.d. [1st ed., 1904–5]), p. 175.

21. Semmel, Methodist Revolution, p. 74.

22. Andrews, Methodism and Society, p. 37.

23. Wearmouth, Methodism and the Common People, pp. 207–8.

24. Semmel, Methodist Revolution, pp. 95–96, quoting Wesley, Thoughts Upon Slavery (1774) and Letters (Feb. 24, 1791).

25. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, pp. 377–78. (The expression “religious terrorism” comes from Lecky.) See also Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century, p. 96.

26. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 65–66.

27. Andrews, Methodism and Society, p. 53.

28. Ibid., p. 55.

29. James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (Chicago, 1952), p. 373 (entry dated 1778).

30. Dreyer, “Faith and Experience,” p. 21.

31. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, p. 52 .

32. Semmel, Methodist Revolution, p. 90.

33. J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, 1985), p. 235.

34. Andrews, Methodism and Society, p. 46; Semmel, Methodist Revolution, p. 56.

35. Quoted in Roy Hattersley, The Life of John Wesley: A Brand from the Burning (New York, 2003), p. 207.

36. Andrews, Methodism and Society, p. 44.

37. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, p. 26.

38. The term “political theology” is Clark’s (English Society, 1688– 1832, pp. 216 ff).

39. Andrews, Methodism and Society, p. 52 (Feb. 24, 1791).

40. Semmel, Methodist Revolution, p. 193.

41. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York, 1937 [1st ed., 1776]), p. 741.

42. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, p. 21. The membership figures are for 1767, the first year such statistics were available. See also Gordon Rupp, Religion in England, 1688–1791 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 372, 449.

6. “THE AGE OF BENEVOLENCE”

1. M. G. Jones, The Charity School Movement: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Puritanism in Action (Cambridge, 1938), p. 3; M. Dorothy George, England in Transition: Life and Work in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1931), p. 65. (Hannah More made that statement in 1788.)

2. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. Philip Harth (London, 1970 [reprint of 1723 ed.]), p. 329.

3. George, England in Transition, pp. 73–74.

4. A. R. Humphreys, The Augustan World: Society, Thought, and Letters in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1963), p. 201, quoting Fielding, February 1740.

5. William Maitland, The History of London from Its Foundations by the Romans to the Present Time (London, 1739), pp. 635, 800.

6. William Maitland, The History and Survey of London (London, 1756), II, 764.

7. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago, 2000 [1st French ed., 1835, 1840]), pp. 183, 489–90.

8. See the lists of societies and institutions in Ford K. Brown, Father of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 329–34. See also the identification in reference books of so many public figures as “philanthropist.”

9. Edmund Burke, “Speech at the Guildhall in Bristol,” in The Works of Edmund Burke (London, 1911), II, 142.

10. M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1965), p. 26, and appendix, p. 406.

11. Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York, 2000), pp. 207–8.

12. Eveline Cruikshanks, Hogarth’s England (London, 1957), p. 55.

13. Frederick Antal, Hogarth and His Place in European Art (New York, 1962), p. 10.

14. Cruikshanks, Hogarth’s England, p. 58.

15. Antal, Hogarth and His Place in European Art, p. 10.

16. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500– 1800 (New York, 1977), p. 238.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid. Almost in passing, Stone noted that “conformity to this new ideal positively reinforced the legitimacy of the ruling class.” But this disparaging note did not detract from his judgment that “the movement was a genuinely moral one,” affecting attitudes toward both animals and human beings.

19. See, for example, G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensiblity: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992), and John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1988). Barker-Benfield emphasizes the relationship of the culture of sensibility to women, characterizing humanitarian attitudes to animals, for example, as “a kind of surrogate feminism” (p. 236).

20. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, p. 69.

21. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Indianapolis, 2002 [reprint of 6th ed., 1737–38; 1st ed., 1711]), I, 84, 88, 91, 121; III, 238–39.

22. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil, in British Moralists, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1897), I, 148.

23. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford, 1976 [reprint of 6th ed., 1790]), pp. 9, 185. See also p. 179.

24. Peter Gay, for example, admits Burke into his work on the Enlightenment only on the basis of this book (Gay, The Enlightenment:An Interpretation [New York, 1969], pp. 303 ff). The book was even more youthful than is generally supposed. Published in 1757, when Burke was twenty-eight, it was written almost ten years earlier, and was the subject of a talk by him before a club he had formed at Trinity College, Dublin.

25. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), in Works, I, 90.

26. Ibid, pp. 52, 79–80.

27. Quoted in Porter, Creation of the Modern World, p. 284.

28. Humphreys, The Augustan World, p. 202, quoting Johnson in the Idler, May 6, 1758.

29. David Owen, English Philanthropy, 1660–1960 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 68. It is curious that this is the only mention of Wesley in Owen’s book, in spite of his substantial contributions to the philanthropic movement—and in spite of Owen’s sympathetic view of him as one of the “humane and informed observers of the eighteenth-century world.” One other passing reference includes the Wesleyans among those active in the anti-slavery movement (p. 129).

30. Eric Midwinter, Nineteenth-Century Education (London, 1970), p. 19. See also Gordon Rupp, Religion in England, 1688–1791 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 300 ff.

31. Thomas A. Horne, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville: Virtue and Commerce in Early Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1978), p. 16.

32. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, pp. 276–78, 295.

33. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 308. (See chapter 1 on moral philosophy, p. 31).

34. Thomas Walter Laqueur, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working-Class Culture, 1780–1850 (New Haven, 1976), p. xi.

35. Ibid., p. 35.

36. Ibid., p. 130. Laqueur attributes the book to Sir Thomas Eden (p. 97), but this is evidently a typo.

37. Ibid., pp. xi, 9.

38. David G. Green, Reinventing Civil Society: The Rediscovery of Welfare Without Politics (London, 1993), pp. 30 ff.

39. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 231 (pt. VI, sect. 3, ch. 2).

40. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (Chicago, 1952 [Encyclopedia Britannica ed.]), p. 182.

41. Ibid., p. 363.

42. See above, p. 117.

43. Elie Halévy, The Birth of Methodism in England, trans. Bernard Semmel (Chicago, 1971 [French ed., 1906]), p. 66. See also p. 37: “They [the Methodists] regenerated the Church of England. . . . They even had an effect on free thinkers, who subsequently refrained from criticizing Christian doctrine in order to devote themselves to political economy and philanthropy. Utilitarians and evangelicals agreed to work together for commercial freedom, the abolition of slavery, and the reform of criminal law and prison organization.”

44. Owen, English Philanthropy, 1660–1960, p. 93.

45. Dorothy Marshall, Dr. Johnson’s London (London, 1926), p. 227; George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848 (New York, 1964), p. 37.

46. Owen, English Philanthropy, 1660–1960, p. 15.

47. See, for example, Gordon Rupp: “Their motives ranged from local patriotism and self-advertisement to human pity and Christian conviction” (Religion in England, 1688–1791, p. 311). Or Dorothy Marshall: “The benevolence of eighteenth-century London was not the less genuine because it expressed itself in language that strikes a discordant note to modern ears” (Dr. Johnson’s London, p. 283).

48. Porter, Creation of the Modern World, p. 19.

49. Diderot, “Encyclopedia,” in Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works, trans. and ed. Jacques Barzun and Ralph H. Bowen (New York, 1956), p. 304.

THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT: THE IDEOLOGY OF REASON

1. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York, 1955 [1st French ed., 1856]), pp. 145–46. This statement has been disputed by, for example, Peter Gay, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist (Princeton, 1959), pp. 7–10, and by Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 20–21 and passim. Some of the philosophes—Montesquieu, Mably, Voltaire, Turgot, Helvétius— did engage in public affairs as magistrates, tax farmers, or on occasional diplomatic missions. Except for Turgot, however, they had only transient and peripheral relationships to political affairs. On this issue, see also Norman Hampson, “The Enlightenment in France,” in The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 45–46.

2. Jean le Rond d’Alembert, “Preliminary Discourse,” in Denis Diderot’s The Encyclopedia: Selections, ed. and trans. Stephen J. Gendzier (New York, 1967), p. 12.(I have used published translations of the articles from the Encyclopédie when available and satisfactory. Citations to the Encyclopédie itself are my own translations. It is awkward to use multiple sources, but the alternative, to cite only the original, would deprive the reader of accessible translations.)

3. Diderot, “Encyclopedia,” in Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works, trans. and ed. Jacques Barzun and Ralph H. Bowen (New York, 1956), p. 291.

4. The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States, ed. Robert Scigliano (New York, 2000), p. 561 (Federalist 85).

5. John Lough, “Reflections on Enlightenment and Lumières, ” British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies (Spring 1985), p. 13.

6. Diderot, “Encyclopedia,” in Rameau’s Nephew, pp. 312–13.

7. Diderot, “Philosophe,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Paris, 1751–52), XII, 510.

8. Ibid., p. 509.

9. Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, p. 6. According to Tocqueville, the church was attacked “less as a religious faith than as a political institution.” I think the evidence points to an animus against religion itself as the rival and enemy of reason.

10. Diderot, “Raison,” in Encyclopédie, XIII, 773–74.

11. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Vol. I: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York, 1966), p. 391.

12. Ibid. While documenting this “obsession,” Gay sympathetically comments: “And so Voltaire assailed intolerance in the name of tolerance, cruelty in the name of kindness, superstition in the name of science, revealed religion in the name of rational worship, a cruel God in the name of a beneficent God” (p. 392).

13. Diderot, “Encyclopedia,” in Rameau’s Nephew, p. 304. In the preface to The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu wrote: “It is not a matter of indifference that the minds of the people be enlightened” (The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent, ed. Franz Neumann [New York, 1949], I, lxviii). But it is not clear what he meant here by either “the people” or “enlightened.”

14. “Multitude,” in Encyclopédie, X, 860.

15. See John Morley, Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (New York, 1978), p. 338. Diderot’s last work, Réfutation d’Helvétius, written about 1773, was published posthumously.

16. Gay, The Enlightenment, Vol. II: The Science of Freedom (New York, 1969), p. 521.

17. Maurice Cranston, Philosophers and Pamphleteers: Political Theorists of the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1986), p. 44. Gay, Voltaire’s Politics (p. 265), quotes part of this but says Voltaire has been misinterpreted.

18. Voltaire, “Atheism,” in his Philosophical Dictionary (New York, 1943), pp. 34, 43.

19. Ronald I. Boss, “The Development of Social Religion: A Contradiction of French Free Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas (October– December 1973), p. 583, quoting Voltaire, Histoire de Jenni.

20. Ibid., p. 577.

21. See above, p. 154.

22. See, for example, Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (New York, 1964), pp. 103–8, and Voltaire’s Politics, where the subject is relegated to an appendix (pp. 351–54). In Gay’s two-volume Enlightenment, it is mentioned only in a note (II, 38 n. 7).

23. Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews (New York, 1968), p. 303, quoting Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs.

24. Ibid., pp. 300–301 and passim. See also Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2003). On anti-Semitism in the Revolution, see Shanti Marie Singham, “Betwixt Cattle and Men: Jews, Blacks, and Women, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man,” in Singham’s The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of the Rights of 1789 (Stanford, Calif., 1994), pp. 114–53.

25. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York, Dolphin ed., 1961 [1st ed., 1790]), pp. 60–61, 67, 97–98.

26. David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 (4 vols., Philadelphia, 1828), I, 377.

27. John Lough concludes, from his comprehensive study of the French Enlightenment, that “the search for the views of the philosophes on the future government of France brings very little reward” ( The Philosophes and Post-Revolutionary France [Oxford, 1982], p. 42).

28. Diderot, “Political Authority,” in Encyclopedia, ed. Gendzier, p. 185.

29. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, p. 293 (bk. XIX, sect. 4).

30. A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), p. 729.

31. Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, 2001), p. 145.

32. Rousseau, Emile (1762), trans. Allan Bloom (New York, 1979), p. 458.

33. Robert Anchor, The Enlightenment Tradition (New York, 1967), p. 49; Berlin, Against the Current, p. 145.

34. Gay, Voltaire’s Politics, pp. 29, 185.

35. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, p. xxvii.

36. Gay, Voltaire’s Politics, p. 147.

37. Geoffrey Bruun, The Enlightened Despots (2nd ed., New York, 1967), p. 38.

38. Gay, Voltaire’s Politics, p. 177, quoting Voltaire’s Commentary on the Spirit of the Laws.

39. Leonard Krieger, An Essay on the Theory of Enlightened Despotism (Chicago, 1975), p. 86.

40. Lough, The Philosophes and Post-Revolutionary France, pp. 16–17.

41. Saint-Lambert, “Legislator,” in Encyclopedia, ed. Gendzier, p. 160.

42. Krieger, Essay on the Theory of Enlightened Despotism, p. 42.

43. Ibid., p. 99 n. 43.

44. Isaiah Berlin, “The Art of Being Ruled,” Times Literary Supplement, Feb. 15, 2002, p. 15.

45. Quoted in Bruun, Enlightened Despots, p. 32.

46. Ibid., p. 36.

47. Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), p. 54.

48. Walter Bagehot, “Adam Smith as a Person,” Collected Works, ed. Norman St John-Stevas (Cambridge, Mass, 1968), III, 104.

49. Diderot, “Droit Naturel,” in Encyclopédie, V, 116.

50. Ibid.

51. Gay, The Enlightenment, II, 435.

52. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, I, 183 ff. (bk XII).

53. See pp. 167–68 above.

54. “Misère,” in Encyclopédie, X, 575.

55. D’Holbach, Universal Morality, in The Age of Enlightenment, ed. Lester G. Crocker (New York, 1969), pp. 66–68.

56. Lamettrie, “Discourse on Happiness,” ibid., p. 145.

57. Alan Charles Kors, D’Holbach’s Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris (Princeton, 1976), p. 323, quoting Helvétius’s De l’esprit.

58. Gay, Voltaire’s Politics, pp. 221–22. (On Diderot’s remark to Voltaire, see p. 155 above.) Gay says that although Voltaire’s views on the canaille moderated in the course of time, he never lost his “distrust of the masses” and continued to identify “the masses with passion, the educated classes with reason” (p. 226).

59. “Compassion,” in Encyclopédie, III, 760–61.

60. “Bienfaisance,” ibid., II, 888.

61. Allan Bloom gives Rousseau’s idea of compassion a prominent place in the introduction to his translation of Emile, pp. 17–18. See also Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York, 1963), pp. 54 and passim; Judith N. Shklar, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Equality,” Daedalus (Summer 1978), p. 13; and Clifford Orwin, “Compassion,” American Scholar (Summer 1980), p. 319. Orwin, in a paper delivered at the 1977 meeting of the American Political Science Association, said that Smith was indebted for the idea of compassion to Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1755), which he reviewed in July 1755, three years before The Theory of Moral Sentiments was published. By the same token, one could argue that Rousseau’s Emile was indebted to Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, published three years earlier. More significant than the issue of priority is the fact that compassion (or “sympathy,” as Smith more often called it) plays a much larger role in The Theory of Moral Sentiments than in either the Discourse or Emile.

62. Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses (1755), trans. Victor Gourevitch (New York, 1986), pp. 162, 184–85. See also Rousseau’s note, p. 226.

63. Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 67. Winch observes that Smith was one of the first to notice the fundamental affinities between Rousseau and Mandeville, so that Smith’s refutation of Mandeville in The Theory of Moral Sentiments was also a refutation of Rousseau (p. 60). Joseph Cropsey, on the other hand, emphasizes the similarity of the Discourse and The Theory of Moral Sentiments (“Adam Smith and Political Philosophy,” in Essays on Adam Smith, ed. Andrew S. Skinner and Thomas Wilson [Oxford, 1975], p. 136 n. 4).

64. Rousseau, Emile, p. 235n.

65. Ibid., p. 250.

66. Ibid., p. 253.

67. Ibid., pp. 40, 52.

68. Rousseau, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, in Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Paris, Pléiade ed., 1959), II, 567 (letter 3).

69. Rousseau, “Political Economy,” in Encyclopedia, ed. Gendzier, p. 195.

70. Rousseau, “Considerations on the Government of Poland” (1772) in Age of Enlightenment, ed. Crocker, p. 242.

71. “Ecole,” in Encyclopédie, V, 303.

72. “Education,” ibid., V, 397.

73. “Legislator,” in Encyclopedia, ed. Gendzier, pp. 161–62.

74. Lough, The Philosophes and Post-Revolutionary France, p. 250.

75. Gay, Voltaire’s Politics, pp. 221–22.

76. Diderot, “Observations on the Instruction of the Empress of Russia to the Deputies for the Making of the Laws,” in Diderot, Political Writings, ed. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (Cambridge, 1992), p. 141. Diderot began to write the “Observations” after his return from Russia in 1774 and worked on it for several years after that. After his death in 1784, it was sent to Catherine, together with other material from his library. It was first published in 1920.

77. See p. 154 above.

78. Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), p. 432.

79. Ibid., p. 428. The figures were higher in the North of France than in the South, and considerably higher in Paris (pp. 428, 659). Another estimate has literacy rising from 25 percent in 1686–90 to 40–45 percent in 1786–90 (Carlo M. Cipolla, Literacy and Development in the West [London, 1969], p. 62). Neither of these figures supports Simon Schama’s extraordinary statement that “literacy rates in late eighteenth-century France were much higher than in the late twentieth-century United States” (Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution [New York, 1989], p. 180). Today, of course, literacy is no longer defined as merely signing one’s name.

80. Alan Charles Kors, “Just and Arbitrary Authority in Enlightenment Thought,” in Modern Enlightenment and the Rule of Reason, ed. John C. McCarthy (Washington, D.C., 1998), p. 25.

81. Diderot, “Indigent,” in Encyclopédie, VIII, 676.

82. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism, trans. Seymour Drescher, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (Chicago, 1997).

83. Turgot, “Fondations,” in Encyclopédie, VII, 75.

84. Diderot, “Hôpital,” ibid., VIII, 294.

85. Jaucourt, “Mendiant,” ibid., X, 331.

86. Jaucourt, “Le Peuple,” ibid., XII, 476.

87. Lough, The Philosophes and Post-Revolutionary France, p. 127.

88. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, II, 25–26. The beginning of this passage, but not the later sentences, is quoted by Norman Hampson, Will and Circumstance: Montesquieu, Rousseau and the French Revolution (Norman, Okla., 1983), p. 22.

89. Jaucourt, “Philantropie,” in Encyclopédie, XII, 504.

90. Bruun, Enlightened Despots, p. 102.

91. For the Encyclopedists during the Revolution, see the monumental work by Frank A. Kafker, The Encyclopedists as a Group: A Collective Biography of the Authors of the Encyclopédie (Oxford, 1996), and, with Serena L. Kafker, The Encyclopedists as Individuals: A Biographical Dictionary of the Authors of the Encyclopédie (Oxford, 1988). See also Kors, D’Holbach’s Coterie.

92. See, for example, Alan Forrest, The French Revolution and the Poor (New York, 1981), pp. 169 ff. Some historians have made much of these measures, describing them as forerunners of the welfare state, but even they admit that they failed. See, for example, George Rudé, Robespierre: Portrait of a Revolutionary Democrat (New York, 1975), p. 140, and Colin Jones, Charity and Bienfaisance: The Treatment of the Poor in the Montpelier Region, 1740–1815 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 8, 159ff., 184 ff.

93. Emmanuel Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? (New York, 1979 [1st French ed., 1789]), p. 10.

94. François Furet, “Rousseau and the French Revolution,” in The Legacy of Rousseau, ed. Clifford Orwin and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago, 1997), p. 181. See also James Miller, Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (New Haven, 1984), pp. 132 ff.

95. Hampson, “The Enlightenment in France,” in Porter and Teich, eds., Enlightenment in National Context, p. 49.

96. Robespierre, Lettres à ses commettans (Paris, 1792), II, 55; Ernest Hamel, Histoire de Robespierre (Paris, 1865), I, 427–28; F. A. Aulard, ed., La Soci té des Jacobins (Paris, 1891), V, 254.

97. Rousseau, “Political Economy,” in Encyclopedia, ed. Gendzier, p. 191.

98. Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. G. D. H. Cole (Chicago, Great Books ed., 1952), p. 439 (bk. IV, ch. 8).

99. Ibid., p. 400 (bk. II, ch. 7).

100. Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur (Paris, 1858), XVII, 135 (session of July 13, 1793); ibid., XVI, 748 (session of June 25, 1793).

101. Tocqueville, The Old Regime, pp. 12–13, 156.

102. Mona Ozouf, “Regeneration,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. Furet and Ozouf, p. 781. “Regeneration” is also described as the aim of education (p. 785). Another article in the same volume, “Enlightenment” by Bronislaw Baczko, ascribes to the Enlightenment in general the idea of “national regeneration”: the belief that institutions and men are “endlessly malleable,” and that the “transformative potential” of politics is unlimited (pp. 664, 661).

103. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York, 1963), pp. 54–55, 66, 69–70.

104. Maurice Cranston, The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity (Chicago, 1997), p. 189.

THE AMERICAN ENLIGHTENMENT: THE POLITICS OF LIBERTY

1. The American Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free Society, ed. Adrienne Koch (New York, 1965), p. 191 ( John Adams to Count Sarsfield, Feb. 3, 1786). For Adams, that vision was sharpened by contrast with Britain where he was then serving as ambassador.

2. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, 1969). Hannah Arendt, for whom the “social question” was the defining issue in the French Revolution, distinguished between political “liberation” and social “freedom.” But she then blurred the distinction by speaking of “political freedom” (On Revolution [New York, 1963], p. 22). Geoffrey Nunberg restated this distinction in “Freedom vs. Liberty: More Than Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose,” New York Times, March 23, 2003, p. 6.

3. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969), pp. 11–13. For the indebtedness of the new country to the old, in terms of institutions and traditions rather than ideas, see, for example, David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferral of English Local Law and Customs to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, 1981), and David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford, 1989).

4. The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States, ed. Robert Scigliano (New York, 2000), p. 48. In focusing on the theme of corruption, the colonists were echoing the complaints of the “Countrymen” or “Commonwealthmen” in England, who, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had brought the same charges against Parliament and the king’s ministers.

5. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (New York, 1992 [reprint of 1791 ed.]), p. 58; The Rights of Man (New York, Dolphin ed., 1961 [1st ed., 1791–92]), p. 420 (pt. II, ch. 4).

6. Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (New York, 1977), p. 182.

7. The Political Writings of John Adams, ed. George W. Carey (Washington, D.C., 2000), p. 701 (letter to H. Niles, Feb. 13, 1816).

8. John Adams, to the abbé de Mably, 1782, in appendix to A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, in The Works of John Adams (Boston, 1851), V, 495. See also Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago, 2000 [1st French ed., 1835, 1840]), pp. 53 ff. (vol. I, pt. 1, chs. 4–5).

9. Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (New York, 2003), pp. ix and passim.

10. Federalist 6, p. 27.

11. Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York, 1984), p. 911 (letter to William S. Smith, Nov. 13, 1787).

12. Ibid., pp. 889–90 (letter to Abigail Adams, Feb. 22, 1787).

13. Ibid., pp. 959–64 (letter to Madison, Sept. 6, 1789).

14. Marvin Meyers, The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison (Hanover, Mass., 1981), pp. 176–79.

15. Federalist 49, p. 323. Madison’s quotation of this provision differed from the version in the Notes on the State of Virginia. As cited in The Federalist, repeal required a convention called by two thirds of the members of any two of the three branches of government. In the Notes, the power of repeal was vested in the electorate in two thirds of the counties in the state. (See Jefferson, Writings, p. 343.)

16. Paine, Rights of Man, pp. 277–78, 304 (italics in original).

17. Political Writings of John Adams, pp. 665, 668 (Oct. 18, 1790).

18. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent (New York, 1949 [1st French ed., 1750]), p. 34 (bk. IV, sect. 5). On Montesquieu as an American classic, see Paul Merrill Spurlin, The French Enlightenment in America: Essays on the Times of the Founding Fathers (Athens, Ga., 1984), pp. 89 ff.

19. Quoted in Herbert J. Storing, What the Anti-Federalists Were For (Chicago, 1981), p. 73 (a reprint of Storing’s introduction to Vol. I of The Complete Anti-Federalist [Chicago, 1978]). For the idea of “classical virtue” as the Anti-Federalists understood it, see Wood, Creation of the American Republic. Wood somewhat modifies his thesis in the preface to the 1998 edition.

20. Jefferson, Writings, p. 290 (Notes on Virginia, query 19).

21. Federalist 84, p. 549.

22. On the Lockean interpretation, see, for example, Thomas L. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke (Chicago, 1988); Michael P. Zuckert, The Natural Rights Republic: Studies in the Foundation of the American Political Tradition (Notre Dame, Ind., 1996); and T. H. Breen, “The Lockean Moment: The Language of Rights on the Eve of the American Revolution,” lecture delivered at Oxford University, May 15, 2001. On the Scottish interpretation, see Garry Wills, Inventing America: Je ferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York, 1978), and Garry Wills, Explaining America: The Federalist (New York, 1981).

23. Jefferson, Writings, p. 874 (letter to Maria Cosway, Oct. 12, 1786).

24. Ibid., pp. 901–2 (letter to Peter Carr, Aug. 10, 1787). See Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (Oxford, 1976), p. 296, for letter to Adams, Oct. 14, 1815.

25. Federalist 12, p. 70. The role of commerce and capitalism in the thinking of the Founders has been a subject of much debate. In Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York, 1984), Joyce Appleby maintains that the Jeffersonian Republicans in that period were favorably disposed to capitalism. This is disputed by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKittrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 109–13 and p. 760 n. 31. See also Peter McNamara, Political Economy and Statesmanship: Smith, Hamilton, and the Foundation of the Commercial Republic (Dekalb, Ill., 1998), and How Capitalistic Is the Constitution?, ed. Robert A. Goldwin and William A. Schambra (Washington, D.C., 1982).

26. Federalist 51, p. 331.

27. Federalist 10, p. 61.

28. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York, 1948), p. 3 (quotation from Horace White).

29. David Hume, “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,” in David Hume’s Political Essays, ed. Charles W. Hendel (Indianapolis, 1953), p. 157.

30. Federalist 9, p. 50.

31. Political Writings of John Adams, p. 652 (letter to Abigail Adams, July 1, 1776).

32. Wood, Creation of the American Republic (1998 ed.), p. 124 (Samuel Adams letter to John Langdon, Aug. 7, 1777).

33. Ibid. (Rush to John Adams, Aug. 8, 1777).

34. Federalist 55, p. 359.

35. Federalist 10, p. 59.

36. The Debates in the Several State Conventions, on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, ed. Jonathan Elliot (Philadelphia, 1907), III, 536–37.

37. Michael Novak, On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding (San Francisco, 2002), p. 34, quoting Rush, “Of the Mode of Education Proper to a Republic,” 1798.

38. The document with the handwritten correction is in the Library of Congress.

39. Richard D. Brown, “The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in the Early Republic,” in his Devising Liberty: Preserving and Creating Freedom in the New American Republic (Stanford, Calif., 1995), p. 160.

40. Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville (London, 1861), I, 359 (letter to M. de Kergorlay, n.d.).

41. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, pp. 282, 278 (vol. I, pt. 1, ch. 9). He made the point even more sharply in the letter to M. de Kergorlay: “I believe that, as a general principle, political freedom rather increases than diminishes religious feeling. There is a greater family likeness than is supposed between the two passions” (Memoir, I, 360).

42. Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford, 2002), pp. 161 ff. A subtitle in Noll’s chapter on evangelicalism gives ca. 1790 as the date for the reemergence of evangelicalism as a vital force (p. 161), but in the text that date is sometimes moved up to the mid-1780s (e.g., pp. 179, 181). On the relation between evangelicalism and the Revolution, see also J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 336 and passim. (American “evangelism,” in the theological and spiritual sense, appears here with a lowercase “e,” as distinct from British “Evangelism,” capitalized, which denoted a specific sect within the Church of England.)

43. Noll, America’s God, p. 162.

44. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–1990 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1994), p. 30.

45. James H. Hutson, Religion and the Founding of the American Republic (Washington, D.C., 1998), p. 32.

46. Noll, America’s God, p. 64.

47. Hutson, Religion and the Founding of the American Republic, pp. 32–33.

48. Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven, 1977), pp. 2–3; see also p. 17. In another book, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, 1989), Hatch associates the democratization of Christianity with the “Christianization” of American society. That book deals with a later period, the early nineteenth century, where the term “democratization” is appropriate. Henry May properly warns against identifying the eighteenth-century Enlightenment with democracy (The Enlightenment in America, pp. 361–62). It was republicanism, not democracy, that was at issue in America.

49. Martin E. Marty, Religion, Awakening and Revolution (Wilmington, N.C., 1977), p. 130.

50. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 278 (vol. I, pt. 2, ch. 9).

51. Hutson, Religion and the Founding of the American Republic, pp. 91–93.

52. Jefferson, Writings, pp. 285, 289 (Notes on the State of Virginia, queries 17, 18).

53. Hutson, Religion and the Founding of the American Republic, p. 96, citing a Ms in the Library of Congress by the Rev. Ethan Allen.

54. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, pp. 43–44 (vol. I, pt. 1, ch. 2).

55. Ibid., p. 280 (vol. I, pt. 2, ch. 9).

56. Ibid., p. 282.

57. Ibid., p. 280.

58. Ibid., pp. 519–20 (vol. II, pt. 2, ch. 15).

59. George Washington, Writings (New York, Library of America ed., 1997), p. 971.

60. Vincent Phillip Munoz, “George Washington on Religious Liberty,” Review of Politics (Winter 2003).

61. Works of John Adams, IX, 229 (letter to Officers of the 1st Regiment, Oct. 11, 1798).

62. Political Writings of John Adams, p. 663 (letter to Richard Price, Apr. 19, 1790, acknowledging receipt of the sermon that inspired Burke’s Reflections).

63. William Cabell Bruce, Ben Franklin Self-Revealed (New York, 1917), p. 90.

64. Hatch, Sacred Cause of Liberty, pp. 2–3.

65. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1995 [reprint of 1886 ed.]), pp. 133–35.

66. Quoted in Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York, 2003), p. 451 (speech, June 28, 1787).

67. May points out this curious situation, “a coincidence very unlikely ever to be repeated in American politics” (The Enlightenment in America, p. 278).

68. Ibid., p. 137.

69. Works of John Adams, X, 53 ( July 13, 1813).

70. Spurlin, The French Enlightenment in America, p. 115.

71. See above, p. 44n.

72. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Albert E. Stone (London, 1986 [1st ed. 1782]), p. 240. (This passage appears in the Sketches, a dozen essays omitted from the Letters as originally published, and first printed by Yale University Press in 1925.)

73. Jefferson, Writings, p. 259 (Notes on the State of Virginia, query 14).

74. Ralph Lerner, The Thinking Revolutionary: Principle and Practice in the New Republic (Ithaca, N.Y., 1987), p. 65.

75. Je ferson’s Letters, ed. Willson Whitman (Eau Claire, Wis., n.d.), p. 32 (letter to Mrs. Trist, Aug. 18, 1785). Five years later, Jefferson spoke of a republic of 30 million.

76. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (Nor-walk, Conn., 1987 [1st ed. 1958]), p. 79.

77. Jefferson, Writings, pp. 1312–13 (letter to Alexander von Humboldt, Dec. 6, 1813).

78. Washington, Writings, p. 788 (Message to Congress, Oct. 25, 1791). Tocqueville loosely rendered this passage: “We are more enlightened and more powerful than the Indian nations; it is to our honor to treat them with goodness and even with generosity” (Democracy in America, p. 320 [vol. I, pt. 2, ch. 10]). The editors of Tocqueville’s work note the difference between his quotation and Washington’s actual statement.

79. Washington, Writings, p. 956 (Address to Cherokee Nation, Aug. 29, 1796).

80. Jefferson, Writings, pp. 1115–16 (letter to Benjamin Hawkins, Feb. 18, 1803).

81. Quoted by Lerner, The Thinking Revolutionary, p. 150.

82. Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (Princeton, 2000), pp. 125, 130.

83. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (rev. ed., Cambridge, Mass., 1992), p. 236.

84. Washington, Writings, p. 973.

85. Federalist 54, p. 349; Federalist 42, p. 268.

86. American Enlightenment, ed. Koch, p. 568 (Hamilton to Jay, March 14, 1779).

87. Jefferson, Writings, p. 264 (Notes on Virginia, query 14). Blacks, Jefferson said, were much the inferior of Indians; the latter had artistic and verbal abilities he had never encountered in a black.

88. Ibid., p. 44 (Autobiography).

89. American Enlightenment, ed. Koch, pp. 458–60 (Madison to Robert J. Evans, June 15, 1819).

90. Herbert J. Storing, “Slavery and the Moral Foundations of the American Republic,” in The Moral Foundations of the American Republic, ed. Robert H. Horwitz (2nd ed., Charlottesville, Va., 1979), p. 225. Storing goes on to argue that the liberty proclaimed in the Declaration was itself equivocal, because it presupposed the Lockean right of self-preservation which was equated with self-interest, thus creating a conflict between the right (or liberty) of the slave and that of his master.

91. Federalist 38, p. 236. See also Federalist 85, p. 561.

EPILOGUE

1. Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew:The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (New York, 2003), p. 104. See also pp. 126–30.

2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago, 2000 [1st French ed., 1835, 1840]), p. 363 (vol. I, pt. 2, ch. 10).

3. Ibid., p. 395.

4. For a discussion of Malthus in relation both to Smith and to his successors, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York, 1983), pp. 100 ff.

5. Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, ed. Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter (New York, 1954), p. 835.

6. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (New York, 1991), p. 309.

7. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, pp. 502–3 (vol. II, pt. 2, ch. 8).

8. Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (New York, 1964), p. 130.