PROLOGUE

This book is an ambitious attempt (more ambitious than its length warrants) to reclaim the Enlightenment— from critics who decry it and defenders who acclaim it uncritically, from postmodernists who deny its existence and historians who belittle or disparage it, above all, from the French who have dominated and usurped it.¹ In reclaiming the Enlightenment, I propose to restore it, in good part, to the British who helped create it—who created, indeed, a very different Enlightenment from that of the French.

The study of the Enlightenment has traditionally focused on France, on the ideas generated by the philosophes and the exportation of those ideas to the world at large. These ideas have always been the subject of contention but never more so than today, for it is not this or that idea that is now in dispute but ideas in general. The Enlightenment, which was preeminently a movement of ideas, is especially vulnerable to this kind of intellectual skepticism. The “Enlightenment project,” as is sometimes said invidiously, is thought to be obsolete, an illusion, or delusion, of modernity. It recalls a time when such terms as “reason,” “nature,” “rights,” “truth,” “morality,” “liberty,” “progress” could be used without benefit of quotation marks, and without the sense of irony befitting these “privileged” concepts. It supposes, one writer says (in a book fittingly entitled Enlightenment’s Wake), a “universal emancipation and a universal civilization” that is nothing more than an embodiment of “Western cultural imperialism.” ² “Enlightenment,” another explains, “is to postmodernism what ‘Old Regime’ was to the French Revolution. . . . [It] symbolizes the modern that postmodernism revolts against.”³ Where the philosophes believed it liberating to exalt reason over religion, the postmodernist finds reason as tyrannical and “totalizing” as religion itself.

Other historians take exception not to the ideas themselves but rather to a conception of the Enlightenment that is unduly focused upon ideas. For them, the Enlightenment was a social movement as well as (or more than) an intellectual one, and can be best understood by examining the dynamics of classes and institutions, social relations and material forces, which in France conspired together to subvert the Old Regime and prepare the way for the Revolution.⁴ Robert Darnton has applied this analysis to the Encyclopédie, the organ of the philosophes, treating it as an economic and social phenomenon by analyzing its mode of production and distribution, the kinds of authors it attracted, and the censorship it invited and evaded. More recently, Darnton has turned away from the “high Enlightenment,” as he puts it, to the “underside” or “low-life” of the Enlightenment, the literature of pornography, sensationalism, and scandal that permeated the popular culture at the time.^{5 1}

This book, by contrast, is an exercise in the history of ideas. It is unapologetic, and unironic, in dealing with those ideas about reason and religion, liberty and virtue, nature and society, which, in different forms and degrees, shaped the distinctive Enlightenments of the three countries that were so dramatically affected by them: France, Britain, and America.⁶ Those ideas spilled over from philosophers and men of letters to politicians and men of affairs, penetrating into what recent historians call the mentalités of the people and what Alexis de Tocqueville meant by moeurs: the “habits of the mind” and “habits of the heart” that make up “the whole moral and intellectual state of a people.”⁷ At a critical moment in history, these three Enlightenments represented alternative approaches to modernity, alternative habits of mind and heart, of consciousness and sensibility.

It is in this sense that I conceive of the phenomenon known as “the Enlightenment,” and in this sense that I propose to restore it to its progenitor, the British. The French themselves credited that venerable English trinity, Bacon, Locke, and Newton, with the ideas that inspired their own Enlightenment. I go beyond that in directing attention not to these forerunners of the Enlightenment, as I see them, but to the eighteenth century itself, thus challenging the French on their terrain, the time and space that they have taken for their own. It was then, early in the eighteenth century, that the British Enlightenment originated and took a form very different from that of its counterpart on the continent (or from that of its own offspring overseas).⁸ The point is not merely to establish the chronological priority of the British Enlightenment but also to establish its unique character and historic importance.

To bring the British Enlightenment onto the stage of history, indeed, the center stage, is to redefine the very idea of Enlightenment. In the usual litany of traits associated with the Enlightenment—reason, rights, nature, liberty, equality, tolerance, science, progress—reason invariably heads the list. What is conspicuously absent is virtue. Yet it was virtue, rather than reason, that took precedence for the British, not personal virtue but the “social virtues”—compassion, benevolence, sympathy—which, the British philosophers believed, naturally, instinctively, habitually bound people to each other. They did not deny reason; they were by no means irrationalists. But they gave reason a secondary, instrumental role, rather than the primary, determinant one that the philosophes gave it. To restore the British to prominence, therefore, is to direct attention to a subject not usually associated with the Enlightenment, that is, the social ethic explicit or implicit in each of these Enlightenments.

To redefine the Enlightenment in this fashion is also to redefine, in a sense, the British Enlightenment itself, expanding it to include thinkers and actors not normally identified with it, some of whom, indeed, are more often assigned to the “counter-Enlightenment”—Edmund Burke, most notably, but also, more audaciously, John Wesley, as well as a score of lesser-known (in our time, although not in theirs) philanthropists and reformers who gave practical meaning to that social ethic. Thus, I am engaged in a doubly revisionist exercise, making the Enlightenment more British and making the British Enlightenment more inclusive.

To speak of “the Enlightenment,” as I have done, is a concession to popular usage. Not many scholars today share Peter Gay’s confidence in the Enlightenment, a single Enlightenment, although that is still the popular conception of it. “There was only one Enlightenment,” Gay announces in the opening sentence of his trilogy. In various places he represents that Enlightenment as a family, a chorus, an army, a party, containing different individuals in different countries of different opinions, but all united in a common goal, a “single style of thinking.” Even more telling is his deliberate use of the word philosophes—not italicized—to describe all these individuals, on the grounds that the French word signifies “an international type.”⁹ That word, which was not then, and never has been, acclimatized in the English language, suggests what Gay’s volumes amply demonstrate, that the Enlightenment, as he conceives it, was essentially Gallican in origin and spirit.

In spite of more recent demonstrations by historians that the Enlightenment was so varied, among countries as well as individuals, as to belie the singular term,¹⁰ the Enlightenment is still almost invariably associated with the French, and the terms of discourse are still those made familiar by the philosophes. It is something of a puzzle why this is so. The most obvious reason is the existential realization or fulfillment of the French Enlightenment (or so it seemed to contemporaries at the time and to many historians since) in one of the most dramatic events of modernity, the French Revolution, which has been widely regarded (again, at the time and since) as the inauguration of the modern world. “It has been said,” Hegel remarked, “that the French Revolution resulted from Philosophy.” For once he agreed with the conventional wisdom. “Never since the sun had stood in the firmament and the planets revolved round him had it been perceived that man’s existence centers in his head, i.e., in Thought, inspired by which he builds up the world of reality.”¹¹

It could be said, however, that the American republic was also the product of “thought,” albeit a different kind of thought. In promulgating a “new science of politics,” the Americans succeeded in creating—in “founding,” the word itself is remarkable—the first viable republic in modern times. Hegel himself paid tribute to America as a “world-historical” phenomenon: “America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself.”¹² That “land of the future,” he recognized, owed nothing to the French and much to the English, whose constitution had permitted it to stand its ground “amid the general convulsion.”¹³

America may have been the land of the future. But it was not the American Revolution that inspired future revolutions. For the past two centuries, the paradigm of popular revolution, like the paradigm of Enlightenment, has been that of France. “The sad truth of the matter,” Hannah Arendt has said, “is that the French Revolution, which ended in disaster, has made world history, while the American Revolution, so triumphantly successful, has remained an event of little more than local importance.” ¹⁴

It was not only its association with the French Revolution that gave the French Enlightenment the primacy it now has, but also the deliberate, self-conscious, indeed, self-dramatizing character of its proponents—an acute awareness of their own identity and (long before Hegel) their place in world history. In 1751, in the “Preliminary Discourse” that preceded the appearance of the first volume of the Encyclopédie, the editor spoke of the “centuries of enlightenment” that culminated in the present “century of enlightenment,” and explained that the Encyclopédie would provide a conspectus of knowledge appropriate to this most advanced stage of enlightenment.¹⁵ It was surely the most ambitious such enterprise that had ever been undertaken: twenty-eight volumes (including plates) issued between 1751 and 1772, with an additional seven volumes by 1780—this compared with the English two-volume Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (which had just been translated into French) and the three-volume Encyclopaedia Britannica (not translated) published between 1768 and 1771. (The latter, inspired, or goaded, by the example of the Encyclopédie, expanded to ten volumes by 1784 and twenty by the end of the century, the last volume being sharply critical of the Encyclopédie.) The titles of these works are themselves significant, the French lacking the national adjective identifying the British (it did not present itself as the Encyclopédie française), thus establishing its universal credentials. The subtitles are similarly suggestive: the British, A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences; the French, omitting the modest indefinite article and adding a portentous adjective, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers.

The Encyclopédie also had an impressive authorship: “Une Soci té de Gens de Lettres.” That attribution suggests yet another reason why the French Enlightenment enjoys the preeminence it does, for it envisions a cohesive group, a “society” of men of letters, or philosophes, with a coherent character and purpose. This society, the vanguard, as it were, of the French Enlightenment, presided not only over the Encyclopédie but also the salons of Paris, making that city the intellectual capital of Europe. The distinguished historian Franco Venturi denies that there was such a thing as an English Enlightenment, on the grounds that the English thinkers, unlike their French confreres, never thought of themselves as a distinctive class or group. “They did not have an organization or a rhythm of their own. So they did not operate as a new and autonomous political force, which tended to question or replace organisms inherited from the past.” Only in Scotland, he said, could be found the essential elements of an Enlightenment, “a new intelligentsia, conscious of its own function and strength” as against the traditional ruling classes. Venturi grants Gibbon the status of the “English giant of the Enlightenment,” but goes on to say that he was an “isolated figure in his own country, a solitary figure,” because there was no Enlightenment in England.^{16 2}

If the English did not have an “intelligentsia” in Venturi’s sense—an organized, dissident, potentially revolutionary class of intellectuals—they did have thinkers, writers, preachers, and reformers who operated under a “rhythm” of their own, and who made London, as well as Glasgow and Edinburgh, a vibrant intellectual center. London may not have had the salons that were the pride of Paris, or the universities that gave distinction to Glasgow and Edinburgh, but it did have coffeehouses and clubs that performed something of the same social function and catered to far more people.

London also had popular journals that provided outlets for writers who could reach a much larger audience than was available to the philosophes. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, the intellectual entrepreneurs responsible for the Tatler and Spectator, were fully conscious of the purpose of their enterprises. “It was said of Socrates,” Addison wrote in the Spectator, “that he brought philosophy down from heaven to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee houses.” ¹⁸ As it turned out, the Spectator proved to be popular in France as well. It was translated into French in 1714, only five years after its first appearance in London; the Tatler was translated twenty years later. In his Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau recalled reading those journals while a young man living with his patroness Mme de Warens in the south of France; the Spectator, he said, was “particularly pleasing and serviceable to me.”¹⁹ In his novel Emile, he recommended an exchange of books between Emile and Sophie; she would give him Telemachus, and he would give her the Spectator.²⁰

So, too, the Americans had thinkers, writers, preachers, and, above all, statesmen who constituted a distinctive intellectual class—a class, moreover, that became a political and revolutionary force, as the philosophes themselves never quite did. They also managed to produce works, The Federalist most notably, which were far less voluminous than the Encyclopédie but more influential and enduring. A century later, John Morley concluded his sympathetic account of the Encyclopédie by reflecting, as he replaced those dusty and huge volumes on his shelves, that they would probably never be read again, that they were now a “monumental ruin.”²¹ That cannot be said of The Federalist, which has never gone out of print, has been widely translated (most recently, into Hebrew), and whose principles and arguments continue to be cited, not only in the United States but also by democracies and aspiring democracies abroad. (The Encyclopédie has never been reprinted and only selected articles have been translated.)

The decisive advantage of France over Britain and America may have been the term “enlightenment” itself. Here the postmodernist has a point: language often is the reality, or what passes for it. “Siècle des lumières” was used as early as 1733 by the abbé Dubos, by Rousseau in the First Discourse in 1750, by the co-editor of the Encyclopédie Jean le Rond d’Alembert the following year in his Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie, and by others throughout the century. In Germany, where the language and the culture lent itself to such abstractions, the term Aufklärung was formally initiated in 1784 in a debate on the question, “What is Enlightenment [Aufklärung]?” “Do we live at present in an enlightened age?” Immanuel Kant asked. “The answer is: No, but in an age of enlightenment.”²²

In Britain, which had the reality of enlightenment but not the appropriate language (where, one might say, the reality discouraged the abstraction), the noun did not come into use until much later. The first English translation of Kant’s essay, in 1798, avoided the noun by using the words “enlightening” or “enlightened” in place of “enlightenment.” ²³ Although the noun did not exist in Britain, the adjective was familiar. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke spoke, ironically, of “the patriotic crimes of an enlightened age,” the “refinement in injustice belonging to the philosophy of this enlightened age,” the “ ‘enlightened’ usurers” (“enlightened,” here, in quotation marks) who confiscated church properties, the “solid darkness of this enlightened age.” ²⁴

It took more than a century for the noun to make its appearance in English. In 1837, Thomas Carlyle, in his History of the French Revolution, coined the word “Philosophism” to describe the system espoused by the philosophes.²⁵ Four decades later, John Morley, who helped bring the philosophes to the attention of the British public in his biographies of Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau, used the term “Illumination.” ²⁶ As late as 1899, the English translator of Hegel’s Philosophy of History said that he had to use the French word Eclaircissement because “there is no current term in English denoting that great intellectual movement.”²⁷ One historian records “a watershed of sorts” in 1910 with the publication of a book called The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, written, significantly, by an American Hegelian.²⁸ Yet the very next year the famous eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica appeared, with no article on the Enlightenment. The first such article was in the fourteenth edition in 1929, where the term was applied primarily to the Germans as a translation of Aufklärung, and only incidentally to the English (Locke and Newton) and the French. ²⁹

Even Scotland, which had some of the characteristics Venturi requires of an Enlightenment—a distinctive, self-conscious school—did not earn the title “Enlightenment” until very late. The term “Scottish Enlightenment,” so familiar today, was first coined in 1900 to describe the Scottish philosophers known as “moral philosophers” (who literally bore that title, as professors).³⁰ Adam Smith was the professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, as Francis Hutcheson had been before him and Thomas Reid was to be after him; and Dugald Stewart succeeded Adam Ferguson in the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. David Hume did not hold any professorial title or position, but he had been born and raised in Edinburgh, attended the university there (without getting a degree), lived most of his life there, and was indubitably of that school. Many of these philosophers, however, chose to identify themselves as North Britons rather than as Scots, and some tried to avoid any hint of Scottish parochialism. Smith, during his six years at Oxford, made a conscious and successful effort to rid himself of a Scottish accent. Like the others, he published his work in London and wrote much of the Wealth of Nations while living there. Hume, who changed his name from the Scottish “Home” to the Anglicized “Hume,” was less successful than Smith in camouflaging his accent, but he did take care to remove Scottish idioms from his works.

The Scottish Enlightenment, therefore, was not as parochially or exclusively Scottish as might be thought; nor was the Enlightenment confined to Scotland. John Locke and Isaac Newton are often designated as the fathers of the British Enlightenment. I myself would give that distinction to the third Earl of Shaftesbury, who was also the father of the Scottish Enlightenment although he was neither Scottish nor a professor. But all three of them were indubitably English, as were such other Enlightenment worthies as Bishop Joseph Butler, William Paley, Joseph Addison, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, and Edward Gibbon. Those who were Welsh or Irish by birth—Richard Steele, Richard Price, Edmund Burke—lived and worked in England.³

Until very recently, however, there has been no recognition of a British Enlightenment because the English were conspicuously left out of the fold. This has been the considered judgment not only of Venturi but also of such eminent historians as Alfred Cobban, who wrote in 1960, “The term ‘Enlightenment’ is hardly naturalized in England”;³² or Robert R. Palmer in 1976, “The term ‘English Enlightenment’ would be jarring and incongruous if it were ever heard”;³³ or Henry S. Commager the following year, who declared England “a bit outside the Enlightenment.”³⁴ Not until the 1980s was England initiated into that select company by John Pocock and Roy Porter, who finally legitimized the idea of a British, as distinct from a Scottish, Enlightenment.³⁵

The exclusion of the British from the Enlightenment, by contemporaries as well as historians, is all the more strange because there was so much interaction between French and British thinkers at the time. They read each other, translated and reviewed each other, and visited each other. Voltaire, having lived in England from 1726 to 1728, professed to be guilty of “Anglomania.” His Letters Concerning the English Nation was first published in London, in English, in 1733, and only the following year in Paris under the title Lettres philosophiques. (Although fluent in English, Voltaire wrote the book in French.) In a later book, the Philosophical Dictionary, he referred to his meeting with George Berkeley and quoted Locke, Shaftesbury, and, with special reverence, Isaac Newton.

Montesquieu, who was more truly an Anglophile than Voltaire (and who, it might be argued, was more representative of the British Enlightenment than of the French), lived in England from 1729 to 1731 for the deliberate purpose of studying English political institutions. As the celebrated author of the Persian Letters, he met the leading Whigs, attended the House of Commons, and received the highest accolade of the British by being elected a member of the Royal Society. Burke’s eulogy of Montesquieu, appearing toward the end of his “Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs” (a vigorous critique of the French Revolution), was unmatched in its enthusiasm by any delivered in France by Montesquieu’s own compatriots.³⁶ On the other hand, another philosophe, the Baron d’Holbach, visiting England in 1765, was reenforced in his unfavorable view of that country. Rousseau, who was even less an admirer of England, took refuge there in 1766 after he was ordered arrested in France because of the impious views expressed in Emile; it was in England that he wrote much of his Confessions.⁴

Crossing the Channel in the other direction were such British celebrities as David Hume, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, Laurence Sterne, Horace Walpole, Thomas Paine, and Joseph Priestley. Hume, who wrote his masterpiece, A Treatise of Human Nature, while living in France as a young man in the 1730s, returned thirty years later to serve as secretary to the British Embassy in Paris and to enjoy the fame that came not from the Treatise but from his multivolume History of England. Smith, who resided in Paris in 1765–66, nominally as tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch, was well known for his Theory of Moral Sentiments and was properly fêted in the salons. Having started to work on the Wealth of Nations, he was pleased to meet such leading physiocrats as Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot and François Quesnay (without, however, being converted to their views). Gibbon was in Paris only briefly, on his way to Lausanne in 1763, but in those few months he made the acquaintance of Claude Helvétius, the Baron d’Holbach, and other eminences of the Enlightenment. (He had met Voltaire in Lausanne several years earlier.) Paine moved to France after publishing Rights of Man in 1792 and was made an honorary member of the National Convention. Priestley had an honorary seat in the National Assembly although he chose to live in America.

Books and ideas circulated even more readily than their authors. Diderot never visited England, but his first work, in 1745, was a translation of Shaftesbury’s “An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit.” His own book published the following year, Pensées philosophiques, has been described by Venturi as “comments on the margins of the English writer.” (But Venturi’s description of that work, as “a vigorous appeal to the passions to liberate man from everything which oppresses him,” is hardly in the spirit of Shaftesbury, who appealed to the passions not to liberate man but to make him moral.)³⁷ Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments was translated twice into French (once by Condorcet’s wife), as was the Wealth of Nations shortly after its publication in 1776. Condorcet himself wrote a summary of the book which was then translated into Spanish.

The Encyclopédie had a more checkered career in Britain. The first edition could be found in several university libraries, including that of Glasgow University, which had received it as a gift from Smith. There were even projects for its translation, one to appear in sixpenny parts. (Eight parts— twenty-four sheets—were actually published in 1752.) Another project in 1768 resulted in the publication of only selections of the first volume. The Encyclopédie itself received only a few brief reviews, one an anonymous letter by Smith in 1756 in the Edinburgh Review, recommending it with some reservations. It was more often plagiarized than cited, by Oliver Goldsmith among others, and by compilers of English dictionaries. Smith borrowed the famous pin-factory illustration in the Wealth of Nations from the article “Epingle” in the fifth volume of the Encyclopédie.³⁸

Both Smith and Hume had a lively interest in French intellectual affairs. In 1759, Hume recommended to Smith that he read Helvétius’s De l’esprit and Voltaire’s Candide, which had just been published. ³⁹ (Hume did not, however, accede to Helvétius’s request that he translate De l’esprit.) A few years earlier, in the newly founded Edinburgh Review, Smith referred favorably to d’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse and reviewed (not uncritically) Rousseau’s Discourses, including a lengthy extract from that book. In a later essay, Smith quoted the Dictionnaire de musique by “an Author, more capable of feeling strongly than of analyzing accurately, Mr. Rousseau of Geneva.”⁴⁰ In The Theory of Moral Sentiments he quoted Voltaire’s Age of Louis XIV, referred in passing to his literary works, and included him among the gifted men throughout the ages who “too often distinguished themselves by the most improper and even insolent contempt of all the ordinary decorums of life and conversation, and who have thereby set the most pernicious example to those who wish to resemble them.” ⁴¹

In spite of their personal familiarity with each other and with each other’s works, the British and French differed profoundly in the spirit and substance of their respective Enlightenments. The British might sympathize with the philosophes’ hostility to a “papist” church and an authoritarian monarchy, both of which they themselves had discarded, and the French could admire the religious and political liberty that they found in England and that they so much coveted. But they each pursued enlightenment, for themselves and their countrymen, in quite different ways. In France, the essence of the Enlightenment—literally, its raison d’être—was reason. “Reason is to the philosophe,” the Encyclopédie declared, “what Grace is to the Christian.”⁴² It was not that, to be sure, to Rousseau or Montesquieu, but it was to Voltaire, Diderot, d’Alembert, and most of the contributors to the Encyclopédie. The idea of reason defined and permeated the Enlightenment as no other idea did.⁴³ In a sense, the French Enlightenment was a belated Reformation, a Reformation fought in the cause not of a higher or purer religion but of a still higher and purer authority, reason. It was in the name of reason that Voltaire issued his famous declaration of war against the church, “ Ecrasez l’infâme,” and that Diderot proposed to “strangle the last king with the entrails of the last priest.”

This was not, however, the Enlightenment as it appeared either in Britain or America, where reason did not have that preeminent role, and where religion, whether as dogma or as institution, was not the paramount enemy. The British and American Enlightenments were latitudinarian, compatible with a large spectrum of belief and disbelief. There was no Kulturkampf in those countries to distract and divide the populace, pitting the past against the present, confronting enlightened sentiment with retrograde institutions, and creating an unbridgeable divide between reason and religion. On the contrary, the variety of religious sects were themselves an assurance of liberty and, often, an instrument of social reform as well as of spiritual salvation.

The driving force of the British Enlightenment was not reason but the “social virtues” or “social affections.” In America, the driving force was political liberty, the motive for the Revolution and the basis for the republic. For the British moral philosophers, and for the American Founders, reason was an instrument for the attainment of the larger social end, not the end itself. And for both, religion was an ally, not an enemy. A book on the British or American Enlightenment could never bear the subtitle that Peter Gay gave to the first volume of his work on the Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism.

I have encapsulated the three Enlightenments in phrases borrowed from others and adapted for my purposes. Thus, the British Enlightenment represents “the sociology of virtue,” the French “the ideology of reason,” the American “the politics of liberty.”⁴⁴ The British moral philosophers were sociologists as much as philosophers; concerned with man in relation to society, they looked to the social virtues for the basis of a healthy and humane society. The French had a more exalted mission: to make reason the governing principle of society as well as mind, to “rationalize,” as it were, the world. The Americans, more modestly, sought to create a new “science of politics” that would establish the new republic upon a sound foundation of liberty.

The heart of this book is an explication—and an appreciation—of the British Enlightenment, with the French and American Enlightenments serving as foils for the British. Within each of these Enlightenments there were important variations and differences; strictly speaking each of them should be pluralized. In Britain, Burke and Paine obviously, but also Francis Hutcheson and Hume, would surely have protested against too close an association with each other. (Hutcheson twice forestalled Hume’s bid for a professorship.) So, too, in America, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, the Federalists and Anti-Federalists, politely tolerated while vigorously disputing with each other. And in France, Montesquieu and Rousseau were an exceedingly odd couple, and both were odder still in relation to the other philosophes. (“Never has so much intelligence,” Voltaire once rebuked Rousseau, “been employed in order to render us stupid.”) ⁴⁵ Yet historically and sociologically, these were distinctive Enlightenments, all the more so by comparison with each other. To be sure, all of them shared some common traits: a respect for reason and liberty, science and industry, justice and welfare. But these ideas took significantly different forms and were pursued in different ways in each country.

The three Enlightenments had profoundly different social and political implications and consequences. There has been much debate, dating back almost to those events themselves, about the relation between the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution, but most historians agree that, in some sense and to some degree, what I have called the “ideology of reason” laid the groundwork for the Revolution. The connection between the “politics of liberty” developed in the Federalist and in the American Constitution was more immediate and obvious. And so, too, was that between the “sociology of virtue” and the non-revolutionary, reformist temper that characterized Britain in that revolutionary age.

This is not to say that ideas were the determining factors in each of these countries. The historical situations were obviously, perhaps decisively, different. As Britain had earlier experienced a religious Reformation, so it also had undergone a “Glorious Revolution,” which gave promise of being a permanent political settlement. France, having had neither a religious reformation nor a political revolution, was, in a sense, ripe for both. And America, having had both as a legacy from Britain, sought the independence that it claimed as part of that legacy.

Yet ideas surely influenced these experiences and circumstances. Britain could have had (as Paine and Priestley might have liked) a Kulturkampf like France’s, designed to disestablish the Church of England together with the monarchy. France could have taken the Montesquieu route (which is to say, the British route) to a more reformist, moderate revolution. And the Americans could have injected into their Revolution a larger utopian mission, rather than the pragmatic, cautious temper conspicuous in The Federalist and the Constitution. That the countries did not take these paths had a good deal to do with the ideas and attitudes that prevailed among the influential thinkers, polemicists, and political leaders in each of those countries, who helped frame the terms of discourse and thus affect the temper of the time.

One of the unfortunate consequences of the identification of the Enlightenment with France is the tendency to see the aftermath of the other Enlightenments in the light of the French experience—to treat the American Revolution, for example, as a prelude to or a minor version of the French Revolution, or to regard the non-revolution in Britain as a kind of counterrevolution (or some aspects of the British Enlightenment as a species of counter-Enlightenment). To appreciate the distinctiveness of these Enlightenments is to appreciate as well the uniqueness of each historical situation. And to focus, as I have done, on the British Enlightenment is to remind us of those “habits of the mind” and “habits of the heart” that produced a social ethic all too easily ignored in the light of the more dramatic claims of the French Enlightenment.

I do not go so far as to credit the British Enlightenment, as Roy Porter does, with “the creation of the modern world”; still less do I agree, with Arthur Herman, that “the Scots invented the modern world.”⁴⁶ But I do find that the British (not only the Scots) confronted the modern world with the good sense—the “common sense,” as their philosophers put it—that served them well in a tumultuous period and that still has echoes today in a later stage of modernity.