The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment
Enlightenment
Recent Titles in
Greenwood Guides to Historic Events, 1500–1900
Slave Revolts
Johannes Postma
The
Enlightenment
RONALD S. LOVE
GREENWOOD PRESS
Westport, Connecticut London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Love, Ronald S., 1955–2008.
The Enlightenment / Ronald S. Love.
p. cm.—(Greenwood guides to historic events, 1500–1900, ISSN 1538-442X)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-313-34243-1 (alk. paper)
1. Enlightenment. I. Title.
B802.L69 2008
940.20 5—dc22 2008028522
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright
C 2008 by estate of Ronald S. Love
American statesman Adlai Stevenson stated, ‘‘We can chart our future
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Series Foreword
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Series Foreword
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become friends. To them and to future historians we dedicated this
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Linda S. Frey
University of Montana
Marsha L. Frey
Kansas State University
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PREFACE
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW:
PRELIMINARIES,
PRINCIPLES, AND
PRECONCEPTIONS
The enlightened age we live in demands of writers greater cultiva-
tion of reason.
—Voltaire, 1764
During the interval between the First and Second World Wars, the for-
eign correspondent for the New York Evening World, Pierre van Paas-
sen, moved his home-away-from-home to the small French village of
Bourg-en-For^et from the city of Paris in 1929. A Dutchman by birth
and a naturalized Canadian citizen, Van Paassen was also a reporter of
rare qualities, possessing among others a graceful writing style, keen
intuition, and acute powers of observation, to which were joined a
world view of extraordinary breadth and sympathetic understanding.
Yet his transition to village life from the hustle and bustle of one of the
globe’s great capitals was more than a change of residence, he recalled;
it ‘‘was like another world.’’ Although time and tempest had left their
mark on the decrepit houses, the weather-worn stone church, the sag-
ging roofs, and peeling paint of his new abode, ‘‘life had remained
untouched by the tumult with which the modern metropolis seeks to
hide its secret anguish.’’1 The peasant folk among whom Van Paassen
lived for the next decade possessed little, but feared nothing, neither
futurity, death, nor life itself. He marveled:
It was not accidental that Pierre van Paassen evoked the idea of
cultivating one’s own garden, the final words in the 1759 novel, Can-
dide, by François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire (1694–1778)
(see Document 5), whose name is all but synonymous with the eight-
eenth-century intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment.
For Candide was one of the first secular books introduced to and read
by a sixteen-year-old Van Paassen,3 and surely one of the most influen-
tial in forming his adult perceptions of the world. Hence, it is not sur-
prising that in his description of the tranquility of life and the essential
contentment that prevailed in Bourg-en-For^et, he summoned up the
fundamental principles associated with the Enlightenment as defined
by Voltaire: respect for human dignity and individuality, and the pur-
suit of happiness, all of which proceeded from man’s basic nature in
relation to natural law.
Connected also to these principles was a conviction that began to
enter into the minds of educated people across the length and breadth
of eighteenth-century Europe from London to St. Petersburg that
change was something to embrace, not fear, and that old ideas, institu-
tions, social relationships, and perceptions of man’s place in the world
could and should be reformed. Prompted by the remarkable achieve-
ments of the Scientific Revolution of the previous century, the leading
spokesmen (or philosophes) of the developing Enlightenment com-
bined their new confidence in the power of human reason with an
equal confidence in rational criticism to defy the authority of tradition,
which was entrenched most stubbornly in two institutions (see Docu-
ments 3 and 4). The first was privilege, in which social status inherited
by blood was more significant than individual merit; the second was
Christian theology, Christian history, and the Christian Church, mean-
ing usually but not exclusively the Catholic Church, in which the
depravity of man after the Fall and his inability to cleanse himself of
original sin without the divine grace of God were emphasized. The
power of tradition that continued to hold popular mentality in thrall
was to these thinkers the source of ignorance, injustice, inequality,
complacency, and superstition; it was regarded therefore as the chief
impediment to progress in the human condition.
A major component of this fresh mode of thinking among the
spokesmen of the new movement was the conviction that if human
Historical Overview
3
beings had the capacity to grasp the operations or laws of physical
nature through reason and education, then they could caress or coerce
those laws to the material and moral benefit of all mankind. For ‘‘it is
at least as important to make men better,’’ wrote Denis Diderot (1713–
1784), Voltaire’s contemporary and a prominent philosophe in his own
right, ‘‘as it is to make them less ignorant.’’4 Consequently, the rational
character of physical nature, a concept derived chiefly from the work
of the great English mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727),
became the litmus test for long-hallowed social customs, accepted tra-
ditions, and established patterns of thought, which were analyzed and
criticized in terms of their consistency with nature’s laws. Such scru-
tiny, founded upon reason, was applied over time to every conceivable
aspect of eighteenth-century culture—political, religious, social, and
economic. The philosophes championed, for example, reform of the
laws, free speech, and the even more radical notion of liberty of con-
science. And although realists who recognized that warfare was a com-
mon feature of human history and civilization, they bitterly opposed
the militarism in Europe of their own day. The Enlightenment ‘‘saw no
area, in fact, to which reason, properly conducted, could not attain.’’5
From such intense scrutiny (which Diderot defined as ‘‘the spirit of
doubt’’)6 and the criticism that followed from it, there emerged among
these men the important, even revolutionary implication that human
beings no longer had to accept their ‘‘assigned’’ lot in life according to
ages-old ideas and social structures. They could uplift their condition
by their own efforts. Therein lay the key to progress in human dignity,
human happiness, and the general improvement of human life.
It is interesting, however, that many historians cannot agree on
precisely what the Enlightenment was or when it started, though there
is greater consensus as to its goals and effects.7 In textbooks and speci-
alized histories on the subject, there is a wide range of interpretation.
To some scholars, the Enlightenment movement emerged out of the
scientific and intellectual achievements of the seventeenth century as a
natural outgrowth, and thus represented ‘‘the transfer into general phi-
losophy, particularly political and social thought, of the intellectual
revolution that had already taken place in the physical sciences.’’ Its
most prominent characteristic was, consequently, ‘‘the emergence of an
informed body of public opinion, critical of the prevailing political sys-
tem, that existed outside the corridors of power.’’8 For others, the
Enlightenment was ‘‘a set of attitudes’’ (rather than ideas) at whose
core was criticism; namely, ‘‘a questioning of traditional institutions,
customs and morals.’’ Hence, for this group of scholars, the great
thinkers of the movement were ‘‘not so much philosophers as savants’’;
that is, ‘‘knowledgeable popularizers whose skills [and, one should
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
4
add, major contributions] were in simplifying and publicizing a hodge-
podge of new views.’’9 Still others see the Enlightenment as a ‘‘period
of contagious intellectual energy and enthusiastic quest for knowl-
edge,’’ during which its leaders believed that ‘‘their role was to bring
light and progress to the world through the application of reason to
their reflections on the nature of mankind,’’ and that their primary goal
was to extend their ideas ‘‘to a general reading public.’’10 As for the
chronological origins of the movement, the dates vary from as early as
1680 to as late as 1748.
Part of the reason for the different interpretations and dates of ori-
gin for the Enlightenment may be that during the eighteenth century
itself, the movement ‘‘meant very different things in different parts of
the continent and even as between different individuals in the same
country.’’11 It also penetrated different regions of Europe at different
times, starting earliest in England and France, before extending steadily
across central and southern Europe to Italy and Germany, and finally to
Russia. Furthermore, though most of the philosophes came from bour-
geois or even more humble backgrounds, a few were noblemen. Some
of the Enlightenment’s leading proponents were also important
crowned heads, the so-called ‘‘Enlightened Despots,’’ such as Frederick
II ‘‘the Great’’ of Prussia, Joseph II of Austria-Hungary, and Catherine II
‘‘the Great’’ of Russia, even if their responsibilities and actions as mon-
archs often contradicted their claims to live and rule in accordance with
the ideas of the new movement that they too embraced.
At the same time, the work of the philosophes took different forms
depending upon the region in which they lived and worked. These
forms ranged from a moderate position that sought more gradual
change and reform, as in Great Britain—the birth place of the Enlight-
enment, where free speech and representative government reigned
under a constitutional monarchy—to ‘‘radical and aggressive criticism’’
that was ‘‘contemptuous of the past and particularly of the religious
assumptions which had done so much to shape the history of Christian
Europe.’’12 That attitude prevailed in France, where censorship, privi-
lege, and absolute monarchy were the order of the day. If, as one mod-
ern scholar has suggested, the Enlightenment had less the scientist’s
passion to know than the schoolmaster’s passion to teach, then it was
also in France that the movement ‘‘exhibited most clearly its tendency
and power to become … popular and didactic’’13 through the publica-
tion of books that criticized existing beliefs and institutions often
through the use of satire. ‘‘Ridicule overcomes everything,’’ quipped
Voltaire, ‘‘It is the most powerful of weapons.’’14 In the German states,
by contrast, the work of the philosophes was more muted and tended to
be more serious, erudite, and academic in scope.15 At the same time,
Historical Overview
5
Enlightenment ideas took root quickly in some kingdoms, where they
spread rapidly and influenced public opinion profoundly among artic-
ulate segments of society, including even some of those who had the
power to affect political decision-making. Elsewhere, the same ideas
had far less impact, for in such places the educated groups were
smaller in size and thus weaker, and in any case ‘‘were protected
against radical intellectual challenge by strong feelings of self-interest
or powerful religious influences.’’16
A further complication was that neither the movement nor the
philosophes themselves reflected a single set of ideas or a single current
of thought. As free thinkers, social critics, and writers of talent rather
than philosophers in any formal sense, they were men of their times,
deeply embedded (notes historian Peter Gay) ‘‘in the texture of their
society,’’ and who had been shaped by many of the same influences.
They shared, for example, ‘‘with literate Christians a religious educa-
tion, a love for the classics of Rome and [in France, at least] French lit-
erature, and an affection for the pleasure of cultivated leisure.’’17
Writing of his first encounter with Voltaire, for example, the famous
eighteenth-century gossip and gad-about, James Boswell (1740–1795),
recalled his reception at Voltaire’s ch^ateau de Ferny, where the great
man entertained ‘‘with the elegance of a real prince.’’18 Furthermore,
because they wished to distinguish themselves from their colleagues,
they were not inclined to abolish all distinctions in society, and in pub-
lic they often defended one ‘‘orthodox party’’ against another.19 ‘‘Men
of letters,’’ wrote Edmund Burke in 1790, ‘‘fond of distinguishing
themselves, are rarely averse to innovation’’ that could bring fame, for-
tune, or both.20 Because he lived in almost perpetual want of money
himself, Denis Diderot, for example, could not understand why Jean-
Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)—a near contemporary of Voltaire
whose name is just as inseparable from the Enlightenment—declined
the offer of a royal pension, despite Rousseau’s own confession that his
‘‘greatest misfortune has ever been inability to resist flattery, and I have
always regretted yielding to it.’’21
Yet notwithstanding certain commonalities of background, out-
look, and even personal or literary ambition, the philosophes never pre-
sented a united front nor, as a result, ever developed ‘‘a coherent
political program or a consistent line of political tactics’’22 (see Docu-
ments 6 through 12). They never worked easily together, writes Peter
Gay; and because they quarreled frequently (the bitter feud between
Voltaire and Rousseau being only the most famous example), they
hardly presented a ‘‘harmonious portrait of a friendly debate within a
philosophical family.’’23 As the contemporary English novelist Tobias
Smollett (1721–1771) pointed out, these men lived, after all, ‘‘in a
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
6
censorious age; and an author cannot take too much precaution to
anticipate the prejudice, misapprehension, and temerity of malice, ig-
norance, and presumption.’’24 To be sure, on occasion the philosophes
could rise to each other’s defense, as Voltaire did when Diderot came
under official fire for publishing the great Encyclopedia (see Document
2) seen by many as the crowning achievement of the age, though Vol-
taire himself had very little faith in the project, despite his claims to
the contrary. He also defended Rousseau’s right to freedom of expres-
sion when the publication in 1762 of his rival’s great work, The Social
Contract, excited fierce opposition, even though Voltaire personally
despised the book (see Documents 8 through 12). Rousseau in his turn
had earlier interceded on Diderot’s behalf when the latter’s Lettre sur les
Aveugles a l’usage pour ceux qui voient (A Letter on the Blind for the Use
of Those Who Can See), published in 1748, landed the author ‘‘in the
donjon of Vincennes.’’ Rousseau appealed directly to Madame de Pom-
padour, the French king’s mistress and a woman sympathetic to the
new current of ideas.25
For the most part, however, the philosophes worked independ-
ently of each other, though they read (and criticized!) each other’s
work and only occasionally collaborated. They were nonetheless aware
of the divisions among them and equally conscious of the danger that
disunity sometimes posed to their personal safety, the publication of
their books, and the survival of the intellectual movement in which
they were all engaged. Voltaire, for one, frequently expressed his dis-
tress at seeing a powerful opposition united to crush the philosophes,
‘‘while the philosophes calmly let themselves be slaughtered one after
another.’’26 Precisely because of the divisions within their small com-
munity, he complained, this ‘‘little flock [of thinkers] is eating at one
another while the wolves come and devour it.’’27 Rousseau expressed
similar bewilderment at the petty jealousies and intellectual rivalries
that perpetually divided his colleagues.28
Yet however disunited, however quarrelsome, or however critical
of each other, the philosophes composed a ‘‘party of humanity’’ (a term
coined by Peter Gay) which claimed a common role, even a mission to
change society, and their works should be read with that spirit in mind.
They were, in effect, a very different breed of intellectual whose activ-
ity did not constitute a mere philosophical exercise, though it was
partly that; above all, their activity constituted political involvement,
meaning to be engage (i.e., engaged in the world). The ultimate aim of
this engagement was bienfaissance universelle, or the ‘‘universal
good.’’29 Under that common goal fell the reform of society, social mo-
res, patterns of thought, and structures of government for the benefit
of human liberty, which included ‘‘freedom from arbitrary power,
Historical Overview
7
freedom of speech, freedom of trade, freedom to realize one’s talents,
freedom of aesthetic response, freedom, in a word, of moral man to
make his way in the world.’’30
To achieve those ends, the philosophes placed supreme confidence
in the power of man’s reason and basic common sense as an operative
force ‘‘to dispel the obscuring clouds of ignorance and mystery [i.e.,
prejudice and superstition] which weighed upon the human spirit’’
and impeded human liberty in all its forms. Reason and common sense
were thus the means ‘‘to render men at once happier, and morally and
spiritually better.’’31 Or to put it differently, reason was exalted by the
philosophes and their disciples as the natural sovereign of a free people.
From that mutual confidence emerged a new belief, ironically not held
by many of the leading philosophes, but nonetheless apparent toward
the end of the eighteenth century, ‘‘that all human beings can attain
here on this earth a state of perfection hitherto in the West thought to
be possible only for Christians in a state of grace, and for them only af-
ter death.’’32 That view helped to fuel the early idealistic period of the
French Revolution that erupted in 1789 at the century’s end, which
conservative thinker Edmund Burke (1729–1797) dismissed sneer-
ingly as a ‘‘philosophical revolution’’ that had upset the old order of
society by a ‘‘new empire of light and reason,’’ but in the ‘‘splendor of
these triumphs of the rights of man’’ had also lost ‘‘all natural sense of
[moral] wrong and right.’’33
There had always been a potential for improvement in the human
condition along ethical and material lines, of course. Similar ideas had
been expressed, after all, by the Renaissance humanists. In their own
opposition to the predominance of ancient or biblical authority in the
realms of philosophy and science, at least, they had turned to the ex-
amination of nature and developed in the process ‘‘a new spirit of real-
ism in politics and the study of society.’’34 During the Reformation, the
same challenge was opposed to religious doctrine and institutional
forms, specifically the monolithic structure of the Catholic Church
and the preeminence of papal authority.35 But not until the late seven-
teenth and early eighteenth centuries were these various attitudes to-
ward traditional authority, society, patterns of thought, politics,
religious belief, and human creativity brought together. This combina-
tion resulted in the creation of a new sense of optimism about life, even
if the philosophes themselves were not particularly optimistic. What
prevented them from slipping into ‘‘pessimism or pious resignation,’’
writes Peter Gay, was their constant engagement, inexhaustible
energy, and deep antagonism to ‘‘the Christian doctrines of man’s de-
pravity.’’36 It was, however, the idea of progress, meaning hope for a
better future in a secular (as opposed to a spiritual) sense, which was
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
8
the real turning point. This concept was derived from, and depended
upon, the ancient Greek emphasis on man as a thinking being and the
Christian idea of God as active in history and the ethical life. For with-
out the concept of an ethical, rational human being, there could be no
concept of progress for the better.
The two keys that unlocked this novel idea were reason (including
the notion of basic common sense) and nature. The same two elements
also underlaid the Scientific Revolution, which had begun to unfold in
the sixteenth century, but had become fully developed during the sev-
enteenth century as a result of the work and achievements of such
giants as Johann Kepler, Sir Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Galileo
Galilei, and above all Sir Isaac Newton. It became clear to the philoso-
phes of the subsequent Enlightenment, based upon the remarkable
discoveries of the previous century, that just as there are natural laws
that govern physical nature and the universe, there is a ‘‘natural’’ way in
which human beings function. The philosophes similarly became con-
vinced that all men had the potential for reason, an idea that grew out
of the philosophy of the great English thinker, John Locke (1632–
1704). So if, according to this idea, human beings are also rational
beings, then through the application of their reason they could discover
the natural laws of the physical world and of human nature, too.
Several preconditions made the Enlightenment possible as an
intellectual movement for reform. The first is that the long period from
1648, the end of the Thirty Years’ War, to 1789, the eve of the French
Revolution, was an age of relative political and social stability. To be
sure, wars were still fought for reasons of state, dynastic interest, and
commercial or imperial advantage, but these conflicts were conducted
in a far more orderly and limited fashion than ever before, especially in
contrast to the brutality and chaos of the wars of religion that had been
so devastating in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This
new stability was provided by the emerging nation-state, and with it
‘‘the development of more professional forms of government’’ that com-
bined both personal (i.e., monarchical) and impersonal (i.e., bureau-
cratic) elements, in which governance ‘‘had ceased to be a partnership
between rulers and great magnates whose birth conferred offices as
well as economic power and social status.’’37
That evolution is usually, but not always, associated with the tri-
umph of royal absolutism, writes historian Norman Hampson, though
Great Britain—with its constitutional monarchy and representative
body of parliament—was an obvious exception, as were the republican
United Provinces of the Dutch Netherlands. In any case, since the early
reign of French king Louis XIV (r.1643–1715) and even before his suc-
cession to the throne of his fathers, the states of western Europe, at
Historical Overview
9
least, had increasingly asserted themselves ‘‘as impersonal forces’’ with
their ‘‘own machinery directed by … professional servants,’’ whose
positions depended upon royal favor alone, and whose power was
commensurate with the effectiveness of the administrative mechanism
that they oversaw.38 In the process, the state had acquired a monopoly
on all political functions from domestic policy and taxation to foreign
affairs, including an exclusive right to wage war. The monarchs them-
selves were aware of this transition. Unlike his predecessors, who had
spoken of ‘‘my state,’’ Louis XIV had slowly but surely ‘‘subordinated
himself to the procedures of his government’’ and, in the last two deca-
des of his life, began to refer increasingly to ‘‘the state’’ and to himself
as its first servant.39 In fact, by the time he died in 1715, the idea of
France as an organic entity had so taken hold in his own mind that he
declared to those attending his deathbed, ‘‘I am leaving you, but the
State will always remain.’’ ‘‘Be faithfully attached to it,’’ he admonished
further, ‘‘and let your example serve all my other subjects. Be united
and in accord: this is the unity and strength of a State.’’40 Frederick II
of Prussia later expressed many of the same sentiments.
A second precondition for the Enlightenment was economic sta-
bility, together with increasing prosperity. These advances had devel-
oped also to a large degree under the protection of the state, as did a
corresponding growth in size of a bourgeois society devoted to com-
merce. Though the European economy was still overwhelmingly agri-
cultural, and industry remained traditional in its methods,41 most
kingdoms in the early eighteenth century were producing slightly
larger quantities of food than were required for mere subsistence, a
process enhanced by the introduction of new kinds of crops, different
methods of farming, and better animal husbandry over time, which
yielded surplus goods that could be sold not just in the local or domes-
tic market, but in foreign markets, too. Maritime commerce was also
on the rise, as the global trade in everything from Indonesian spices to
Indian cotton, Chinese tea, American tobacco, Caribbean sugar, and
African slaves increased dramatically in volume.
The result of these agricultural and commercial developments
was, in part, a slow but steady growth in European population, owing
to better nutrition and the decline of certain diseases such as plague,
as well as the increase in the number of men who acquired wealth and
a new degree of status from trade. Together with such professionals as
lawyers, doctors, financiers, and civil servants—all city dwellers—
these men of commerce formed an ever larger body of bourgeois who
set the standards of urban culture and over time began to demand
greater equality of status with the hereditary nobility (their social bet-
ters) and a role in the political decision-making process in proportion
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
10
to their wealth, growing importance, and economic influence. The
Enlightenment was largely a bourgeois phenomenon, after all, and
most of its leading spokesmen (e.g., Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, David
Hume, and Adam Smith, to name just a few) came from bourgeois or
petty bourgeois origins. These men, and the movement itself, advo-
cated individual rights, and openly attacked the traditional emphasis
on heredity by blood and social privilege accorded to the aristocracy,
who owed their dignity (sneered Tobias Smollett) ‘‘to the circumstan-
ces of their birth, and are consecrated from the cradle for the purposes
of greatness, merely because they are the accidental children of
wealth.’’42 In fact, without the existence of an increasingly rich, numer-
ous, vocal, and self-conscious bourgeoisie, eighteenth-century society
would have been very different than it was, and the Enlightenment
could not have occurred as it did. For without the bourgeoisie, the
philosophes ‘‘could hardly have existed,’’ writes historian Franklin
Baumer, and without the philosophes ‘‘the bourgeoisie must have lacked
assurance and a philosophical basis.’’43
A third precondition for the intellectual movement was the ero-
sion of religion or religious authority, specifically of Catholic Christi-
anity, provoked by generations of scholars, religious reformers, and
scientists since the Renaissance. The humanism of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries focused in part upon deriving a lay ethic from the
literary classics of ancient Rome that was suitable to ‘‘modern’’ times
and secular life. This search was not a movement away from religion,
for the humanists were neither anti-religious, skeptical, nor atheist in
any sense. At a time, however, when the Catholic Church had become
spiritually bankrupt and a corrupt papacy had lost the ethical leader-
ship of Christianity, humanism offered an alternative pagan morality
that paralleled Christian morality. Partly from this pursuit had emerged
the concept of ‘‘civic humanism’’ that stressed the active life and good
citizenship in secular society. But because the humanists conceived of
man in a religious sense as a being of elevated status, having been cre-
ated (according to the book of Genesis) in the image of God, he was
endowed with certain potentialities that allowed him to chart his own
moral course through life. The highest expression of this challenge to
the traditional view of human depravity after the Fall of Adam is Pico
della Mirandola’s famous Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), in
which he argued that God had given human beings ‘‘neither fixed
abode, form, nor function,’’ and moreover that ‘‘human actions, not
thoughts, determine man’s nature.’’44
Subsequently, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries scholars
began to focus their attention on Christianity. In the process, their
work steadily (if inadvertently) undermined the religious traditions of
Historical Overview
11
European society and thus weakened Christianity’s hold on many artic-
ular people (see Documents 16 through 19). The earliest steps in this
direction were not critical, but rather conservative, as Christian
humanists and ‘‘historians’’ such as Martin Luther undertook biblical
translations for the benefit of a wider reading audience, in order to
increase knowledge of the Christian past. This in turn led to critical
study of the sacred texts by others, starting with the compilation of
more scholarly editions of the Gospels based on the original languages,
the attempt to define key words in scripture, and the effort to reconcile
inconsistencies that appeared too often among various versions of the
Bible but which had crept in by mistake or clerical error as the texts
were reproduced and passed down from generation to generation.45
This biblical scrutiny culminated in such analytical works as Richard
Simon’s Critical History of the Old Testament (1679) and Pierre Bayle’s
Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697), which only fueled the grow-
ing skepticism with respect to the historical accuracy of scripture, as
both works revealed omissions, transpositions, implausibilities, and
contradictions that undermined the value of the Bible as revealed truth
and exposed much religious doctrine ‘‘as ludicrous superstition.’’46
Scientific discovery only contributed to the new skepticism. De-
spite the fact that all, or almost all, the men engaged in the various
branches of ‘‘natural philosophy’’ (as the sciences were still called)
were sincere Christians who believed deeply that their discoveries
‘‘glorified God by revealing the unsuspected grandeur of his Crea-
tion,’’47 their findings nevertheless chipped away at the foundations of
Judeo-Christian tradition backed by ancient Greek authority. The heli-
ocentric theory of the solar system proposed in 1543 by Nicolas Coper-
nicus, and steadily developed by other European scientists over the
next century and a half, had very important implications for the theo-
logical relationship between man and nature. For if the earth were the
center, writes Norman Hampson, then man was the ‘‘Lord of the uni-
verse’’ in accordance with ancient Greek belief and Christian doctrine.
If, however, man merely inhabited one planet orbiting a local star, then
it was a short step to conceive of similar planets and solar systems scat-
tered across the heavens.48
At the same time, the perfection of God’s Creation was steadily
undermined. Johann Kepler demonstrated, for example, that the plan-
ets orbited the sun in an ellipse, not a perfect circle, while Galileo’s tel-
escope revealed not just imperfections on the moon’s surface and
sunspots, but also Jupiter’s moons. This discovery proved that the
earth was not the center of the universe, around which the planetary
system was supposed to pivot. Newton’s universal theory of gravitation
further contributed to that displacement by demonstrating through
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
12
advanced mathematics that there was, in fact, no center at all. Com-
pounding the growing rupture between reason and revelation was the
discovery of fossil evidence, which made it clear that early life-forms
had disappeared, only to be replaced by new ones. But neither phe-
nomenon was accounted for in the scriptures, nor could they be
explained away by reference to the great flood. Nevertheless, most sci-
entists still believed that scientific discovery and religious orthodoxy
were not incompatible, despite the mounting evidence, but could be
reconciled. To that end, in 1614, Galileo published The Authority of
Scripture, while Rene Descartes illustrated his whole approach to in-
ductive reasoning in the Discourse on Method (1637) by ‘‘proving’’ the
existence of God. Even Newton devoted much of his considerable in-
tellectual energy to biblical studies during his later life. Yet the fact
remained that by 1700, Christianity no longer enjoyed its former
invincibility.
A fourth and final precondition for the Enlightenment was the
process of maritime exploration and expansion around the globe, start-
ing in the early fifteenth century, which had provided Europeans with
direct exposure to non-Western, non-Christian societies that often
appeared more civilized and advanced than their own. This contact
helped not only to nourish the growing skepticism about Christianity
already evident from scientific endeavor, but also to pose ‘‘disturbing
contradictions to Europe’s ethnocentric confidence and sense of supe-
riority’’ in terms of culture.49 The publication of travel literature (see
Documents 26 through 30), which began as a trickle in the early six-
teenth century but by the late seventeenth century had become a flood,
was vital to these changing attitudes. As the National Geographic of
their day, these accounts provided a reading audience in Europe with
vicarious experience of the wider world, which broadened their minds
with respect to geography, ethnography, and anthropology. The knowl-
edge, in particular, that there existed several high cultures, especially
in Asia, that owed nothing to the Judeo-Christian or Greco-Roman her-
itage made Europeans more self-reflective in a way that served to
inspire a new sense of cultural relativism,50 as contemporary
Europeans ‘‘came to appreciate that difference a priori did not consti-
tute inferiority or superiority.’’51 English novelist Sarah Fielding
(1710–1768) made a similar observation when she wrote in 1744 ‘‘that
the Customs and Manners of Nations, related chiefly to Ceremonies,
… have nothing to do with the Hearts of Men.’’52
On the contrary, Europeans looking outward and discovering
around the globe ‘‘a vast agglomeration of non-Christian values, [and]
a huge block of humanity which had constructed its moral system, its
concept of truth, on lines particularly its own,’’ compelled articulate
Historical Overview
13
men and women to reconsider their fundamental concepts of the West-
ern world ‘‘as a result of the conditions in which [the same ideals] were
seen to operate in far-off countries,’’ and to recognize that they no lon-
ger could take their old perceptions for granted.53 Or, as Simon de La
Loubere expressed it more succinctly in his 1691 relation of Siam, ‘‘so
true it is that the Phantasies [i.e., social mores and cultural patterns],
even they which seem to be most natural, do greatly consist in
Custom.’’54
To be sure, those who traveled abroad and published accounts of
their experiences upon their return still carried the baggage of their
own culture, especially in terms of their Christian faith (which they
saw as the engine for moral advancement) and the achievements of
Western science and technology (which they saw as the engine for ma-
terial progress). These twin pillars of early modern Europe constituted
for them the most striking contrast with the rest of the world of their
day. Whether laymen or ecclesiastics, these authors were, after all,
people of their time and place. Yet the depth of their observations on
the societies they experienced reveals a profound recognition of the
essential structures of these cultures and a sincere endeavor to gauge
them according to indigenous standards, not European, in a manner
that transcended a description of mere superficialities.55 Commenting
specifically on human virtue and vice, for example, English novelist
Lawrence Sterne (1713–1768) observed that
Notes
1. Pierre van Paassen, Days of Our Years (New York: Hillman-Curl,
Inc., 1939), 210.
2. Ibid. (Emphasis added.)
3. Ibid., 18, 19. He was introduced to the book by his uncle, a land-
scape painter with ‘‘an enthusiastic and sensitive nature.’’
4. Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works, Jacques Barzun
and Ralph H. Bowen, trans. and eds. (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Com-
pany, Inc., 1956), 300.
5. A. Robert Caponigri, Philosophy from the Renaissance to the Roman-
tic Age (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), 277.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
20
6. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, 288.
7. For a good, general introduction to the conflicting views among
some writers from the eighteenth century to the present, see Dena Good-
man and Kathleen Willman, eds., The Enlightenment (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 2004), 9–39.
8. Thomas F.X. Noble, Barry S. Strauss, et al., Western Civilization:
The Continuing Experiment, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1998), 659, 660.
9. Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien, Civilization in
the West, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper Collins College Publishers, 1995), 578.
10. John Merriman, A History of Modern Europe, from the Renaissance
to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), 399.
11. M.S. Anderson, Europe in the Eighteenth Century, 1713–1783,
3rd ed. (London: Longman, 1987), 408.
12. Ibid.
13. Caponigri, 272, 275.
14. Voltaire to Jean Le rond d’Alembert, June 26, 1766, Richard A.
Brooks, trans. and ed., The Selected Letters of Voltaire (New York: New York
University Press, 1973), 264.
15. Caponigri, 275.
16. Anderson, 408.
17. Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlighten-
ment (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1959), 119.
18. Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle, eds., Boswell on the Grand
Tour: Italy, Corsica and France, 1765–1766 (New York: McGraw-Hill Book
Company, Inc., 1955), 196.
19. Gay, Party of Humanity, 119.
20. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, H.D. Maho-
ney, ed. (New York: Macmillan Publishing company, 1955), 126.
21. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (Ware, Hertfordshire:
Woodsworth Editions Ltd., 1996), 360, 370.
22. Gay, Party of Humanity, 119.
23. Ibid., 116.
24. Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Paul-
Gabriel Bouce, ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 42–3.
25. Rousseau, Confessions, 336.
26. Voltaire to Jean-le-Rond d’Alembert, April 25, 1760, Voltaire,
Selected Letters, 209.
27. Voltaire to Jean-le-Rond d’Alembert, March 19, 1761, Ibid., 219.
28. See, for example, Rousseau’s remarks on 376, 386, 443–4, in his
Confessions.
29. For a good discussion of the origins and application of this term,
see Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (Harmondsworth, Middlesex:
Penguin Books, 1968), 79–83.
Historical Overview
21
30. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Volume I: The Rise
of Modern Paganism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 3.
31. Caponigri, 272.
32. Crane Brinton, Ideas and Men: The Story of Western Thought
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1950), 289.
33. Burke, 87, 93, 152.
34. Caponigri, 273.
35. Ibid.
36. Gay, Party of Humanity, 114–5.
37. Hampson, 48–9.
38. Ibid.
39. John B. Wolf, Louis XIV (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
Inc., 1968), 379.
40. Quoted in Ibid., 618.
41. Hampson, 45, 46.
42. Smollett, Count Fathom, 46.
43. Franklin Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 365.
44. Ernst Breisach, Renaissance Europe, 1300–1517 (New York: The
Macmillan Company, 1973), 318. For a good general discussion of human-
ism and civic life, see 318–21.
45. A. Lloyd Moote, The Seventeenth Century: Europe in Ferment
(Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1970), 400–1.
46. George A. Rothrock and Tom B. Jones, Europe: A Brief History, 2
vols., 2nd ed. (Chicago: Rand McNally College Publishing Company, 1975)
vol. I, 341–2.
47. Hampson, 24.
48. Ibid.
49. Rothrock and Jones, 340.
50. Glenn J. Ames and Ronald S. Love, eds., Distant Lands and Diverse
Cultures: The French Experience in Asia, 1600–1700 (Westport, CT: Praeger
Press, 2003), xvii.
51. Glenn J. Ames and Ronald S. Love, eds., Distant Lands and Diverse
Cultures: The French Experience in Asia, 1600–1700 (Westport, CT: Praeger
Press, 2003), xvii.
52. Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple, Malcolm Kelsall,
ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 27.
53. Paul Hazard, The European Mind, 1680–1715, trans. J. Lewis May
(Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1964), 25–6, 45; first
published under the title, La Crise de la conscience europeene (Paris: 1935.)
See also Lach, vol. I, bk. 2, 835.
54. Simon de La Loubere, A New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of
Siam (London: 1693; facsimile reprint, Singapore: Oxford University Press,
1986), 27.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
22
55. Ames and Love, xvii.
56. Lawrence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy,
Graham Petrie, ed. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1967),
84–5.
57. La Loubere, 66.
58. Philippe Avril, S.J., Travels into Divers Parts of Europe and Asia,
Undertaken by the French King’s Order to Discover a new Way by Land into
China (London: 1693), 44.
59. Chevalier d’Arvieux, Memoires du Chevalier d’Arvieux, Envoye
Extraordinaire du Roy a la Porte, Consul d’Alep, d’Alger, de Tripoli, & autres
Echelles du Levant, 6 vols. (Paris: 1735) III, 15–6.
60. Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1965) vol. I, bk. 2, 835.
61. Ronald S. Love, ‘‘Simon de la Loubere: French Views of Siam in
the 1680s,’’ in Glenn J. Ames and Ronald S. Love, Distant Lands and Diverse
Cultures: The French Experience in Asia, 1600–1700 (Westport, CT: Praeger
Press, 2003) 282; Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. I, bk. 2, 835.
62. Jacques de Bourges, Relation du Voyage de Monseigneur l’Ev eque de
Beryte, Vicaire Apostolique du Royaume de la Cochinchine, Par la Turquie, la
Perse, les Indes, &c. jusqu’au royaume de Siam, & autres lieux, 2nd ed. (Paris:
Denys Bechet, 1668), iii–iv.
63. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. II, bk. 2, 835.
64. Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, F.E. Sut-
cliffe, trans. (London: Penguin Books, 1968), 45.
65. Hampson, 26.
66. Rothrock and Jones, 341.
67. Bartolome de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the
Indies, Nigel Griffen, trans. and ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 9, 11.
68. Michel de Montaigne, Essays, J.M. Cohen, trans. (London:
Penguin Books, 1958), 109–10.
69. Sir Walter Raleigh, Selected Writings, Gerald Hammond, ed.
(Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1984), 95.
70. John Dunmore, trans. and ed., The Pacific Journal of Louis-Antoine
de Bougainville, 1767–1768 (London: Hakluyt Society, 2002), 72–3.
71. Jonathan Swift, A Selection of His Works, Philip Pinkus, ed.
(Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada Ltd., 1965), xx.
72. Ibid., xxix.
73. Gay, Party of Humanity, 120–1.
74. Caponigri, 278.
75. Ibid.
76. Brinton, 293.
77. Merriman, 401.
78. Ibid., 400–1.
79. Brinton, 293.
Historical Overview
23
80. Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought, 364.
81. Brinton, 293.
82. Ibid., 291.
83. Merriman, 399–400.
84. Voltaire to Charles-Emmanuel de Crussel, duc d’Uzes, September
14, 1751, Voltaire, Selected Letters, 164.
85. Hampson, 114–5.
86. Bainton, 291.
87. Ibid., 292.
88. Merriman, 400.
89. Bainton, 292.
90. Merriman, 400.
91. Voltaire to Jean-Baptiste de Boyers, marquis d’Argens, October 2,
1740; and to Sir Everard Fawkener, June 1742, Voltaire, Selected Letters,
84–5, 98–9.
92. Voltaire to Louise-Florence Petroville de Tardin d’Esclavelles
d’Epinay, July 8, 1774, Ibid., 301.
93. Merriman, 400.
94. Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 28.
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CHAPTER 2
all the World was America, and more so than it is now; for no
such thing as Money was any where known. Find out something
that hath the Use and Value of Money amongst his Neighbours,
you shall see the same Man will begin presently to enlarge his
Possessions.32
Now, in our age, we must trample mercilessly upon all these an-
cient puerilities, overturn the barriers that reason never created,
give back to the arts and sciences the liberty that is so precious
to them.… The world has long awaited a reasoning age, an age
Science and the Triumph of Reason
37
when the rules would be sought no longer in the classical
authors but in nature.51
If it gets bad, heave it into the ocean; that’s why you have the
ocean all about you. You are the slaves of laws. The French are
slaves of men. In France, every man is either an anvil or a ham-
mer; he is a beater or he must be beaten.61
Likewise observed his sister, Sarah, in her novel The Adventures of David
Simple (1744), when her hero
From how many errors would the reason be preserved, how many
vices would be strangled at their birth, if mankind knew how to
compel the animal economy to support the moral order, which it
so frequently disturbs! Different climates, seasons, sounds, colors,
darkness, light, the elements, food, noise, silence, movement,
repose—all affect the bodily machine, and consequently the mind;
all afford us a thousand opportunities which will almost infallibly
enable us to govern those feelings in their first beginning, by
which we allow ourselves to be dominated.70
Added Diderot:
People impute to the passions all of man’s pains and forget that
they are also the source of all his pleasures: It is an element of
man’s constitution of which we can say neither too many favor-
able, nor too many unfavorable things. … It is only the passions,
and the great passions, that can raise the soul to great things.71
The string vibrates and makes a sound for a long time after it is
plucked. It is a vibration of this sort, it is this kind of necessary
resonance, that keeps an object present to our minds while our
understandings deal with whichever of its qualities we please to
study. Besides, these vibrating strings have still another prop-
erty—they can make other strings hum—so that in this way one
idea can call forth another, the sound can call forth a third, and
so on. Hence no one can set a limit to the ideas that will occur
to a philosopher, for his ideas arise out of their own necessary
connections while he meditates in darkness and in silence.77
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
44
The appeal for an empirical approach was begun by Voltaire in the
1730s and would be continued by his fellow philosophes through the
end of the century.
Notes
1. Caponigri, 271.
2. Gay, Party of Humanity, x–xi.
3. Caponigri, 272.
4. Rousseau, Confessions, 251.
5. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, 288.
6. Evelyn Schuckburgh, trans. and ed., The Memoirs of Madame
Roland (Mount Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell Limited, 1989), 172.
7. Voltaire to the marquis d’Argence, January 20, 1761, Voltaire,
Selected Letters, 217.
8. Caponigri, 272.
9. Voltaire to Joseph-Michel-Antoine Servan, April 13, 1766, Voltaire,
Selected Letters, 261–2.
10. Diderot, 287.
11. Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought, 365.
12. Alexander Pope, Selected Poetry and Prose, William K. Winsott,
ed., 2nd ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1972), 202.
13. Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought, 366.
14. Ibid., 365–6.
15. For the Rules, see Sir Isaac Newton, Principia, or Mathematical
Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, vol. II, The Sys-
tem of the World, Andrew Motte, trans. (1729), Florian Cajori, ed. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1934), 398–400.
16. Ibid., 400.
17. Voltaire to Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, April 15, 1741, Voltaire,
Selected Letters, 87–8.
18. Voltaire, Letters on England, Leonard Tancock, trans. (London:
Penguin Books, 1980), 71.
19. Descartes, Discourse on Method, 41–2.
20. Ibid., 41.
21. Moote, 336.
22. Descartes, Discourse on Method, 18–9.
23. Moote, 337.
24. Hampson, 37.
25. Ibid., 37–8.
26. Voltaire, Letters on England, 77.
27. Hampson, 39.
Science and the Triumph of Reason
45
28. Moote, 379.
29. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, C.B. MacPherson, ed. (London: Pen-
guin Books, 1968), 185, 186.
30. Moote, 380.
31. Ibid.
32. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Peter Laslett, ed. (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 301. (Emphasis Locke’s.)
33. Ibid., 350. (Emphasis Locke’s.)
34. Ibid., 326. (Emphasis Locke’s.)
35. Ibid.
36. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, James H. Tully, ed. (In-
dianapolis: 1983), 25.
37. Locke, Two Treatises, 411. (Emphasis Locke’s.)
38. Gay, Party of Humanity, 123.
39. Locke, Two Treatises, 271.
40. Gay, Party of Humanity, 115.
41. Caponigri, 273.
42. For the characteristics of the philosophes, see Gay, Party of Human-
ity, 114–19.
43. Boswell, Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica, France, 182.
44. Brinton, 289.
45. Ibid., 290.
46. Ibid.
47. Gay, Party of Humanity, 124.
48. Paul Hazard, The European Mind, 1680–1715, J. Lewis May, trans.
(Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1964).
49. Caponigri, 272.
50. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, 294.
51. Ibid, 298.
52. Caponigri, 26.
53. Ibid., 498, 502.
54. Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought, 363.
55. Ibid.
56. Rothrock and Jones, 346.
57. Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought, 364.
58. Boswell, Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica and France, 293.
59. Voltaire to Pierre-Joseph Thoulier d’Olivet, March 26, 1754, Vol-
taire, Selected Letters, 172.
60. Voltaire to Martin Ffolkes, 25 November 1743, Voltaire, Selected
Letters, 108.
61. Boswell, Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 45.
62. Ibid., 239–40.
63. Schuckburgh, Memoirs of Madame Roland, 186.
64. Burke, 100.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
46
65. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones (New York: The New
American Library, 1963), 412.
66. Sarah Fielding, David Simple, 28.
67. Voltaire to Willem Jacob ‘S-Gravesande, August 1741, Voltaire,
Selected Letters, 95.
68. Rousseau, Confessions, 411.
69. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, 105.
70. Rousseau, Confessions, 398.
71. Quoted in Gay, The Enlightenment, II, 188.
72. Voltaire to Etienne-No€ el Damilaville, September 19, 1764, Vol-
taire, Selected Letters, 254.
73. Voltaire on ‘‘Liberty of the Press,’’ excerpted in Baumer, Main Cur-
rents of Western Thought, 423.
74. Quoted in Gay, Party of Humanity, 89.
75. Quoted in Gay, The Enlightenment, II, 76.
76. d’Alembert, ‘‘Discours preliminaire’’ from the Encyclopedia, quoted
in Franklin L. Baumer, Modern European Thought: Continuity and Change in
Ideas, 1600–1950 (New York: MacMillan, 1977), 145.
77. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, 100.
CHAPTER 3
THE PHILOSOPHES,
THE CHURCH, AND
CHRISTIANITY
Ecrasez l’inf^
ame! (Destroy the infamous thing!)
—Voltaire, 1762
He has left the world full, he finds it empty. In Paris they see
the universe as composed of vortices of subtle matter, in London
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
50
they see nothing of the kind. For us it is the pressure of the
moon that causes the tides of the sea; for the English it is the
sea that gravitates toward the moon.… Furthermore, you will
note that the sun, which in France doesn’t come into the picture
at all, here plays its fair share. For your Cartesians everything is
moved by impulsion you don’t really understand, for Mr. New-
ton it is by gravitation.… For a Cartesian light exists in the air,
for a Newtonian it comes from the sun in six and a half
minutes.… The very essence of things has totally changed.12
For Voltaire, Descartes was a ‘‘dreamer’’ whose natural science was ‘‘a
sketch,’’ while Newton was a ‘‘sage,’’ whose system was ‘‘a master-
piece.’’13
As for Newton’s universal law of gravitation specifically, the philo-
sophe criticized his fellow countrymen for their slowness to accept the
new science. He wrote in 1735:
That there are some who are as pernicious in society as they are
obscure in their ideas, and that their souls are swelled with
venom and pride in proportion to their being devoid of truth.
They would disturb the world’s tranquility for a sophism and
lead all kings to avenge, with sword or firearms, the honor of an
argument in ferio or in barbara. Any thinking person who does
not agree with them is an atheist, and any king who does not
favor them will be damned.29
‘‘Of all religions the Christian is undoubtedly that which should instill
the greatest toleration,’’ Voltaire later added in 1764, ‘‘although so far
the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men.’’32
For free-thinkers such as Voltaire, and for those engaged like him
in the secular world around them, the notion of doctrinal religion was
becoming anachronistic. Similar to the protagonist of Tobias Smollett’s
contemporary novel, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom
(1753), many of these men increasingly conceived of dogmatic Christi-
anity and the institutional churches that produced it with ‘‘the utmost
detestation and abhorrence, rejecting [both] with loathing and disgust,
like those choice spirits who, having been crammed with religion in
their childhood, renounce it in their youth, among other absurd preju-
dices of education.’’33 As far as Voltaire and many of his fellow philoso-
phes were concerned, religious enthusiasm expressed in religious
dogma was a myth in which people blindly believed. Moreover, as
Locke had noted, it was that devotion to blind belief that made dogma
so dangerous, mythical or not, because it incited intolerance, together
with fanaticism and persecution. Hence, Voltaire’s growing skepticism
in Christianity evolved steadily into Deism, a mixture of science and
hostility to Christian doctrine and pretense. As one contemporary
asserted, ‘‘to be a philosophical skeptic is, in a man of letters, the first
and most important step to being a sound, believing Christian.’’34
It follows, then, that if a spirit of rational criticism as applied to
every aspect of human society and culture characterized the Enlighten-
ment, traditional religion was certainly an object of special scrutiny
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
56
and concerted attack by the philosophes, including Voltaire, for its dog-
matism and intolerance, as well as for its miracles and revelations. All
four features were viewed as irrational. Christian doctrine was thus
examined closely to prove its absurdity, Christian history to reveal its
cruelty, and Christian ritual to discover its derivation from pagan rites.
The purpose, ultimately, was to remove the superstition from Christi-
anity to get at its essential foundation, which was considered to be
rational, even scientific. For if reason and empiricism could uncover
further natural laws to render explicable those phenomena in nature
that remained mysterious to human understanding, then reason and
empiricism just as surely could reveal miracles as ‘‘fanciful explana-
tions of natural phenomena’’ that were not simply inaccurate, but even
offensive to human intelligence.35
In the process, the Christian world view was replaced steadily by
a non-Christian one based upon a concept of materialism,36 (see Docu-
ments 19 and 21) with its intense belief in the here-and-now and its
thirst for knowledge.37 If the universe had come to be intelligible as a
material and mechanical process governed by mechanical or immutable
natural laws, as the scientific achievements of a century or more had
demonstrated culminating with the work of Isaac Newton, then the
same natural laws were discernable by human reason. Moreover, natu-
ral law was the key in a very material sense that could open the gate to
wealth, knowledge, and power—that is, the improvement of man’s con-
dition on earth.38 Materialism thus constituted the ‘‘natural position of
one freed from the trammels of religious belief and … superstition.’’39
The ground work for the intense kind of scrutiny now applied by
the philosophes to Christianity had already been laid in the seventeenth
century by thinkers like Richard Simon and Pierre Bayle, whose critical
analyses of the scriptures had revealed many of their inconsistencies
and improbabilities. Even John Locke had entered the lists, not just
with his Letter on Toleration, but also with the publication in 1695 of his
book The Reasonableness of Christianity. His purpose in the second work
was to defend religion on the basis that it was both common-sensical
and simple to understand. ‘‘Locke seems to have been the first
Christian,’’ wrote Scottish philosopher and religious skeptic David
Hume in c. 1761, ‘‘who ventured openly to assert that faith was nothing
but a species of reason; that religion was only a branch of philosophy;
and that a chain of arguments, similar to that which established any
truth in morals, politics, or physics, was always employed in discovering
all the principles of theology, natural and revealed.’’40 A year later, John
Toland published Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), in which he too
claimed that nothing in Christianity was above reason, before criticizing
what he considered to be some of its more ludicrous doctrines.
The Philosophes, the Church, and Christianity
57
Over time, however, the philosophes of the eighteenth-century
developed a deep antipathy, and in some cases even a profound hatred,
for Christianity that surpassed these early inquiries. Few of these men
asserted personal atheism in religion, however, for according to their
Newtonian view of the universe, ‘‘they still required a creator for their
world-machine, an architect or engineer whose designs were the foun-
dation of natural law.’’41 Or as Voltaire argued, ‘‘whatever some pres-
ent-day scholars may say, one can be a very good philosopher and still
believe in God. Atheists have never responded to the objection that a
clock proves the existence of a clockmaker.’’42 Besides, the philosophes
all, or almost all, appreciated the important role played by Christianity
in preserving moral behavior at every level of society. Echoing Locke,
who once observed that true religion was instituted to govern the life
of men ‘‘according to the rules of virtue and piety,’’43 David Hume simi-
larly noted that the ‘‘proper office of religion is to regulate the heart of
men, humanize their conduct, infuse the spirit of temperance, order,
and obedience.’’44 Although generally opposed, on moral grounds, to
all varieties of traditional religious belief and practice,45 the Scottish
philosopher nevertheless went so far as to acknowledge grudgingly
that religion, ‘‘however corrupted, is still better than no religion at all.’’
He mused:
The doctrine of a future state [i.e., heaven or hell] is so strong and
necessary a security to morals that we never ought to abandon or
neglect it. For if finite or temporary rewards and punishments
have so great effect … how much greater must be expected from
such as are infinite and eternal?46
What, then, was the proper role of religion in society, and did the
idea that men could exercise reason to discover the physical laws of
The Philosophes, the Church, and Christianity
61
nature necessarily eliminate the Christian notion that man himself was
the product of a beneficent God, or at least of God’s providence in a
mechanistic world? Furthermore, did the exercise of human reason
necessarily mean that the concept of divine action in the material
world on a day-to-day basis could be dismissed? These were questions
of intense debate among the philosophes. Even those strict materialists
among them who denied God, religion, and theology, and who reduced
all knowledge to the simple function of sensation and materialism, had
difficulty denying that the human pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of
pain might represent part of the divine order of things.
Hence, God was not eliminated by the trend toward materialism.
Even Voltaire, as critical as he often was in religious matters, asserted
that men possessed a natural benevolence absent in beasts, meaning
that man was born with an inherent moral faculty which gave him the
capacity to do good. Voltaire’s contemporary, English writer Henry
Fielding, actually linked the Christian concept of charity to natural
law as reverse sides of the same coin in his novel Tom Jones (1749). In
a discussion with another character, who denied that the word
‘‘charity’’ meant beneficence or generosity in scripture, Squire Alwor-
thy disagreed on the principle that charity was ‘‘an indispensable duty,
enjoined by Christian law and the law of nature itself’’:
Thus it is obvious that even those who were inclined to view the direct
intervention of God in the world with skepticism, saw in mankind an
inherent capacity to do good things and to make moral judgments.
The irony of this view is, however, that as more direct, biological
connections were discovered in the early eighteenth century between
men and beasts, it appeared less and less that men were disposed by
nature to bestial behavior. Sir Isaac Newton certainly believed that
man’s capacity to reason and nature’s acting in harmony with natural
law were proofs not just of God’s presence, but of his benevolence
toward men. For Newton, the universal law of gravitation, together
with his notions of space and time, demonstrated that God had created
a structure beneficial to man if only man was alert enough to try to dis-
cover that structure. Indeed, notes Norman Hampson, the ‘‘whole phi-
losophy of Newton leads of necessity to the knowledge of a Supreme
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
62
Being, who created everything, arranged all things of his own free
will.’’66 This view was, to some extent, Voltaire’s view as well, espe-
cially considering the remarkable coincidence that whenever the philo-
sophe ‘‘thought of God, [he] tended to think of Newton at the same
time.’’67 But although the Enlightenment began with assuming that the
structure of the world and its universal physical laws implied not just
the benevolence of God, but also his existence, the characteristics or
attributes of God remained a mystery despite a multitude of books
written on the subject early in the century.
The proper place of religion thus became an element in social
thought, whatever its spiritual implications. To be sure, the argument
for toleration produced by Locke and subsequently adopted by philoso-
phes such as Voltaire and Hume was a partial answer, insofar as it pro-
vided a political formula for stability through freedom of conscience,
though even that formula required extraordinary effort to maintain.
Cautioned Hume along these lines:
All other systems have something in them that either shock our
reason, or are repugnant to it, and man, if he thinks at all, must
stifle his reason in order to force himself to believe them. But in
Deism our reason and our belief become happily united. The
wonderful structure of the universe, and everything we behold in
the system of the creation, prove to us, far better than books can
do, the existence of a God, and at the same time proclaim His
attributes. It is by the exercise of our reason that we are enabled
to contemplate God in His works, and imitate Him in His ways.
When we see His care and goodness extended over all His crea-
tures, it teaches us our duty toward each other, while it calls forth
our gratitude to Him. It is by forgetting God in His works, and
running after the books of pretended revelation, that man has
wandered from the straight path of duty and happiness, and
become by turns the victim of doubt and the dupe of delusion.72
Notes
1. See Robert R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Po-
litical History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1959–1964).
2. Caponigri, 349.
3. Gay, Party of Humanity, 131.
4. Voltaire to Jean-le-Rond d’Alembert, April 5, 1766, Voltaire,
Selected Letters, 260.
5. Caponigri, 278.
6. Brinton, 291.
7. Caponigri, 350.
8. Quoted by James Boswell, Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 263.
The Philosophes, the Church, and Christianity
71
9. Voltaire to the comte de Maurepas, April 20, 1726, Voltaire,
Selected Letters, 22.
10. Voltaire to Jean-Baptiste Nicolas de Formont, December 6, 1732,
ibid., 29.
11. Voltaire, Letters on England, 8.
12. ‘‘On Descartes and Newton,’’ Letter 14, ibid., 68.
13. Ibid., 70, 72.
14. Voltaire to Rene-Joseph Tournemine, August 1775, Voltaire,
Selected Letters, 48.
15. Voltaire to Martin Ffolkes, November 25, 1743, ibid., 108.
16. Voltaire to Sir Edward Fawkener, September 18, 1735, ibid., 52.
17. Voltaire to Willem Jacob ‘S-Gravesande, August 1741, ibid., 94.
18. Voltaire to Rene-Joseph Tournemine, August 1735, ibid., 51.
19. Voltaire to Willem Jacob ‘S-Gravesande, August 1741, ibid., 94.
20. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, 45.
21. Ibid., 15.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 57.
24. Ibid., 17, 27.
25. Ibid., 36, 39.
26. ‘‘On the Presbyterians,’’ Letter 6, Voltaire, Letters on England, 41.
27. ‘‘Toleration,’’ Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, Theodore Bester-
man, trans. and ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 391.
28. ‘‘On the Anglican Religion,’’ Letter 5, Voltaire, Letters on England,
38–9.
29. Voltaire to Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia, September 1,
1736, Voltaire, Selected Letters, 57. In ferio and in barbara were mnemonics
for classes of syllogisms.
30. Voltaire to Antiochus Cantemir, March 13, 1739, ibid., 77.
31. Voltaire to Isaac Cambiague, December 1725, ibid., 21. (Empha-
sis Voltaire’s.) The reference to ‘‘the very Christian king’’ derives from the
honorific title granted in medieval times to the monarchs of France as the
most Christian kings of Europe and the eldest sons of the Catholic Church.
32. ‘‘Toleration,’’ Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 390.
33. Smollett, Count Fathom, 50.
34. Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Henry D. Aiken,
ed. (New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1948), 94.
35. Rothrock and Jones, 344.
36. Gay, Party of Humanity, 135.
37. R.W. Harris, Absolutism and Enlightenment (London: Blandford
Press Ltd., 1964), 3.
38. Ibid.
39. Caponigri, 369.
40. Hume, Dialogues, 13. (Emphasis Hume’s.)
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
72
41. Rothrock and Jones, 344.
42. Voltaire to Jean-François Dufour, seigneur de Villevielle, August
26, 1768, Voltaire, Selected Letters, 276.
43. Locke, Letter on Toleration, 13.
44. Hume, Dialogues, 88.
45. Ibid., xi.
46. Ibid., 87.
47. Voltaire to Joseph de Vaux de Giry, February 1743, Voltaire,
Selected Letters, 100–1.
48. ‘‘Atheist,’’ Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 57.
49. Voltaire to the seigneur de Villevielle, August 28, 1768, Voltaire,
Selected Letters, 278.
50. ‘‘Atheist,’’ Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 57.
51. Voltaire to the seigneur de Villevieille, August 28, 1768, Voltaire,
Selected Letters, 278.
52. ‘‘Atheist,’’ Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 57.
53. Brinton, 295
54. Ibid., 295, 296.
55. Ibid., 301.
56. ‘‘Original Sin,’’ Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 332.
57. Hume, Dialogues, 61.
58. Rothrock and Jones, 344.
59. Gay, Party of Humanity, 122.
60. Hume, Dialogues, 92–3.
61. Ibid., 93.
62. Rothrock and Jones, 345.
63. Hume, Dialogues, 17.
64. ‘‘Miracles,’’ Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 311–3.
65. Fielding, Tom Jones, 79.
66. Hampson, 79.
67. Ibid.
68. Hume, Dialogues, 90–1.
69. Hampson, 85.
70. ‘‘Theist,’’ Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 386.
71. Ibid.
72. Modern History Sourcebook: ‘‘Thomas Paine: Of the Religion of
Deism compared with the Christian Religion,’’ http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/
mod/paine-deism.html.
73. ‘‘Theist,’’ Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 386.
74. Baumer, Modern Currents of Western Thought, 370.
75. Ibid.
76. ‘‘Theist,’’ Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 370.
77. Baumer, Modern Currents of Western Thought, 370.
78. Boswell, Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica, France, 261.
79. Ibid., 281–2.
The Philosophes, the Church, and Christianity
73
80. Quoted in J.H. Randall, The Making of the Modern Mind, rev. ed.
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1940), 292.
81. Brinton, 300.
82. Ibid.
83. ‘‘Atheist,’’ Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 56.
84. Voltaire to Dominique Audibert, July 9, 1762, Voltaire, Selected
Letters, 232.
85. Ibid.
86. Voltaire to the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha, March 7, 1763, ibid., 235.
87. ‘‘Fanaticism,’’ Voltaire, Philosophical Letters, 201–3.
88. Modern History Source book: ‘‘David Hume: On Miracles,’’ http://
www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/hume-miracles.html.
89. Ibid.
90. Gay, Party of Humanity, 125.
91. Merriman, 408.
92. Gay, Party of Humanity, 125.
93. Ibid.
94. Merriman, 409.
95. Ibid., 410.
96. Caponigri, 370.
97. Ibid.
98. Ibid., 370–1.
99. Gay, The Enlightenment, I, 398.
100. Holbach, La Syst^eme de la Nature, excerpted in Baumer, Modern
Currents of Western Thought, 402.
101. Caponigri, 371.
102. Gay, The Enlightenment, I, 398–400; see also Party of Humanity,
114, 176, 272.
103. Quoted in Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought, 403.
104. Gay, The Enlightenment, I, 400.
105. Holbach, La Syst^eme de la Nature, excerpted in Baumer, Modern
Currents of Western Thought, 402.
106. Caponigri, 370.
107. Ibid.
108. Quoted in Baumer, Modern European Thought, 167.
109. Quoted in ibid.
110. Hampson, 150.
111. Ibid., 126.
112. Harris, 29.
113. Quoted in Hampson, 126.
114. Caponigri, 372.
115. Ibid., 373; Hampson, 126.
116. Boswell, Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica and France, 184.
117. Ibid., 112–3.
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CHAPTER 4
THE PHILOSOPHES,
POLITICAL THOUGHT,
AND ENLIGHTENED
DESPOTISM
What is the true End of Monarchy? Not to deprive People of their
natural Liberty; but to correct their Actions, in order to attain the
supreme Good.
—Catherine II ‘‘the Great’’ of Russia, 1767
Voltaire was far too sensible, far too realistic, and far too aware of the
historical processes at work in state- or nation-building ever to believe,
however, that the British constitution could or even should be superim-
posed upon, or emulated by, his native France.
At the same time, though his superb histories of the reigns of
Kings Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Charles XII of Sweden revealed just
how much he admired the power and accomplishments of great mon-
archs,34 while also advocating undivided sovereignty and secular
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
82
supremacy over all public and ecclesiastical matters,35 Voltaire offered
a vigorous defense of republican ideas on more than one occasion. He
once wrote:
Rousseau was still more critical of the philosophers of his day for adopt-
ing ‘‘false principles of wisdom brought to perfection.’’48 The same scorn
for contemporary philosophy and those who generated it led Denis
Diderot to advise in a more moderate tone, ‘‘Let the last century furnish
examples of genius; it is for our own age to prescribe the rules,’’49 which
(added the Marquis de Condorcet) would allow for a human race
‘‘emancipated from its shackles, released from the power of fate and
from that of the enemies of its progress,’’ as humanity advanced ‘‘with a
firm and sure step along the path of truth, virtue, and happiness.’’50
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
84
Among the dogmatic philosophical systems that the philosophes
opposed in particular was, of course, doctrinal Christianity that lay at
the core of organized religion. For not only did it render nature and
man—supposedly God’s special creation, formed in His image and
likeness, and endowed with certain god-like qualities—helpless before
the dictates of a universal yet unknowable divine plan for Creation and
the mysterious workings of Providence; it also degraded humanity as
essentially evil, sinful in nature, and forever incapable of moral self-
improvement through human reason or action. The same dogmatic
Christianity was held responsible for the sectarianism and intolerance
that had caused so much human misery in European history, as well as
the perpetuation into the eighteenth century of ignorance, compla-
cency with things as they were, and traditional authority, which
obstructed man’s progress toward a more enlightened, secular future.
The Baron d’Holbach made that point specifically with respect to man’s
political life when he asserted that
Collect all the children of the universe, and you will see in them
only innocence, gentleness, and fear. If they were born wicked,
evil-doing, cruel, they would show some sign of it, just as small
serpents try to bite and little tigers to claw. But nature, not hav-
ing given more offensive arms to men than to pigeons and rab-
bits, could not give them an instinct of destruction. So man is
not born evil.52
that men who have devoted themselves to thought and who are
honored with the great name of philosopher … [through] pride
and ambition should make them wish that they could lay down
the law to all their fellows and thus be almost kings of mankind.
And it is not less surprising that the majority of men have submit-
ted to this intellectual domination, since a great part of mankind
are timid and lazy when it comes to thinking for themselves. As
for me, who have found myself in every frame of mind and have
experienced life in great variety, I think that the general rules are
very badly connived and hold men in tiresome dependence, with
no other advantage than to aggrandize certain famous names
which have almost become oracles. It is true that a society cannot
exist without general rules.… Let us therefore have laws, and let
those laws be the general laws … which are really necessary for
public happiness.… [Otherwise], I wish everyone to live natu-
rally, as he himself pleases, and then possibly we might not hear
so many people complaining of this evil world.62
The full significance of Boswell’s words lies not just in his rejec-
tion of intellectual dogmatism and philosophical systems-building, but
also in his very utilitarian appeal for a set of general rules that could
ensure individual liberty to all men. What he invoked, in short, was
the developing concept of natural rights that permeated Enlightenment
political thought. This concept was based partly upon principles of
natural law, partly upon older theories of man in the state of nature
and the social contract proposed by such philosophers as Thomas
Hobbes and John Locke, and partly upon empiricism united to the
study of history, which demonstrated that security of life, liberty, and
property was essential for social stability and the full realization of the
human potential. The doctrine of natural rights thus came to provide
‘‘a standard against which to measure the performance of govern-
ments.’’63 Indeed, it was precisely that standard to which Voltaire
appealed when extolling the excellence of Great Britain’s constitution
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
88
and the privileges that, he noted, ‘‘attach to everyone who sets his foot
on English ground.’’
To the extent, therefore, that political authority—however consti-
tuted—contributed to the greater security of life, liberty, and property
(the three most basic human rights enumerated by John Locke), then it
fulfilled its proper function with respect to the individual citizen or sub-
ject. After all, wrote Locke in his Two Treatises of Government (see Docu-
ment 23), ‘‘the Reason why Men enter into Society, is the preservation
of their Property; and the end why they chuse and authorize a Legisla-
tive [power], is, that there may be Laws made, and Rules set as Guards
and Fences to the Properties of all the Members of the Society, to limit
the Power, and moderate the Dominion of every Part and Member of
the Society.’’64 When, however, that same security of life, liberty, and
property was abrogated by some corrupting influence, such as dynastic
ambition or arbitrary rule without reference to law and the responsibil-
ities of the government to the governed, then political authority not
only failed in its primary purpose, but exposed itself to popular rebel-
lion, too, just as Locke had also warned in his philosophy. In fact,
according to the English thinker, revolution was not merely the inevita-
ble outcome of political oppression, it was the right of the oppressed to
rebel and erect a new government in place of the old. He admonished:
How proud they make a man feel! What have you done to
deserve such advantages? Put yourself to the trouble of being
born—nothing more! For the rest, a very ordinary man! Whereas
I, lost among the obscure crowd, have had to deploy more
knowledge, more calculation and skill merely to survive than has
sufficed to rule all the provinces of Spain for a century!77
that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure
these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed.—That
whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these
ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to
institute new Government, laying its foundation on such princi-
ples and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall
seem most likely to effect their Security and Happiness.80
When you see Frederick the Great (for I must own he deserves
that name), instead of being struck with the majesty of his pres-
ence and the splendor of his actions, you should have recollected
with abhorrence his ruinous ambition, his perfidy and want of
principles; you shall have seen not a hero who conquers but to
bless, but the tyrant of his people and the enemy of mankind.91
has sometimes been said that the happiest government was that
of a just and enlightened despot, it is a very reckless assertion.
It would easily happen that the will of this absolute master was
in contradiction to the will of his subjects. Then, despite all his
justice and all his enlightenment, he would be wrong to deprive
them of their rights even in their own interests.93
Notes
1. Immanuel Kant, ‘‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlighten-
ment?’’ in Goodman and Wellman, eds., The Enlightenment, 20.
2. Ibid., 20, 21. (Emphasis Kant’s.)
3. Anderson, 412.
4. Baron d’Holbach, ‘‘A Materialist View of Nature,’’ excerpted in
Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought, 408.
5. Jean-le-Rond d’Alembert, ‘‘Encyclopedia,’’ excerpted in Baumer,
Main Currents of Western Thought, 380.
6. Harris, 3.
7. Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought, 368.
8. Ibid.
9. Leonard Krieger, Kings and Philosophers, 1689–1789 (New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 1970), 118.
10. Ibid., 116.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 116–7.
13. Ibid., 117–8.
14. Gay, Party of Humanity, 120.
15. Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought, 370.
16. Bay, Party of Humanity, 275.
17. Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought, 370.
18. Voltaire, ‘‘Fatherland,’’ in Philosophical Dictionary, 329.
The Philosophes, Political Thought, and Enlightened Despotism
97
19. Brinton, 303.
20. Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought, 365.
21. Ibid., 370.
22. Krieger, 131.
23. Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France, 3 vols. (Harmmonds-
worth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1965) vol. I, 29.
24. William Shakespeare, Henry V, Act V, scene 2, in The Complete
Works (London: Abbey Library, 1977), 493.
25. Cobban, vol. I, 30.
26. Harris, 3.
27. Ibid., 34.
28. Ibid., 4–5.
29. Quoted in ibid., 3–4.
30. Gay, Party of Humanity, 274.
31. Voltaire, ‘‘Tyranny,’’ in the Philosophical Dictionary, 398.
32. Voltaire to Frederick, Crown Prince of Prussia, September 1,
1736, in Voltaire, Selected Letters, 56.
33. Voltaire, ‘‘Government,’’ excerpted in Baumer, Main Currents of
Western Thought, 421.
34. Harris, 26.
35. Gay, Party of Humanity, 60.
36. Voltaire, ‘‘Fatherland,’’ in Philosophical Dictionary, 328.
37. Quoted in Gay, Party of Humanity, 56, 87.
38. Quoted in ibid., 87.
39. Voltaire, ‘‘Tyranny,’’ in Philosophical Dictionary, 398.
40. Brinton, 303.
41. d’Alembert, ‘‘Preliminary Discourse’’ to the Grande Enclyclopedie,
excerpted in Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought, 377.
42. Boswell, Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 280.
43. Cobban, vol. I, 102.
44. d’Alembert, ‘‘Preliminary Discourse’’ to the Grande Enclyclopedie,
excerpted in Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought, 378.
45. Rousseau, Confessions, 405.
46. Quoted in Cobban, vol. I, 102.
47. Voltaire to d’Alembert, June 26, 1766, in Voltaire, Selected Letters, 263.
48. Rousseau, Confessions, 411.
49. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, 288.
50. Quoted in Cobban, vol. I, 102.
51. Baron d’Holbach, ‘‘On Theology and Morality,’’ excerpted in
Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought, 404. (Emphasis his.)
52. Voltaire, ‘‘Wickedness,’’ in the Philosophical Dictionary, 299–300.
53. The following discussion of Leibniz’s philosophy is derived from:
Ellen J. Wilson, Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (New York: Facts on File,
1996) 244–5; Edward Craig, ed., Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
98
(London: Routledge, 1998) vol. V, 545–6; Donald M. Bourchert, ed., Ency-
clopedia of Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Farmington Hills, MI: Thomas Gale, 2006)
vol. V, 263–5.
54. Voltaire, Candide or Optimism, John Butt, trans. (London: Penguin
Books, 1947), 9.
55. Voltaire to Jean-Robert Tronchin, November 24, 1755, Selected
Letters, 181.
56. Voltaire, ‘‘All is Good,’’ in the Philosophical Dictionary, 68, 74. Ibid.
(Emphasis ours.)
57. Voltaire, Candide, 9–10.
58. Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, or: An Examination of that Axiom ‘‘All
is Well’’, 1, http://geophysics.tau.ac.il/personal/shmulik/LisbonEq-letters.htm.
59. Voltaire, Candide, 10.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 11.
62. Boswell, Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica and France, 119–20.
63. Rothrock and Jones, 346.
64. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 412.
65. Ibid., 412–13. (Emphasis Locke’s.)
66. Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought, 366.
67. Ibid., 366–7.
68. Rothrock and Jones, 346.
69. Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought, 371.
70. Ibid.
71. Quoted by James Boswell, Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica and France,
286.
72. Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought, 365.
73. Quoted in ibid.
74. Smollett, Count Fathom, 299–300. The four men referred to are
respectively Philip Yorke, first Earl of Hardwicke (1690–1764); Henry Fox,
first Baron Holland (1704–1774); John Aislabie (1700–1742), a statesman
and politician; and Sir Horace Mann (1709–1782), a British diplomat.
75. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, trans. and ed., The Autobiography of Du
Pont de Nemours (Delaware: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1984), 123.
76. Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, The Barber of Seville and
the Marriage of Figaro, John Wood, trans. (London: Penguin Books, 1964),
29, 112.
77. Ibid., 199.
78. Quoted in ibid., 30.
79. Abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes, What is the Third Estate? M. Blondel
and S.E. Finer, trans. and eds. (London: Pall Mall Press, 1963) 51–2. (Empha-
sis Sieyes’.)
80. See http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/index.htm.
81. Gay, The Enlightenment, vol. II, 483.
The Philosophes, Political Thought, and Enlightened Despotism
99
82. Voltaire to Marie-Louise Denis, December 18, 1762; to Jean-
Baptiste de Boyer, marquis d’Argens, October 2, 1740; and to Charles-Jean-
François Henault, October 31, 1740, Selected Letters, 84, 85, 167.
83. Krieger, 251.
84. Quoted in Harris, 4.
85. From J. Ellis Barker, trans., The Foundations of Germany (New
York: E.P. Dutton, 1916), 22–3, excerpted in the Modern History Source-
book: ‘‘Frederick II: Essay on Forms of Government,’’ http://www.fordham.
edu/halsall/mod/18fred2.html.
86. From Catherine II, ‘‘Proposals for a New Law Code,’’ excerpted in
the Modern History Sourcebook, 2, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/
18catherine.html.
87. The only aim of contemporary monarchy in Europe, wrote Mon-
tesquieu, was ‘‘the glory of the subject, of the state, and of the sovereign.
But hence there results a spirit of liberty, which in these states is capable of
achieving as great things, and of contributing as much, perhaps, to happi-
ness, as liberty itself’’ (Spirit of the Laws, 162).
88. Voltaire to Sir Everard Fawkener, June 1742, Selected Letters, 98.
89. Voltaire to Marie-Louise Denis, December 18, 1752, ibid., 167.
90. Rousseau, Confessions, 580–1.
91. Boswell, Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 276.
92. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 152.
93. Quoted in Harris, 28–9.
94. Quoted in Gay, Party of Humanity, 275.
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CHAPTER 5
liberty can consist only in the power of doing what one ought to
will, and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to
will.… Liberty is a right [therefore] of doing whatever the laws
permit, and if a citizen could do what they forbid, he would no
longer be possessed of liberty, because his fellow-citizens would
have the same power.2
Those civilized peoples cultivate, in turn, ‘‘the semblance of all the vir-
tues without possessing them.’’14
Rousseau’s position was both unorthodox and the object of scorn
by various critics. In fact, he later recalled, ‘‘no sooner had my Essay
appeared, than the defenders of literature fell upon me as if by com-
mon consent.’’15 Among those ‘‘defenders’’ was Poland’s King Stani-
slaus II Poniatowski (r. 1764–1795), one of Europe’s Enlightened
Despots, who affirmed the orthodox view that the arts and sciences
‘‘serve to make known the true, the good, and the useful of all kinds, a
precious knowledge which, by enlightening minds, ought naturally to
contribute to purifying morals.’’16 The embattled philosophe defended
his ideas nevertheless and in such a manner, he wrote, that his critics
‘‘no longer had the laugh on their side.’’ This staunch republican was
especially proud of his response to Stanislaus Poniatowski, for in it he
‘‘seized the opportunity of showing the public how a private individual
could defend the cause of truth, even against a sovereign.’’17
Clearly undaunted by his critics, Rousseau returned to his theme
in an essay he submitted for a second competition sponsored by the
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
106
same Dijon Academy in 1754. This time, the entries were to respond
to the question, ‘‘What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it
authorized by natural law?’’ In his Confessions, the philosophe described
in fascinating detail the thought processes by which he arrived at his
answer. Residing near Saint-Germaine at the time, he took long walks
in the surrounding forest, where he ‘‘sought and found the picture of
those primitive times’’ in which men had lived originally, and of which
he sketched out the history. In the process, boasted Rousseau,
Such was, or must have been the origin of society and of law,
which gave new fetters to the weak and new power to the rich;
irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, fixed for ever the laws of
property and inequality; changed an artful usurpation into an
irrevocable right; and for the benefit of a few ambitious individ-
uals subjected the rest of mankind to perpetual labor, servitude,
and misery.22
Rousseau echoed the baron’s outlook, adding in his own turn that as
the citizen of a free state and a member of its sovereign body, ‘‘the very
right to vote imposes on me the duty to instruct myself in public affairs,
however little influence my voice may have in them.’’41 Therein lay the
key to human liberty in civil society and virtue, which Voltaire defined
as ‘‘a commerce of beneficence.’’ ‘‘No account should be taken of any
man,’’ he asserted, ‘‘who had no part in this commerce.’’42 On that prin-
ciple, at least, Voltaire and Rousseau could agree.
Notes
1. Brinton, 306.
2. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 150.
3. Paul Rahe, Twilight of Liberty, Democracy’s Drift to Soft Despotism
(New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press, 2008), 14.
4. Ibid., 425.
5. Ibid., 156.
6. Ibid., 150.
7. Ibid., 151–2.
The Alternative Vision of Montesquieu and Rousseau
111
8. Ibid., 160.
9. Ibid., 156.
10. Voltaire to the duc de Richelieu, June 22, 1762, Voltaire, Selected
Letters, 231.
11. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, and
Polemics, Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelley, and Judith R. Bush, trans.
and eds. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992), 3.
12. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, Maurice Cranston,
trans. (London: Penguin Books, 1968), 16.
13. Rousseau, Discourse on Sciences and Arts, 5.
14. Ibid.
15. Rousseau, Confessions, 354.
16. Stanislaus Poniatowski, ‘‘Reply to the Discourse which was
awarded the prize of the Academy of Dijon,’’ Rousseau, Discourse on Scien-
ces and Arts, 29.
17. Rousseau, Confessions, 355.
18. Ibid., 378.
19. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourse on the
Origin of Inequality, Lester G. Crocker, trans. and ed. (New York: Pocket
Books, 1967), x–xi.
20. Ibid., x.
21. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Ibid., 211–12.
(Emphasis Rousseau’s.) Significantly, Voltaire had arrived at a parallel con-
clusion when exploring the origins of evil. Why are some men afflicted by
‘‘this plague of wickedness?’’ he asked. ‘‘It is because their leaders, being
infected by the disease, communicate it to the rest of mankind.… The first
ambitious man corrupted the earth.’’ (‘‘Evil,’’ in Voltaire, Philosophical Dic-
tionary, 300.)
22. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, 228.
23. Voltaire to Rousseau, August 30, 1755, in Voltaire, Selected Letters,
179.
24. Rousseau, Confessions, 386.
25. Rousseau, Social Contract, 24.
26. Ibid., 49.
27. Ibid., 27.
28. Ibid., 49.
29. Brinton, 307.
30. Ibid.
31. Rousseau, Social Contract, 59.
32. Ibid., 69.
33. Ibid., 64.
34. Brinton, 309.
35. Rousseau, Social Contract, 64.
36. Brinton, 309.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
112
37. Ibid.
38. Gay, Party of Humanity, 277.
39. Ibid.
40. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, xii–xiii.
41. Rousseau, Social Contract, 49.
42. ‘‘Virtue,’’ in Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 398.
Denis Diderot, 1713–1784. Courtesy of Library of Congress.
Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Ch^atelet
(1706–1749), Enlightenment writer and commentator. Courtesy of
Library of Congress.
Charon accepting the baker Sr. Remy, mistakenly beheaded, into his
boat while rejecting several government officials and guardsmen, all
who carry their severed heads atop pikes; on the opposite shore, the
Elysian Fields, the unfortunate Jean Calas and others have come to
welcome the baker. Courtesy of Library of Congress.
Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise
du Ch^atelet (1706–1749)
The future writer and commentator on the science of Sir Isaac
Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier
de Breteuil, marquise du Ch^atelet was the daughter of a well con-
nected French aristocrat attached to the Bourbon court. After receiv-
ing an education in literature, science, and music, which was
uncommon for young women in the period, she married Florent-
Claude, marquis du Ch^atelet in 1725. Within a few years, however,
husband and wife became estranged from each other, owing in large
part to the marquis’ extended absences as a soldier on campaign or
as a royal governor.
Settling in Paris in 1730, Mme. du Ch^atelet became deeply
involved in the salon culture of the day, and in 1733 she met Voltaire,
who became her lover. Even after their affair had ended, they remained
life-long friends and intellectual collaborators, particularly interested
in promoting Newtonian science. In fact, it was she who protected Vol-
taire in 1734 when, faced with arrest following the publication of his
Philosophical Letters. She gave him refuge at her country estate of
Cirey. It was there that Voltaire and his mistress-benefactress began
their collaboration on the Elements of the Philosophy of Newton (1738),
which was designed to introduce the natural philosophy of the great
English scientist to the French reading public in popular form.
Thereafter, Mme. du Ch^atelet began preparation of a separate
book on physics, drawing not only upon Newtonian principles but
also upon the work and ideas of Leibniz, some of whose theories she
defended even over and above those of Newton on a number of sub-
jects. Her research and writing resulted in the publication of the
Biographies
121
Institutions of Physics (1740), which established her reputation as an
intellectual in her own right. Mme. du Ch^atelet next embarked upon
a French translation of Newton’s Principia Mathematica in 1745,
though the book was not published until 1756 and 1759, after her
death. During her work on the project, which remains the only
French-language translation of Newton’s masterpiece to date, she met
and began an affair with a young military officer named J.F. de Saint-
Lambert. Soon pregnant by him, Mme. du Ch^atelet died of complica-
tions from childbirth in 1749 to the intense sorrow of Voltaire, who
deeply regretted the loss of a woman he referred to as his one and
only soul-mate. Indeed, it was for her sake that he had declined the
repeated invitations of Frederick II of Prussia to go to Berlin prior to
1750, writing that ‘‘I cannot leave Madame du Ch^atelet to whom I
have dedicated my life, not for any prince, not even for this one.’’13
She was also among the very few women who participated actively
in the scientific world of the Enlightenment, and whose independent
contributions are important in their own right.
Joseph II (1741/1765–1790)
Joseph II was the eldest son and heir of Holy Roman Emperor
Francis Stephen of Lorraine (1708/1745–1765) and Maria Theresa
Biographies
130
(1717/1740–1780), whose accession to the throne of the Habsburg
dominions of her late father, Charles VI, provided the impetus for a
European war over the Austrian succession, during which the weal-
thy province of Silesia was lost permanently to Frederick II of
Prussia, Maria Theresa’s life-long nemesis. Upon his father’s death in
1765, Joseph, whom one biographer described as having a ‘‘sublime
confidence in the infallibility of his own judgment,’’ 25 became Holy
Roman Emperor and ruled the Habsburg territories jointly with his
hard-working mother until she died in 1780.
His brother Leopold, an astute judge of character, described his
sibling as a ruler who ‘‘tolerates no contradiction and is imbued with
arbitrary, brutal principles and the most severe, brutal, and violent
despotism … He despises everything which is not his own idea and
likes and wants around him only those men who have no talent, who
obey like nothing more than mere machines, and who give him credit
for everything that is done.’’26 Thereafter, he ruled the empire alone,
earning the reputation in the meantime as one of Europe’s most com-
mitted Enlightened Despots. Even more, perhaps, than his fellow mon-
archs (and occasional rivals), Frederick II of Prussia and Catherine II
of Russia, Joseph II was devoted to the idea that state policy should be
guided by humanitarian considerations, and for this purpose he inaug-
urated an almost radical reform program from above, while still main-
taining the fundamental policies initiated by his late mother to
consolidate and strengthen the Habsburg realm and imperial power.
Dedicated to the ideals of social, or at least legal, equality,
humanitarianism, religious toleration, universal education, and eco-
nomic prosperity, when the pace of Joseph’s reform program appeared
to move too slowly for his tastes, he asserted his authority in the
belief that meaningful change had to come from the ruler, in whom
resided all legitimate authority to effect such change. At once idealis-
tic and authoritarian, like his fellow monarchs in contemporary
France, Prussia, and Russia, Joseph refused to share his sovereignty
with lesser centers of power (e.g., the nobility, the guilds, the Catholic
Church, and so on), because he believed these various intermediate
groups would more likely promote their own interests rather than the
common good. In the process, the emperor directly attacked tradi-
tional institutions, privileges, and corporate bodies that appeared to
obstruct his reform measures, which he was impatient to implement.
But his efforts served only to antagonize many constituencies within
the Habsburg realm, from aristocrats to peasants, and hence the close
of his reign was marked by domestic strife and revolt.
Despite this turmoil, Joseph II remained committed to Enlight-
enment ideals to the end of his life. As ruler of one of Europe’s
Biographies
131
greatest powers, he continued the centralization of the state and po-
litical authority in the hands of the monarchy, but at the same time
he limited the influence of the Catholic Church in secular affairs and
confiscated some Church lands, though he saw the value of religion
as a moral force in society. He also worked to secularize education
and to place marriage more fully under state supervision. He even
clashed with the papacy over matters of Church governance, and
introduced a measure of religious toleration for his non-Catholic
subjects. In addition to these ecclesiastical reforms, Joseph sought to
improve economic affairs by implementing a universal land tax and
placed restrictions on the fiscal privileges of certain corporate
groups; he similarly relaxed official censorship of the press. But as
conservative opposition grew to what was regarded as an assault on
traditional entitlements and privileges, Joseph responded with a
heavy hand by restricting the freedom of specific groups, outlawing
others (e.g., the freemasons), and generally curtailing individual lib-
erties under the law, all of which incited still more intense opposi-
tion from many of his subjects and contradicted, ironically, many of
the very ideals he held. Joseph was not even popular with his minis-
ters, one of whom, Kaunitz, upon hearing of the emperor’s death
remarked: ‘‘That was good of him.’’27 As a result of the mounting
domestic strife, following his death in 1790 most of the emperor’s
reforms were rescinded by his successor, Leopold II (1747/1790–
1792), who shared many of his late brother’s Enlightenment ideals
but who recognized the impracticability of his reform policies.
Notes
1. Giacomo Casanova, chevalier de Seingalt, History of My Life, Will-
ard R. Trask, trans. and ed., 12 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
Inc., 1968), vol. 3, 189; vol. 5, 265.
2. Voltaire to Cardinal Domenico Passionei, January 9, 1746, Vol-
taire, Selected Letters, 119.
3. Voltaire to Jacob Vernet, September 14, 1733, ibid., 30.
4. Ibid.
5. Peter Gay, Voltaire’s Politics (New York: Random House, 1965), 48.
6. Rousseau, Confessions, 594.
7. Voltaire to Jean-Jacques Dortous de Mairan, May 5, 1741, Voltaire,
Selected Letters, 89.
Bertrand, December 26, 1763, ibid., 242.
8. Voltaire to Elie
9. Gay, Voltaire’s Politics, 32.
10. Quoted in Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, The Sci-
ence of Freedom (New York: Norton and Co., 1969), 438–9.
11. Frederick A. Pottle, ed., Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763 (New
York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Ind., 1950), 102.
12. Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, August 27, 1775, R.W. chap-
man, ed., The Letters of Samuel Johnson, 3 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon
Press, 1952) vol. 2, 431.
Biographies
142
13. Voltaire to Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, marquis d’Argens, October 2,
1740, Voltaire, Selected Letters, 84.
14. Rousseau, Confessions, 543.
15. Ibid., 543–4.
16. Ibid., 333, 334.
17. Voltaire to Charles Palissot de Montenoy, June 4, 1760, Voltaire,
Selected Letters, 213.
18. Rousseau, Confessions, 336.
19. Ibid., 339.
20. Pottle, Boswell on Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 179.
21. Pottle, Boswell’s London Journal, 173.
22. Adam Smith to William Strahan, November 9, 1776, in The Porta-
ble Age of Reason Reader, Crane Brinton, ed. (New York: The Viking Press,
1956), 613.
23. Rousseau, Confessions, 618.
24. Pottle, Boswell on Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 280.
25. T.C.W. Blanning, Joseph II and Enlightened Despotism (New York:
Harper and Row, 1970), 43.
26. Ibid.
27. T.C.W. Blanning, Joseph II (New York: Longman, 1994), 198.
28. Manfred Kuehn, Kant, a Biography (New York: Cambridge, 2001), 1.
29. Maurice Cranston, John Locke, a Biography (New York: Longman,
1957), 480.
30. John Dunn, Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 87.
31. Ibid.
32. Voltaire, Letters on England, 62.
33. Voltaire to Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues, April 15,
1743, Voltaire, Selected Letters, 103.
34. Voltaire to Charles-Emmanuel de Crussol, Duc d’Uzes, September
14, 1751, ibid., 164.
35. Voltaire, Letters on England, 69, 70.
36. Rousseau, Confessions, 7.
37. Ibid., 106.
38. Voltaire to Jean-le-Rond d’Alembert, June 17, 1762, Voltaire,
Selected Letters, 230.
39. Rousseau, Confessions, 370.
40. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (India-
napolis, Ind: Hackett Publishing, 1992), xvi.
41. Voltaire to the duc de Richelieu, June 22, 1762, ibid., 231.
42. Pottle, Boswell on Tour: Italy, Corsica and France, 321.
PRIMARY DOCUMENTS
Source: Austin, Sarah, trans. Fragments from German Prose Writers (New
York: D. Appleton and Company, 1841), 228–38.
Among men of letters there is one group against which the arbit-
ers of taste, the important people, the rich people, are united:
This is the pernicious, the damnable group of philosophes, who
hold that it is possible to be a good Frenchman without courting
those in power, a good citizen without flattering national preju-
dices, a good Christian without persecuting anybody. These phil-
osophes believe it right to make more of an honest if little-
known writer than of a well-known writer without enlighten-
ment and without principles, to hold that foreigners are not infe-
rior to us in every respect, and to prefer, for example, a
government under which the people are not slaves to one under
which they are. This way of thinking is for many people an
unpardonable crime. What shocks them most of all, they say, is
the tone the philosophes use, the tone of dogmatism, the tone of
the master who knows. I admit that those of the philosophes
who do indeed deserve this reproach would have done well to
avoid deserving it … [Yet] Truth can hardly be too modest,
Truth indeed, just by being truth, runs always a sufficiently great
risk of being rejected. But after all, this truth, so feared, so
hated, so insulted, is so rare and precious, it seems to me, that
those who tell it may be pardoned a little excess of fervor. The
writer who wants to write more than ephemerally has got to be
right.… If a dogmatic tone, one that tells the truth crudely,
shocks our delicate judges, they will do well never to open ge-
ometry books; they won’t find more insolent ones.
Primary Documents
147
Source: Jean-le-Rond d’Alembert, ‘‘On men of letters,’’ The Portable Age
of Reason Reader, Crane Brinton, ed. (New York: The Viking Press,
1956), 90–1.
Your Jean-Jacques is the one I’m most angry with [for causing
disunity among the philosophes]. This stark mad man, who could
have amounted to something if he had let you be his guide, has
taken it into his head to go on his own. He writes against the
theater after producing a bad comedy … he writes against
the France that feeds him.… He abandons his friends; he writes
me the most impertinent letters ever scribbled by a fanatic.
Excessive pride and envy have destroyed Jean-Jacques, my
illustrious philosopher. That monster dares speak of education …
! A man who refused to raise any of his … sons and put them
all in foundling homes! … I do not know whether he is abhorred
in Paris as he is by all the upright people of Geneva. You may be
sure that whoever abandons the philosophes will come to an
unhappy end.
Source: Richard A. Brooks, trans. and ed., The Selected Letters of Voltaire
(New York: New York University Press, 1973), 219, 230.
Document 10: Rousseau Explained the Source of His Split with his
Fellow Philosophes as Their Jealousy over His Musical Talent
Source: Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle, eds., Boswell on the Grand
Tour: Italy, Corsica and France, 1765–1766 (New York: McGraw-Hill
Book Company, Inc., 1955), 271, 280; Frederick A. Pottle, ed., Boswell
on Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 1764, (New York: McGraw-Hill Book
Company, Inc., 1953), 262.
I have finally read Candide. They must have lost their senses to
attribute that filth to me. Thank God, I have better things to
do.… I would forgive this optimism provided that those who
uphold this system added that they believed God will give us in
another life, according to his mercy, the good he deprives us of
in this world according to his justice. It is the eternity to come
that makes for optimism and not the present moment.
Since you are pleased to inquire what are my thoughts about the
mutual toleration of Christians in their different professions of
religion. I must needs answer you freely that I esteem toleration
to be the chief characteristic mark of the true Church.… Now, I
appeal to the conscience of those that persecute, torment,
destroy and kill other men upon pretence of religion, whether
any do it out of friendship and kindness towards them or no? …
The toleration of those that differ from others in matters of reli-
gion is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the
Primary Documents
155
genuine reason of mankind, that it seems monstrous for men to
be so blind as not to perceive the necessity and advantage of it
in so clear a light. I will not here tax the pride and ambition of
some, the passion and uncharitable zeal of others.… The care of
the salvation of men’s souls cannot belong to the magistrate;
because, though the rigour of laws and the force of penalties
were capable to convince and change men’s minds, yet would
not that help at all to the salvation of their souls. For there
being but one truth, one way to heaven, what hope is there that
more men would be led into it if they had no rule but the reli-
gion of the court and were put under the necessity to quit the
light of their own reason, and oppose the dictates of their own
conscience, and blindly to reign themselves up to the will of
their governors and to the religion which either ignorance,
ambition, or superstition had chanced to establish in the coun-
tries where they were born? … Let us now consider what a
church is. A church, then, I take to be a voluntary society of
men. joining themselves together of their own accord in order
to the public worshipping of God in such a manner as they
judge acceptable to Him, and effectual to the salvation of their
souls.…
You see that natural law is but an intimate feeling that, like all
other feelings (thought included) belongs also to imagination.
Evidently, therefore, natural law does not presuppose education,
revelation, nor legislator—provided one does not propose to
confuse natural law with civil laws, in the ridiculous fashion of
the theologians. The arms of fanaticism may destroy those who
support these truths, but they will never destroy the truths
themselves. I do not mean to call in question the existence of a
supreme being; on the contrary it seems to me that the greatest
degree of probability is in favor of this belief. But since the exis-
tence of this being goes no further than that of any other toward
proving the need of worship, it is a theoretic truth with very lit-
tle practical value. Therefore, since we may say, after such long
experience, that religion does not imply exact honesty, we are
authorized by the same reasons to think that atheism does not
exclude it. Furthermore, who can be sure that the reason for
man’s existence is not simply the fact that he exists? Perhaps he
was thrown by chance on some spot on the earth’s surface,
nobody knows how nor why, but simply that he must live and
die, like the mushrooms which appear from day to day, or like
those flowers which border the ditches and cover the walls.
Source: Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws (1748), trans. and ed. by Anne
M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3–5.
All things are good as their Author made them, but everything
degenerates in the hands of man. By man our native soil is forced
to nourish plants brought from foreign regions, and one tree is
made to bear the fruit of another. Man brings about a general
confusion of elements, climates, and seasons; he mutilates his
dogs, his horses, and his slaves; he defaces and confounds every-
thing, and seems to delight only in monsters and deformity. He is
not content with anything as Nature left it; not even with man,
whom he must train for his service like a saddle horse, and twist
in his own particular way like a tree in his garden.
Yet without this interference matters would still be worse
than they are, for our species cannot remain half made over. As
things now are, a man left to himself from his birth would, in his
association with others, prove the most preposterous creature pos-
sible. The prejudices, authority, necessity, and example, in short,
the vicious social institutions in which we find ourselves sub-
merged, would stifle everything natural in him and yet give him
nothing in return. He would be like a shrub which has sprung up
by accident in the middle of the highway to perish by being thrust
this way and that and trampled upon by passers-by.…
To form this rare creature, man, what have we to do?
Much, doubtless, but chiefly to prevent anything being done.…
In the natural order of things, all men being equal, their com-
mon vocation is manhood, and whoever is well trained for that
cannot fulfill any vocation badly which demands manhood.
Whether my pupil be destined for the army, the Church, or the
bar, concerns me but little. Before he is called to the career cho-
sen by his parents, Nature summons him to the duties of human
life. To live is the trade I wish to teach him.… All our wisdom
consists in servile prejudices; all our customs are but suggestion,
anxiety, and constraint. Civilized man is born, lives, dies in a
state of slavery. At his birth he is sewed in swaddling clothes; at
his death he is nailed in a coffin; and as long as he preserves the
human form he is fettered by our institutions. It is said that
nurses sometimes claim to give the infant’s head a better form
by kneading it, and we permit them to do this! It would appear
that our heads were badly fashioned by the Author of Nature,
and that they need to be made over outwardly by the midwife
Primary Documents
164
and inwardly by philosophers! The Caribbeans are more fortu-
nate than we by half.… Observe nature and follow the path she
traces for you!
Source: Robert C. Leslie, ed., Life Aboard a British Privateer in the Time of
Queen Anne. Being the Journal of Captain Woodes Rogers, Master Mariner
(London: Diploma Press, 1894), 57–65.
Source: Baron de Montesquieu, Persian Letters, C.J. Butts, trans. and ed.
(London: Penguin Books, 1973), 72–3.
Their conversation was a long one and covered the form of gov-
ernment in El Dorado, local customs, behavior towards women,
Primary Documents
168
public ceremonies, and the arts. At last Candide, whose taste for
metaphysics was insatiable, told Cacambo to ask whether any re-
ligion was practiced in the country. The old many blushed
slightly. ‘‘Religion!’’ he exclaimed. ‘‘Why, of course there’s a reli-
gion. Do you suppose we are lost to all sense of gratitude?’’ …
Candide was curious to see some of their priests.… The old
man smiled. ‘‘My friends,’’ said he, ‘‘we are all priests; the King
and the heads of each family perform solemn hymns of thanks-
giving every morning.…’’ ‘‘Do you mean to say you have no
monks teaching and disputing, governing and intriguing, and
having people burned if they don’t subscribe to their opinions?’’
‘‘We should be stupid if we had,’’ said the old man; ‘‘we are all
of the same opinion here, and we don’t know what you mean by
monks.’’ … To pass away the time before supper they were
shown the sights if the city. The public buildings were so lofty
that their roofs seemed to touch the sky, and the market-places
wee adorned with endless colonnades. Fountains of pure water,
rose-water, and sugar-cane liqueur played unceasingly in the
public squares, which were paved with a kind of precious stone
smelling of cloves and cinnamon. Candide asked to see the Law
Courts and the Court of Appeal, but was told there were none;
court cases, in fact, were unknown. He enquired whether there
were any prisons, and his guide answered no. What surprised
and delighted him most of all was the Palace of Sciences, where
he saw a gallery two thousand feet long filled with mathematical
and scientific instruments.
Introduction
In every human society, there is an effort continually tend-
ing to confer on one part the height of power and happiness,
and to reduce the other to the extreme of weakness and misery.
The intent of good laws is to oppose this effort, and to diffuse
their influence universally and equally
Of the Origin of Punishments
Laws are the conditions under which men, naturally inde-
pendent, united themselves in society. Weary of living in a con-
tinual state of war, and of enjoying a liberty which became of
little value, from the uncertainty of its duration, they sacrificed
one part of it, to enjoy the rest in peace and security. The sum
of all these portions of the liberty of each individual constituted
the sovereignty of a nation and was deposited in the hands of
the sovereign, as the lawful administrator. But it was not suffi-
cient only to establish this deposit; it was also necessary to
defend it from the usurpation of each individual, who will
always endeavour to take away from the mass, not only his own
portion, but to encroach on that of others. Some motives there-
fore, that strike the senses were necessary to prevent the despot-
ism of each individual from plunging society into its former
chaos. Such motives are the punishments established, against the
infractors of the laws.
Of the Right to Punish
Every punishment which does not arise from absolute
necessity, says the great Montesquieu, is tyrannical. A proposi-
tion which may be made more general thus: every act of author-
ity of one man over another, for which there is not an absolute
necessity, is tyrannical. It is upon this then that the sovereign’s
right to punish crimes is founded; that is, upon the necessity of
defending the public liberty, entrusted to his care, from the usur-
pation of individuals; and punishments are just in proportion, as
the liberty, preserved by the sovereign, is sacred and valuable.…
Of Torture
The torture of a criminal during the course of his trial is a
cruelty consecrated by custom in most nations.…
No man can be judged a criminal until he be found guilty;
nor can society take from him the public protection until it have
been proved that he has violated the conditions on which it was
granted. What right, then, but that of power, can authorise the
Primary Documents
172
punishment of a citizen so long as there remains any doubt of
his guilt? This dilemma is frequent. Either he is guilty, or not
guilty. If guilty, he should only suffer the punishment ordained
by the laws, and torture becomes useless, as his confession is
unnecessary, if he be not guilty, you torture the innocent; for, in
the eye of the law, every man is innocent whose crime has not
been proved. Besides, it is confounding all relations to expect
that a man should be both the accuser and accused; and that
pain should be the test of truth, as if truth resided in the
muscles and fibres of a wretch in torture. By this method the ro-
bust will escape, and the feeble be condemned. These are the
inconveniences of this pretended test of truth, worthy only of a
cannibal …
Conclusion
I conclude with this reflection, that the severity of punish-
ments ought to be in proportion to the state of the nation.
Among a people hardly yet emerged from barbarity, they should
be most severe, as strong impressions are required; but, in pro-
portion as the minds of men become softened by their inter-
course in society, the severity of punishments should be
diminished, if it be intended that the necessary relation between
the object and the sensation should be maintained. From what I
have written results the following general theorem, of consider-
able utility, though not conformable to custom, the common leg-
islator of nations:
That a punishment may not be an act of violence, of one,
or of many, against a private member of society, it should be
public, immediate, and necessary, the least possible in the case
given, proportioned to the crime, and determined by the laws.
Source: Catherine II, ‘‘Proposals for a New Law Code,’’ from Documents
of Catherine the Great: The Correspondence with Voltaire and the Instruc-
tion of 1767 in the English Text of 1768, W.f. Reddaway, trans. (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), excerpted in the Internet
Modern History Source Book, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/
18catherine.html.
Men, even when their aim is identical and their motives of the
highest, see the same things from very different points of view.
Some are charmed by everything that is new, while others
remain blindly attached to the habits of their predecessors. The
fault of the first is levity and their merit is their anxiety to make
things better. The defect of the second class is their indolence of
mind and their reluctance to look for anything that lies outside
their range of knowledge. Their redeeming traits are prudence
and confidence.… I do not belong to either party. I do not
give expression forthwith to every whim that happens to come
into my head, and, on the other hand, I do not ruminate on my
ideas too long, lest I fall into a state of indecision and become a
mere dreamer.
Our present situation demands, as I see it, our undivided
attention and prompt measures of reform. Of course I am as yet
a mere novice and can only express myself in accordance with
general principles, relying upon hearsay and a little common
sense. I am far from censuring what has been done, since I do
not have such a high esteem for myself that I can believe that
my wise predecessors would not have done the same thing as I,
had they found themselves in the situation which prevails to-
day, or had they seen things from the point of view that I regard
them.…
I may say that all that I have observed or learned has
forced me to the conclusion that there is nothing so dangerous
as cleverness and subtlety in discussion. I will not recognize the
force of any argument derived from the ancient Greeks or
the modern French. Reasons drawn from the past century or the
customs of a hundred years fail to convince me, since the Aus-
trian monarchy does not resemble any other and the year 1765
cannot be compared with any other since the birth of Christ. Let
us act, then, according to the dictates of good sense and reflec-
tion, for we shall have done enough if we reach our decisions in
the light of such talents as the Creator has vouchsafed us, and
Primary Documents
177
execute them with confidence and determination when once we
have made up our minds.…
To hold that everything that has been done before our time
is good and unchangeable or, on the other hand, to believe that
everything should be revolutionized, both these are prejudices
which have serious consequences. The latter is particularly se-
ductive, since we see that things are not going well, and we con-
clude that they formerly went even worse because what we now
have was once itself regarded as a remedy. Everything in this
world can be made good if we diminish its faults and increase
its advantages. The greatest prejudice of all and the least excusa-
ble is not to dare to attack or emancipate one’s self from preju-
dice. We must have a great deal of courage and still more love
of country to be a reformer in this world. No form of evil
instinct is easier to inculcate, adopt, and follow than that which
encourages us to leave things where we find them without giv-
ing any thought to the matter. But we shall have one day to give
an account of the good that we should have sought for and then
accomplished.
Notes
1. Quoted in Paul Rahe, Twilight of Liberty, Democracy’s Drift to Soft
Despotism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 265.
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GLOSSARY OF SELECTED
TERMS
Enlightened Despotism
Beales, Derek. 2005. Enlightenment and reform in eighteenth-century Europe.
London: I.B. Tauris. A collection of articles examining Enlightened Des-
potism in Europe, but focusing primarily Joseph II and the Habsburg
monarchy.
Bernard, Paul B. 1979. The limits of Enlightenment: Joseph II and the law.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press. A study of the administration of
criminal justice under Joseph II in relation to his professed ideas of
enlightened rule.
Blanning, T. C. W. 1994. Joseph II. London: Longman. An excellent study of
Joseph II that examines his attempts to consolidate territories and to
impose reform on a diverse population that was deeply resistant to
reform.
Bruun, Geoffrey. 1967. The enlightened despots. New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston. Classic study of the rulers whose absorption of Enlight-
enment ideas led them, with various degrees of success, to attempt to
put those ideas into practice.
Catherine II. ‘‘Proposals for a New Law Code.’’ Online. In Modern History
Sourcebook. Available http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/18catheri-
ne.html. Drafted in 1767, but never enacted, Enlightenment ideas are
evident throughout this new code of law (e.g., ‘‘What is the true End
of Monarchy? Not to deprive People of their natural Liberty; but to
correct their Actions, in order to attain the supreme Good.’’).
Duffy, Christopher. 1988. Frederick the Great: a military life. London: Rout-
ledge. A biography of the Russian Czar, emphasizing his accomplish-
ments as a military leader who transformed Russia into a formidable
power and increased the size of his territory significantly.
Gagliardo, John G. 1967. Enlightened despotism. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell
Co. A concise analysis of the Enlightened Despots that focuses on the rela-
tionship of their reforms to the Enlightenment ideas of the philosophes.
Harris, R. W. 1964. Absolutism and Enlightenment. London: Blandford Press
Ltd. Discusses the monarchies and empires of Europe in the context
of the shifts in social and political thought during the Enlightenment.
Hubatsch, Walther. 1975. Frederick the Great: absolutism and administration.
London: Thames and Hudson. An excellent biography of Frederick II
that focuses on the political administration of his reign rather than his
Annotated Bibliography
191
personal life and relationships. The development, problems, and
achievements of his administrative system are examined in detail.
Krieger, Leonard. 1970. Kings and philosophers, 1689–1789. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company. A study of the development of European mon-
archy during the Enlightenment, examining in particular the ‘‘philoso-
pher kings,’’ the enlightened absolutists.
MacDonogh, Giles. 2001. Frederick the Great: a life in deed and letters. New
York: St. Martin’s Press. This biography reveals a contradictory ruler
whose conquests made him one of the most formidable leaders of the
eighteenth century, while his patronage of the arts and intellectual com-
munity contributed to his rank as one of the Enlightened Despots.
Madariaga, Isabel de. 1990. Catherine the Great: a short history. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press. An informative and balanced biography of
Catherine II and her reign in the context of the social, political, and
cultural history of Russia in the eighteenth century.
Ritter, Gerhard. 1968. Frederick the Great: a historical profile. Translated by
Peter Paret. Berkeley: University of California Press. A critical exami-
nation of Frederick II, his ideas, his domestic and foreign policies,
and his military endeavors.
Scott, Hamish M., ed. 1990. Enlightened absolutism: reform and reformers in
later eighteenth-century Europe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press. A collection of essays examining such topics as the Danish
reformers, Catherine the Great, Italy and Spain, and the Habsburg
Monarchy.
James Boswell
Boswell, James. 1998. Life of Johnson. Edited by R. W. Chapman, J. D. Fleeman,
and Pat Rogers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. This classic biography
of Samuel Johnson also reveals the vivid writing and humor of the biog-
rapher, who was singularly devoted to his subject and whose observa-
tions are exemplary of the best of eighteenth-century literature.
———. 1994. The journals of James Boswell: 1762–1795. Edited by John
Wain. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. A fine selection of
James Boswell’s writings, together with an informative introductory
essay by the editor.
Boswell, James, and Samuel Johnson. 1996. Journey to the Hebrides: a journey
to the Western islands of Scotland and the journal of a tour to the Hebrides.
Edited by Ian McGowan. Edinburgh: Canongate Books. An account of
Boswell’s and Johnson’s tour of the Highlands and Western Islands of
Scotland during the autumn of 1773. Their vivid accounts illustrate a
society very different from the Europe of the Enlightenment.
Edmund Burke
Burke, Edmund. [1790] 1986. Reflections on the revolution in France. Edited
with an introduction by Conor Cruise O’Brien. Reprint, London, Pen-
guin Books. Written before the radical phase of the French Revolu-
tion, Burke predicted that it would result in terror and tyranny.
———. 1981. The writings and speeches of Edmund Burke. 9 vols. Edited by
Paul Langford and William B. Todd. New York: Oxford University
Press. Comprehensive collection of Burke’s works from his early years
until the French Revolution, organized chronologically and themati-
cally into nine volumes.
Annotated Bibliography
195
Kramnick, Isaac. 1977. The rage of Edmund Burke: portrait of an ambivalent
conservative. New York: Basic Books. An important biography of
Burke, ‘‘the father of modern conservatism,’’ that underscores the
many ambiguities in his thinking.
Lock, F. P. 1999. Edmund Burke. Vol. 1: 1730–1784. Oxford: Clarendon
Press. A collection of Burke’s early writings with a biographical sketch.
It focuses on Burke as a writer and private individual rather than a
political thinker and public persona.
Denis Diderot
Diderot, Denis, and Jean-le-Rond d’Alembert, eds. 1751–1772. Enclyclopedie,
ou dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers. 17 vols.
Online in French and in English translation. Available http://www.lib.u-
chicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/encyc/. An important work that helped
to disseminate Englightenment ideas about science and the arts.
Diderot, Denis. [1761] 1956. Rameau’s nephew and other works. Translated
and edited by Jacques Barzun and Ralph H. Bowen. Indianapolis: The
Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. A satirical criticism of the enemies of the
Enlightenment that was not published until after Diderot’s death.
———. 1992. Political writings. Edited by J. H. Mason and R. Wokler. Cam-
bridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press. A collection of the most important of
Diderot’s articles for the Encyclopedie, a substantial number of his con-
tributions to the Histoire des Deux Indes, and many others. The editors’
introduction sets these works in their context, and the volume
includes a chronology of events and a bibliography.
Bremner, Geoffrey. 1983. Order and chance: the pattern of Diderot’s thought.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A study of Diderot’s way of
thinking that argues he never strayed far from Cartesian philosophy in
his discussions of both physical matter and political systems.
Darnton, Robert. 1979. The business of enlightenment: a publishing history of
the Encyclopedie, 1775–1800. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Har-
vard University Press. A history of the publication of the Encyclopedie,
both early and later editions, including an examination of the book’s
origin, manufacture, marketing, and influence.
Furbank, Philip Nicholas. 1992. Diderot: a critical biography. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. An incisive study of Diderot’s private life, public ca-
reer, and his literary and philosophical works.
Thomas Hobbes
Hobbes, Thomas. [1651] 1997. Leviathan. A Norton Critical Edition. Edited by
Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company. This is the most complete expression of Hobbes’s philosophy.
Annotated Bibliography
196
He famously posited that the state of nature in human beings is one of
struggle for survival, and that the best solution to the problem is the for-
mation of a commonwealth under the authority of an absolute sovereign.
———. 1998. On the citizen. Edited and translated by Richard Tuck and Mi-
chael Silverthorne. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobbes’s first extended effort
to discuss the political ideas that would be developed more fully in Levi-
athan. This is the first modern English translation of the work.
Bagby, Laurie M. Johnson. 2007. Hobbes’s Leviathan: reader’s guide. New
York: Continuum International Publishing Group. A good guide for
students that offers a look at the context and themes of Leviathan and
takes the reader through the text systematically.
Cranston, Maurice William, and Richard Stanley Peters. 1972. Hobbes and Rous-
seau. New York: Anchor Books. A collection of essays on Hobbes and
Rousseau (nine devoted to each philosophe, and one that links the two)
and address both the philosophical and political aspects of their works.
Strauss, Leo. 1963. The political philosophy of Hobbes: its basis and its gene-
sis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. An analysis of the political
philosophy of Thomas Hobbes that argues that his ideas arose not
from tradition or science but from his own deep knowledge and expe-
rience of human nature.
David Hume
Hume, David. [1779] 1948. Dialogues concerning natural religion. Edited by
Henry D. Aiken. New York: Hafner Publishing Co. Considered by
some to be the greatest philosophical work of one of Europe’s greatest
philosophers, Hume uses the device of a dialogue to examine whether
or not the existence and nature of God can be proved rationally.
———. 1994. Political essays. Edited by Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge
Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press. A fully annotated collection of twenty-seven of Hume’s
most important political essays, reflecting the entire range of his intel-
lectual engagement with politics.
Norton, D. F., ed. 1993. The Cambridge companion to Hume. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press. A comprehensive overview of Hume’s work that
includes not only his contributions to epistemology, metaphysics, and
the philosophy of religion, but also to many other disciplines.
Immanuel Kant
Kant, Immanuel. [1781] 1998. The critique of pure reason. Translated and
edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge Edition of the
Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Annotated Bibliography
197
An authoritative translation that includes a useful introduction sum-
marizing Kant’s main arguments.
———. 1964. Perpetual peace and other essays on politics, history, and morals.
Edited by Ted Humphrey. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co. A col-
lection of essays detailing Kant’s views on politics, history, and ethics.
———. 1991. Political writings. Edited by Hans Reiss. Translated by H. B.
Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. An important collec-
tion of Kant’s political writing, together with an expository essay
examining recent development I Kant scholarship.
———. [1793] 1960. Religion within the limits of reason alone. Translated by
T.M. Greene and H. H. Hudson. New York: Harper. Illuminates Kant’s
understanding of man’s moral life and some of the fundamental beliefs
of Christianity.
Allison, Henry E. 1996. Idealism and freedom: essays on Kant’s theoretical and
practical philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collec-
tion of essays on Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy, along the
author’s interpretation of transcendental idealism and other aspects of
Kant’s moral philosophy.
Guyer, Paul. 2006. Kant. New York: Routledge. An introduction to Kant’s meta-
physics and epistemology, explaining his arguments about the nature of
space, time, and experience in his most influential but difficult work,
The Critique of Pure Reason. Includes an overview of Kant’s life and times.
Kuehn, Manfred. 2002. Kant: a biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. A comprehensive biography of Kant that examines his life from
childhood through his years as a university professor and traces the
development of his philosophical thought.
Scruton, Roger. 1983. Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press. An excellent,
concise biography that examines Kant’s moral, aesthetic, and political
philosophy, as well as his relations with and responses to Descartes,
Leibniz, and Hume.
Sullivan, Roger J. 1989. Immanuel Kant’s moral theory. A detailed, authorita-
tive account of Kant’s moral philosophy, including his ethical theory,
his philosophy of history, his political philosophy, his philosophy of
religion, and his philosophy of education.
Wood, Allen W. 2005. Kant. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishing. A
thought-provoking biographical study of Kant that examines his life
and philosophical thought and provides an exposition of Kant’s major
philosophical works, including Critique of Pure Reason.
John Locke
Locke, John. [1689] 1955. A letter concerning toleration. Indianapolis: The
Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. An important document arguing the case
Annotated Bibliography
198
for religious toleration and liberalism in general. A religious counter-
part to Locke’s political writings.
———. 1997. Political essays. Edited by Mark Goldie. Cambridge Texts in the
History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A
comprehensive collection of Locke’s writings on politics and society that
includes over a dozen of his major and minor essays together with a
biographical introduction and suggestions for further study.
———. [1689] 2000. Two treatises of government. Edited by Peter Laslett.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,. The best edition of Locke’s
classic works on civil government, which includes a scholarly intro-
duction on Locke, the historical context of his political treatises and
their relation to Hobbes’s theories.
Cranston, Maurice William. 1957. John Locke: a biography. London: Long-
mans. This biography of Locke is not an analysis of Locke’s philoso-
phy, but rather an account of his life and career, revealing a man of
remarkable versatility who was at once philosopher, diplomat, econo-
mist, and theologian.
Dunn, John. 1984. Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press. An excellent
introduction to the work of Locke that focuses on his public life and
career, his many friendships with political figures and thinkers from
all over Europe, and his years of political exile in which he wrote An
Essay on Human Understanding.
———. 1969. The political thought of John Locke: an historical account of the
argument of the ‘‘Two Treatises of Government.’’ Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. A comprehensive study of Locke’s political thought,
stressing the predominantly theological character of all Locke’s think-
ing about politics.
Thomas Paine
Paine, Thomas. 1945. The complete writings. 2 vols. Edited by Philip S.
Foner. New York: Citadel Press. A collection of Paine’s most important
writings, together with a lengthy biographical sketch that examines
whether Paine’s political thoughts grew out of his religious ideas.
———. 2000. Political writings. Edited by Bruce Kuklick. Cambridge Texts
in the History of Political Thought, ed. Raymond Geuss and Quentin
Skinner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Contains the full
texts of Common Sense, The Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, and
other works, along with a biographical introduction and chronology.
———. ‘‘Of the Religion of Deism compared with the Christian Religion.’’
Online. Internet Modern History Sourcebook. Available http://www.
fordham.edu/halsall/mod/ paine-deism.html. A short treatise in which
Paine posits the ideas of religious toleration, freedom of conscience, and
the importance of rational inquiry in all matters, including religion.
Annotated Bibliography
199
Aldridge, A. Owen. 1984. Thomas Paine’s American ideology. Cranbury, N.J.:
Associated University Presses. Analyzes the entirety of Paine’s intellec-
tual work between 1775 and 1787, not merely his attitude toward
American independence. The author explains Paine’s major philosoph-
ical doctrines in the context of earlier ideas.
Claeys, Gregory. 1989. Thomas Paine: social and political thought. Oxford:
Routledge Press. A comprehensive study of the social and political
thought of Thomas Paine, concentrating on his tract The Rights of Man.
Keane, John. 1995. Tom Paine: a political life. New York: Grove Press. A definitive
biography of Thomas Paine, examining his reputation as a notorious pam-
phleteer and one of the greatest political figures and writers of his day.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. [1781] 1996. The confessions. Ware, Hertfordshire:
Woodsworth Editions Ltd. A memoir of Rousseau’s life that serves as a
detailed glimpse of life in the eighteenth century, from the more pleas-
urable recollections of his youth through his darker latter years.
———. [1751] 1992. Discourse on the sciences and arts, and polemics. Translated
and edited by Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelley, and Judith R. Bush.
Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England. A fresh translation of
Rousseau’s controversial first discourse and contemporary responses to it.
———. [1762, 1754] 1967. The social contract and discourse on the origin of
inequality. Translated and edited by Lester G. Crocker. New York:
Pocket Books. Rousseau’s classic study of the foundations of political
society and the importance of developing virtue within civilized society.
Cobban, Alfred. 1964. Rousseau and the modern state. Hamden, Conn.:
Archon Books. A thorough analysis of Rousseau’s work, which argues
that while Rousseau rejected philosophical systems, there was never-
theless a fundamental unity about his thought.
Cranston, Maurice. 1982. Jean-Jacques: the early life and work of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, 1712–1754. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The first
volume of Cranston’s definitive biography of Rousseau, covering his
early life from his birth in Geneva, his youthful wanderings, and his
return to his birthplace in 1754 as a celebrated writer and composer.
———. 1991. The noble savage: Rousseau, 1754–1762. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press. The second volume of Cranston’s biography of
Rousseau offers an exposition of his life and works, offering a vivid
history of his most eventful and productive years.
Launay, Michel. 1971. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: ecrivain politique (1712–1762).
Cannes: C.E.L. A careful and thorough study of the main themes of
Rousseau’s political writings, placing them within both the political
and social contexts.
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Starobinski, Jean. 1988. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: transparency and obstruction.
Translated by A. Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
One of the most comprehensive studies ever written on Rousseau,
placing his work into the context of his personal life.