The Enlightenment in America

"Henry May, was a great intellectual historian of post-World War Two America. I have several good friends in academia who were students of Henry May as undergraduates, and I have other scholarly friends who knew him well as a colleague. My own claim to fame with Henry May, is that when I was a student at Harvard Divinity School, I was the sommelier at the Harvard Faculty Club, which wasn’t the greatest of dining establishment—there were still rumors when I was there that they were serving horse, which they may have done during World War Two. But, anyway, May came to campus with a professor with whom I was studying, and they sat at a table. And so I was able to serve him wine. Henry May was a great historian at University of California, Berkeley. This book was published in 1976. The story he tells has been carried on by many people. He told the story that the Enlightenment is not one thing. It is several things and it happens in different places, and at different times—in England, Scotland, France, Germany, North America. And it has different kinds of traditions, such as the moderate enlightenment of Newton , for instance, or the skeptical enlightenment, of Voltaire , the didactic enlightenment of the Scottish Enlightenment figures of Smith and the like. May puts Franklin in the skeptical camp. I think he may emphasize that a little more than necessary. Because I think that in the revolutionary camp of the Enlightenment, there’s a utilitarian side and you really see that strain in Franklin. He was constantly thinking about how things worked, whether in the natural world, or the famous fireplace that he invented, or bifocals, or hospitals, or even colleges. He was not just a thinker, he was a tinkerer, his whole life and he tinkered with ideas as well. May is really useful for situating Franklin in that Enlightenment. Even though it’s almost 50 years old, it’s a very useful guide to thinking about the Enlightenment and how it unfolded in the United States. I think he would put different figures in different camps depending on their politics. Jefferson would go in the revolutionary camp, but Adams would go much more in the moderate or didactic camp, with his concern for order. I think the book helps to explain the arguments of different Founding Fathers and the arguments and different emphases they made about forging the new nation."

"This, again, is part of my idea to choose Five Books which would cover the main dimensions of the Enlightenment in an interesting and comprehensive way. Europeans often tag America on, as an interesting supplement coming late in the day to the Enlightenment and to 18th century history. Actually the American Enlightenment is much more fundamental than that. It’s terribly important because the American Revolution and the American Constitution and what America is today was shaped to a considerable degree by the Enlightenment. Also, there’s a lot about the European Enlightenment that one can understand better through knowing the American Enlightenment. So I think a good overview of the Enlightenment requires one to have a more detailed view of what is happening in America. And I think many scholars would agree that although it came out in 1976, Henry May’s survey of the American Enlightenment is the best overview that there is. No one has matched it. In the humanities, like in the sciences, we need basic categories. Categories are terribly important, not just for philosophers, but for everyone. Historians sometimes forget this and try to operate without categories, but I don’t think that’s a very good way of pursuing historical studies. So Henry May divided the American Enlightenment into four categories. He saw the first of those, what he calls the American moderate Enlightenment, as being essentially British. The English Enlightenment in the 18th century was predominantly conservative politically and socially and, like the Enlightenment overall, divided on the religious issue. I mentioned before this split between a mainstream, moderate Enlightenment which is trying to reconcile religion with philosophical reason and a radical tendency. The English Enlightenment had this too. There was a very strong tradition starting with Toland and Collins at the beginning of the 18th century — and recent research has confirmed this, though I got into a lot of trouble for stressing it — that they were borrowing an awful lot from Spinoza and the circle around him, as well as from Bayle and the Huguenot diaspora. There was also Thomas Gordon who is rather overlooked and quite a lot of other interesting English, Scottish and Irish figures. Bolingbroke is another important one. This whole world of radicalism developed in England and was the other part of the English Enlightenment. It’s terribly important as well, although in the case of Bolingbroke and Collins it was not particularly subversive politically. If anything it was on the conservative side, and certainly very supportive of the legacy of the 1688 Revolution. It was radical more in the religious sense — although there are aspects in there which are republican and could potentially develop in a more democratic direction. I think May doesn’t give quite enough emphasis to the radical tendency in the early period in America, because it’s obviously quite strong in the middle years of the 18th century. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, when he was a student at William and Mary College was very strongly influenced by Bolingbroke, perhaps, especially. This clearly fed into the rather democratic, radical, republican direction his thinking took later. But May is right that his first category, the English Enlightenment, was predominantly aiming at that reconciliation, often through physico-theology and ‘the argument from design’ –that something as wondrously complex as the universe can only have been created by a knowing and benevolent creator. In the wake of Newton and Newtonianism the argument from design was one of the most powerful arguments for belief and for religion, but also for welding together science and faith. This played a dominant role. There was also a rather complacent attitude about the 1688 Revolution that Britain had struck a wonderful compromise — mixed government as it was often called — combining monarchy, aristocracy and a little bit of democracy. This was perfection itself, supposedly. Many people in the 18th century firmly believed that it was impossible to improve on British mixed government, that it was not just the best political system that existed but a kind of universal model. This was profoundly influential everywhere, but outside of Europe especially in the American colonies. So May is very correct about his first category. Now the French Enlightenment, or at least the mainstream French Enlightenment, he tended to put, on the whole, in the second category, the Skeptical Enlightenment. His fourth category was a kind of Scottish didactic Enlightenment which could be distinguished both from the Skeptical Enlightenment and the moderate Enlightenment. Personally I think there is a much deeper division between those three and his third category, what he calls the Revolutionary Enlightenment (rather than Radical Enlightenment). May should be noted as the only important historian in the 20th century who has, especially in the English language, really developed this point: that if you want to understand the American Revolution, you’d better get down to the fact that there’s a serious divergence between a radical and a moderate tendency. If you’re not willing to accept that — and many scholars still won’t accept that — you’re not going to understand anything about the American Revolution . May was 100% correct about that; he was spot on, though he wasn’t the first to develop this point. It goes back much earlier in German writing, to Leo Strauss, who in the 1920s is already using the term “radikale Aufklärung.” It plays quite an important part in the way he views Hobbes and Spinoza and Bayle. So the distinction goes back at least to the 1920s. But in May it’s fundamental because he sees that to correctly understand the relationship between the American Revolution and the American Enlightenment is to see that it is a clash between the moderate Enlightenment and the Revolutionary Enlightenment. This is the key to understanding what’s happening. And I’m sorry to say most historians haven’t quite grasped that yet. This is why there is an awful lot of confusion in writing about the Enlightenment and the Revolutionary era. If historians paid more attention to philosophy, and to these categories, it would work very much to their profit and advantage. They would get a much clearer feel for what’s really happening. But May grasped it perfectly and it was really a remarkable achievement — especially as many writers complained in the 60s and 70s that although everyone paid lip-service to the American Revolution and American Constitution being fruits of the Enlightenment, for some reason no one ever wrote a general survey of the American Enlightenment. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, but Henry May sat down and did it and I think it’s a great work. It is a wonderful book. I don’t think that’s quite correct. For one thing, you don’t have revolutions without ideology and a very important part of the ideology of the American Revolution, as we see from the Declaration of Independence, is the idea of universal human rights. I know the majority of historians at the moment stress the cultural-history explanation. Lynn Hunt’s idea is very popular, that you’ve got to look at slow cultural processes — people were reading novels, they developed more empathy for other people, and in this way universal rights evolved. A good illustration of the point I am trying to make is this recent book of Peter de Bolla, The Architecture of Concepts , which I strongly recommend. It’s an important book on what Lynn Hunt called the invention of universal human rights. “You don’t have revolutions without ideology and a very important part of the ideology of the American Revolution, as we see from the Declaration of Independence, is the idea of universal human rights. ” On the whole historians, with their muddled categories and lack of interest in philosophy have said, “Oh well! John Locke started talking about rights, so these universal human rights must somehow have evolved slowly from Locke.” Lynn Hunt’s idea, because it’s bottom up, it’s slow, it’s nice and simple is terribly popular — lots of people think it’s great. The problem with it is it’s absolutely certain it’s total nonsense. It doesn’t work at all, and for two excellent reasons. One of them is demonstrated by de Bolla, which is that the advent of universal human rights is quite different from the way rights are used in Locke and earlier, and it happens very suddenly in the 1770s. The other is that it can’t have anything to do with cultural processes because of the ferocious divisions over universal human rights. It’s enormously divisive within France and Europe, and within the French Revolution. The majority are strongly against it. There is a small fringe who are pushing it through against tremendous opposition. The emancipation of the Jews is supported by very, very few. This has nothing to do with cultural processes, this is an ideological battle which can only be understood in philosophical terms. So we have to throw out the cultural processes and we have to look at the suddenness of human rights, and the way the idea of them came about. It is Paine, Jefferson, George Mason and others who engineer the notion in America in the early and mid-1770s, taking it from the French context. It comes in in the Histoire Philosophique des Deux Indes , which was the most widely known French book anywhere in the later 18th century, even more than Montesquieu or Rousseau. It was published under the name Raynal, who for a time was very very famous, but we know today it was written by a team, and the hardest hitting parts, the parts that really electrified people, were written by Diderot. The Histoire Philosophique was fundamental for the American and French Revolutions and for everything after. It was a six-volume work on the history of the Europeans in the two Indies and it marks the beginning of anti-colonialism, by saying it’s a horrible story of conquest, exploitation, brutality and arrogance and imposing a religion that was alien to these people, and forms of rule which were quite alien to the peoples that were conquered. So the political and religious sections are very, very important. It was followed by a number of books, of which d’Holbach’s are very important. His political books are ignored and underestimated by historians — books like La Politique Naturelle (1773) and Systeme Sociale (1773). Like Condorcet does in his writing, these books use this concept of universal human rights as one of their main arguments again exploitation and slavery. This is where Paine and the others who are developing this idea in America in the 1770s are getting it from. But I wouldn’t want to say that the French are doing all the thinking, and the Americans are just applying it. That would be a great oversimplification. There is a complex convergence here, creating a powerful new ideology which is then taken further in the French Revolution. But unlike most historians, especially American historians, who love to stress the differences between the American Revolution and the French Revolution, I’m much keener on seeing them both as children of the Enlightenment. They are much more closely entwined, and closer in their basic characteristics, than historians normally see it. And this question of universal human rights plays a basic part in that, all leading up to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Franklin and Jefferson and Adams read a great deal, they were very erudite. It wasn’t a hobby, they were passionately committed to the Enlightenment. If you read the correspondence between Jefferson and Adams when they were old men in the 1820s, they say, “We used to be political rivals, but let’s forget all that: we agree about the Enlightenment, and that’s more important than anything.” Still in the 1820s they see it as the biggest and most important thing that has ever happened. They would talk about enlightened ways of thinking. They would use ‘enlightened’ as an adjective, enlightened ideas of government, enlightened views of society, and so on. Oh yes. And of course the term ‘Aufklärung’ was established in the late 18th century. So this idea that they didn’t have the terminology of the Enlightenment that we use is a little bit overdone. It’s very clear reading correspondence like that that they have an extremely vivid conception of what the Enlightenment was, and a much higher view of its importance than we have today. That is something very striking. I just wanted to finish off by saying May has four categories, but in terms of the American Revolution, and the importance of the American Enlightenment for the rest of the world, it seems to me better to see three of those as forming subcategories of one larger category. After all, the differences between the Scottish Didactic Enlightenment and the British Moderate Enlightenment are not that great, it’s essentially the same views: we want to reconcile revelation and science, and moderation is our watchword. We want to base a social and intellectual system on British mixed government. The Scottish Enlightenment never challenges the domination of British life by the aristocracy, which is one of its most striking features in the 18th and 19th centuries. Adam Smith entirely subscribes to aristocratic domination: he thinks trade should be free, but politics is different. Capitalism might be great for business, but it’s terrible for politics because capitalists only think about their own interests and never give a thought to anyone else’s. So the last people you want to be running the government are capitalists. Who are the best educated, the most generous, the most outward looking group? Well, the aristocracy. The British aristocracy are already running everything, so let them carry on running it. That’s the best solution."