The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce and Crisis
Richard Whatmore
Allen Lane, £30, 480 pages
It is sometimes said that moral philosophers spent the 19th century grappling with the French Revolution (or rather the following Terreur) much as their 20th-century successors did with the Third Reich. That is not to relativise the crimes of the latter but, rather, to help situate the dislocation felt by 18th-century thinkers faced with civilisational breakdown.
Among the most shocking consequences of the Revolution, even to foreign Protestant eyes, was the despoiling of the French Catholic Church: the campaign of “de-Christianisation” which led to the ransacking of churches, the exile of 30,000 clerics and the murder of hundreds more. On 1 November 1793, a “Feast of Reason” replaced All Saints Day in Notre-Dame de Paris.
Richard Whatmore’s new book, however, makes clear the suspicion that all was not well with the Enlightenment project long before the 1789-92 cataclysm. Also, while events in France stimulated ideas about moderating Enlightenment excesses, they accelerated existing thought patterns as much as instigating new ones. The crazed blood-letting that followed the overthrow of the Bourbons led the Revolution not only to exterminate the aristocracy but also to devour its own children as faction displaced faction, one after another.
British intellectuals’ horror at events in France was compounded by feelings of personal betrayal. Some of those instigating, or excusing, mass executions across the Channel had once been intellectual allies in the cause of Enlightenment. France’s Enlighteners seemed to have developed shared ideals about liberty and equality in directions antithetical to the Enlightenment’s goals of promoting human improvement, domestic civility and international peace.
The Enlightenment sought to dispel superstition, deflate violent religious sectarianism and promote an open “marketplace of ideas”. Yet soon fantastical utopian beliefs, intolerant political orthodoxies and ideological witch-hunts had produced a mirror image of the religious conflagrations of the 17th century. The result seemed to be the “end of Enlightenment” to which the book’s title alludes.
Edmund Burke’s subsequent development of conservatism was not an assault on the Enlightenment per se, but an attempt to salvage what could be seized from its wreckage – the unkind might say “to save the Enlightenment from itself”. While still affirming reforming aims, Burke’s later works – especially his Reflections on the Revolution in France of 1790 – stressed the importance of intentionally conserving mechanisms for moderation.
Burke’s position did not emerge ex nihilo. As early as the 1760s, David Hume began to fret that (as Whatmore puts it) “excessive focus on liberty, approaching fanaticism, led people to forget that liberty relied upon law and government but could quickly erode both”. Signs of Hume’s early disquiet are mainly evident in private correspondence but can also be detected in changes made in the 1763 reissue of his History of England.
Hume warned that the unhappy clash of “fanatics for liberty” with George III’s dictatorial tendencies would engender civil collapse. What followed would be a secularised repeat of Stuart and Commonwealth-era turmoil. As Whatmore observes, “political religions were being formed: new ideologies which defined exclusive communities worthy of defence… When political religions clashed it would be legitimate to kill or persecute those of a different political faith.”
Worse, strife would not remain at home. Contemporary economic theory already impelled states towards violent territorial expansion. A new republic, lacking the social unifier of personal monarchy, would be even further inclined to expansion. Only thus might it restrain a sense of faction and engender one “homogenous and unified national will dedicated to the survival of the state”. Hume’s pessimism about Britain proved unfounded. His predictions, however, proved eerily true of revolutionary France in 1789 and its subsequent war with Austria and Prussia in 1792.
The End of Enlightenment is an accomplished exercise in intellectual history. Besides Hume and Burke, Whatmore surveys the varied disillusionments of figures as disparate as Jacques Pierre-Brissot, Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Our epoch is beset by pessimism about “the failure of Liberalism”, which echoes the despondency about “the end of Enlightenment”. Whatmore alerts us to precedents, especially Burkean conservatism, which show how progressive inclinations can undergo successful, self-critical recapitulation and thereby make an enduring contribution to the public good. Whether this will be true of contemporary liberalism remains to be seen.
The Revd Alexander Faludy is an Anglican clergyman and a freelance journalist.
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