Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750-1790

"First of all I should apologize for mentioning one of my own books. It’s not that I’m interested in self-promotion, but sticking to my formula that I wanted to give Five Books that would provide a comprehensive overview of the main dimensions of the Enlightenment, the Radical Enlightenment seems to me absolutely fundamental. It’s the key to understanding universal human rights and the American and the French Revolutions and the way the Enlightenment relates to everything that happens afterwards. Yet it’s not really been recognized or accepted or studied. It’s more or less ignored in Anthony Pagden’s recent book on The Enlightenment , where there’s not much about it. I think that’s disastrous. You can’t write about the Enlightenment like that because there’s a very deep split. Once the French Revolution begins, the whole Enlightenment becomes completely divided between supporters of the Revolution and opponents. There is this fundamental division that you see at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century between a Burkean Enlightenment — that says never mind all that overconfident theorizing about society and human rights, what we want is a society run by aristocrats and kings and the existing legal systems — and all those who reject that, which is most of the Enlightenment intelligentsia. “Once the French Revolution begins, the whole Enlightenment becomes completely divided between supporters of the Revolution and opponents.” I just want to be clear about this: every important Enlightener always condemns Robespierre and Montagne. You won’t find any Enlightener who says, “oh they’ve got the right idea.” Every Enlightener thinks Robespierre is an absolutely terrible, bloodthirsty dictator who is not marking the culmination of the Revolution but is the destruction of it. There’s no exception to that. All the Germans and the British and the Tom Paines and Mary Wollstonecrafts and Benthams and all the Italians and all the Dutch and the great Swedish radical, Thorild. They’re all mad keen on the French Revolution, but they condemn Robespierre and the Montagne faction. Historians, with their weakness in philosophy, haven’t quite cottoned onto this. We’ve been given a terribly distorted view of the French Revolution through this intellectual failure to see the collision between democratic republicanism — which is the real radicalism — and the populist authoritarianism of the Revolution. But eventually people will get a better grasp of this, I believe. And whether our historians get a better grasp of this or not — and perhaps they won’t, perhaps they’ll say, “No, we refuse to accept this,” — nevertheless it is still the view of all the Enlighteners in the 1790s. It may be that Napoleon backtracked a lot — I see him as a kind of militarized embodiment of the moderate Enlightenment — but in Spain, in France, in Europe generally there’s still this tremendous conflict between reaction and Enlightenment which goes on and on. It’s still the same story in the 1830 Revolutions. You can’t just see the Enlightenment as something that disappears. We mentioned the correspondence between Adams and Jefferson in the 1820s. For many thoughtful political leaders, including Lafayette — who is still around till the early 1830s — all these fundamental issues of the Enlightenment are still very real in the early 19th century. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Some people say, “Oh well, that happens after 1789 but that’s not how it was before.” Furet thought the conflicting ideologies just jumped up out of nowhere, as part of the Revolutionary process, but I don’t think ideologies can be explained like that. Some commentators say Furet is very good at restoring the emphasis to ideology but I think he is actually very bad at it, because he doesn’t give us the pre-1789 background. But I think that unless you are willing to say that the lines on which the entire the Enlightenment divided after 1789 is purely haphazard and without any pattern to it, then you have to ask yourself what it is in the ideas of enlighteners in the 1790s that divides them. And that relates to pre-1789 debates. It seems, to me, there are some pretty big divisions over politics and society and religion and that these correspond in important ways to the divisions we see after 1789. But I thought that Democratic Enlightenment would be better to include than Radical Enlightenment [another volume in the trilogy] because we’ve already got Hazard dealing with the early Enlightenment and none of the other of the five brings together the Enlightenment and the revolutionary impulse, the revolutionary era and the importance of the Radical Enlightenment. I really don’t think that’s been done, but that’s what I tried to do in my book."