The Enlightenment in National Context

The Enlightenment in National Context

The Enlightenment in

National Context Edited by ROY PORTER Lecturer in the Social History of Medicine, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London

and MIKULAS TEICH Fellow, Praelector and Librarian, Robinson College, Cambridge

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS London

Cambridge New York New Rochelle Melbourne Sydney

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521237574 © Cambridge University Press 1981 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1981 Re-issued in this digitally printed version 2007 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-521-23757-4 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-28212-3 paperback

Contents

Preface 1 The Enlightenment in England by Roy Porter

page vii i

2 The Scottish Enlightenment by Nicholas Phillipson

19

3 The Enlightenment in France by Norman Hampson

41

4 The Enlightenment in the Netherlands by Simon Schama

54

5 The Enlightenment in Switzerland by Samuel S. B. Taylor

72

6 The Italian Enlightenment by Owen Chadwick

90

7 The Protestant Enlightenment in Germany ^Joachim Whaley

106

8 The Enlightenment in Catholic Germany by T. C. W. Blanning

118

9 Reform Catholicism and Political Radicalism in the Austrian Enlightenment by Ernst Wangermann

127

10 Bohemia: From Darkness into Light by Mikulas Teich

141

11 The Enlightenment in Sweden by Tore Frangsmyr

164

12 The Russian Enlightenment by Paul Dukes

176

13 Enlightenment and the Politics of American Nature by J. R. Pole

192

Afterword by Mikulas Teich

215

Notes to the text

218

Further reading

260

Index

268

Preface

The last two decades have seen a great revival in Enlightenment studies: the philosophes and their ideas are now taken seriously once more; their thought has been analysed with scholarly depth and precision by historians of ideas; new approaches have been pioneered; and the social history of the Enlightenment is at last being explored (witness for example Robert Darnton's studies of the relations between the 'High' and 'Low' Enlightenments). In one important respect at least our grasp of the Enlightenment is still badly lacking. Comparatively little has been written about its geographical, social and political location as a cultural movement. Much of the historiography still treats the Enlightenment as systems of socially disembodied ideas. Because the philosophes proclaimed themselves cosmopolitans some historians have felt free to study them in isolation from their precise social and political milieus, while others have blithely presupposed that the Enlightenment was quintessentially a French bloom, cultivated at Les Delices and Paris. There are obviously elements of truth in these approaches. But it is also important to grasp the many different forms the Enlightenment took in vastly different social and political environments. Stereotypes derived from the French Enlightenment - that it was atheistical in tendency, radical, sceptical, literary and salon-based - break down on confronting the very different roles which elites of enlightened intellectuals were playing elsewhere: as government servants, as church reformers, as popularizers of 'civility', as utilitarian political economists and technocrats. Hence the purpose of this book is to grasp - while accepting a certain common identity in the Enlightenment - what precisely the Enlightenment meant in thirteen particular national contexts, ranging from England to Bohemia, from Russia to America, from Italy to Sweden. The emphasis is chiefly on the social history of culture or the sociology of knowledge - that is, not upon the internal analysis of ideas but upon their roots, functions and deployment in specific situations by particular intelligentsias. Contributors have also focused upon the many-sided problem of the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas across cultural boundaries. vii

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Clearly, much gets left out in concentrating attention on socio-political and geographical divergences and convergences. The issue of the unity and diversity of the Enlightenment could obviously have been posed from many other thematic angles: religious, linguistic, class, topical, and so on. 'National' contexts were, however, real at the time, and so have provided our focus. Yet 'nations' are themselves deeply problematic, as our contributors point out. Was there a 'Swiss' Enlightenment? Or one Enlightenment in French-speaking, and another in German-speaking Switzerland? Furthermore, only some 'nations' are represented here. We have Sweden not Denmark, Scotland not Ireland, Bohemia not Poland. At most we can hope our choice is representative of the diverse experience of the century, and that these brief survey essays will stimulate thought by focusing on the specificities of the social contexts within which ideas have their life-force. The germ of this book comes from a seminar series held in Cambridge under the auspices of the History Faculty in the spring and summer of 1979 which examined the Enlightenment from different national perspectives. We found the talks contained similar thematic threads. Many contributors thought the traditional French orientation of general Enlightenment studies misleading. Many wanted to discuss the relations between Enlightenment, patriotism and civic virtu. Several saw the Enlightenment as an important aspect of national modernization. Others thought the relations between Enlightenment and religion needed restatement. Encouraged by the fact that common themes emerged and by general enthusiasm for this approach to Enlightenment studies, the editors were emboldened to go ahead and publish. The essays printed here are revised versions of the original seminar papers. They have been kept short and controversial, and have been only lightly annotated. Our hope is that the reader of this comparatively brief work will be able to absorb its geographical and cultural sweep, posing for himself some of the questions of national difference and convergence which originally stimulated us. R.P. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors have many debts to discharge, above all to their contributors for producing their papers so promptly and cheerfully accepting criticism and revisions. We should like to thank the Cambridge History Faculty for sponsoring the original seminar series and meeting expenses. Patricia Williams and William Davies of the Cambridge University Press encouraged the project early on and have shown consistent interest and help. The Press's anonymous referees offered illuminating criticism. Among many people who gave helpful comments and suggestions we should particularly like to thank viii

Preface

Clarissa Campbell Orr of the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology. Robinson and Churchill Colleges, Cambridge, and the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London have provided facilities which have lightened the editorial process.

IX

I

The Enlightenment in England ROY PORTER

To approach the question of the Enlightenment in England means plunging into the quicksands of historical paradox. Throughout the eighteenth century Aufkldrer of all nations revered English government, society and opinion as the pure crystal of Enlightenment. Anglophiles celebrated the British constitution, law and freedom, the open weave of English society, its religious toleration and prosperity. 'The English are the only people upon earth', asserted Voltaire, in his significantly titled Lettres philosophiques ou Lettres anglaises,

who have been able to prescribe limits to the power of Kings by resisting them; and who, by a series of struggles, have at last established that wise Government, where the Prince is all powerful to do good, and at the same time is restrained from committing evil; where the Nobles are great without insolence, tho' there are no Vassals; and where the People share in the government without confusion.1 Diderot envied his English confreres: There seem to be two countries in Europe in which philosophy is cultivated, France and England. In England, philosophers are honoured, respected; they rise to public offices, they are buried with the kings. Do we see that England is any the worse for it? In France warrants are issued against them, they are persecuted, pelted with pastoral letters, with satires, and libels.2 Hence Aufkldrer set up a kind of society for the propagation of the English gospel. A popular Paris comedy of the 1760s depicts the Anglomaniac who has 'Hogard' and 'HindeP on his lips, drinks only tea, reads nothing but Shakespeare and Pope, and proclaims: 'The teachers of mankind have been born in London, and it is from them we must take lessons.'3 This idolatry is scarcely a caricature. The encomia of the English were earnest, as Edward Gibbon found visiting Paris just after France's inglorious defeat in the Seven Years' War: Our opinions, our fashions, even our games, were adopted in France; a ray of national glory illuminated each individual, and every Englishman was supposed to be born a patriot and a philosopher.4 AO

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Cultural borrowing was extensive and flowed through diverse channels. Recall Venturi's discussion of the Piedmontese nobleman, Alberto Radicati di Passerano, whose prayers for political redemption were uttered before English icons: He absorbed the more violent and polemical elements from English deism. He dreamed of a world without property or authority, and, at the same time, showed enthusiasm for the mixed government of the British Isles, which he experienced during his difficult and troubled exile. He combined the most diverse elements from the commonwealthmen in a curious and original way You will recall that Robert Molesworth's son was the British representative at the court of Turin at the same time as Radicati was preparing for his religious and political rebellion and his subsequent exile. Every aspect of this example, both the ideological and the political, reveals particularly well the penetration on the continent of the ideas formed in England at the turn of the century.5 No esoteric influence study is needed to prove how particular English thinkers galvanized continental savants, in politics and moral philosophy, in inquiries into knowledge and beauty, and in literary imagination - an impact strong enough to warrant Diderot's exclamation that 'Without the English, reason and philosophy would still be in the most despicable infancy in France.' 6 Deism, as rational religion, and, more sharply, as a stab at historical Christianity, sped to France from the writings of Toland, Tindal, Collins, Wollaston, Woolston, and those scions of aristocratic natural religion, Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, and his mouthpiece, Pope. By sniffing out bookmarks, Norman Torrey confirmed Voltaire's raids on the scholarly critical armoury of the English freethinkers.7 Their writings were also tugged eastwards, through Leibniz and the Electress Sophia in German states, and south through the Austrian diplomat, Georg Wilhelm, Baron of Hohendorf, through Prince Eugen and Pietro Giannone. 8 Moral benevolism also flowed to the Continent from English sources, Locke and Shaftesbury, Addison and Steele. Diderot's lifelong affair with virtil found tongue when he began to translate Shaftesbury.9 Other philosophes salaamed before Pope's Essay on man. Rousseau found balm in Addison. ' The Spectator pleased me greatly, and did me good', he confessed.10 Later on, Bentham stimulated pleasure and pain psychology and legal reformism. Nor was exporting less brisk in the natural sciences, where Newton's void space flooded into France through many channels in addition to Voltaire's enthusiastic evangelism.11 Likewise, in practical knowledge. According to the Journal encyclopedique, F r a n c e How many owes to England the great revolution which has taken place in her literature excellent works, in place of the ingenious trifles which have come at last to be valued at no more than their true worth, have appeared in recent years upon the useful arts upon agriculture . . . upon commerce, finance, manufactures, navigation and the

The Enlightenment in England

colonies, in short upon everything which can contribute to render peoples more happy and States more flourishing.12 The great Encyclopedie itself arose from a scheme to translate Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia.1* Its iconographical frontispiece, the Avatar of Philosophy, strikingly resembles the ceiling of the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford. English letters exerted no less fascination too. Robinson Crusoe took Germany by storm - by 1760 over forty continuations had appeared - and English bourgeois sentimental drama and novels ravished European hearts: 'O Richardson, Richardson, man unique in my eyes', apostrophized Diderot, 'thou shalt be my reading at all times!' 14 In short, as the critic Dorat snarled in 1768, once the Frenchman had tasted the springs of English literature, 'a revolution took place in our own; . . . the Frenchman . . . no longer welcomed or valued anything that had not something of an English flavour about it'. 15 Abundant contemporary evidence thus proves the English parentage of sa many of the continental children of light. And yet modern scholarship reads like a paternity-denying alibi, proving that England's kinship with the family of philosophes was no closer than a maiden aunt's. This negative genealogy grew from the English Romantics' impatience with their predecessors' 'single vision and Newton's sleep'. As Owen Chadwick has shown, not until late Victorian times did the concept of Aufkldrung become naturalized into the English language - and then pejoratively. 16 In his now centenarian but alas - unsuperseded History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, Leslie

Stephen showed limited sympathy as he chid facile rationalists like a fatigued schoolmaster, breathing a deep sigh of relief on reaching the historical, the organic, and the almost nineteenth-century Edmund Burke.17 Among recent native scholars, the English Enlightenment has had few champions. 18 Social historians from Trevelyan to Christopher Hill have had no use for the term Hill can see only the mystifying rationality of 'Yahoo society'. 19 Literary historians still prefer to write round the term 'Augustan', 20 partly because Enlightenment rationality is sometimes supposed to have manacled imagination.21 Such negative readings dominate Enlightenment historiography too. Leonard Marsak's anthology, The Enlightenment, presents no readings at all from English writers.22 Lester Crocker's does a bit better, with a token four out of fifty.23 Ernst Cassirer, analysing The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, omitted Hartley, Mandeville, Malthus, Priestley, Paine, Bolingbroke, Bentham, Erasmus Darwin, Richardson and Defoe, and all political economists, including Adam Smith.24 Surveying the swelling democratic revolutions late in the century, R.R. Palmer portrayed a conservative John Bull as the buttress of counter-revolution.25 In other words, eighteenth-century English thought has been presented as a picturesque island blessed by continental drift. Conservative historians such

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as Namier and recent American Burke scholars have celebrated England's supposed escape from Enlightenment contagion as permitting an age of grace, realism and the end of ideology. Socialist historians see the same picture but praise it less. Christopher Hill has written of the age's 'moral wilderness',26 perhaps echoing Alasdair Macintyre's verdict that after Hume British moral philosophy suffered from 'barrenness'.27 'The eighteenth century', bemoans Perry Anderson, 'sailed forward into an era of unparalleled stability . . . No ferment of ideas or memories remained.' 28 Confronted by this paradox of philosophes, who claimed they had been electrified by English currents, being switched off by historians who see in the Augustans nothing but peace, let us trust the philosophes and try to diagnose why the English Enlightenment is a scholarly black-hole. One prime blockage has been historians' insistence - out of mingled academic imperialism and tidy-mindedness - that the Enlightenment was a unity. 'There were many philosophes', opens Peter Gay, sententiously, 'but there was only one Enlightenment.' 29 The quintessence of this homogeneous Enlightenment is presumed to be France. Marsak thus dubs it 'primarily a French phenomenon', 30 and Gay judges that in philosophical pedigree the Frenchman was 'the purest specimen'.31 And from this it follows - as Crocker suggests - that the Enlightenment did not blossom until Voltaire's glorious decade in the 1740s.32 Obviously, if one's yardstick is France in mid century the English experience goes by default. But this hallucination need not detain us. For most of the thinkers and benchmarks celebrated by the philosophes themselves long antedated the 1740s: the Declaration of Rights, the Toleration Act, the Act of Union, 33 Locke, Newton, Defoe, Shaftesbury, Toland and the freethinkers. The weapons of Gay's philosophical flock had been first forged in the Dutch Republic and in England a generation or more earlier. Shaftesbury pronounced la crise de la conscience europeenne in 1706: 'There is a mightly light which spreads itself over the world, especially in those two free nations of England and Holland, on whom the affairs of all Europe now turn.' 34 Holland was the Enlightenment's first ray. But the English searchlight ultimately probed further. This is perhaps because the Dutch ferment had not arisen totally from Dutchmen and Dutch conditions but among refugees like Bayle, and marginal figures like Spinoza. Unlike in Holland, the challenges of an expanding society maintained the dialectic of experience and criticism throughout the eighteenth century in England. Unlike the Dutch, English thinkers remained a continuing influence on Europe.35 The short answer, then, to the thematic question, 'what are the unique features of the English Enlightenment?' would be: None, because practically all its currents subsequently irrigated Enlightenments elsewhere. England's special role was that in many areas - freethinking, empiricism, utilitarianism - she came first.

The Enlightenment in England

Other blocks, consequences of presuming the Enlightenment to be essentially a unity, almost a priori debar England from scholars' Enlightenment maps. The first is the intellectualist fallacy. Many historians of ideas will hardly raise their hats to thinkers unless they are abstruse, formal and systematic. Under this prejudice seminal English influences, such as the brittle and allusive Shaftesbury, or Steele, have received little scholarly attention. Perhaps in the very act of making his subject the philosophy of the Enlightenment Cassirer became involved in a distortion, even a betrayal, especially insofar as he saw the philosophes stumblingly trying to write Kant. Certainly, Cassirer's perspective leaves the Enlightenment in England a case for teratologists. For the same reason, the Scottish Enlightenment has often been vaunted for producing systematic logics of the mind and conjectural histories36 - almost as though Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart were expecting intellectual historians to pin posthumous medals on them. As Taine observed, over a century ago, eighteenth-century England had everything - well, almost: There is none so rich, so free, so well nourished, where public and private efforts are directed with so much assiduity, energy, and ability towards the improvement of public and private condition. One point alone is wanting: lofty speculation.37 Certainly, England produced no Critique of Pure Reason. But why should systematic theorizing be the touchstone of Enlightenment? After all, Enlightenment thought itself sought to subvert metaphysics and Vesprit de systeme. Ridicule was the test of truth. In any case, the world of writer and audience in Georgian England had little stomach for synthetic philosophy.38 No professoriate won kudos by scaling Andes of ideas. The real intelligentsia was not chairbound but worked in the market place. Ideas were a trade, produced for a wide popular readership.39 'It was said of Socrates', wrote Addison, that he brought Philosophy down from Heaven to inhabit among Men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee Houses.40 Forming a coffee table philosophy, English thought was concrete, practical, entertaining. And writers occupied many niches. Brushing aside New Left verdicts of the treason of the intellectuals, E.P. Thompson has argued how there were formed scores of intellectual enclaves, dispersed over England, Wales and Scotland, which made up for what they lost in cohesion by the multiplicity of initiatives afforded by these many bases and (as the entire record of scientific and technical advance witnesses) by the opportunities afforded for the interpenetration of theory and praxis.41

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Thompson perhaps has in mind Lunar Society science, the Warrington medical connexion, the York literary scene that nurtured Sterne, itinerant lecturers, or the country parsonage as research centre. In a similar vein, Plumb guides the eyes away from the 'peaks of culture'. 'Too much attention, it seems to me', he writes, 'is paid to the monopoly of ideas amongst the intellectual giants, too little to their social acceptance. Ideas acquire dynamism when they become social attitudes, and this was happening in England.' 42 The second order myopia arising from straining on France lies in hearing in the Enlightenment heartbeat a militant secularism: 'Ecrasez l'infame', or as Gay puts it, the 'rise of modern paganism'.43 With few exceptions eighteenthcentury English thinkers, however, continued to profess Christianity within its reasonableness. Ergo, they could not have been enlightened. But the flaw of this logic has been exposed by Miss Behrens, Franklin Ford, Henry May and others.44 For if we argue the Enlightenment's synonymity with emergent paganism we immediately shrink it to a nuclear family of Frenchmen - at most d'Holbach's circle45 - and snuff it out by definition from Italy, Austria, Scotland, America or England. The simple fact is that Enlightenment goals like criticism, sensibility or faith in progress - throve in England within piety.46 There was no need to overthrow religion itself, because there was no pope, no inquisition, no Jesuits, no monopolistic priesthood with a stranglehold on children through education and on families through confession. As Chadwick has argued, the real business of European secularization remained to nineteenth-century infidels.47 The last myth eclipsing the English Enlightenment is a teleology born of historians' own identification with Enlightenment values.48 This is the vista of the Age of Reason as torch-bearer in the great relay race of human progress. The Enlightenment's task supposedly was to smash the ancien regime and build the free world. Missionaries of modernity - and several historians have slotted the Enlightenment into sociologists' 'modernization theories'49 philosophes must have been 'radical' through and through; for Gay, 'revolutionaries', 'skeptics', 'democrats', 'atheists'.50 Hence finding that English thinkers were not materialists,51 democrats, or anarchists we infer that eighteenth-century England was not enlightened. Yet few French philosophes, and hardly any German, Italian, Swiss or Scottish thinkers were democrats, materialists or atheists. In any case, do not mistake the radical rhetoric of the philosophes - and their genuine attacks upon throne and altar - for a desire to turn society upside down. It has been assumed - since Burke - that the eruption of the French Revolution in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity gives the French Enlightenment a warranted place in conservative demonology, unlike perhaps the English. But as Robert Darnton has shown, relations between the High Enlightenment and the French Revolution are anything but clear.52 Many philosophes

The Enlightenment in England

had feathered comfortable nests within the ancien regime - as revolutionary pamphleteers complained.53 D'Alembert after all held four more pensions and sinecures than Dr Johnson. To what extent, and until when, would the great philosophes have approved the French Revolution? — a revolution which executed Lavoisier and hunted down Condorcet, one rejected by latter-day philosophes like Raynal and Marmontel? Perhaps their reaction would have been those of enlightened Englishmen like Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Bishop Richard Watson: the bubbling enthusiasm of the toast to Liberty turning to poison in the very cup. 54 In any case, England too had radical movements in the 1780s and 1790s, whose banners proclaimed Enlightenment credos.55 In short, we must be sensitive to the Enlightenment's chiaroscuro in order to judge its contours. We must not carve up the century with the knife of moral prejudices or anachronistic categories, or be deafened by illuminati rhetoric. Instead of hypostatizing the Enlightenment as the destiny of Humanity we should see it rather as the ideology of particular articulate elites with defined interests. A social history of ideas will show how contexts and preferences led some - like Bentham - to proceed in the name of a managerial rationality, and others - like Wilkes - on the ticket of liberty. For some, such as Gibbon, Enlightenment meant religious emancipation within the political status quo; for others, like Priestley, it demanded political radicalism within millennial Christianity. It is vital to grasp the horizons of projected change, the nuanced whole of limits as well as liberations; what was taken for granted that other things could be questioned. For, as Thompson has shown, nuance is the key to the Enlightenment in England. 'In France', he writes, the armies of Orthodoxy and Enlightenment faced each other. But Britain [as a result of the liberalizing function of Protestantism] was more like a weakly occupied country in which, whenever Orthodoxy had repelled a small frontal attack, it found itself harassed on its flanks, at its rear, and even within its own midst. The Enlightenment proceeded in Britain not like one of those flood-tides massing against a crumbling dyke, but like the tide which seeps into the eroded shores, mudflats and creeks, of an estuary whose declivities are ready to receive it.56 All the shibboleths of Enlightenment were familiar to English lips: reason and experience; law, liberty and justice; happiness, humanity and nature; knowledge is power is progress; sapere aude, and the rest - as I have argued, the baby Enlightenment's first words were spoken in an English nursery. But what did they mean there? The cardinal fact is that in England, and in England almost alone, the realization of Enlightenment hopes was not thwarted at every turn by the existing order of state and society. Quite the reverse. In England after 1688 the constitution itself incorporated central Enlightenment demands, such as

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personal freedom under Habeas Corpus, representative government, religious toleration and the sanctity of property. Furthermore, neithei censorship, economic regulation nor unbending social proprieties debarred the affluent, articulate and ambitious from pursuing their own personal Enlightenment goals, such as free speculation, or the accumulation of wealth, or happiness.57 Not until quite late in the century did opposition to the English state sing to an Enlightenment tune.58 In England the educated and propertied who espoused Enlightenment rationality did not need to storm barricades. For by application of intellect they could succeed within the rules of the game. Faber suae quisquefortunae.

Hence the Enlightenment in England is marked by its pragmatism. The proof of the pudding time lay in the eating. 'No vain Utopia' seated somewhere over the rainbow, the acid test of the Enlightenment lay in the skill with which the garden was actually cultivated, or rather the fields enclosed, the buttons burnished and hopes realized. Foreign visitors marvelled at the business, practicality and resourcefulness of England's thriving hive. Louis Simond, the French-American, proclaimed 'the English are great in practical mechanics'.59 Pastor Moritz from Prussia was ecstatic about the way the English had of 'roasting slices of buttered bread before the fire, which is incomparable . . . This is called "toast",' he drooled.60 Characteristically, English religion was esteemed for being deeds not words. 'Religion in England', wrote Prevost, 'in towns, and even in the smallest villages finds its expression in hospitals for the sick, homes of refuge for the poor and aged of both sexes, schools for the education of the children.' 61 Obversely, enlightened Englishmen felt contempt for continental incompetence. Abroad, they were appalled by poverty and palaeolithic technology. Finding peasants in the Palatinate 'poor and wretched', Mrs Montagu chorused the Enlightenment contrast between them and their 'princes so magnificent'.62 Smollett, lamenting such signs of poverty, misery, and dirt, among the commonalty of France, their unfenced fields dug up in despair, without the intervention of meadow or fallow ground, without cattle to furnish manure, without horses to execute the plans of agriculture; their farmhouses mean, their furniture wretched, their apparel beggarly; themselves and their beasts the images of famine, drew the predictable Enlightenment conclusion: I cannot help thinking they groan under oppression.63 The point is that this pragmatism was not mere worldliness. It was a philosophy of expediency, the art of living well, part both of the liberation and the limitations prescribed by English Enlightenment consciousness. Chesterfield's advice to his son amplified Locke's dictum that 'our business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct',64 or as

The Enlightenment in England

versified by Pope, 'the proper study of mankind is man'. Is it fanciful to suggest that Sir Robert Walpole's self-presentation as 'no saint, no Spartan, no reformer' has a distinct Enlightenment tinge? Enlightenment sanctioned the pursuit of happiness, and to this end Englishmen set about manufacturing a consumer society of objects and opportunities, and also the practical skills needed to fly a capitalist economy taking off into growth.65 A key dilemma faced articulate Englishmen. How could one produce a society where individuals could pursue life, liberty, wealth and happiness, but which nevertheless possessed the stable solidarity needed to preclude selfdestructive anarchy? The English Enlightenment had certainly come riding in on the wavecrest of rampant assertions of rights. Liberty and England become virtually synonymous.66 Lockean liberal individualist prescriptions assumed Biblical status for enlightened minds in all walks of life.67 They insisted on their rights to seize opportunities in the 'opportunity state' 68 where, as Thompson says, 'a patrician banditti contested for the spoils of power' - especially now that private rights and self-interest were being clothed in respectability by the revolutions in morality, epistemology and psychology we label benevolism, sensationalism, associationism and utilitarianism. Each man best knew his own interests, which was the quest to maximize happiness. 'Virtue is the conformity to a rule of life', explained the Revd John Gay, 'directing the actions of all rational creatures with respect to each other's happiness; . . . obligation is the necessity of doing or omitting any action in order to be happy.' 69 'Whatever is expedient', wrote Paley, glossing Pope, 'is right' 70 - a breathtaking maxim to come from an ecclesiastic and a Cambridge instructor of youth. The rightness of self-interest meant that (in Priestley's words),71 'it is most advisable to leave every man at perfect liberty to serve himself, till some actual inconvenience be found to result from it'. Even the phlegmatic Bishop Butler thought that 'self-love' - so long as it was 'reasonable' - was a virtuous spur to Christian action.72 And egoism in practice had a free run between the furniture of a complex, hierarchical and propertied society. The arguments from Child and Locke to Priestley and Bentham for free-range private property and laissez-faire, the belief that 'the inconveniences which have arisen to a nation from leaving trade quite open are few . . . in comparison of the manifest injury it receives from being cramped in almost any form whatever' 73 bore fruit in de facto economic liberalism, the freedom of capital. In a parallel way, Lawrence Stone has recently argued that it was Enlightenment England which saw among the gentry and professional classes - the first flowering of affective individualism: greater freedom of choice in spouses, some emancipation of women from male dominion, and of children from the paternal rod. Madame du Bocage thought that the daughters of the gentry 'live in much less constraint than young ladies amongst us'.74 Similarly, writers and artists won freedom from the encumbering help of the patron. 'How sweet this bit of

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freedom really is!' exclaimed Haydn in 1791 on one of his visits to London. 'I had a kind prince, but sometimes was I obliged to be dependent on base souls. I often sighed for release, and now I have it in some measure.' 75 This liberation of the libido from the past, from tradition, from the judgement of society, elders, family and peers, this abandonment of the moral economy and of customs in common could be dared because optimism was programmed into Enlightenment consciousness.76 Optimism about human nature: Locke taught that man was not flawed by original sin; desire was desirable; what Priestley called man's 'endless cravings' caused progress; man could educate himself; knowledge was limitless.77 Optimism about Nature: Newton's universe, like society, was composed of individualistic atoms, yet its sum was a harmonious and glorious economy, which, through science and technology, man had a right to dominate.78 And an optimism about the divine order: God's rational benevolence dissolved the theodicy problem; evil was an illusion;79 providence — Smith's invisible hand — had not only bid self-love and social be the same but made progress the result. Private vices were, fortunately, public benefits (though shouting this from the rooftops was indiscreet).80 Egoism was, therefore, natural, because selfinterest could be enlightened. In Shaftesbury's sanguine formulation: 'The wisdom of what rules, and is FIRST and CHIEF in nature, has made it to be according to the private Interest and Good of every-one, to work towards the general Good.' 81 Or, as Frederick Eden put it in more bourgeois terms, 'the desire of bettering our condition . . . animates the world [and] gives birth to every social virtue'. 82 Thus encouraged, eighteenth-century Englishmen seized the chance to express themselves, to indulge their feelings,83 to escape from the traditional discipline of Calvinism, customs and kin. Acquisitiveness, high living, sexual and emotional exploration, social climbing and the delights of fashion were freed from the moral and religious straitjackets of guilt, sin and retribution so tightlaced before. Authority towards children was relaxed.84 Humanitarianism awakened sympathy towards lunatics and animals, and movements to emancipate slaves.85 But enlightened elites had to convince themselves how in practice subjective emancipation, humanitarianism and the relaxation of formal discipline could be won without social collapse. For Civil War lowerclass licence, levelling and liberty of prophesying had scarred the mind, just as the cavalier libertinism of the Restoration court was an unsavoury reminder of how hedonism - if unbridled - not only destroyed itself through the bottle, the pox or the duel but was also in league with tyranny and popery. The challenge flung down by Hobbes was that if man were utterly individualistic Leviathan alone could curb his excesses. The special quality of English Enlightenment social ethics lay in divining how to make the world safe for egoism; how order could be sustained within an individualistic society. And solutions - expressed in sermons, manuals of 10

The Enlightenment in England

conduct and periodicals - had to reckon with two special features of English society. First, having bid absolutism good riddance Enlightenment elites were confronted with a boisterous and assertive plebeian voice. 86 The Prussian visitor Von Archenholz saw very well how this was the price of Enlightenment:87 The idea of liberty, and the consciousness of protection from the laws, are the reasons why the people in general testify but little respect for their superiors, and even for those in the highest offices, unless they have acquired their affection by affable and popular manners. The masses could not be directly suppressed but must - as Thompson has emphasized - be negotiated with. Madame du Bocage did not mince words: 'In France we cringe to the great, in England the great cringe to the people.'88 Secondly, England's free-market economy (itself licensed by Enlightenment individualism) was accelerating by deepening consumption down through the social spectrum. 89 With the renaissance of provincial towns, the emergence of petty-bourgeois aspirations, the growth of service industries, the commercialization of leisure and knowledge, an expanding middle class could newly vote with its pocket in the cultural preserves of the traditional elite. Tt is evident', observed Madame Roland, 'that man, whatever he may be, is here reckoned something, and that a handful of rich does not constitute the nation.' 90 In these circumstances, with assertive claims for freedom echoing down the social order, Enlightenment opinion mapped out two strategies for socializing egoism within a fabric of stability. The first lay in embracing inclusiveness. The pioneers of Enlightenment were propertied elites. Yet they expounded a universal ideology. Reason was - potentially - a comprehensive attribute, including even women and children. The best bid for harmony was to assimilate as many people as possible within enlightened values - all who qualified themselves for admission by their industry, achieved rationality, civility or wealth. Stability, not to be asserted through brute force, might be won through hegemony: the universality of the law, 91 mobility through merit and patronage, a minimization of formal civil disabilities or through capitalizing on rising expectations. Of course, those who could not or would not play the hegemony game were to be stigmatized. Religious fanatics, obdurate criminals and the idle and undeserving poor mocked the consensus, and so were subjected to what became severer social discipline. 92 But in a society which set little store by blood nobility and still less by predestination few were excluded by birth. Enlightenment thinkers knew the power of the pen and set about recruiting to their opinions. In fact, there were two main tactics for broad-bottom comprehension. One lay in 'paternalism' 93 and condescension. The threatening glare of the 11

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destitute, the mad, the sick, the fallen, could be bought off by a humanitarian generosity which confirmed rank even as it palliated suffering. Enlightened sentiment - rather than specifically Christian piety - swelled a spring-tide of voluntary charitable foundations of schools, hospitals, dispensaries, asylums and reformatories. The beauty of philanthropy lay in enhancing within the elite the superiority of their own patrician sensibility.94 The other mode of assimilation lay in acting out social openness. Foreigners observing the manners of the Quality were struck by their choosing to mingle with, rather than to segregate themselves from, the mob. The hustings, sporting spectacles, theatres, resorts - all provided arenas of social mixing. The Prussian Moritz was surprised that in England 'officers do not go in uniform but dress as civilians.'95 He asked: why is St James's Park so special? Tt is the astonishing medley of people.' 96 Grosley felt the same about London's resorts: 'The pleasures of Vauxhall and Ranelagh unite both sexes, and all ranks and conditions.'97 Cesar de Saussure pondered the unique feature of cricket, and answered: 'Everyone plays it, the common people and also men of rank.' 98 And the English stage-coach, pondered Louis Simond? Because it contains 'Passengers of all sexes, ages, and conditions'" - or the coffee house? Why, said Prevost, What a lesson to see a lord, or two, a baronet, a shoemaker, a tailor, a winemerchant, and a few others of the same stamp poring over the same newspapers. Truly the coffee houses ... are the seats of English liberty.100 Bath, the most genteel and enlightened of the resorts, was at least from mid century open to anyone with money in his pocket, so long as he kept to the rules enforced by that enlightened despot of etiquette, Beau Nash.101 As Smollett described it, through the dyspeptic Matt Bramble, Every upstart of fortune, harnessed in the trappings of the mode, presents himself at Bath, as in the very focus of observation - Clerks and factors from the East Indies, loaded with the spoil of plundered provinces; planters, negro-drivers, and hucksters ... agents, commissaries, and contractors ... usurers, brokers, and jobbers of every kind; men of low birth, and no breeding ... all of them hurry to Bath, because here without any further qualification, they can mingle with the princes and nobles of the land.... Such is the composition of what is called the fashionable company at Bath; where a very inconsiderable proportion of genteel people are lost in a mob of impudent plebeians.102 Peter Burke has recently pointed to a widening gulf between elite and popular culture in the ancien regime. 103 But England stands somewhat in exception. There certainly was - as Thompson states - ham theatre in the visibility of the grandees and their cultural display.104 But it meant that many Englishmen were able to share Enlightenment aspirations for amusement, social emulation, the pursuit of taste, novelty and fashion. Enlighten12

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merit culture created an enviable world within clutching distance. John Newbery sold improving children's books for those Who from a State of Rags and Care, And having Shoes but half a Pair; Their Fortune and their Fame would fix, And gallop in a Coach and Six.105 The Enlightenment creed of self-improvement and progress offered carrots to the lower orders to embourgeoisify themselves. As William Paley said, the Lord Mayor's coach was not for the mayor's benefit, but for society's: to excite the ambition of the 'prentice boy.106 Money became the esperanto of social commerce. Betterment, happiness and the dreams of reason could be bought by felicific down payments. Thus James Lackington, the self-made book seller, wrote in 1792, the sale of books in general has increased prodigiously within the last twenty years The poorer sort of farmers, and even the poor country people in general, who before the period spent their winter evenings in relating stories of witches, ghosts, hobgoblins &c, now shorten the winter nights by hearing their sons and daughters read tales, romances, &c, and on entering their houses, you may see Tom Jones, Roderic Random, and other entertaining books stuck up on their bacon racks.107 And Samuel Johnson confirmed how Enlightenment free trade in knowledge spread rationalism: The mass of every people must be barbarous where there is no printing and consequently knowledge is not generally diffused. Knowledge is diffused among our people by the news-papers.108 This open market in possessive individualism created common goals - as Mandeville predicted - in what seemed, especially to foreigners, a society dangerously lacking formal discipline and subordination. And this drive towards inclusiveness informed other facets of the English Enlightenment mind. Whereas militant French philosophes represented the world in contending opposites - light versus dark, body versus soul, humanity versus priestcraft - and whereas Kant's critical philosophy sundered into tragic dualisms,109 English thought went for comprehension: individual and society, trade and gentility, conscience and self-love, science and religion,110 Locke's mental sensation and reflection, or even Priestley's monistic fusion of matter and spirit.111 The tragic paradoxes of stoical humanism and the other-worldy solutions of Augustinian Christianity were traded in for faith in man's progressive ability to remould - even perfect - himself and surmount dichotomies.112 I have been discussing the Enlightenment dilemma of how to prevent hedonic liberty being self-destructive, and have been arguing that, following 13

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the dismissal of the police and priests, army and bureaucracy of the absolutist state, one bid for order lay in progressive equilibrium resulting from the mechanics of open market forces. The other - which I shall now discuss - lay in establishing a rational framework of cosmic order and moral imperatives. For despite stereotypes, very few philosophes (as Henry May has emphasized) were ultimately sceptics.113 If we keep too prominently in the foreground the philosophes as merciless critics of the mystifying formulae of oppression Aristotelianism, traditionalism, autocratic ipse dixitism, the depravity of man, and all the other bogeys of Bentham's Book of Fallacies - we will underestimate their desire to replace these with a new physical and moral order, their inexhaustible urge to preach and teach. Traditional beliefs were rejected, partly for being untrue - as the march of science proved - but chiefly because, though promising order, they had not delivered the goods. For history was a saga of rudeness and barbarity tempered by despotism. Seventeenth-century fanaticism had resulted in full-scale civil war and a king beheaded. Enlightenment opinion sought to replace militancy with a civil and political order. These required civility and politeness. But how could men lead happy lives in harmony with each other? Not through traditional certainties like Christian dogmatics whereby righteousness had wielded the sword. Rudeness had to yield to a new moral order of refinement. Voltaire thought he could see this filtering down into social practice in England's 'free and peaceful assemblies': Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together as tho' they all profess'd the same religion, and give the name of Infidel to none but bankrupts. There the Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends on the Quaker's word. And all are satisfied.114 This passage confirms my earlier theme of the market making Enlightenment cooperation possible by undermining confessional divides. Money is the new cult. But in showing men content, and content to be content, it reveals a revolution in summum bonum, a shift from an ethic of righteousness which was transcendental and religious, to a selfhood which is psychological and personal. As Peter Gay emphasized, the Enlightenment translated the cosmic question, 'How can I be good?' into the pragmatic, 'How can I be happy?' and opened the gates for a new psychology of personal and social adjustment. Individual and social adjustment lay down the road of cultivation. Refinement was not a petty obsession with punctilio; it was the last ditch therapy for chronic social conflict and personal frustration arising from ignorance, family tyranny, isolation or spleen. Refinement could be taught by education - and, after Locke, pedagogics stressed 'learning in the uses of the world'. It was also to be learned by practice: 14

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The great art [Boswell noted] of living easy and happy in society is to study proper behaviour, and even with our most intimate friends, to observe politeness.115 Above all, the refinement of self was to be directed towards sociability. Solitude, 'certainly one of the greatest obstacles to pleasure and improvement', in Dr Johnson's opinion,116 brought on hypochondria and boorishness. The scholar immured in his study succumbed to pedantry and spleen. 'Nothing can easily exceed', deplored Hartley, 'the Vain-glory, Self-conceit, Arrogance, Emulation and Envy, that are found in the eminent Professors of the Sciences.'117 To be a rational gentleman a fellow had to be sociable, or, in Johnson's phrase, clubbable (and Johnson's own club contained the leading minds of the day - Burke, Reynolds, Adam Smith, Goldsmith, Percy). In the absence of Gesellschaft, or of the State as Reason, Gemeinschqft was vital to English Enlightenment hopes of producing a moral order. Clubs - like The Spectator's - masonic lodges, tavern meetings, coffee houses and friendly societies flourished in the name of company, fellowship and credit, free republics of rational society.118 Shaftesbury anchored this social urge in nature: 'If Eating and Drinking be natural, Herding is so too. If any Appetite or Sense be natural, the Sense of Fellowship is the same.' 119 And in urging sociability, Enlightenment writers codified the art and science of pleasing. Men were malleable. They must cheerfully conform and accommodate. Good breeding, discreet charm and conversation were the polish which reduced social friction, 'Contributing as much as possible to the Ease and Happiness of those with whom you converse.'120 'We polish one another,' wrote Shaftesbury, 'and rub off our corners and rough sides by a sort of amicable collision.' m A rational art of ease, good humour, sympathy, restraint,122 moderation, sobriety and culture, based upon knowledge of human nature this was the key felicific technology pioneered by the English Enlightenment.123 Thus the Enlightenment in England sought patterns of conduct which would embody order. But social harmony also had to be seen to be anchored in the larger order of nature. All English natural philosophers affirmed the rational cosmos. Theologians found natural religion, moralists natural law. Christian providentialist natural theology and Deism likewise; the static chain of being and Erasmus Darwin's evolutionism; uniformitarian natural law and theories of change; universal human nature and the infinite perfectibility of man - all these beliefs offered some universal and absolute underpinnings to the social frame. 'Cease then, nor ORDER Imperfection name': All Nature is but Art unknown to thee; All Chance, Direction, which thou can'st not see; All Discord, Harmony, not understood, All partial Evil, universal Good:

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And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason's Spite, One truth is clear, 'Whatever is, is Right.'124 My argument has been that the distinctive dilemma of the English Enlightenment was to achieve individual and group fulfilment with the familiar social frame. Unlike elsewhere state power was not the central focus:125 neither its destruction, nor its task in building the New Heavenly City. Private and voluntary activities were. With their own constitution assured, English thinkers were less interested than others in providing comprehensive theories of the cosmos or speculations on the biology of man, but more exercised with a praxis of man in society. In the short term, this concentration worked. The vocabulary of liberty, interest and consensus won many converts. It took men who were as marginal as Swift, Wesley and Blake to decode its hidden messages and debunk it.126 Eighteenth-century England retained a general equilibrium while undergoing rapid local change. In the slightly longer term the hopes of Enlightenment ideologues for creating a stable, though free and fluid society, were scuppered by the increasingly open social ruptures late in the century - these class conflicts being the Enlightenment's endorsement of possessive individualism coming home to roost.127 From the time of Wilkes, and then through the parliamentary reform movement and English Jacobinism, Enlightenment ideology shivered into contradictory fragments, and the conjuring trick of juggling dynamic individualism on social stability tumbled to the ground. In one quarter, Enlightenment libertarian rhetoric was appropriated by Jacobin radicals - witness the very titles of Paine's works: Common Sense, The Age of Reason, The Rights of Man. For Paine and other radicals, the common man's struggle against state tyranny replicated that of freethinkers and Whigs a century earlier against a land of pope and Tory. The Nore mutineers of 1797 asked if they were prepared to remain the 'footballs and shuttlecocks of a set of tyrants' and answered: 'No. The age of reason has at last revolved.'128 The object of the Corresponding Society movement was defined by a local leader as 'to enlighten the people, to show the people the reason, the ground of all their complaints and sufferings'.129 Diverging from this Jacobin radicalism, the aristocracy of labour and petty bourgeoisie cobbled Enlightenment attitudes into a self-help reformism. Richard Carlile urged progress through Reason: 'Let us then endeavour to progress in knowledge, since knowledge is demonstrably proved to be power.' Francis Place also stressed moral improvement: 'We are a much better people than we were . . . better instructed, more sincere and kind-hearted, less gross and brutal.' 130 Haut bourgeois liberals, by contrast, put a still different complexion on Enlightenment ideology. Individual emancipation stiffened into the iron laws of Ricardian political economy. The end of social 16

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harmony demanded the means of time and work discipline, penology and scientific poor laws, while humanitarianism sank into proto-Victorian sentimentality.131 And at the end of the century, an Establishment apologetic gelled, utilizing still other facets of Enlightenment thought. Malthus in particular reglossed economic liberalism, to show why government could not relieve suffering and starvation, and detailed science to prove how the law of the cosmos was, after all, struggle.132 More dramatically, the turmoil of the French Revolution led conservative society to jettison Enlightenment values altogether, fearing they had produced anarchy in France and disaffection in England. 'From liberty, equality and the rights of man', wailed Hannah More, 'good Lord deliver usV13S Burke abandoned Enlightenment in dubbing the people 'the swinish multitude'; Canning in the Anti-Jacobin: Reason, Philosophy, 'fiddledum, diddledum' Peace and Fraternity, higgledy, piggledy Higgledy piggledy, 'fiddledum, diddledum'.134 The burgeoning Evangelical revival anathematized rational religion135 and Enlightenment was also repudiated by Romantic critics who saw its worldly rationality symbolizing the atomized, utilitarian, capitalist society they loathed. 'Were we required', wrote Thomas Carlyle to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral age, but above all others, the Mechanical Age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches, and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Only the material, the immediately practical not the divine and spiritual, is important to us.... Our true Deity is Mechanism. It has subdued external Nature for us, and, we think it will do all other things.136 From Enlightenment lips, this would have been praise indeed. From Carlyle it was damnation. In providing a biting socio-political critique of the Enlightenment as false consciousness, Romanticism restored the humanistic dualisms which the Enlightenment had sought to abolish. And yet in the long term the Enlightenment ideology had got very deeply under the skin. By providing a secular legitimation for free market capitalism, it continued to inform Victorian self-help liberalism and modern defences of the open society.137 In proclaiming individual progress through reason it conjured up a meliorist, gradualist future which immunized radicals against ideologies of class war and fraternal socialism. Owenism, phrenology, secularism, Fabianism are all the legacies of the English Enlightenment. The Halevy thesis perhaps needs supplementing. Might it have been the Enlightenment which rendered England proof against the French — and all sub-

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sequent - revolutions? The English clerisy - even, as Dr Norman has recently reminded us, the clergy - still reads the world and interprets its history in the rays of the Enlightenment. The peculiarities of the English are not least the product of the peculiarities of the English Enlightenment. It is not lightly to be dismissed.

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2 The Scottish Enlightenment NICHOLAS PHILLIPSON

By the 1760s Scotland had become a centre of learning and letters of international importance. The universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen employed some of the most admired philosophers and scientists in the contemporary world. The classrooms of Adam Smith and John Millar at Glasgow, Adam Ferguson and Dugald Stewart at Edinburgh and the medical professors of Edinburgh attracted students from every corner of the Continent and the Anglo-Saxon world. Edinburgh was the hub of this intellectual universe. Although the Act of Union of 1707 had meant the abolition of the Scots parliament and Privy Council the city was to remain the effective centre of Scottish political and social life until the early nineteenth century. Its law courts, churches and college; its academies, improvement societies and theatres; its salons and taverns, supported a large and complex society of men of letters whose members were drawn from the ranks of the local professions and from the landed elite around which the social and political life of the country revolved. 1 Tobias Smollett's Matthew Bramble enthusiastically described Edinburgh as 'a hot-bed of genius' but his contemporaries generally preferred a more measured metaphor. 2 The painter Allan Ramsay, one of the leading members of the city's literati in the early 1750s, had described Edinburgh as 'the Athens of Britain', Where instead of the awkward and monkish pedantry of the old-fashioned Universities, young gentlemen will be initiated in the principles of usefull knowledge and at the same time exercised in all these liberal accomplishments which qualify a man to appear in the distinguished spheres of Life.3 This was to emphasize the moral, political and even patriotic importance of pursuing the polite arts and sciences, and it seems clear that foreign readers of Scottish philosophy and literature valued it for precisely those reasons. During the second half of the century Scottish learning began to penetrate the salons and classrooms of England, France, Germany, Italy and America. The pattern is everywhere the same. In the salons, Scottish learning meant the histories of David Hume and William Robertson, the Poems of Ossian, the 19

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philosophical novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Mackenzie, the moral literary and political essays of Hume, and Mackenzie's Mirror and Lounger. By the early nineteenth century that list would also have included Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott and the literary and political journalism of Francis Jeffrey's Edinburgh Review. In the university classrooms of Germany, France and America, Scottish learning meant the philosophical treatises of Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Thomas Reid, James Beattie and Dugald Stewart, the aesthetic writings of Lord Kames and Hugh Blair and the medical textbooks which were used at Edinburgh University.4 This was a distinctive and sophisticated intellectual diet. The Scots had set out to approach what Hume called 'The Science of Man' in a scientific and secular spirit with the clearly stated intention, sometimes laboriously rehearsed, of helping ordinary men and women to lead happy, useful and virtuous lives in an increasingly complex, commercial society. To be sure, traditional moralists might object that this Science of Man was too secular, too closely associated for comfort with religious scepticism and with the notoriously sceptical philosophy of David Hume. However, as we shall see, the fear of scepticism and the desire to found a Science of Man that would serve the interests of Christians as well as of unbelievers were among the hallmarks of Scottish learning in the age of the Enlightenment. For one of the greatest continental admirers of Scottish philosophy, Victor Cousin, the supreme achievement of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart was that they had succeeded in reconciling the interests of science with those of religion and morality. For him, Une politique liberale, l'amour de la vertu, un bon sens inexorable, la vraie methode philosophique, tels sont les caracteres generaux de l'ecole ecossaise; c'est a ces titres que nous la presentons avec confiance a la jeunesse de notre pays.5 Of what did this Scottish Science of Man consist?6 Technically, it was founded on a desire to study scientifically what we should call the contents of the mind and what contemporaries called 'ideas' or 'beliefs'. These ideas made intelligible the external world, God and even the self, and to understand their origins was the key to understanding the principles of morality, justice, politics and philosophy. The Scots thought that it was unscientific to trace the origins of ideas back to abstract conceptions like reason, however convenient that might be theologically. The scientific study of the mind involved an empirical investigation of its operations and of the process of socialization. In his early days, Hume and his critics like Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart thought that the key to understanding the problem lay in studying the constitution of the mind - what they called 'metaphysics'. Others, like Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and Hume himself in his later days, preferred to study the process by which we internalize the moral, social and intellectual ideas and beliefs of our world and acquire ideas of propriety 20

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and virtue; this was a process which contemporaries called 'moral culture' or 'moral education'. But they all believed that the only data fit for a modern philosopher to reason about were those which could be observed. Intellectually, the importance of this enquiry into the Science of Man lies in the fact that it was the first attempt to make a genuinely sociological study of man, society and history.7 For the Scots were able to show how men's personalities were shaped by their social experience and how the political, economic and cultural institutions of society were shaped by men's expectations of them. They thought that men were sociable beings who relied on others for the satisfaction of their moral, economic and political needs. They were actors continually playing different roles in different scenes of life, seeking always to maintain a sense of identity while doing so. Society was an organization designed to satisfy the needs of those who belonged to it, and its structure was determined as much by the distribution of property, the division of labour and the mores of its inhabitants as by the form of its constitution. History was the story of the process by which changing property relations and changing expectations as well as the struggles for power and the preservation of constitutional liberties shaped a nation's progress from a state of rudeness to one of refinement. And through it all ran the moral concern that animated eighteenth century Scottish culture at large - that, properly conducted, such an enquiry would help to build a society of happier men and better citizens. But why should Scotsmen have been so deeply committed to an intellectual and moral exercise of this sort? Put like this, the question is too vague to be answered. A more useful way of formulating it would be to ask why the Scots should have abandoned, or rather so drastically modified, the traditional language of civic morality which political moralists were accustomed to employ in discussing the affairs of civil society.8 The civic humanist tradition in Western political and moral thinking had taught men to value above everything else the sense of moral autonomy that could be won by learning how to live virtuously in civil society. That tradition had taught that men's capacity for virtue was released when they participated as citizens in the political life of the polity to which they belonged and directed their energies to the defence of the liberties enshrined in its constitution. The Scots took it for granted that a sense of moral autonomy - or, as they sometimes put it, 'independence' - represented the supreme source of gratification to which men could aspire, and that this sentiment could only be found by participating in the public affairs of society. But they did not believe that political participation was the only means of releasing it. It was clear to them that savages, living in pre-political, tribal societies were capable of experiencing a sense of moral autonomy. More important, it was equally clear that in modern societies there were many men and women, often living far from the seat of government, who devoted themselves to local 21

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affairs and knew something of these feelings of moral autonomy even though the classic means of participating in the political process were effectively closed to them. Perhaps classic ideas of civic morality attached too much importance to the role of politics in shaping the moral personality of a citizen class and the constitution of a civil society or even a tribe. Perhaps not enough attention had been paid to the civic importance of economic, social and intellectual activity. Perhaps it was time to reconsider traditional ideas of civic virtue in the light of the experience of men living in primitive and civilized societies and from what could be discovered about the principles of human nature. If that were done, it would be possible to develop a science of morals and politics and a true understanding of the nature of civic virtue in a modern age. In other words, one way of looking at the Scots inquiry into the Science of Man is to think of it as a critique of the classic language of civic morality undertaken by a group of men living in a sophisticated but provincial community which had been stripped of its political institutions at the time of the Act of Union in 1707 and still hankered after an understanding of the principles of virtue which would make sense of their present provincial condition. In the essay which follows I want to sketch out the origins and evolution of this enquiry. I want to show that the Scots' concern with the principles of virtue can be related to the traumatic effect of the Act of Union on the Scottish political community. In a long, sophisticated debate about the political and economic crisis in which the country was engulfed in the early years of the century, the Scots discovered that the language of contemporary politics was not well suited to making sense of their present predicament. In the three decades which followed the Union philosophers, politicians and men of letters set out to fashion an alternative language of civic morality. By the 1760s the process was complete, and a new language of civic morality had been created which provided the Scots with a new understanding of civic virtue and that 'sociological' understanding of the Science of Man which is the unique contribution of the Scots to the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun was the ideological father of the Scottish Enlightenment. 9 He was an intelligent, irascible and anglophobe country gentleman and one of the most learned of all British political writers at the end of the seventeenth century. He had spent much of his early life in exile studying the political systems of the ancient and modern world, acquiring a profound distrust of the growing power of the princes. His understanding of British politics was principally distilled into a short, elliptical and brilliant pamphlet on the militia question which was first published in 1698.10 Here Fletcher set out to contrast the system of liberty which he thought had been enshrined in a Gothic constitution and the state of political corruption which 22

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existed in the commercial civilization of his own age. He held that virtue had been possible in Gothic times because the distribution of military power between the king and his barons had established a balance of power favourable to liberty. Trade, learning and luxury had destroyed that Gothic constitution, replacing it with a system of commerce which had encouraged landowners to commute their civil and military responsibilities for a tax on their estates. This had been used to finance the huge bureaucracies and standing armies characteristic of the modern age, throwing power into the hands of the king and setting the liberties of the citizen at risk. Only a parliament of virtuously minded landowners could curb the power of the king by curtailing his revenue and establishing a system of local militias to counterbalance the power of the standing army. And Fletcher had an imprecise, inspirational vision of Britain as a free commercial polity, divided into four provinces of which Scotland would be one. Each would maintain its own militia and each in time would acquire its own peculiar political, social and cultural institutions. So many different seats of government will highly encourage virtue. For all the same offices that belong to a great kingdom, must be in each of them; with this difference, that the offices of such a kingdom being always burdened with more business than any one man can rightly execute, most things are abandoned to the rapacity of servants; and the extravagant profits of all great officers plunge them into all manner of luxury, and debauch them from doing good: whereas the offices of these lesser governments extending only over a moderate number of people, will be duly executed, and many men have occasions put into their hands of doing good to their fellow-citizens. So many different seats of government will highly tend to the improvement of all arts and sciences; and afford great variety of entertainment to all foreigners and others of a curious and inquisitive genius, as the ancient cities of Greece did.11 This was a model of a genuinely British polity whose provinces would be the guarantors of its liberties in a commercial age. Part of its attraction, Fletcher admitted, was that it provided Scotland with an honourable and important role to play in creating a free Britain. For once reformed and purged of political corruption, she would be the prototype of the sort of province on which the future of British liberty would depend. As far as Fletcher was concerned, reformation meant restoring Scottish 'independence'. He believed that Scotland had once had her own system of Gothic liberty, the power of her kings being held in check by a virtuous baronage. The Union of the Crowns in 1603 and the departure of the Scottish court to London had brought that Gothic age to an end. During the seventeenth century Scotland had fallen into a state of 'dependence' on the English court and her economy had been ruined as a result. This state of dependence lay at the heart of all Scotland's troubles; it was, Fletcher thought, 'the cause of all, comprehends them all, and is the band that ties up the bundle'. 12 The 23

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remedy lay with parliament, and Fletcher urged it not to recognize the Hanoverian succession until 'limitations' had been placed on the crown and the right of free trade with England and her colonies had been conceded by the English parliament. Only then would the bands be broken and national independence restored. 'Independence' rather than 'liberty' was the pivot on which Fletcher's analysis of Scottish politics rested; indeed he was clear that without independent provinces to hold in check the power of the crown there could be no free Britain. But what did independence mean? There is no doubt that Fletcher would have preferred to think of it in purely constitutional terms, and he took it for granted that an independent province without free political institutions was a contradiction in terms. But his understanding of contemporary Scottish politics made him realize that national power had to be seen in socio-economic as well as constitutional terms. Indeed, he thought that the preservation of national independence might have as much to do with strengthening the socio-economic foundations of the state as with imposing limitations upon the monarchy. He devoted two 'Discourses on the Affairs of Scotland' and a series of speeches to the Scots parliament to reviewing Scotland's present political discontents.13 He discussed the seven terrible years of famine which had decimated the population, the virtual collapse of Scotland's overseas trade, the bitter faction in church and state and the incessant, infuriating interference of the English court in Scottish affairs. It left him in no doubt about the importance of trade to stimulating economic growth and creating the conditions which made independence possible. Without it, Fletcher believed, the fabric of Scottish society would crumble. Men of all ranks, rich and poor alike, would emigrate and the country would fall into a worse state of dependence upon the English than anything they had experienced so far. There was an ambiguity of the greatest importance in Fletcher's thinking. His analysis of British politics had shown that political corruption was closely connected with the growth of trade, commerce and a division of labour which had given birth to a professional army and a professional bureaucratic class. But his analysis of Scottish politics had shown that in a modern state a free society without an expanding system of trade and commerce was a contradiction in terms. Fletcher hoped that this contradiction would be resolved by a free parliament which would somehow ensure that trade and commerce did not lead to new forms of corruption. But the English were alarmed by the political turmoil in Scotland and by the prospect of a disputed Hanoverian succession and would offer the Scots free trade only in exchange for dismantling the Scots parliament and direct government from London.14 And so from 1703 to 1707 the Scots were obliged to consider whether free trade or a free parliament was more important to preserving the independence of their country. The fact that they finally agreed to the 24

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English parliament's terms is evidence of the power of political management. But it is also evidence to the strength of an ideological conviction that it was possible to conceive of Scotland as an independent nation even without free political institutions. The irascible, anglophobic Fletcher took no part in this final debate about the Anglo-Scottish union; its paradoxes were clearly too much for him. But the influence of his analysis of Scottish politics is everywhere apparent. It was taken for granted by all who took part in it that independence rather than liberty lay at the heart of the debate. 15 But it is clear that few Scots believed that the story of Scotland's struggle to preserve her independence had ever had much to do with free political institutions. Indeed it was hard to believe that Scotland had ever had a free constitution. Nearly all writers thought, like the Earl of Cromartie, that Gothic Scotland had been a licentious not a free country whose history had been a sorry tale of 'the former horrid Wars, Raperies, Invasions, Incursions, Murders, Exiles, Imprisonment even of our Sovereigns of which our ancient Histories, while we were in a Separate State gave us so many sad examples'. 16 Indeed the only possible explanation of how Scottish independence had been preserved lay in the warlike manners of a licentious baronage which had fought hard to keep the English at bay. This was an explanation with which no one disagreed, and one of the questions which lay at the heart of the Union debate was how that warlike spirit could be recaptured in the modern age. That meant finding institutions which would release the patriotic zeal of the heirs of that old baronial class. No one, not even Fletcher, had much faith in parliament as it stood, and the pamphlets contain some startling projects for its reformation.17 What is even more startling is that those who supported the idea of a Union with England believed that Scotland's independence would actually be more secure without its parliament, provided it was included within the framework of a free British constitution. William Seton of Pitmedden put it like this. In general, I may assert, that by this Union we will have access to all the advantages in commerce the English enjoy; we will be capable, by a good government, to improve our national product, for the benefit of the whole island; and we will have our liberty, property and religion, secured under the protection of one Sovereign and one Parliament of Great Britain.18 Seton clearly believed that the patriotism and civic virtue of a citizen class could be released through non-political institutions, and he was not alone in thinking so. Many Scots recognized that the preservation of Scotland's future independence would have more to do with securing her social, economic and cultural fabric than with securing her constitution. In fact those who took part in the debate were very reluctant to use political terminology to describe their country, preferring more ambiguous terms like 'Nation', 'People', 25

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'Country' to describe a kingdom with an ancient history, an underdeveloped economy and an underdeveloped constitution. One or two writers even thought of Scotland as a market system which supported a peculiar social system and required peculiar institutions to maintain it.19 In fact, in responding to the pressure of political events, the Scots found that they were groping for an alternative to a political language which did not make sense of their own political predicament. They could see that in a commercial world states had developed a complex provincial structure which the existing language of politics did not seem to recognize. What they sought was a language responsive to the economic, social and historical experience of provincial communities and realized that the virtue of a provincial citizen class was more likely to be released by economic and cultural institutions than by a national parliament remote from the provincial citizen's world. And they warned that a polity that did not respect the independence of its provinces could not possibly be said to be free. The passing of the Act of Union and the abolition of the Scots parliament was to sharpen the problem of discovering alternative modes of participation to that which parliament had once provided. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's Tatler and Spectator essays were to provide the Scots with the clue they needed. Their essays, published in London between 1709 and 1712, were instantly republished in Edinburgh - interestingly, in view of their English associations, by a Jacobite publisher, James Watson.20 And they were to be repeatedly extracted and imitated throughout the century. It is testimony to the depth to which they penetrated Scottish culture that they provided a genre for men like David Hume and Lord Kames to exploit, that the last influential imitation of this style of moral journalism, Henry Mackenzie's Mirror and Lounger and the style which was to replace it, Francis Jeffrey's Edinburgh Review, were the work of Edinburgh writers. And it is surely no coincidence that contemporary writers who were anxious to trace the origins of Scotland's intellectual revival were accustomed to doing so by referring to the publication of those two seminal works.21 The importance of The Tatler and The Spectator as instruments for the reformation of manners has long been recognized.22 They provided an entertaining and popular account of the process of social interaction which was designed to help ordinary men and women lead happy and virtuous lives in a commercial world.23 Addison and Steele saw that it was all too easy for men and women to become mindless slaves of fashion, prejudice and habit and to lose their self-respect and independence of mind in the bustle of ordinary life. They knew it was pointless to tell their readers to fly from society and seek a life of stoic virtue in solitary retreat. That was advice only fit for heroes and eccentrics. It was better to seek a life of virtue within commercial society itself but away from the world of business, politics and 26

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fashion. The key lay in the salons, coffee-houses and taverns of modern cities. Here men and women met each other as friends and equals and were able to enjoy the sense of ease that good conversation could bring. Addison and Steele saw coffee-house conversation as a form of social interaction that taught men tolerance, moderation and the pleasures of consensus. It also taught them to look on their own behaviour with a critical detachment which was difficult to acquire in public life. It taught them to be adaptable, thoughtful and pragmatic in their attitude to social relations and to ideas and to lead decent, pleasant lives according to the principles of propriety. To put it another way, Addison and Steele set out to show men and women who had been raised in a classical tradition that the coffee-house could play as important a part in providing them with a sense of moral identity as the polis had done in the case of the citizens of ancient Greece and Rome. But the Scots believed that coffee-house conversation could teach them the principles of civic virtue as well as of propriety. Throughout the eighteenth century Scottish intellectual life, and that of Edinburgh in particular, was to be meshed into a complex and constantly changing network of clubs and societies devoted to the improvement of manners, economic efficiency, learning and letters.24 For it was believed that those who took part in such activities would help to secure their country's independence and acquire a sense of civic virtue. Some of these clubs were little more than glorified drinking clubs - it was not for nothing that the Edinburgh literati earned the nickname 'the eaterati'. 25 Others were highly formal, highly institutionalized organizations. Some drew their members from the ranks of the humble, others from the city's social and professional elite. Although we know far less of their activities than we would like, we know enough to be able to identify the Addisonian vocabulary which had penetrated their proceedings. Words like 'conversation', 'friendship', 'moderation', 'easiness', 'taste', 'politeness' and 'improvement' crop up continually in their records. So does a distinctive patriotic vocabulary. Thus the members of Allan Ramsay's Easy Club (i 712-15) linked discussion of a Tatler or a Spectator essay with the improvement of Scots literature in the hope that this would 'maintain in us love to our Native Country which we See day by day decaying and Animate to us projects for her interest'.26 The Rankenian Club (1716-74) devoted itself to the discussion of morals, metaphysics and aesthetics in the hope that 'liberal conversation and rational enquiry' would help to improve the manners of the nation by 'disseminating freedom of thought, boldness of disquisition, liberality of spirit, accuracy of reasoning, correctness of taste and attention to composition'.27 In other words, the Scots seemed to have believed that the adaptable, modest principles of Addisonian propriety, undertaken in a patriotic spirit could be developed into a system of civic morality which was appropriate to the needs of the provincial citizen preoccupied with preserving the independence of his community. Moreover it was an activity that 27

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could be undertaken in the knowledge that it was by these means that the liberties of modern Britain could be preserved. It was to be the principal intellectual achievement of the Scottish Enlightenment that its philosophers were able to show how this provincial language of civic morality could be used as an instrument for discussing the moral, political and economic organization of commercial civilization at large. But in charting its subsequent history it is worth noticing two developments, one negative, the other positive, which were to be of integral importance to its development. The first was the striking absence of any challenge from the church to the development of an essentially secular language of civic morality. The reasons for this are by no means clear, but the story clearly has much to do with the history of the kirk in the 1690s.28 For much of that decade its political life was dominated by an elderly, zealous, antinomianminded clergy, many of whose members had spent the years between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution in exile or in hiding. Under their leadership, the kirk was to become a divisive force in national politics, obsessed with strict Presbyterian orthodoxy, vigorously intrusive into the affairs of schools and universities, prepared even to engineer the execution of a young man, Thomas Aitkenhead, for blasphemy in 1696. This was the culmination of a vigorous campaign against the supposed laxity of the government in enforcing laws against heterodoxy. By 1707 this elderly elite seems to have had its day. Riven by internal dissent, under pressure from younger, more moderate ministers, the kirk was to be bitterly divided over matters of doctrine and church government for a generation. Its weaknesses thus exposed were quickly exploited by government. Legislation was passed in 1712 to reintroduce lay patronage and curb the worst excesses of antinomianism. By the 1720s the affairs of the General Assembly of the Kirk had been brought firmly under the control of government managers. At the same time clerical education was to be deeply influenced by reforms within the universities whose sails, as we shall see, had been trimmed to meet the ideological needs of a secularly minded gentry elite. The precise importance of the reformation of the Scottish universities Edinburgh and Glasgow in particular - for the development of a peculiarly Scottish language of civic morality is hard to assess at present. In the 1690s the two universities had been little more than seminaries, designed to prepare young men of relatively humble backgrounds for the kirk and to give the sons of the gentry a smattering of classics and philosophy. In the first three decades of the century, however, both universities had become increasingly responsive to the educational needs of a crdc-minded gentry and professional class.29 In the case of Edinburgh this had involved a lengthy process of reorganization designed to turn the college into an institution which could provide young men of rank and property with the sort of education that they had once been able to acquire at Leiden and Utrecht.30 In the case of 28

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Glasgow it involved providing a secularly orientated education for young men destined for the kirk.31 By the 1730s Edinburgh's reformation was complete. A prospectus for 1741 demonstrated the importance the professors attached to the teaching of natural theology, natural law, medicine, civil history and rhetoric and belles lettres, and it also demonstrates the importance they attached to Locke, Newton, Grotius, Pufendorf and Boerhaave.32 What it conceals, however, is the evident importance attached to the philosophy of Cicero and Shaftesbury, Addison's intellectual ancestors, and to the philosophy of Berkeley whose metaphysics were discussed by the Rankenian Club and seriously taught in John Stevenson's Logic class.33 It is possible to see exactly the same influences at work in Glasgow, although here they were brought into focus by the teaching of two professors of the greatest importance, Gershom Carmichael and his pupil Francis Hutcheson. Carmichael, who taught philosophy as regent and professor from 1694 to 1729, introduced his students to the study of moral philosophy by lecturing on Grotius and Pufendorf.34 Hutcheson, who was professor of moral philosophy from 1729 until his death in 1746, used the philosophy of his teacher, the psychology of Locke and the ethics of Cicero and Shaftesbury to develop an approach to the study of the origins of ideas of morality and virtue resting on genuinely empirical foundations.35 Hutcheson had attended classes at Glasgow in the 1710s and had spent the next years in Dublin. There he had encountered the literary and political world of Irish civic humanism and had contributed essays to the Dublin Journal, that attempt by Dublin's literati to study the philosophical implications of Addison's moral teaching. It was here and later at Glasgow that he set about the difficult task of developing a model which would enable him to distinguish between those moral ideas which were the product of sentiment and social experience and those which rested upon some principle which lay beyond experience. In so doing, he hoped that he would be able to develop a neo-Ciceronian science of morals that would help to underpin Christian belief and improve the civic capacity of his students, feeding them with a 'spirit of enquiry' and a love of 'conversation' which would assist in the 'culture of the heart' which was 'the main need of all moral instruction' and the key to understanding the principles of religion and virtue.36 This was the intellectual and ideological world into which David Hume, the pivotal figure in the history of the Scottish Enlightenment, was born.37 No one was more concerned with the moral wellbeing of his contemporaries; no one was more sensitive to the language of contemporary morals and politics. No one did more to develop a language of civic morality that would help his contemporaries to understand themselves and the principles on which modern society was organized and, by so doing, help them to lead happier, more virtuous lives. Like Hutcheson, a philosopher he greatly admired, Hume was anxious to create a science of morals and he set out to 29

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do this in his first and greatest book, The Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40). It is a long, complicated and difficult work, which Hume seems to have planned when he was about 17 and finished when he was 29. He believed that Hutcheson had not carried his discussion of the origins of moral ideas far enough. He was able to show, most disconcertingly, as far as Christians were concerned, that reason did not and could not possibly play a part in furnishing any of the ideas upon which our understanding of morality, justice, politics and religion were founded and upon which our sense of moral autonomy depends. Those ideas were beliefs, acquired in the course of ordinary life which were to be thought of as more or less plausible interpretations of ordinary experience. In other words, it was imagination, custom and habit and not reason which furnished us with those beliefs which made experience intelligible and a happy, decent and virtuous life possible. Hume held that happiness was the end to which all human life was directed, and as society provided men with those ideas which made life intelligible and happiness possible, men could only find happiness in society. For Hume, as for Addison, the happy man was adaptable, gregarious, thoughtful and active, responsive to the opinions of his friends and to the works of the learned. But what interested him, more than the process by which men internalize the values of the world around them, was the meaning of virtue. Every man aspired to a life of virtue and believed that happiness and virtuous living were integrally connected. For Hume, virtue consisted in teaching ourselves to be critical of our beliefs, learning how to review them in the light of the experience which had brought them to life. Cultivating sceptical habits of this sort would help to release men from the bondage of myth and prejudice which corrupted the mind and generated enthusiasms which could stand in the way of human happiness. But Hume thought that all virtue was a species of civic virtue. The only reason men consented to government was because they believed that it was necessary for the preservation of their happiness. That, he thought, had everything to do with the preservation of political stability upon which an orderly life depended and it had little or nothing to do with the struggle to preserve abstract ideas of liberty as so many of his English contemporaries believed. Indeed Hume devoted much of his time in his remarkable History of England to demonstrating that a concern with such abstractions had been largely responsible for the political commotions of the seventeenth century. But the preservation of political stability had much to do with recognizing the nature of that social experience which had furnished ordinary men and women with the ideas and beliefs which made life intelligible to them. In his political essays Hume went to some trouble to present commercial society in pluralistic terms, as a society with a complex division of labour, composed of a multitude of ranks and orders of men living in different regions of the kingdom which possessed their own ideas of morality, justice and religion. No commercial society could be 30

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stable, Hume thought, whose government did not recognize and respect the variety of its social and regional structure. No citizen could possibly think of himself as virtuous unless he acknowledged that his own happiness and that of society at large were interconnected, unless he realized the importance of preserving political stability and respecting the regional integrity of the different communities of the kingdom. There was, Hume thought, no more important variable in the equation of modern politics than its provincial structure. In his essay 'Of a Perfect Commonwealth' he sketched out a startlingly Fletcherian model of a modern polity which stressed the importance of preserving the integrity of local communities and of maintaining a carefully balanced relationship between central and local government if political stability and happiness were to be preserved. Moreover, Hume seems to have thought that it was in these provincial communities that the virtuous citizen was most likely to be found. For he directed his moral and political writing at the serious-minded men of middling rank who were rich enough to be independent of the great, but not too rich to be able to tyrannize the poor. These, he believed, were the men upon whom the political, economic and cultural fortunes of modern Britain depended. It was in the coffee-houses and taverns of modern provincial cities that such men could enjoy the serious conversation that Hume and his friends enjoyed in contemporary Edinburgh. They could see that independence of mind, provincial independence and happiness were synonymous and that, taken together, they represented the end to which the modern citizen should direct his endeavours. There was much in Hume's political and moral writing for intelligent and virtuously minded Scots to savour and it is this, I think, that accounts for his remarkable position in Edinburgh society. He was generally recognized to be an arbiter of public taste, an important patron of polite learning and remarkably enough, a mentor of the younger moderate clergy.38 And if his notorious religious scepticism threatened to distance him from some of his contemporaries, his good nature and an agreement to differ on matters of religion which it was occasionally necessary to spell out in detail, were generally enough to make his social position unassailable.39 It is in the history of the Select Society, however, that the true extent of Hume's influence on Scottish culture can best be seen. During the 1720s the Scots' preoccupation with alternative modes of political participation had taken a new turn. The Honourable the Society for Improvement in the Knowledge of Agriculture had been founded in 1723, and its large and aristocratic membership had been mostly recruited from the ranks of the nobility and gentry of central Scotland. As such it was one of the earliest agricultural improvement societies in the West and the model for many that followed it.40 But soon its members' interests began to broaden. They began to devise plans for improving the economy as a whole and even prepared

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legislation which was passed through parliament for doing so. What is interesting about these activities is that many of the projects they undertook had already been tried out by the old Scots parliament before the Union. In other words, the Honourable Society had begun to acquire what may be called para-parliamentary functions. It seemed as though an aristocratic governing class was beginning to see that participation in projects for economic improvement was an acceptable alternative to political participation for Scotsmen who were anxious to identify themselves as virtuous citizens and custodians of the independence of their country in the changed conditions of a post-Union world. The Honourable Society was defunct by 1745, killed off, no doubt by the agricultural depression of 1740-2 and by the Jacobite rebellion. By the 1750s, however, a new generation of young men of rank and property had begun to look for an institution which would release their own capacities for virtue. What they found was the Select Society.41 The Select Society was a small literary society, founded by a small group of literati which included moderate ministers like William Robertson and Hugh Blair, rising advocates like the future Lord Chancellor Loughborough and the future Lord Monboddo, university professors like Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, and men of letters like David Hume and Allan Ramsay. Within a few months of its foundation, the society had been transformed as young men of rank and property, ambitious clergymen and lawyers clamoured for membership. As it grew in size it began to change in function. By 1755, in addition to holding regular debates, the society had begun to sponsor an elaborate and expensive series of projects for improving the economy and culture of Scotland. In spite of all these changes, however, the original group of literati continued to control every area of its activities and ensured that the society's primary function would be to debate the questions they had chosen for it.42 In other words, the literati found themselves directing an aristocratic and politically minded society whose para-parliamentary functions had grown out of its members' primary interest in literary debate. The pursuit of literature had been established as an acceptable alternative to political participation for those seeking a life of civic virtue. In the process the literati had become identified with the civic leadership of post-Union Scotland. Edinburgh had become a Modern Athens in a strict sense. It was a true republic of letters in which men sought public reputation by becoming excellent in the arts and sciences. The society's debating programme is fascinating.43 While few of the 159 questions that were chosen for debate were unusual in themselves, their wording indicates that they had been chosen by men who were responsive to a peculiarly Scottish language of civic morality and to the writing of Hume. The questions dealt with interpersonal relations, with the political, economic and cultural organization of civil society and with the role of virtuous citizens 32

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in managing the public affairs of a country rapidly progressing from rudeness to refinement. Many of the questions were those on which Hume had written and on which Adam Smith was lecturing at Glasgow. Only about one-fifth dealt with purely theoretical questions (e.g. 'Is there such a thing as Taste?'). The rest dealt with the role of law, political institutions, economic management and culture in preserving the fabric of society. The language in which they were couched shows that the committee that drafted them had the same reluctance to employ a narrowly political vocabulary as the men who had debated the Union. Thus terms like 'Nation', 'Country', 'People' were used rather than 'Monarchy', 'Aristocracy', 'Republic', 'Commonwealth' or even 'Civil Society'. In the same way, instead of invoking the idea of liberty as the standard by which public achievements should be measured, the Question Committee preferred to speak of 'Utility', 'Public Advantage' and above all 'Happiness'. Their language, in other words, was the language of Scottish politics, fortified by that of Hume. And it was designed to show that the citizens of a modern provincial community could acquire virtue by learning to be adaptable in their reactions to the government of their country as well as in their own private conduct. But it was a language that had its own inherent doubts and uncertainties. This becomes clear from the debates about the reform of the law of entail and the militia question — the only two debates it is possible to reconstruct. The first encouraged some to ask whether the rise of commerce in Scotland had not threatened to undermine the independence of the nation it was supposed to preserve.44 For the rise of commerce threatened the position of those ancient landed families on whose shoulders the task of preserving the nation's independence had always rested. As Sir John Dalrymple put it, 'A Nation without families will either become unfeeling to its liberties or abuse them'. 45 The militia debate raised the same question in a different way.46 By 1760 parliament had finally agreed to allow the English counties to raise a militia to cope with the threat of a French invasion. It was confidently expected that the Scottish counties would shortly be allowed to do so too. But they were not. For the English parliament and the English ministers quite unreasonably feared that to arm the Scottish counties would encourage a Jacobite revival. The situation greatly excited the Select Society which debated the matter more than any single question between 1756 and 1762. Leading members of the society led a campaign to force parliament to allow Scotland a militia, and two of its members, Adam Ferguson and Alexander Carlyle, wrote influential pamphlets on the matter.47 It was generally held that the unequal treatment of Scotland by parliament threatened to compromise Scotland's independence. Unless it was repelled it would demonstrate that Scotland had sunk in a state of civic corruption. The problem was that while the Union had encouraged the rise of commerce and released Scotsmen's capacity for virtue, they had not yet found effective means of 33

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translating the warlike spirit of their ancestors into modern forms. Unless the Scots proved that 'the ancient Scottish spirit' was not yet exhausted in a commercial age and learned that patriotism and the love of empire was a higher and more noble sentiment than the mere love of happiness and adaptability, the Scots would soon earn the contempt of the English and fall into a state of moral dependence upon them.48 And if that happened, Carlyle exclaimed, 'It had been good for Scotland that there had been no Union.' 49 The Select Society's militia men were wedded to the idea that the rise of commerce and the growth of happiness had been good for Scotland, but they were troubled by the thought that there might be no higher virtue than mere adaptability. What they sought was a more lofty view of virtue that was rooted in a desire to preserve Scottish independence but would not obstruct the progress of commerce. What they found was Ossian.50 Ossian's was the preposterous face of the Scottish Enlightenment. His discovery was a testimony to the gullibility of the Select Society's militia men and to the strength of their desire to develop a new conception of virtue. Ossian was the creation of a young, unscrupulous man, James MacPherson, who was sent to the highlanders by Alexander Carlyle, Adam Ferguson and their friends to discover the epic by a Celtic Homer that they were sure must exist. No such epic existed, but MacPherson was perfectly content to construct one out of the fragments of Celtic verse he had been able to find. His patrons provided him with money, a publisher and editorial assistance, and Hugh Blair wrote a brilliant, subtle and influential essay on Ossian which was to present the fictitious bard in the guise in which he was to appear to his readers on the Continent and in the Anglo-Saxon world for the next century.51 This introduction, first published in 1763, presented Ossian as a bard, chieftain and hero, the last survivor of a doomed civilization that would shortly fall to the Roman sword. For Blair, Ossian's heroic virtue consisted in his stoic resignation in the face of the inexorable forces of historical change and in his desire to release his virtue by celebrating the triumphs of its heroes in tearful, sentimental songs. Blair and Ossian showed how modern provincials, whose fortunes lay on the side of progress, could alleviate any guilt they might feel at making a virtue out of adaptability by celebrating the past with nostalgia and sentiment and in song.52 The history of the Select Society is evidence that post-Union Scotland possessed a political elite which was anxious to present itself as the watchdogs of their country's independence. It is evidence too of the remarkably high political regard which that elite attached to the pursuit of polite philosophy and letters. But it is also evidence that the Scots' understanding of civic morality was embedded in a language which had been designed to make sense of the political experience of their own country and that of commercial civilization at large. The roots of this language lay in the debate about the Union, and its founding fathers were Fletcher, Addison and David Hume. In 34

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this language, virtue was defined as the pursuit of happiness, happiness was defined in terms of maintaining political stability, generating economic growth and preserving the cultural integrity of an independent province of Britain. Improvement undertaken by para-parliamentary societies devoted to economic engineering and cultural improvement was seen as the instrument by which virtue might be released. For without such instruments a community would lose its sense of moral independence, leaving its citizens no alternative but to respond to its fallen fortunes with sentimental acts of Ossianic resignation. The problem of the relationship between propriety and virtue was the central problem embedded in this language of civic morality, and it was one which greatly exercised the Scottish philosophers. Addison and Hume had shown how easy it was for men of reasonable substance to internalize ideas of morality, justice and political obligation in the course of ordinary life and to acquire ideas of moral autonomy and happiness in the process. Did this mean that there was nothing more to virtue than learning how to adapt oneself to change? Did it mean that virtue was no more than a species of propriety, a system of values which were somehow conditioned by experience of ordinary life? Such ideas allowed sentimental novelists like Tobias Smollett and Henry Mackenzie to present portraits of commercial society composed of men and women of different ranks, orders, professions and regions who were animated by different ideas of propriety, and they had raised the question whether a country with so diverse a culture could possibly find a true standard of virtue.53 William Robertson, John Millar and jurists like Lord Kames and Sir John Dalrymple, reflecting on the process by which men living in different types of civilization internalized different ideas of justice, speculated on the role of property and different modes of production in shaping laws and legal institutions.54 In the process they helped to lay the foundations of a new materialist approach to the study of history which stressed the primacy of economic and cultural variables in shaping men's ideas and generating social change. This understanding of history and society was perfected by Adam Smith, and it is in his work that the rich potentialities of the Scottish language of civic morality is most clearly visible.55 He was appointed to the chair of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow in 1752 and devoted the next eleven years to a series of lectures on morals and jurisprudence. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), the published monument to his moral philosophy lectures, Smith examined the process by which men's moral sentiments and their ideas of propriety and virtue were shaped in the ordinary process of social interaction.56 Smith was an unashamed advocate of the commercial civilization of his own day. Here, he believed, men had been freed from the corrupting values of dependency which were characteristic of feudal civilization. As he observed, 'Nothing tends so much to corrupt and enervate and 35

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debase the mind as dependency and nothing gives such noble and generous notions of probity as freedom and independency.' 57 In commercial society men could confront each other as consumers and producers and could acquire a sense of fair play and propriety by 'higgling and bargaining' in the market places of the towns and cities of a modern polity.58 In Smith's theory, the polls and the coffee-house had become a market place, the citizen had been redefined as homo economicus, winning his sense of moral autonomy by participating in the regionally based economic life of the commercial world. Commerce, independence and happiness had become the watchwords of the citizen in the civic world of the Scottish Enlightenment. But how was commercial civilization to be preserved? In the Wealth of Nations (1776) Smith showed that the laws which governed the economic relationships upon which the happiness of society depended bred their own forms of corruption. 'The wretched spirit of monopoly' was everywhere at work among the merchants and manufacturers of the modern world, encouraging a movement towards mass-production which threatened a regionally based system of production and the integrity of that regional market system upon which the happiness of ordinary men depended.59 Such a tendency would encourage the creation of a brutish proletariat, incapable even of forming ideas of propriety. It would create suspicion and anxiety within local communities. It would lead to a system of government wedded to ideas of interference in economic management, war, empire and the high taxation which would be necessary to finance a colossal public debt. It would lead to a slowing of the rate of economic growth and to an undermining of the happiness of ordinary people. In Smith's theory virtuous statesmanship was needed to preserve the fabric of the commercial society he so greatly admired. But his discussion of morals had shown, in the most disconcerting way, that in the last resort virtue was only a form of propriety, moulded subtly and insensibly by social experience. Did that not mean that in time even virtuously minded men might learn to approve of monopoly capitalism and fail to see the dangers it posed to ordinary human happiness? To be sure, Smith believed that philosophers and men of middling rank were better placed than most to understand the true interests of society. But by the end of his life, depressed by illness and the loss of his family and friends, he could not be so sure. And rather like Blair's Ossian, he began to wonder whether philosophers were not condemned to understand the decline of a noble form of civilization which they were powerless to prevent.60 Some thought that Hume and Smith had misunderstood the constitution of the mind and the principles of morality and virtue. Adam Ferguson, a militia man and professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh from 1764 to 1785, was deeply troubled by the notion that virtue was simply a species of propriety and feared that if Smith was right, classic ideas of citizenship were dead. 61 He saw in human nature a Heraclitean tension between a love of 36

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propriety and a love of conflict. The first promised ease and comfort; the second, which was rooted in men's natural restlessness and love of perfection, promised excitement and a heightened sense of friendship. For Ferguson gaming and political intrigue were to modern men what competitive and dangerous games were to children and what the love of fighting for its own sake was to the savage. This restlessness, this 'greatness of mind', this 'propensity to excel', lay at the heart of men's capacity for virtue. 62 It was common to all men in all civilizations and from it stemmed that love of community, patriotism, adventure and innovation upon which true human happiness and the survival of human society depended. Like Smith, Ferguson looked with gloomy foreboding on the increased specialization that commercial society had brought with it, threatening to dampen men's restless spirit, lessening the opportunity for achieving excellence and exposing society to new forms of corruption. Ferguson was a popular and influential moralist in the universities of America and on the Continent. But his popular success was greatly overshadowed by that of his successor in the Edinburgh Moral Philosophy chair, Dugald Stewart. Stewart was one of the most influential moralists in the Western world at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. 63 He was not an original thinker. His self-appointed task was to develop and propagate the philosophy of his teacher, Thomas Reid, who taught moral philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen from 1751 to 1764 and then moved to Glasgow to fill Adam Smith's chair, much to the latter's annoyance. At Aberdeen Reid had gathered round him a group of philosophers who were alarmed by the sceptical tendency of Edinburgh philosophy and by that of Hume in particular. 64 In the eyes of one of them, James Beattie, this philosophy was The bane of true learning, true taste and true sense; [it is] to it we owe all this modern scepticism and atheism; [it] has a bad effect upon the human faculties and tends not a little to sour the temper, to subvert good principles, and to disqualify men for the business of life.65 Reid's own philosophy was founded on a critique of the metaphysical foundations of Hume's philosophy and upon which the Edinburgh writers and Smith's discussion of morality was based. 66 In his complex and highly technical Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764) he had set out to show, rather as Hutcheson had done, that there were various orders of belief- about the self, the existence of the external world and God - which were shared by all men and embodied in all languages. Such ideas could not possibly be explained satisfactorily in Humean terms as products of experience. No doubt social experience played an important part in shaping our manners, but these were to be clearly distinguished from those intuitively based, fundamental beliefs of common sense which were impervious to time and experience. It was on 37

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such ideas that the principles of morality, science and religion were founded, and it was by learning how to distinguish between these ideas and those rooted in social experience and prejudice that men could learn the meaning of virtue and religion and discover the moral disciplines which were necessary to cultivate them. Stewart added little to Reid's discussion of the mind. His concern was to show that it provided a vital clue to a proper study of philosophy, science and politics. This could provide modern citizens with an understanding of civic morality that would fit them to play a useful role in public life and provide an alternative to the dangerously sceptical understanding of virtue built into the philosophy of Hume and Smith. At the same time, he was to become the philosopher of a new theory of citizenship which substituted the ideal of the virtuous expert for that of the virtuous citizen, and saw the attainment of wisdom as an alternative to participation in public affairs as the key to preserving the happiness of mankind. In this, Stewart, like so many Scots before him, was philosophizing about his countrymen's present political concerns. For Stewart was an active, clubbable member of Edinburgh's literary society and he was in a position to see that the Select Society, for all its para-parliamentary glamour, had not succeeded in providing his contemporaries with a credible means of releasing their sense of virtue. By the late 1750s the society was in trouble. Subscriptions were unpaid, attendance at debates was thin and members who were growing older and steadily advancing in their careers had less time for paraparliamentary pastimes. By 1764 the society was dead and its place was being taken by a new set of debating societies like the Belles Lettres Society, the Pantheon Society and the Speculative Society which were composed of young men destined for careers in the professions and political life.67 They debated the same sort of subjects as the Select Society but steered clear of para-parliamentary involvements. It was as though these young men were anxious to internalize the language of civic morality the Select Society had institutionalized so that they could use it to inform their understanding of how they should pursue their careers in the established professional life of the country. They had abandoned the classical republican ideal of participation in parliament or para-parlimentary institutions as a means of releasing their virtue. Rather, they had begun to think of the virtuous citizen as the expert whose skills could be put to public use in an effort to help it towards improvement and happiness. It was in this Ciceronian spirit that moderate clergymen like William Robertson, Alexander Carlyle and Adam Ferguson had set out to redirect the affairs of the kirk and the universities into the paths of improvement and it was an exercise they conducted with conspicuous skill and success.68 In the same way Kames and Dalrymple had set out to found a science of jurisprudence which could be used by virtuously minded legislators and judges to further the course of improvement.69 Most 38

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important of all, public boards of improvement like the Board of Trustees for Trade, Manufactures and Fisheries, the Commission for the Forfeited Estates and the Highland Society, which were filled with Select Society members, evidently served as more effective agencies for generating improvement and releasing ideas of virtue than para-parliamentary institutions founded on antique classical republican principles. Stewart's moral teaching marks the end of the classical republican phase in Scottish intellectual history and the final recognition that the Scottish philosophers had indeed reduced the principles of virtue to ideas of propriety which ordinary men and women could acquire in the course of ordinary life. Stewart took it for granted that the rise of commerce and the progress of society had led to the diffusion of wealth and 'a more equal diffusion of freedom and of happiness' than had ever existed before, and he had none of Smith's reservations about the moral consequences of the technological innovation which he associated with the rise of monopoly capitalism. 70 For Stewart, technological innovation would simply mean that men were released from the bondage of mechanical labour and would be free to cultivate the mind. His only interest was in showing how a class of public servants could be created with enough virtue and wisdom to preserve commercial society. What he feared was the moral corruption that ideas of virtue rooted in propriety had let loose. Such ideas were the product of 'the sceptical tendency of the modern age' encouraging doubt, anxiety and loss of confidence and were 'equally fatal to the comfort of the individual and to the improvement of society'. 71 Stewart thought that the answer lay in the 'culture of the mind' and in creating an elite versed in the true principles of human understanding. To be sure, this sort of wisdom could only be learned from an understanding of metaphysics and was therefore not accessible to the vulgar or the ignorant. But it would furnish those with intelligence, ambition and a love of virtue with the intellectual and moral equipment to make them wise men who could help to mould the laws of their country and preserve the happiness of society. For, as Stewart observed, Happiness is, in truth, the only object of legislation which is of intrinsic value; and what is called Political Liberty, is only one of the means of obtaining this end. With the advantage of good laws, a people, although not possessed of political power, may yet enjoy a great degree of happiness; and on the contrary, where laws are unjust and inexpedient, the political power of the people, so far from furnishing any compensation for their misery, is likely to oppose an insurmountable obstacle to improvement, by employing the despotism of numbers in support of principles of which the multitude are incompetent to judge.72 Stewart was the philosopher of a new influential and singularly unsubtle idea of citizenship. He was the apostle of the expert, confident and instructed, willing to assist in the ordinary process of government, concerned above all 39

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with increasing its managerial efficiency in the interests of preserving public order in an increasingly turbulent age. It was a conception of virtue that had risen from the ashes of a classical ideal now fatally tainted with ideas of propriety and it was one that showed absolutely no concern with the provincial structure of modern Britain. For in an age of monopoly capitalism and international war Britain was best regarded as a polity whose internal political and economic structure could be well regarded as single and simple. And for those who uneasily feared for the independence of local communities there was the nostalgic balm of Ossianic stoicism and, rather later, of Sir Walter Scott's historical novels, to ease the wound. If Stewart's philosophy marks the retreat of Scotland's intellectuals from the neo-classic ideas of civic morality that had been their distinctive contribution to Scottish civic culture, it also marks their retreat from that remarkable inquiry into the moral, economic and intellectual principles which shape the human personality and society at large which had so deeply concerned men like Hutcheson, Hume, Smith and Ferguson. Above all, it marks their retreat from that desire to investigate the principles of propriety which had been the cornerstone of their investigation of the Science of Man and the principles of civic morality which a commercial age required. We live in a sociologically minded world and we rightly value the intellectual force of men who succeeded in laying the groundwork of a science which is integral to our understanding of ourselves. I have only given glimpses of the intellectual glories of their work. Instead, I have emphasized the evolution of that discussion of civic morality which derived, so it seems to me, from the peculiar history of their country in the century after the Union and served as a language-system which gave Scotland's intellectuals access to some of the central problems that were to preoccupy them as authors of a new Science of Man. It was because the Scots grappled with these problems that they earned the respect of their contemporaries at home and abroad. For while it was their understanding of the principles of human nature, social organization and historical change which has commended itself to posterity, it was their concern with the principles of propriety, virtue and citizenship that made Scotland a Modern Athens in the eyes of an enlightened world.

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3 The Enlightenment in France NORMAN HAMPSON

Since the Enlightenment is usually regarded as something that happened rather more in France than anywhere else, this is perhaps the best place to ask what it was, even if the question can only be answered in the vaguest of terms. It was not some kind of a torch, kindled by Bacon, blown into flame by Newton and Locke and thence passed to the outstretched hands of the French philosophes. If it had anything to do with light, it was more like the green band in the rainbow, which began mostly as blue and ended up unmistakably yellow. Some such way of looking at things at least serves as a reminder that the movement was in a state of continual change, but it remains such a crude oversimplification that it may be more of a hindrance than a help, for the Enlightenment was less a body of doctrine than a number of shared premises from which men of different temperaments, placed in different situations, drew quite radically different conclusions. The Enlightenment implied a simultaneous commitment to three assumptions, which had not been generally believed or taken for granted before the latter part of the seventeenth century, and which were to appear increasingly implausible in the nineteenth. The first of these was that Nature was a selfregulating system of laws. In former days it had been regarded rather as an assortment of phenomena, related to each other mainly by the fact that they all served Man as signposts or sources of more or less moral admonition: 'Go to the ant, thou sluggard . . . ' 'When poor men die there are no comets seen/ The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.' For the men of the eighteenth century comets were still demonstrations - but only of the operation of the law of gravity. Later times were to maintain the belief in 'Nature's laws' but were more inclined to equate them with 'the law of the jungle'. The view that Nature represented conflict rather than harmony had already been expressed in the eighteenth century by Hume, Helvetius and Goethe.1 It must have been obvious, from time immemorial, that one could look at the question either way and it was all a matter of emphasis. Newtonian physicists tended to stress order, whereas the evolutionary biology of the nineteenth century was more concerned with that 'struggle for existence' which Spencer was to describe as producing 'the survival of the

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fittest'. Our own age is once again more inclined to think of living with nature than with conquering it. The second assumption of the Enlightenment was that, whether or not he was distinguished from the rest of creation by the possession of an immortal soul, Man could study himself only as a part of Nature. In this respect as in many others, the men of the Enlightenment shared a common language, even if they spoke with different accents. Voltaire and d'Holbach might be poles apart in their attitudes to religion but they held similar views about the futility of metaphysics and the limitation of human knowledge to what could be inferred from the judgement of the senses. What distinguished them from their predecessors was again largely a question of emphasis. Few went so far as to embrace a whole-hearted materialism but even fewer made the affairs of the soul their prime concern. It had not been so in earlier days, when Nature had appeared to provide the properties for a theatre where Man alone was the tragic actor. For a privileged moment, perhaps best glimpsed nowadays in England, in places like Stourhead, Man and Nature seemed to coexist in elegant symbiosis. The mood was short-lived and by the end of the eighteenth century things were already beginning to fall apart, as the forerunners of Romanticism sighed for an impossible reintegration into an innocent Eden from which Man's knowledge and self-consciousness had for ever alienated him. In France, Rousseau held out the theoretical possibility, if not the very confident hope, that men might recover some of the lost ground, but even for him this meant rowing against the stream, a violent effort to make men what they ought to be rather than the improvement of things as they were by the painless operation of enlightened self-interest. The last of the Enlightenment's postulates was that Man and Nature were the creation of a beneficent providence. In one form or another most of the philosophes believed in an 'invisible hand' which had so fashioned things that benevolence came naturally and what was of most service to Man was most pleasing in the eyes of God. As Montesquieu put it, 'The prime objective of the religious man must surely be to please the Divinity who established the religion he believes. The surest means to this end is without doubt to observe the rules of society and the duties of humanity.' 2 What seemed so obvious to men like Montesquieu and Franklin would have appeared arrant blasphemy to their grandfathers, who saw their terrestrial pilgrimage through the Vale of Tears as a renunciation of the joys of one world in favour of those of the next, a painful probation and a stern choice. When Nature ceased to be equated with harmony and Man broke away from his moorings within the natural order, belief in this kind of providence gave way to a more Napoleonic conception of progress as a succession of victorious battles. Whether one thought in terms of the dialectical triumphs of the Zeitgeist or the class war of Marx, conflict was not merely inevitable, but synonymous with life and change.3 42

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Any such catalogue of Enlightenment attitudes can only serve, at best, as a means of orientation. Starting from this broad consensus of principle, men could draw conclusions as different as those of Voltaire and Rousseau, conclusions which varied not merely with individual temperament but with national experience. The shape of society in a particular country determined what was possible and what seemed most immediately relevant. It was, of course, the hope of the philosophes that the opposite would prove to be the case: that society would increasingly conform to what they said it ought to be.4 This merely restated the problem in a new form: the extent to which it was thought necessary to alter the status quo varied from one country to another and influenced the character of the Enlightenment in each. The French philosophes had much in common with Enlightenment writers everywhere, but the situation in which they found themselves gave a particular colour to their message and in the process altered the nature of the message itself. With the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and the ending of a generation of wars, French society became more open to change and to new ideas from across the Channel. The Regent's fleeting attempt to loosen the grip of bureaucratic absolutism was accompanied by a relaxation of censorship. This was the context for Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721), which can be considered the first great critical work of the French Enlightenment. In the event, the Regency proved to be a false dawn and government soon became more conservative and repressive. This failed to stifle the new intellectual movements that had sprung up during the years of relative freedom, and for a long time France was characterized by political orthodoxy at loggerheads with intellectual dissent. Towards the end of the century France alone experienced a major social revolution. 5 This was not a direct product of the thought of the Enlightenment but it transformed the social context within which the ideas of the Enlightenment operated. In marked contrast to the period before 1789, a significant number of those who enjoyed political power made a deliberate effort to force French society into conformity with their ideas of what it ought to be. 6 If there is any validity in this way of looking at the assumptions behind the French Enlightenment, it follows that we are dealing with a widely disseminated attitude of mind rather than with a specifically literary or philosophical movement. Such attitudes were responsive to social and political, as well as to cultural and intellectual change. After the enforced grandeur and oppressive orthodoxy of Louis XIV French society wanted to be entertained and was ready to welcome the new, the exotic and the scandalous. This was an aristocratic society whose court culture served as a model for continental Europe. The salon, which was a very different institution from the coffee house, imposed its own kind of standards. In the early part of the century at least, women played a much more active part in the cultural 43

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life of French society than was customary in the rest of Europe. Outside the salons such political life as there was consisted of acquiring influence at court - as often as not through the wives and mistresses of those in office - rather than in cultivating 'interests' in the shires. Even if the gulf between nobles and commoners has been exaggerated, that between polite society and commerce was immense. All this meant that the cultural atmosphere in Versailles and Paris was more removed from the practical business of earning a living and creating wealth than was the case in England. This was also true of the provinces. France was a rich and cultivated country and, whatever the Parisians might think, provincial culture was probably more developed than elsewhere in Europe. It was not until the second half of the century that England's literary and philosophical societies could rival the French provincial academies. These academies, like the salons, were socially exclusive in the sense that their membership was confined to nobles, clergy and the more distinguished representatives of the professional classes. Even in prosperous Bordeaux the merchants took no part. 'The society of orders and ranks offered them no share in its intellectual labours. To some extent the world of the traditional notables remained isolated from the economically dynamic classes throughout the whole century.' 7 Traditional society could be dynamic enough in its development of the economy, as Chaussinand-Nogaret has shown in his Noblesse au dixhuitieme siecle, but it remains true that French cultural life was relatively divorced from the practice of commerce and from what the English understood by politics. All this influenced the form and content of the French Enlightenment, especially in its formative years. It retained throughout its course a penchant for mild sexual titillation that probably appealed more to the marquise than to the merchant.8 Montesquieu had very respectable reasons for introducing the harem theme into his Lettres persanes, but it did offer scope for the gratification of tastes that were not wholly philosophical. It was presumably not merely philosophie that prompted Diderot to write Les Bijoux indiscrets and La Religieuse. Even Rousseau, the self-appointed censor of public morals, prefaced his Nouvelle Heloise with the irresistible, if implausible claim that any girl 'who dares to read a single page, will be a lost woman'. More important was the fact that writers accustomed to a salon audience were more inclined towards the exchange of brilliant ideas than to the sustained examination of their implications. This remained the case even when they wrote for a learned public. A work so wise and profound as De VEsprit des lois, if one excepts its final chapters, is essentially an anthology of penetrating insights. There is an excellent example of the tendency to be satisfied with an arch pirouette in Diderot's Reve de d'Alembert. After advancing the startling Lamarckian thesis that le besoin cree I'organe, rather than explore its biological consequences in depth, he is content to have 44

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Mademoiselle de l'Espinasse reply to Dr Bordeu's prophecy that, in time, men would become nothing but heads, 'A head, a head! That's not much. I hope that unbridled gallantry .. .' 9 Perhaps he had made his point, but if he had been a Scotsman he would have made it differently and at greater length. There were political as well as social reasons why the French philosophes tended to pursue intellectual curiosity as an end in itself, or at least to think more of principle than of practice. If one compares them to their peers in England or Germany, they can be seen to have been operating in a kind of void. At least until the closing years of the reign of Louis XV there seemed little prospect of their having much influence on the political or economic life of the country. Even the discomfiture of the Jesuits probably owed more to their old Jansenist foes than to the men of the Enlightenment.10 They moved in an atmosphere that encouraged speculation for its own sake, and the audience for which they wrote was more interested in bold and original concepts, especially those which sentaient le fagot, than in the systematic study of how things came to be as they were and in detailed plans for improving them. Politically, the writers of the French Enlightenment were in the unusual situation of living under a government that was neither enlightened nor effectively despotic. They experienced enough persecution to alienate them but not to silence them. Diderot served his time in Vincennes; Voltaire, who had once been in the Bastille, found safety on the Swiss frontier; Helvetius ran into serious trouble when he sought official sanction for the publication of De rEsprit. Until the 1770s - by which time most of them were old or dead the philosophes could have no realistic expectation of influencing policy, or even of getting an audience from those who did. There would have been no point in their drafting elaborate schemes for a constitution, the improvement of the judicial system or the reform of local government, if no one was going to bother to read them. This was in sharp contrast to the situation in some of Europe's other autocracies.. The French government was hostile but too divided either to impose its own orthodoxy or to silence the heretics. As the case of De VEsprit illustrated, ministers, parlements and clergy were too preoccupied with their own divergent interests to do much more than frighten the fish they failed to catch.11 The life of the philosophe might occasionally be nasty and brutish; it was rarely short. Malesherbes, when he was Directeur de la Librairie, saw to it that those whom he was supposed to be pursuing came to no serious harm. The inevitable consequence of all this was that the philosophes saw themselves as a kind of perpetual opposition, with the tendency towards generalized and abstract criticism that the role usually implies. The essential difference between Montesquieu and Burke can be put in one word: 1688. Both men regarded individual liberty and what we now call civil rights as the 45

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main objective of political activity and they agreed that any plans for change must take as their starting point society as it was, with all its accumulated traditions, interests, prejudices and aspirations. What divided them was that Burke was an active political agent within a system whose legitimacy he accepted, and Montesquieu was not. The Englishman might disagree with the policies of a particular government; he might even believe the constitution to be in danger, but so long as it survived, he believed it to be the best towards which any society could aspire. Montesquieu thought the constitution of his own country had been subverted by Richelieu and Louis XIV, who had turned France from a monarchy into a despotism.12 No doubt things might have been worse, but it was not enough for him to keep them as they were. It was therefore the political state of the two countries rather than any fundamental difference of principle that made Burke a conservative and Montesquieu a reformer. The legacy of French absolutism, with the parlements, such provincial estates as survived, and the Assembly of the Clergy forming the opposition to what they were eventually to denounce as 'ministerial despotism', had another consequence. Until the final crisis of the ancien regime its critics had to choose between representative government and enlightened reform. The former meant transferring political power to the most socially and politically conservative elements of the population; the latter, staking all one's money on the chance of an enlightened ruler. Faced with this kind of choice, the philosophes found themselves on different sides during the crisis that closed the reign of Louis XV. 13 It was therefore not surprising that much of the political thought of the French Enlightenment should have been somewhat speculative in character.14 Rousseau in particular referred all issues to the criterion of an idealized Sparta or Rome in whose name he totally repudiated the society in which he lived. The mania for classical republicanism was not unknown outside France, but elsewhere it met with a more mixed reception. Goethe denounced Roman patriotism as monstrous, and the 'republicans' Square and Jolter in Tom Jones and Peregrine Pickle are a pair of singularly nasty hypocrites. What was significant in France was not so much that Rousseau thought differently - as he was the first to insist, he was a very unusual man but the fact that he became the spokesman for a whole generation of men like Brissot, Desmoulins, Marat and Mercier.15 Somewhat naturally, nostalgia for the toga had not much to contribute by way of concrete suggestions for the improvement of the government of eighteenth-century France. It did, however, infect the language and inspire some of the attitudes of the revolutionaries. To this tendency for the philosophes to approach politics in terms of frustrated opposition and messianic dreams there was one apparent exception. The physiocrats, who did have access to the ear of those in office,

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addressed themselves in more specific terms to the immediate problems of an actual society. The result was, rather curiously, to confirm the extent to which all the men of the Enlightenment were isolated from the actual business of making the country work. As Elizabeth Fox-Genovese pointed out in a recent study, 'The physiocrats, like the philosophes . . . passed in silence over the problem of political implementation.' 16 One reason for this was that they failed to convert the landowners whom they proposed to enrich. Their conception of increasing productivity by free trade and long-term investment in scientific agriculture failed to impress those who saw an easier, quicker and safer way of making money by the more rigorous exploitation of their rents and seigneurial rights.17 The physiocrats were therefore driven to invoke the power of the state to impose by authoritarian means the kind of policies for which a landowning 'ruling class' should theoretically have been clamouring. Wherever one turns therefore the picture is pretty much the same. It was not until the last years of the ancien regime, when the parlements turned De VEsprit des his into a battering ram directed against the absolute monarchy, and the Rousseauists urged the king to 'lead men to happiness through vertu, and to vertu through legislation founded on the unchangeable principles of universal morality5,18 that the breakdown of the system allowed the political message of the philosophes any serious prospect of practical implementation. The religious thought of the Enlightenment in France was similarly influenced, if not conditioned, by the practicalities of power. The French church was a wealthy and autonomous corporate organization whose authority had no parallel outside the Iberian peninsula. It was responsible for much of what is now civil policy: for education and poor relief, for example. The philosophes were particularly liable to fall foul of it in its capacity as censor. Its relatively rigid dogma, when compared with that of the Church of England, and its commitment to clerical celibacy - that affront to 'Nature' - ruled out the kind of more or less peaceful coexistence that obtained on the other side of the Channel. At the same time, as the attack on Helvetius's De VEsprit showed, the Gallican church was only one pressure group among others, in the competition for political influence. There was no Inquisition in France, and the philosophes were able to take - and generally to get away with - the kind of risks that would have been inconceivable in Spain. The consequences of this situation were easily predictable. The French church was both a target and a provocation. The deism of the philosophes took on an anti-clerical, in some cases an anti-Christian edge that was unnecessary in England or the Netherlands and impolitic elsewhere. The result was often to give a provocative and aggressive air to what was basically quite a moderate message. At first sight Voltaire and Dr Johnson might seem as far apart as champagne and roast beef, but they shared a common attitude to many issues. If Johnson was a Tory it was partly because he thought - quite rightly - that nothing like the judicial murder of the chevalier de la Barre 47

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could happen in England. Voltaire, who preferred his guests not to discuss the non-existence of God in front of the servants, was no radical by temperament and seemed to be one only by force of circumstances: he countered dogma with an irony not unlike Hume's; what aroused his fury was not so much belief as persecution. Something not too far removed from the profession of faith of the vicaire Savoyard found its way into a good many British pulpits. Similar views, expressed in his Essay on Man, had not done Pope any harm. Rousseau was less lucky and it was the relatively innocuous Emile as much as the potentially explosive Du Contrat social that earned his proscription in both Catholic Paris and Calvinist Geneva. In a rather different way, though with somewhat similar consequences, developments in science, to which the Enlightenment was exceptionally sensitive, reinforced its radical and aggressive character in France. Newtonian physics could accommodate itself without much difficulty to latitudinarian Christianity. Voltaire, indeed, was always commending Newton, especially when he felt under pressure from the atheists, as the man who had provided scientific proof of the necessity for God's existence. Developments in biology in the course of the eighteenth century, which were associated mainly with France, seemed to point in the direction of materialism. In £adig Voltaire had used the spectacle of the heavens for reflections on human insignificance that would have needed very little modification to fit into a Christian homily. When d'Holbach treated the same subject in his Systeme de la nature his awareness of evolution in time changed the whole nature of the demonstration: 'Suns blemish and expire, stars die and are dispersed across the wastes of the sky . . . and man, a minute particle on a globe that is itself an imperceptible speck in the vast whole, believes that the universe was created for himself alone.' 19 Despite their apparently similar conclusions, d'Holbach's point was very different from Voltaire's. The latter wanted Zadig to feel his personal unimportance within a meaningful celestial order. What d'Holbach was saying was that 'The whole can have no purpose since there is nothing outside itself towards which it can tend.' 20 This was a good deal harder to square with either Christianity or deism and it carried more implications than even d'Holbach chose to explore. Diderot confessed himself unable to come to terms with the concept of a universe in a state of perpetual change. 'If beings are in a state of continuous alteration, if nature's work is still unfinished, despite all the links between phenomena there can be no philosophy.' 21 Whatever one made of it the result was not likely to point towards any modus vivendi with the church. Many diverse influences therefore pulled the French Enlightenment in a common direction, away from the practical and from the kind of compromises that blurred the edges of dissent. There were many things in the French situation that gave an air of strident opposition to what would have

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been unexceptionable elsewhere, goaded moderates into radicalism and encouraged abstract speculation on the part of men who had little direct contact with the political and economic life of the country. As the second half of the eighteenth century wore on and the original spokesmen of the Enlightenment died off, attitudes tended to change throughout Europe. Some turned more and more towards specific social and economic problems. Others abandoned the initial quest for a Science of Man and sought from the emotions the kind of guidance that reason seemed unable to provide. Such developments could lead either towards reformism attempts to improve the functioning of a society regarded as acceptable, or at worst inevitable - or to the radical rejection of the present in the name of a superior morality: to the Wealth of Nations or Du Contrat social. Both options were taken in France where, indeed, Rousseau had inaugurated the revolt against much of the Enlightenment while the movement was still at its height. After the fierce mid-century battles the successors to Voltaire were becoming respectable. Men like Turgot, Necker, Lavoisier and Condorcet, in his earlier works, became almost a kind of intellectual Establishment, respected, if rarely followed, by those in office. Turgot actually achieved office himself for a brief and frustrating period. This was more akin to the situation in Scotland or Germany than had been the case earlier in the century.22 Men like this were emphatically living within the real world and addressing themselves to the solution of its more practical problems. The Academie des Sciences made its peace with the government.23 At the same time the successors to Rousseau moved even further in the opposite direction. What characterized the Rousseauists was no basic difference of principle. They shared the common belief that Nature was a harmonious system and Man part of a natural order presided over by a beneficent providence. Where they differed from the others was in their conviction that Man had broken this natural harmony and created for himself an unnatural and corrupting way of life whose pressures forced him to play a part that was alien to his true nature. To quote the opening words of Emile, 'Everything is good, as it comes from the hands of God; everything degenerates in the hands of man.' Or, as Robespierre put it in 1793, 'Man is good, as he comes from the hands of nature . . . if he is corrupt, the responsibility lies with vicious social institutions.'24 What had been done could be undone, and one of the things that distinguished the Rousseauists from the later Romantics was their conviction that, even if it was not possible to restore Man to the moral stature he had attained at the dawn of civil society, one could go part of the way along the road. Sparta and Rome were still just within reach, although the effort required to attain them would be almost superhuman. This doctrine seems to have been peculiarly French, at least in the extent of its acceptance by men coming to maturity in the 1780s and in the fact that only in France was there some attempt by government to translate it into 49

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political practice. Some of Rousseau's appeal to the country he adopted was perhaps due to his peculiar personality, which attracted some as much as it repelled others. Much more was a tribute to his spellbinding prose. Merrier, who claimed to have known him quite well, thought him 'above all the other writers of his century'. 'Those who admire Rousseau feel a kind of veneration for him that Voltaire never managed to inspire.' 25 Whatever the nature of the attraction, a generation of young Frenchmen was fascinated by this Pied Piper and they were to provide the French Revolution with some of its most important spokesmen: Brissot, Robespierre and Saint-Just. The relationship between Rousseauist theory and revolutionary practice has never been satisfactorily explored and it is impossible to do more than sketch in a few outlines here. 26 The starting point was the total rejection of existing society, where commerce had destroyed 'the gentle and beneficent virtues characteristic of simple, poor and hospitable nations'. 27 The basis of this rejection was essentially moral and the prime objective of all political action was the restoration of the reign ofvertu, which implied government for if not necessarily by - the humble and obscure, that section of society least corrupted by false values and an artificial social order. 'The only foundation of civil society is morality Men of letters, in general, have dishonoured themselves in this Revolution and, to the eternal shame of intelligence, all the burdens have been borne by the good sense of ordinary people.' 28 The people, however, despite - or perhaps because of- their innocent simplicity, were incapable on their own of understanding what needed to be done and only too likely to be led astray by false prophets. The New Jerusalem required its architect, in the shape of a quasi-superhuman legislator, a post for which there were a good many candidates. 29 The main task of this legislator was the moral regeneration of his flock. Rousseau had written, 'If it is good to use men as they are, it is much better to transform them into what one needs them to be.' 30 Saint-Just arrived at very much the same conclusion: 'It is for him [the legislator] to make men into what he wants them to be.' 3 1 The most obvious way of doing this was through a state educational system. Unlike Rousseau in his Emile, the revolutionaries could not think in terms of a staff/student ratio of i : i. Lepeletier's education bill, which Robespierre read to the Convention after the murder of its author, therefore provided for the compulsory education of all children in comprehensive coeducational state boarding schools. Saint-Just advocated a similar sort of moral conditioning, in the notes that were subsequently published under the title of Institutions republicaines. Rousseau had argued, towards the end of Du Contrat social, that the kind of society he envisaged would need to be underpinned by a state religion. Robespierre proposed something very much along these lines in the speech of 7 May 1794 which inaugurated the worship of the Supreme Being. The more intelligent of the Rousseauists did not hesitate to take issue with 50

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Jean-Jacques on points of detail. In an editorial on education Robespierre even, in a veiled reference, rejected Sparta as irrelevant to eighteenthcentury France, and when it came to proscribing atheists of unimpeachable revolutionary credentials he maintained that there were some truths best left in the writings of Rousseau.32 Both he and Saint-Just had their reservations about the infallibility of the general will.33 It is nevertheless clear that the influence of Rousseau was extraordinarily pervasive during the Revolution, and not merely among the republicans. It was a deputy of the Right, Cazales, who cut through the pious cosmopolitanism of the Constituent Assembly with the Spartan suggestion that 'Our own country must be the exclusive object of our love Love of country makes more than men, it makes citizens.'34 Rousseau could not have put it better. For the Rousseauists 1789 meant the entry into that Promised Land that their Moses had not been privileged to see. For a moment, even the fierce and gloomy Marat believed that the millennium had happened: 'O my country, how I see you changed! . . . The people no longer groan under a crushing weight of taxation. Already the husbandman has bread and clothing and he can breathe again; already the worker shares the same lot; the artisan is free from need and the tireless servant of the altar languishes in poverty no more.' 35 For Robespierre, the moral take-off did not occur until after the overthrow of the monarchy on 10 August 1792. 'Since the abolition of royalty, since the re-establishment of political equality, the provisional constitution, purged of those two basic vices, already raises you above all peoples whom the enslaved nations have ever described as free.'36 The republic of vertu had a steep rate of climb and by May 1794 its pilot could already gratify his audience with the news that they were already two thousand years ahead of the rest of Europe. What all this would have meant in practical terms it is impossible to guess. Lepeletier's education bill was never implemented and the worship of the Supreme Being died with Robespierre, in July 1794. If one wants a blueprint of the kind of society that the revolutionaries had in mind, it is to be found, not in the future, but in the Utopia that Mercier had already published in 1772, UAn 2440, which anticipated a good many of the attitudes of the year II. Since Mercier's imaginary people were more malleable than Robespierre's real ones, he could dispense with the Terror.37 Inevitably, the fact that France was plunged into a major social revolution made her national experience at the end of the eighteenth century unique, but the Revolution does not explain everything. Well before 1789 the millenarian streak in French radical thinking was already more developed, and more widespread, than elsewhere in Europe. Marat's peculiar brand of radical chic brought him more success in Paris than during his stay in England. The Revolution did no more than intensify differences of attitude that had already become apparent. Paine's Rights of Man was inspired by 51

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Burke's attack on it, but Part II, with its elaborate calculation of how a welfare state could be financed, was worlds apart from the theorizing of the Rousseauists. In France itself, although men like Saint-Just drew more radical conclusions from their old Rousseauist premises, the Revolution gave rise to little genuinely new thinking, at least in the short run. The social theories of the sans-culotte militants, for which ambitious claims have sometimes been made, rested on traditional foundations and most of them could be paralleled in seventeenth-century England. Even the ideas of Babeuf, as his most recent biographer has shown, derived in their essentials from the writings of Morelly and Rousseau.38 The contribution of the Rousseauists to the actual course of the Revolution is a more complicated matter. It would not be difficult to argue that the exigencies of war and inflation would have driven the Montagnards along a path that most of them trod very reluctantly, even if Rousseau had never been born. There was more to the Terror, however, than political or military expediency. The national emergency was responsible for the fact that virtually dictatorial powers were entrusted for a time to certain men. It was not an accident that some of these men should have been followers of JeanJacques who had come to believe - partly as a result of the Revolution itselfin the practical possibility of creating by political means the kind of ideal society that Rousseau had considered beyond the grasp of the French. Perhaps, by 1794, they also saw such a society as the only possible justification for the shedding of so much blood. Viewed from abroad, the bloodshed was more obvious than the idealism and, except for one or two men like Fichte, the Terror discredited an ideology that had made few foreign converts, even before 1789. The French philosophes therefore shared the assumptions that were common to the Enlightenment as a whole. These were broad enough to permit of many different conclusions, and conditions peculiar to the ancien regime gave to French thought its characteristically critical and generalized tone. During the generation before 1789 the philosophes split into two camps. Those concerned with the world of practicality, despite the false dawn of 1774, were frustrated before the Revolution and swept aside (in some cases to their destruction) by its course. If there was any sense in which the Enlightenment was an ideology of the bourgeoisie and the French Revolution a bourgeois movement, it seems rather odd that the latter should have dealt so harshly with men like Necker and Barnave. Thanks largely to the spell exercised by Rousseau's writings, there grew up after his death a significant body of writers and intellectuals committed to the kind of millenarian objectives of which he had dreamed. Whether or not they shared his veneration for Sparta and Rome, their concern was always to recover something they thought to have been lost. Robespierre wrote that political equality had been retablie 52

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after 10 August 1792; he would have been hard put to it to explain when it had disappeared. Their kingdom was not of this world. They were more concerned with vertu than with economics or administration and their aspirations could be realized only if it was indeed possible to reshape human nature by means of political institutions. The belief of some of the revolutionaries that the regeneration of France was in fact well advanced, transformed their attitude towards the rest of Europe. All men were no doubt brothers, but the French benefited from a kind of primogeniture of vertu that bound them to each other and set them above the rest. Rousseau would have liked that, though he might have disagreed about the fact of regeneration. It was perhaps natural for Robespierre, in wartime, to say, 'Today, one Frenchman is worth more than ten Prussians' and 'As for me, I don't like the English.'39 He had never been much of an Anglophil. It was more significant that Mercier should move from his Anglomanie of 1772 to a diatribe in 1791 before the two countries were at war - against 'the rich and cruel inhabitants of London, the most pallid of all the worshippers of gold, the hardest, most inhuman and most coldly vicious of all mortal men'.40 There was more to this than natural resentment against a people one had been made to admire for too long. Every Roman needed his Carthaginians. Albion had long been famous, of course, for its Punicafides\now it could be despised as mercenary and corrupt as well. In a similar way Paine, who had sat in the Convention in 1792, came to despair of France. 'This is not a country for an honest man to live in; they do not understand anything at all of the first principles of a free government.' 41 Things had changed a good deal since the cosmopolitanism of Voltaire and Montesquieu and they were not to revert to the former pattern. The Utopians had developed a new kind of ideological nationalism that was to plague Europe for generations to come, and to encourage the rise of a no less deadly conservative nationalism in reply. Much of this was due to the political and military impact of the French Revolution and Empire, but these in turn would not have assumed the form they did if it had not been for the Enlightenment. What was peculiar to France was not the relationship between ideas and events but the exceptional nature of both.

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4 The Enlightenment in the Netherlands SIMON SCHAMA

The Enlightenment came to the Dutch Republic rather as an urbane but hard-pressed man of affairs might come visiting among hayseed provincial cousins. Gratitude for hospitality was tempered by bemused condescension and by the kind of heavy forbearance which strains politeness between host and guest. The upshot of the experience was an acknowledgement of kinship but a sharpened awareness of its remoteness. Moreover, the Enlightenment - that most reified bundle of axioms appeared in the Netherlands in not one but three guises. The first was as the crusade for toleration and free enquiry seeking shelter from harassment. This flattered what had become a stock component in the Dutch view of themselves as a morally heroic asylum where neither bigotry nor censorship was entertained. 1 This not wholly accurate stereotype found ringing endorsement from a succession of beneficiaries of Dutch liberality who echoed Bayle's view that the Republic of Letters was indeed 'la grande arche des fugitifs'.2 In its second incarnation the Enlightenment appeared as professional publicist and campaigner, looking for reliable printers, publishers and distributors in tricky or illicit markets. Finally the Enlightenment entered Dutch vernacular culture itself, but in so doing transmuted its nature into a moral revival answering the calls of both economic and political crises. That these three roles were not only not culturally continuous but were actually mutually incompatible may be illustrated by the following impressions. The Marquis d'Argens, one of many philosophes to be published in the Republic, and whose Lettres juives contains a familiar eulogy of the 'cradle of liberty' declared that if he were to have had the choice of a birthplace he would have chosen either Venice or Holland. For the latter was 'le pays du bon sens et de la liberte. L'homme en Hollande n'est sujet qu aux lois . . . la Hollande semble etre le pays des philosophes.'3 Voltaire, who began by subscribing to the conventionally flattering view of the Republic as the cradle of toleration and liberty, came to be more affected by his experience as polemicist and customer. In the Histoire de VEmpire de Russie he commented sourly: 54

The Enlightenment in the Netherlands Un libraire de Hollande commande un livre comme un manufacturier fait fabriquer des etoffes, et il se trouve malheureusement des ecrivains que la necessite force de vendre leur peine a ces marchands comme des ouvriers a leurs gages; de la tous ces insipides panegyriques et ces libelles diffamatoires dont le public est surcharge; c'est un des vices les plus honteux de notre siecle.4

Both uncritical acclaim and unrestrained rancour could, however, be subsumed within downright incomprehension. Pierre-Jean Grosley in 1772 related a famous story illustrating its consequences.5 An impressionable Parisian bourgeois gentilhomme visiting Amsterdam was so struck by the opulence of one of the great patrician mansions on the Herengracht canal that he inquired from a passer-by the identity of its proprietor. 'Cani Fruston' was the reply. Later the same day observing a merchantman unload its impressive cargo on the wharf he asked another man under whose commission it sailed. 'Cani Fruston' was the response once more. And so on, until the Frenchman left the city satisfied at having identified the most powerful merchant prince in Holland - when all that he had really heard was an expression of ritual indifference - 'ik kan niet u verstaan' (I cannot understand you). While the story remains in the realm of jest rather than parable it does illustrate a caveat necessary to any examination of 'the Enlightenment in the Netherlands'. For there is no more evidence that the idiom and sensibility of the lumieres found easy reception in the United Provinces than there is that their language was understood below the level of the patrician elite. The Enlightenment in the Dutch Republic, then, was not at all the same phenomenon as the Dutch Enlightenment. Indeed, in the context of a collection of essays devoted to the Enlightenment in national contexts it is difficult to escape the impression that there was an inverse relation between the cosmopolitanism of rational or sceptical ideas and their acceptability within Dutch vernacular culture. In several respects the Dutch Republic offered inappropriate targets to the conventional artillery of the philosophes. Religious intolerance, stringent censorship and even judicial torture did exist in the 'periwig Republic' but they were less embedded in institutional authority than in the absolute monarchies. Equally, Dutch religiosity was of an intensely social kind which owed little to the mystique of miracle and revelation that the philosophes excoriated. Indeed, when the 'verlichting' came to throw some fitful rays of illumination on the gathering gloom of Dutch life in the later eighteenth century it did so as much in the name of moral and spiritual rejuvenation as political or philosophical progress. To lecture the Dutch on the prospects of political liberty would have been an exercise in sustained anachronism. To say that many of the philosophes who sojourned in the Netherlands deferred to its reputation as an arcadia of the wise and the free would be an 55

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understatement. Their sense of a collective pedigree for the troupeau depended on it as an early historical and geographical reference point. A list of its most celebrated fugitives - Descartes, Locke, Bayle, Shaftesbury, Collins - reads like a roll-call of the founding generation of the Age of Reason. Moreover, eighteenth-century accounts of the Republic rely less on topographical accuracy and more on presenting the Dutch as exempla virtutis, with only slightly more plausibility than the Venetians.6 At a time when the stratification of mercantile society was becoming more not less pronounced and its governing elite more oligarchic French accounts in particular continued to describe it as a commonwealth where the extremes of wealth and poverty were melded into a bourgeois middle way; and where servile deference had been replaced by gritty individualism. They even implied that there was something like a necessary relationship between toleration and prosperity in a period when the Dutch were exporting skilled labour to Spain and Russia. In other words the philosophes were not so much gazing through the windows of a Dutch house as into a mirror image of themselves. Historical reality had been colonized by their collective wishful thinking and had fathered on the Dutch a role which made them yet another runner in the relay-race of the free, stretching from Socratic Athens and Republican Rome to Rousseau's Geneva and Franklin's Philadelphia. Mirabeau, who was something of an expert at designing instant historical identities, described the protection of the United Provinces in Doutes sur la liberte de VEscaut as a cause for all humanity, since the very existence of that nation against all military and geographical odds 'honoured the human race'. In a similarly rhapsodic vein he went on to describe habitants, industrieux, honnetes, paisibles, courageux, qui ont acquis l'aisance et la liberte qu'on leur envie, par une continuite d'efforts dont l'histoire des hommes n'offre pas un autre exemple ... la longue perseverance ... la lutte glorieuse de l'esprit de la liberte.7 Not all Dutchmen, of course, would have been embarrassed by the allotted role of guardians of the Spirit of Liberty. Johan Wagenaer, the official historian of Amsterdam in the mid eighteenth century exuded from his volumes precisely the air of whiggish sententiousness one might expect from an apologist of the urban patriciate's exclusive definition of the 'ware vrijheid' (True Liberty). 8 Much earlier, Jean Basnage, the Huguenot refugie pastor had been commissioned to write a history of the Republic in French, to serve as a brandished torch of freedom thrust in the face of the imperious Sun King. He did his job well enough to claim that 'les anciens habitans des Provinces-Unies ont toujours aime la liberte et la guerre, parce que l'une est souvent necessaire a la conservation de l'autre'. 9 The reduction of historical reality to an epigraphic cliche, however benignly intended, is perhaps best 56

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exemplified by Voltaire's inscription in Willem van der Pot's album amicorum during his visit to Amsterdam in 1757: O Liberte, si chere a l'Univers O Liberte, qu'un pouvoir despotique Loin de ces lieux fait languir dans les fers Regne a jamais dans cette Republique Cher a mes amis et meme dans ces vers.10

Perhaps a distinction should be drawn between those like Descartes and Bayle who lived for many years in the Netherlands, and more transient visitors of the following century who, like Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau had only a passing acquaintance from their passage en route or from trips made reluctantly, to settle outstanding publishing business. MarcMichel Rey, for instance, was usually unsuccessful in persuading Rousseau to come to Amsterdam to sort out his affairs.11 Even the more settled figures, however, made little effort to penetrate their host society below the superficial level of salon culture. Bayle was satisfied with his new home, Rotterdam, in its dissimilarity from the rest of Holland, being 'une ville tres belle et florissante ou on a des connaissances toutes faites et ou on trouve tant de franc,ais ou parlant franc,ais qu a peine sent a l'etranger'.12 In another letter he expressed his relief that 'je suis traite a la franchise a la table, ce qui est un grand article car dans une pension hollandoise je souffrirais trop'. 13 It was possible, in fact, for refugies like Leclerc and Basnage to move in an almost exclusively francophone circle, editing their internationally important gazettes and journals in French destined for the increasingly francophone international community of letters. Bayle's opinion of native philosophical talent, especially in the Dutch universities, was low,14 and his disdain only serves to point up the distance between Enlightenment in its international and 'national' contexts. Conversely, there were some Dutch reformers in the early eighteenth century who lamented the fact that years of resisting the hegemony of the King of France had ended by capitulating to his culture.15 How much more likely, then, that a notoriously reluctant traveller like Denis Diderot should insulate himself from the less edifying aspects of eighteenth-century Holland. He spent the summer of 1773 procrastinating as to whether he would, after all, continue his announced journey to St Petersburg to pay his respects to his benefactress the Empress Catherine.16 The next best thing, to be sure, was to bring St Petersburg to The Hague so that he indicated good faith if not resolution by staying with Dmitri Golitzin and his young bride Amelia von Schmettau at their house on the Kneuterdijk. The Hague then, as now, was not a typical Dutch town. Like other court cities it was dominated by the establishment of the Stadholder: the assemblies of the States General and the States of Holland, the corps of 57

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diplomats and the army of service industries required to keep them all in proper style and station. On the broad tree-lined avenues, beautified with Marot-influenced masonry, rival ambassadorial teams of coachmen played out proxy wars contesting rights of way with an exhibition of petulence that Voltaire's satirical inventions could hardly have improved on.17 In the repose of the woods and hamlets skirting the town Diderot was able to read Helvetius's De I'Homme (banned in France) and ruminate, none too deeply, on the demonstration of virtue and freedom supplied by the history of the Republic. His table was served by quantities of soles, turbots and crabs landed at Scheveningen, and there he beheld a spectacle of exemplary domestic felicity, as fishermen returning from their trips were greeted by the embraces of wives and children waiting for them at the harbour.18 Although Diderot travelled a little in Holland before the arrival of Prince Naryshkin summoned him to proceed further with his journey east, when writing his Voyage de Hollande he fell back on stereotyped earlier accounts, transcribing unacknowledged large chunks of Janigon's Etat present de la Republique des Provinces- Unies (1755) and de la Chesnaye des Bois's Lettres hollandaises (1750). It would not do, however, to strike too sardonic a note at the impressions of these visitors, however superficial they might have been. There was something instructive and even moving for a philosophe, committed to the triumph of applied reason and resourcefulness over natural adversity and calamity, to observe the lush pastures of the Dutch meadows wrested from the sea. So it is not surprising to find Voltaire describing his journey from Amsterdam to Leiden through the Rijnland as an exploration of a 'paradis terrestre',19 or Charles Ogier seeing the inlets and islets of southern Holland as 'les iles de la bonheur'. 20 And there was still a disarming candour of manners and behaviour which in the artisan and simpler middle class had not yet disappeared beneath oversize perruques and coiffure a Vaile de pigeon, and which corresponded to their desiderata for the honnete homme. Voltaire was startled but delighted to meet up with a high magistrate of Amsterdam in the midst of a throng of shoppers and attended by not a single lackey. Diderot confessed himself amazed that fines could be imposed on masters found guilty of striking their servants. Much was made of this alleged indifference to formal rank, high style and bon ton. The same stories tended to be repeated ad infinitum in support: the apocryphal account of Spinola's confrontation with the High Mightinesses on a barge eating a meal of bread and cheese, for example. In fact the number of servants in patrician houses was increasing and the style of their life becoming progressively more ornate. Diderot, notwithstanding the evidence in The Hague, insisted, ici chacun est maitre chez soi: la liberte civile y met tous les habitans de niveau; les petits ne peuvent etre opprime par les grands ni les pauvres par les riches La liberte de penser, parler et d'ecrire est presque illimitee.21 58

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He did, however, notice that many of the most menial jobs in a city like Amsterdam were performed by immigrant labourers from outlying border regions of Westphalia, East Friesland and Austrian Brabant, living in hovels by the city walls or near the docks and attempting to save a pittance before returning home. This substantial floating population of vagrants were, he commented, the 'Savoyards' of Holland.22 It was nonetheless understandable that the pleasure of being able to utter opinions without fear of arbitrary arrest and capricious royal justice beguiled many of these writers into pardonable hyperbole. Much earlier Descartes had rejoiced in the possibility of strolling abroad 'tous les jours parmi la confusion d'un grand peuple avec autant de liberte et de repos que vous scauriez faire dans vos allees'.23 Praise was heaped on the Dutch magistracy for presiding over peaceful and orderly communities even though it seems inconceivable that Diderot or Montesquieu should have missed the wayside gibbets from which corpses dangled for prolonged display or the public scaffolds and stocks where chastised whores or branded cut-purses were subjected to general contumely or physical violence.24 But they saw what they wished to see. In 1773, the year in which Diderot said there were no beggars in the Republic, the authorities in The Hague where he was living provided for six thousand destitute or impoverished. In the promenading area in front of the Vijver lake in the heart of the city, after dark, burghers were regularly plundered, roughed up and even poniarded and flung in the water.25 But a body of law which desisted from arresting a man in his own home, which permitted incarcerated debtors to visit their pregnant wives and which permitted elaborately applied procedural safeguards to avoid wrongful imprisonment for debt, was bound to win their approval, even if none seems to have known that torture was still used to extract confessions.26 Toleration and freedom of conscience were not, of course, chimerical or hypocritically assumed. And it was the most important wave of beneficiaries the Huguenots refugies, following in the footsteps of the earlier Walloons who first proclaimed, with due gratitude, this redeeming virtue of the Dutch Republic. Naturally the philosophes noted that the Dutch were mindful of the material benefits brought by a community rich in skills and capital. The Huguenots had virtually created the Dutch silk industry, just as the Marrano Jews before them had brought their own economic specialities in diamond cutting and polishing and dealing in other precious commodities. They stopped short of implying crudely mercenary motives to this hospitality, for they noted that at the outset of their asylum the Republic had done much to relieve their distress. The Amsterdam regents had set aside a thousand dwellings in the city for the refugees and had provided Pierre Bailie, a former director of the Clermont textiles factory, with fl. 20,000 to recommence operations. In Haarlem a special home had been established for the widows and daughters of Huguenot victims of persecution. But what these same 59

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generous accounts sometimes glossed over was the passionate conviction of many Dutch at the end of the seventeenth century that they were indeed engaged in a holy war against the barbaric, cruel and idolatrous Louis. His enemies were their friends and they went out of their way, for example, to fete the Camisard leader Cavalier, in 1706. Toleration as a publicly avowed principle of state was more controversial. It had, of course, been unblushingly advocated by a long line of Dutch statesmen and writers from Dirk Coornhert and William the Silent in the sixteenth century, to Grotius and de la Court in the seventeenth. And, paradoxically, while there remained a possibility of Calvinist zealots imposing their absolute will on the rest of the nation, the more humanist position was argued with commensurately aggressive force. But despite the official triumph of the church militant in 1618, as is well known, the subsequent history of the Republic bore emphatic witness to the failure to maintain that success in any systematic fashion or to cow lay authorities into enforcing the edicts of further synods. The result was the accepted presence within major cities of large dissenting congregations. Once this modus Vivendi had become an intrinsic element to the preservation of civil quiet, the assertive promotion of toleration as an absolute virtue became considered by the magistracy as potentially disruptive as the militancy of its opposite. Toleration, then, really came about in the Republic through benign neglect and settled in the gaping interstices of official power. Jacob Bicker's reaction, when pestered in church, by an overzealous informer disclosing the whereabouts of an Arminian conventicle in Amsterdam, was an irritably dismissive wave of the hand. By the middle of the eighteenth century the most repressed and nervous of the minorities, the Catholics, could take their safety sufficiently for granted to be able to inscribe their doors in Haarlem with a chalked ' C so as to alert Protestant sextons, calling for poor donations, to their addresses. And if toleration was a pragmatic function of the delicate arts of government in the Republic the same uncertainties could actually limit its applicability. When Bayle's patrons in Rotterdam, who had been responsible for securing his teaching post in 1681 after the closure of the College at Sedan, were themselves turfed out by their Orangist rivals in one of the periodic wetsverzettingen ('legal upheavals') with which the country was afflicted, their protege was dismissed, pursued by his vindictive fdXow-refugti, Jurieu. Likewise, it would be misleading to infer from all the encomia piled on the Republic concerning freedom of conscience that there was no censorship there. Admittedly, the system by which the States of Holland and their counterparts in other provinces issued licences was extremely liberal by other standards, but it still demanded prior submissions and on occasion, monetary cautions. W.P.C. Knuttel's list of forbidden books increases rather than decreases in the eighteenth century.27 Many of them were Dutch, rather than French, since the criterion for refusal was their potential for disturbing the 60

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public peace. In this category were placed not only Hobbes's Leviathan but Diderot's own Pensees philosophiques (both deemed an attack on religion); Rousseau's Du Contrat social and, most notoriously, La Mettrie's L'Homme machine. In that last case, Elie Luzac, La Mettrie's publisher in The Hague, explicitly disavowed the views of his author, while courageously insisting on his right to print them. The denouement of this affair did not bear out received wisdoms concerning freedom to print in the Republic of Letters. Luzac's copies of the offending tract, like other material deemed seditious or godless, were confiscated and then burned by the public hangman. In order to preserve his licence to publish and his very rights of citizenship he was obliged to publish both his own retraction and UHomme plus que la machine, the official refutation. La Mettrie himself was expelled from the Republic in 1748 and went to Berlin where he was welcomed by Frederick the Great, then flirting with daring materialism. The Prussian king's own Eloge de la Mettrie waxed sarcastic in Voltairian style on the subject of the hypocrisy and pomposity of the grave divines of Leiden. If the first impression of the Dutch Republic was, in effect, an idealized projection of the Enlightenment's own self-image - a republican habitat where the seeker after truth might pursue his calling undisturbed by the hostility of tyrants and prelates - its secondary image was the polar opposite, that is as a service industry for its products. Despite its long reputation for publishing work prohibited elsewhere the Republic was yielding some of its market to the Swiss, especially those in Geneva, Lausanne and Neuchatel.28 Nevertheless, the more enterprising printers, publishers and sellers, like Neaulme, Marc Michel Rey, Scheurleer and Gosse, still provided formidable competition in both cost and quality, and controlled the northern networks of smugglers and colporteurs distributing through Antwerp, Ostend, Rouen and Dunkirk, and onwards to North Germany, Britain and Scandinavia. Dependence, however, is rarely a good basis for mutual trust and respect, and the philosophes' suspicion (often justified) and disdain for their publishers in the Netherlands was in glaring contrast to the praise they heaped on the institutions of their nation. As elsewhere the relationship between writer and publisher was coloured by the former's loathing of men who trafficked in imperishable truths as though they were so much grocery. Nor was this distaste modified by the expectation that the Dutch would soak up their ideas along with the ink which printed them. Exactly the opposite assumption seems to have obtained, and correctly. Major editions of Rousseau's works were not translated into Dutch until the 1790s, and in many respects the mechanical business of publishing the more audacious work of the Enlightenment seems to have immunized them from its content. Marc Michel Rey was alleged to have told Rousseau 'Nous vous imprimons mais nous ne vous lisons pas.' 29 The mercenary degeneration of the Dutch was a regular theme in the 61

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accounts of French visitors. In his Voyage en Hollande Montesquieu remarked that 'la coeur des habitants des pays qui vivent de commerce est entierement corrompu', 30 a view which went oddly with his conviction that political virtue had brought forth prosperity in the Republic. In one passage he went so far as to see in the Dutch the embodiment of pecuniary ignobility: Tout ce qu'on m'avoit dit de l'avance de la friponnerie, de l'escroquerie des Hollanders, n'est point farde; e'est la verite pure. Je ne crois pas que, depuis un homme celebre apple Judas il y'ait jamais eu de Juif plus Juif que quelques-unes d'eux. Comme ils sont accables d'impots, il faut qu'ils ayent de l'argent par toutes voies. Ces voies sont deux: l'avarice et la rapine.31 At their basest 'on met a ferme tous les actions; on trafique des vertus morales et les choses qui l'humanite demande, on les vend pour de l'argent'.32 The literature of Dutch sharp practice and the extortionate treatment of foreigners stretches back into the seventeenth century, and like that earlier rhetoric of distaste often testifies more to the repressed cupidity and commercialism of the critic than those at whom the rebukes were addressed. The Dutch had long been the whipping-boys of collapsed speculations, and Voltaire's complaints on their rapacity may not have been uninfluenced by his loss of 1400 francs in an Amsterdam speculation when his correspondent defaulted.33 But the proverbially unsavoury reputation of Dutch innkeepers, barge skippers and coachmen for fleecing foreigners at every conceivable opportunity did nothing to allay the common beliefs to which Montesquieu referred. Raynal was appalled to discover that in the little canal-side refreshment booths where passengers awaited the arrival of the inter-urban barge service and sheltered from the frequently inclement weather, they were charged for beverages supplied, irrespective of whether they had consumed them or not.34 The Abbe Coyer's horror on being made to pay a fat fee by the verger of the Grote Kerk in Haarlem for a privilege of a view from the tower only rebounded embarrassingly when his truculent English companion not only refused to pay but dragged the menial before a magistrate who promptly fined him for his temerity.35 And three years after his flattering inscription in van der Pot's book Voltaire penned a verse in an altogether different temper: Un peuple libre et mercenaire Vegetant dans ce coin de terre Et vivant toujours en bateau Vend aux voyageurs Fair et l'eau And still more memorably: Sur la Bourse on vous parlera De pacotille et prorata. 36 62

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His most acidulous remarks, predictably, were reserved for publishers and printers who thought of nothing but gain and whose mental horizons were bounded by the profit and loss ledger. Lorsque les Hollandais s'aperc,urent de ce nouveau besoin de Pespece humain [reading], ils devinrent facteurs de nos pensees comme ils etoient de nos vins et de nos sels, et tel libraire d'Amsterdam qui ne savait pas lire gagnait un million parce qu'il avait quelques Fran^ais qui se melaient d'ecrire.37 This aversion to vulgarization and the bitter sense that they were being exploited by their intellectual, social and national inferiors resonates through many similar comments, and suggests another aspect of the peculiarly divided sensibility that the philosophes brought to bear on the gap between word and deed. Montesquieu was appalled at the thought of having to peddle his writing through the baker's son Meyndert Uytwerff, and Voltaire who believed that his translated edition of Newton had been cannibalized by the publisher Ledet thought that, after all, nothing better could be expected from a refugie: 'II se fait ici [Amsterdam] parmi quelques malheureux refugies un commerce de scandales et de mensonges a main, qu'ils debitent chaque semaine dans tout le Nord pour de P argent.' 38 The thought that their work was being sold alongside such disreputable trash was repugnant to the philosophes. Voltaire's nightmare was of some greasy colporteur approaching a customer with a tug at the sleeve: 'II vous tire, et vous dit: Monsieur, voulezvous des livres de Hollande?' 39 Since current preoccupations with the sociology and diffusion of the Enlightenment lean so heavily towards a view of the philosophes as publicists, propagandists and lexicographers, rather than as philosophers in the classic sense, it must be said that the documentation of their relations with Dutch publishers betrays very little evidence of promotional enthusiasm. A far more common attitude was the assumption (not unwarranted in Voltaire's case) that they were doing a publisher a good turn by confiding their manuscripts to his care, and that they needed to exercise the utmost vigilance lest they be robbed blind. Such caution and suspicion was understandable in the freebooting atmosphere of eighteenth-century publishing.40 In 1753, for example, the refugie publisher Neaulme did bring out a pirated edition of Voltaire's Abrege de Vhistoire universelle, and although the author inserted several irate advertisements in the Dutch press he was unable to sabotage the edition.41 These snares and subterfuges, infuriating though they must have been, do not entirely account for the contempt in which the philosophes held those who published them, especially in the Netherlands. It was, in part, an externalization of an inner disquiet concerning the ethics of their work. Those who yearned to flaunt their iconoclasm under the very noses of the bigoted and 63

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the despotic detested what they took to be the ignobility of backdoor publishing in a foreign land and the thrall in which it placed them to men they judged their moral inferiors. Even so, this aversion did not prevent them from using Dutch imprints as a convenience. A number of important editions were secretly printed in France or Switzerland but provided with a false Dutch imprimatur to avoid detection in case of prosecution. Mably's Entretiens de Phocion ('Amsterdam' / Paris, 1763); Condillac's Essai sur Vorigine des connaissances humaines ('Amsterdam' / Paris 1746) and Helvetius's De VEsprit ('La Haye' / Provins 1759) were all published in this way. 42 Paradoxically, both the eulogistic and the dismissive modes of treating the Dutch reflected a common trait in the Enlightenment. For whether the Dutch were hauled into commission to supply an ancestral genealogy for the Party of Liberty; to provide an empirical demonstration of the compatibility of social civility with commercial fortune; or whether they were peremptorily summoned and discarded as the artisans of Enlightenment, depended on the functional utility of their culture for the cause of the philosophes. As a separate culture, to the polished French, glorying in the promotion of their own tongue to the status of a universal discourse, the Dutch seemed barely halfevolved. In any event their politics and history, when comprehensible, seemed to have little relevance to strictures on Oriental despots or an infamous ecclesiology. To lecture the Dutch on these matters, they acknowledged, would have been otiose. On the other hand the rude mysteries of their guttural tongue provided an impenetrable barrier to most of the French, even supposing their curiosity to have been alert. For the most part the Dutch were viewed as an admirable, phlegmatic, industrious, unimaginative, disconcertingly unrefined people who had developed a virtuous but somewhat unlovely style of life. How could any people who subsisted on fish, roots and cheese, said Raynal, have access to the sublime secrets of passion? Diderot lamented that the reputation of the amplitude of Dutch bosoms was set off by such plainness above the neck that there was little temptation to indulge in personal verification.43 As Frenchmen manques they exchanged this endearing boorishness for a much more ludicrous pretentiousness. Their theatre and opera was execrable, pandering to the base tastes of the parterre, and performed with droll amateurishness. Their literary efforts in French likewise betrayed the perspiring earnestness of the derivative and the second rate. The writer Camusat reserved his most headmasterly tone for assessing the work in French of Justus van Effen, the formidable editor of the Dutch 'Spectatorial' press of the 1720s and 1730s Vous ecrivez passablement pour un etranger, mais le gout du terroir ne se perd jamais a vos transpositions forcees, a vos constructions louches, a vos termes impropres et has, nous reconnaitrons toujours que notre langue ne vous est pas naturelle.44 And should the Dutch writer have the temerity to presume an affinity with 64

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his French counterparts he was often sent away with a stinging rebuff. The unfortunate advocate of natural religion, Bernardus Nieuwentydt, for example, who frogmarched Voltaire into his equipe of deists whose views were meant to support the existence of Supreme Inventor, was cut down with Voltairian allusions to his 'bavard impertinent' and his 'pitoyable raisonnant'.45 By the same token, those among the Dutch who were most anxious to ingratiate themselves with the Party of Humanity inflicted on themselves great waves of disgust for the mediocrity of their origins. Belle van Zuylen, BoswelFs %elide and Benjamin Constant's Older Woman, once described Holland as a 'mudcake floating in the North Sea', and early in her life pined on the misfortunes of having been born Dutch and marooned in provincial banality. Becoming Mme de la Charriere involved a cultural metamorphosis indispensable to her desire to live at the centre rather than on the periphery of European intellectual life.46 By the 1730s and 1740s, at the very time that the French Enlightenment was gathering force, a rift within the Dutch elite was opening between the advocates and the adversaries of Gallic, or indeed neo-classical, influences on the vernacular culture. The long period of apologetic embarrassment inaugurated by the commitment of the Nihil Volentibus Arduum society to purge Dutch literature of its most egregious features and to refine it through the formal severities of classicism was coming to a close. At the same time, the supremacy of the refugie gazettes was giving way to a more aggressively native journalism. In the 1740s the Nederlandsche Spectator sought to strip away the patina of French elegance which had overlaid the allegedly plainer virtues of indigenous style. French, van Effen asserted, was the idiom of euphemism; flattery, redundant gesture and disingenuous social stratagem. In short, it was the vehicle of moral disguise. It had so corrupted the Dutch that peccadillos or more serious transgressions had been prettified up in the language of polite dalliance and galanterie. Thus the contemporary Dutch word for a swindle was afoppa (faux pas); for adultery, coquetterie and, for an out and out lie, sottise. The semantic associations had thus subtly changed culpable iniquity into pardonable lapse or unfortunate folly. It was especially reprehensible, thought another writer in De Borger, that when a Dutch bachelor wished to lay siege to a girl's virtue he would switch from Dutch to French so that the baseness of his intentions would be dressed up in flowery insinuation and seductive grace. It was as if familiarity with French was a permissive agency enabling the Dutch to escape, for a while, from the more rigid moral casing of their own language and culture. Other writers in the 'Spectatorial' press pointed out that the Dutch language had been 'invaded' by alien and obnoxious usages, just as the army and even the navy of the Republic had degenerated into hordes of foreign mercenaries recruited from the stews and tenements of Europe. 65

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There was another sense in which the revival of a self-consciously patriotic culture, expressing itself through a rhetoric of moral authenticity, would be more likely to resist than welcome the enlightened temper. As it gathered momentum it was certain to become more, not less, religious, and to regard pugnacious secularism as an affront. This was not merely because the Calvinist Church had failed to impose the kind of orthodoxy which might have presented a target to iconoclasts. There was certainly room, as elsewhere in Europe, for an agitation to grant de iure as well as de facto toleration of public worship for religious minorities like the Catholics. It was rather because the Dutch had evolved a genre of moral and political discourse, separable from theological dogma but which depended on appeals to collective piety for its legitimacy.47 Dutch national identity had been shaped by the appropriated self-image of reborn and resworn Hebrews, destined to enjoy the favours of Providence just so long as they remained faithful to the Ark of the Covenant. Miracle, then, served not as a mummery devised to gull the credulous into incomprehending submission, and to subdue the inquisitive with the fiat of revealed authority, but rather as a component of historical analogy. The drowning of Pharaoh's hosts was described as an antecedent of the storm flood which relieved Leiden in 1573, or the inundations which put a great inland sea between Turenne and Amsterdam in 1672. The abrupt dropping of the wind off the Helder in the same year which prevented the junction of the French and British fleets before they were separately assaulted by de Ruyter and Cornelis Tromp was regarded as a mark of timely divine intervention (secured by mass atonement and prayer), and comparable to the sun standing in the firmament until Joshua had finished off the Canaanites at Ai. Those writers who saw their work as arresting the atrophy of the Republic under the periwig regents were obliged to resort to this language of folk piety if they wished to command a popular following. And since a conspicuous number were either predikants or expredikants, like Abraham van de Meersch, the editor of De Denker, and Nicolas Bondt who came from a church family, this was in any case a natural vocabulary for them to employ. Nor did Dutch eighteenth-century writers feel particularly apologetic about their religiosity. When 's Gravesande was reproached by a French correspondent for skating over the inconsistencies of Christianity, he replied that he was proud to let it be known that he, at any rate, remained a Christian. Much of the scientific advances attained by Musschenbroek, Swammerdam and Nieuwentydt were argued within the framework of a natural theology48 and, all in all, deism (much less atheism) found few acolytes within the indigenous culture. These ingrained habits merely confirmed the isolation of those who, like the members of Petrus Burman's circle at Kasteel Santhorst, thought of themselves as genuinely 'verlicht\^ Burman's credentials for presiding over a modest 66

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troop of Dutch philosophes were impeccable, having been a professor of rhetoric and poetry at Franeker University in Friesland and at the Amsterdam Athenaeum Illustriae - an institution with a strong humanist background. As an aristocrat and landowner he had the ease and cultivation with which to launch a campaign on behalf of the philosophes, and in defending Marmontel's Belisaire against denunciation by godly zealots like Petrus Hofstede and Barueth, he did enter the lists against the superstititous and the intolerant. But even Burman's motto for his little group was 'Vrijheid, Vroomheid, Vrede en Verdrag' (Liberty, Piety, Peace and Toleration). And in attacking bigotry he went out of his way to avoid any imputation of paganism. And well he might, for the more aloof he and his followers stood from what they regarded as the incorrigible sententiousness of their countrymen the less chance they had of exerting any appreciable influence. A minor castle adorned with eighteenth-century beautifications was indeed an apt metaphor for the whole enterprise. There were other occasions when reason attempted to stand fast against a rising tide of apocalyptic hysteria, and emerged somewhat battered from the onslaught. In 1730-2 a particularly calamitous series of floods inundated large stretches of the North Sea coast north and south of Haarlem, and between The Hague and Rotterdam. When the waters receded and officials inspected the broken sea dykes they found them honeycombed with cavities.50 These had been caused by what was naturally described as a 'plague' of hitherto unknown molluscs with impressive boring equipment and apparently insatiable appetites, dubbed the 'pile worm' (teredo T. navalis). Needless to say, those preachers who had long been warning that the depravities of the sinful would invite the wrath of God used this calamity, along with a contemporaneous outbreak of cattle murrain (which had the usefulness of being one of the ten plagues visited on Egypt), as ammunition for their jeremiads. The situation turned much uglier, however, when a sudden outbreak of prosecutions for homosexuality began to assume to proportions of a witch-hunt. 51 While the two phenomena began without direct connection, it was not long before 'unnatural crimes' were held to have been responsible for the chastisement of an angry Jehovah. Trials were mounted in the north of the country, especially in Groningen, and began to spread south to Holland. In one village, Oudhoorn, the sadistic drost or squire, Rudolph van Mephschen, specialized in extracting confessions from youths between the ages of twelve and eighteen by subjecting them to the most humiliating and brutal interrogations. The oldest of the offenders were executed, others were brought to the scaffold only to be reprieved at the last minute and confined for life in a House of Correction. In the larger towns the ferocious sentence of strangling, submersion with a hundred pound weight, and then the display of the inverted corpse on a gibbet, was duly carried out. The response of the lay magistracy, and of moral and political commen67

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tators, to this appalling hysteria was more like embarrassment than abhorrence. Nothing comparable to the Calas polemic ever emerged even though the evidence produced to convict was often very dubious. Those who wished to calm the situation refrained from directly attacking the predikants most prominent in the campaign, and instead published learned treatises on the zoological attributes of the dreaded Worm, suggesting its affinities with other molluscs, hotly debating whether it was gastropod or bivalve, and in general attempting to present it as a natural phenomenon rather than an instrument of divine displeasure. One wit went so far as to observe that, since a day of public fasting had been called to propitiate the Almighty, he hoped the worm would obey the injunction along with other sinners. The difficulty for the advocates of natural religion was that since they themselves had assimilated the multifariousness of Creation into propositions concerning the omnipotence and ingenuity of the Creator, it was difficult to make a selective exception on purely materialist or fortuitous grounds. It was well nigh impossible to persuade the Dutch public that any part of the Creation or any event in the contemporary world was devoid of moral meaning and consequence. No wonder that Diderot the freethinker noticed that for all their tolerance 'la nation est superstitieuse, ennemie de la philosophic et de la liberte de penser en matiere de religion'.52 For the same sort of reasons, the formal institutions of learning in the Republic, the universities and academies, were more receptive to a north German, Wolffian strain of idealism than to French iconoclasm and secularism. Wolff had taught for a while at Utrecht and his influence was sustained through disciples such as Pestel and van der Marck, both of whom held chairs in Dutch universities and exercised a powerful influence on the 'Patriot' generations of the 1770s and 1780s. It would be misleading to imply, however, that these institutions were aflame with creative speculation. Leiden resembled Oxford or Cambridge much more closely than a Scottish university, its student population dwindling and spending more time hunting, duelling and whoring than in the lecture theatres. By 1800, when Richard Fell visited, there were a paltry hundred and fifty students, and, to complete the lugubrious scenario, half the stuffed hippopotamus in the onceadmired zoological collection had fallen away. Academic personnel was as moribund as the rest of the institution. When the Stadholder William V visited Leiden in 1775 he was greeted by the Professor of Latin and the Professor of Medicine who, respectively had held their chairs for forty-one and forty-three years. There were some exceptions. The tradition inaugurated by the great Herman Boerhaave of empirical study of clinical cases was still maintained and in oriental languages, and the newly founded discipline of Fatherland History, the University showed some flickering embers of intellectual vitality. In other less illustrious universities matters were even worse. Harderwijk in Gelderland was notorious, its corruption immortalized in the doggerel 68

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Harderwijk is een stad van negotie Er koopt hier bokking, bessen en bullen van promotie Harderwijk is a town of trade Here you can buy smokedfish,berries and degrees At the informal level, intellectual life in the Republic was more lively. It could scarcely have been less. Clusters of self-consciously 'improving' writers and debaters gathered in the so-called 'Friday Clubs' which began with Libertate et Concordia founded in Amsterdam by van der Meersch. By the 1760s there were similar clubs throughout most of the major towns of the country, drawing their membership from the professional, commercial and landed classes. Their proceedings were characterized by a tone of moral urgency and were devoted to discussing the improvements required to regenerate what was held to be the Republic's stagnating economy and its political and military decline. Not unlike the French societes de pensee they gave rise to a later generation of learned societies promoting essay competitions and journals on more specialized topics. The Hollandsche Maatschappij van Wetenschappen (1752); the Zeeuwsche Genootschap van Wetenschappen (1769); the Bataafs Genootschap van Proefondervindelijk Wijsbegeerte te Rotterdam (1770) and Teyler's Genootschap in Haarlem (1778) all interested themselves in the compilation of information and expertise on subjects ranging from astronomy to tax reform and fertiliser improvement, but they also fed the growing 'Patriot' attack on complacency, venality, luxury, oligarchy and obsolescence.53 In common with similar informal academies in Spain, Italy, Switzerland, England and France, these societies were as much an expression of the clubbability and gregariousness of eighteenth-century amateur men of letters and science as of any burning desire for reform. Indeed, their published proceedings are marked by an air of polite and detached illumination, and it was left to the more explicitly missionary 'Patriot Economic' movement to attempt to apply new ideas on the reformation of economy and polity alike. At a much less exalted level, curiosity about the natural world was communicated to a wider public through digests such as the Algemeen Magazijn van Wetenschap, Kunst en Smaak (The General Store of Knowledge, Art and Taste), or the Nieuw Algemeen Vaderlandsch Magazijn (The New General Storehouse of the Fatherland) which produced snippets of articles suitably vulgarized for a lay readership, along with news and reviews from home and abroad. At the same time, these very miscellaneous offerings studiously avoided anything that could be construed as politically controversial. The first two items of one issue suggest the indiscriminate and apolitical nature of their selections: 'Advice on how to deal with a prolonged and severe attack of Diarrhoea'; 'Report on special and dangerous ways in which to search for birds' eggs on the Orkney and Faroes islands.'54 69

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Encyclopedism without polemic; reform without scepticism - that was the character of the Dutch 'verlichting'. Whether this precludes its classification within a more general 'European Enlightenment' must depend on how schematically the latter is defined. What is conspicuous by its absence from all but the most savant circles in the Netherlands is precisely that spirit of Voltairian pagan rationalism which set the tone for the Enlightenment in France. On the other hand, much Dutch moralizing writing echoed similar strains of social evangelism in Switzerland or some of the north German towns, and in its rhetoric approaches the language of English reform, and even perhaps Jansenism. Equally the sentimental novels of Rheinvis Feith, and the redoubtable pair of women writers, Aagje Deken and Betje Wolff, in which innocence is beguiled into ignominy only to find eventual repentance and salvation, closely follows the lachrymose intensity of Rousseau and Richardson, the latter in particular winning a great following in Dutch translation. But however derivative in style and theme, as Betje Wolff wrote in her preface to Sara Burgerhart, 'We are depicting for you Dutch characters; people who may really be found in our Fatherland'. 55 And in the tales of the wayward Cornells Wildschut, or the egotistical and impulsive Willem Leevend who first ravishes the unfortunate Lotje and then proceeds to foreign adventures including a disastrous liaison with a German countess, only to sail eventually into the haven of an upright Christian marriage with the allforgiving Christje Helder, there remains perfectly preserved the perennial moral themes of the literature and genre painting of the previous century. This parochialism was not incidental to the cause of reform in the Netherlands; it was its motive force. For much of the eighteenth century, while the Republic was becalmed in a political and economic torpor, there was little sense of sustained emergency. Even after the riots against taxfarming in 1748 which threatened the supremacy of the urban patriciate, the Stadholder William IV was undisposed to contemplating any far-reaching changes in government. Through an astute neutrality in the Seven Years' War, the Republic continued a prosperous if unspectacular career. Even the financial panic which rippled out from the Amsterdam crash of 1763 failed to shake the governing class - either pro- or anti-Orangist - from ancient assumptions about their alternating ascendancy, and their monopoly of office. Some of the journals which had grown out of the 'Spectatorial' press, like De Grijsaard, De Vaderlander, De Politieke Opmerker and De Spectator der

Studenten, did come to adopt a more missionary tone ridiculing the pretensions of oligarchy, its great thickets of nepotism and the secret 'contracts of correspondence' by which allied patrician dynasties shared the spoils of city government.56 Their targets in the 1750s and 1760s were mostly local city magnates and their hangers-on. It was only in the late 1760s and the 1770s, when the Stadholderian party sought to establish a more powerful ascendancy throughout the country, that disaffection of the temporarily and the permanently excluded generated more ominous criticism.57 70

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But in the upheavals which were to follow those few who might be described as partisans of 'enlightened reform' like Elie Luzac were conspicuous for their political conservatism.58 This hardly disqualifies them for the troupeau, of course. Voltaire was not renowned for his enthusiasm for immoderately prosecuted reform, and he dreaded mobocracy as much as the most entrenched oligarch. But by the 1780s, it must be plain, the condition for bringing about that amorphously defined act of collective renewal prescribed by the vernacular Enlightenment in the Netherlands was the rejection of a cosmopolitan, Francophone, universally applicable, rationally discerned set of natural laws, in favour of a highly particular, inward-looking, evangelical, proto-romantic cult of the Fatherland. In other words, so long as the Enlightenment in the Netherlands remained true to itself it also remained alien: the product of two 'false' Dutch enlightenments - that of eulogy and that of functional employment. To reaffirm their own, as they supposed, threatened identity, Dutch 'patriots' were required to become something more than the purveyors of other cultures' wisdoms. Simon Stijl, whose popular Opkomst en Bloei der Verenigde Nederlanden (The Rise and Flourishing of the United Netherlands) breathed a balmy air of self-satisfaction, nonetheless concluded on a more apocalyptic note. A new race of Dutchmen would arise, he promised, schooled and hardened by a virtuous education, to show the rest of Europe that the Dutch no longer stagnated 'in our stuffy fogs', but (unlike the unlamented Poles) would be 'ready to defend our Liberty which is the Mother of us all'.59 But stereotypes cannot be decreed out of use. The Dutch no sooner shook off one type of cultural colonization before they became captive to another, no less callow and much more brutal. Mirabeau, who thought he was a friend, in the aftermath of the wretched debacle of 1787 when the Patriot revolution was suppressed by a Prussian army, urged his allies to renewed efforts: 'aux armes nobles patriotes, aux armes, faites retentir partout ce cri de liberte'.60 The Dutch, it seemed, were yet again honoured with the role of vanguard battalions for the cause of Liberty, and yet again their fraternal well-wishers were leading from the rear.

5 The Enlightenment in Switzerland SAMUEL S. B. TAYLOR

It is a bold man who takes the Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet as representative of the Enlightenment in his country after the publication of a work whose title translates as Charles Bonnet, Enemy of the Enlightenment.1 And

what of the Bernese anatomist Albrecht von Haller, who congratulated the Genevese for condemning Rousseau's Emile and Du Contrat social, saying no less was due to restore the damaged reputation of the Genevese church?2 The same writer published his Thoughts on Reason, Superstition and Unbelief as early

as 1729, attacking Catholics and freethinkers alike,3 and Bonnet and Haller both took up the defence of Christian Revelation against its attackers and notably against Voltaire and Rousseau. It may seem a little cavalier to suggest that these great symbols of the French Enlightenment are untypical of, even alien to the Enlightenment in another country and that in some mysterious way their opponents are more typical of it. Yet arguably something very similar also occurred in England where free critical enquiry by no means precipitated a break with the Christian church.4 It is the purpose of this brief survey of a largely unexplored field to look at the special conditions which produced this apparent paradox and to follow the 'Darwinian' process by which a difference in cultural environment resulted in a significant difference in plumage. There is a regrettable lack of information and of synthetic studies on the Swiss Enlightenment. Very little at all has been written on the SwissGerman intellectuals of the period, with the obvious exception of the literati of the Bodmer and Breitinger circle in Zurich. There is no authoritative, modern study of the Protestant churches in the cantons in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.5 Little has been said of the political movements in the cantons prior to the French Revolution. Serious work has been done on Voltaire, Rousseau, Haller and Bonnet certainly and on the development of the publishing trade in Switzerland over this period.6 Individuals have attracted their biographers. On the general intellectual movement of the time, however, and especially on such movements as there may have been in the German-speaking cantons there is very little indeed. It may well be that 72

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the bias in our sources of information has produced a resultant bias in the view presented here, but if we have emphasized Swiss-French intellectuals this does appear to be an accurate reflection of events themselves, though we must expect the picture for the German-speaking cantons to be modified in due course. For reasons that will become apparent, however, Enlightenment philosophy in Switzerland made its greatest mark in urban Protestant areas where French was the dominant language. The fact that Berne also followed these movements - at some slight remove - may also have something to do with the strong gallicizing influences it underwent and with the immigrant Huguenot community and its pastor Elie Bertrand. The European Enlightenment cannot merely be equated with French deism and even less with the militant materialism of the 1760s and 1770s in France. It is simply not a homogeneous concept subject to rigid definition. Whatever the original organism, it underwent significant mutations over a period of time and as it spread into differing cultural environments. It began, certainly, as an epistemological revolution transforming Cartesian philosophy into something approaching the modern empirical, scientific method. Even where religious faith remained firmly rooted, we still witness an approach to the study of human behaviour and of scientific phenomena as secular sciences regulated by purely material phenomena. The view of philosophy and science as the handmaids of theology was decently buried and the temporal dimension rehabilitated so that man's material well-being might be sought without inhibition or ecclesiastical anathema. Another fairly widespread factor was the emergence of a self-conscious, educated public opinion in many countries and the development of the media which served and not infrequently manipulated it. This opinion took the form of a diffused scepticism and agnosticism in areas of knowledge which were not conducive to empirical proof, but it also took the form of a more generalized political and civic self-awarenes, and a humanitarian regard for the need for reform, whether economic, judicial or administrative. In Kant's term, the Enlightenment encouraged a militant belief in the right to conduct rational inquiry regardless of official attitudes or theological censorship. It also encouraged a generalized though perhaps naive assumption that ideas could stimulate reform. There are therefore elements of convergence in the European Enlightenment - though divergence was inevitable even to the point of areas in which there was conflict, not between the enlightened and the unenlightened, but between the enlightened themselves in different intellectual environments. A complicating factor in our study is the fact that the Enlightenment grew in a soil prepared for it in the full flood of the seventeenth-century Cartesian revolution. In Switzerland in particular its foundations were laid when academic circles in Geneva and elsewhere in the Protestant cantons espoused a rational philosophy and established an intellectual climate receptive to 73

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further philosophical advances, and alien to the intellectual rigorism of earlier years. The ground was prepared for the empirical philosophy of Newton by this profound penetration of rationalism in the academies and by the creation of a pastorate and governing elite for whom Newtonian philosophy was less a distinct phase than a continuing development of changes already well established. For all practical purposes, eighteenth-century Switzerland consisted of twenty associated cantons of which only thirteen were fully federated and the remainder technically no part of the confederation. These latter did, however, have involved forms of alliance with the confederation, or what we would now term special relationships. Substantial parts of present-day French-speaking Switzerland were in this anomalous position, Geneva being a separate city-state, Vaud being under Bernese rule and Neuchatel subject to the king of Prussia. Reluctant as some Catholic cantons may have been to admit further Protestant members to the confederation, we should not doubt the genuine 'family' ties connecting federated and non-federated cantons. In social structure too they were very alike, most urban centres showing a general movement in the seventeenth century towards administrative control by an elite governing class drawn from a small group of families. In every sense these urban centres were patrician societies and aristocratic in all but name. They became increasingly oligarchical as the self-perpetuating magistratures accrued power and eroded the residual powers of other strata of society. The governing families were a closed society with a distinctive lifestyle, however limited they may have been by sumptuary laws. They occupied specific parts of the town. As social mobility froze and the social capillary action ceased to function the larger body of bourgeois or citizens unrepresented in the supreme councils came to resent patrician rule coupled with insidious class distinction. The citizens' success in challenging the exclusive privileges of the patriciate was instrumental in persuading the classes who were effectively denied citizenship itself to demand it. There was a double struggle between on the one side the citizenry and those who held a monopoly of authority over them by birth, and on the other hand between the citizens and those to whom they denied citizenship.7 It was the classic situation of a challenge for power by disenfranchised groups who have achieved a level of material prosperity. In the cantons, armed force usually was the bourgeois militia and could not therefore be used to suppress a bourgeois uprising. The pot came to the boil very easily in the cities, and the means to regulate or put out the flames were not so readily available without calling in the fire brigade from France or other foreign, mediating powers which cities were loth to do. Political developments naturally concerned the cities rather than the countryside and rural populations. The bourgeois and natifs (residents without citizenship) were literate, reasonably prosperous and partially indus74

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trialized. There were libraries, schools and academies with the status of universities. Social divisions were limited superficially by the sumptuary laws still obtaining, but out of these divisions grew a major public debate on the legitimacy of restricted political authority and the principle of government by consent of the governed through existing representative institutions. Arguments were framed in terms of historical precedent within the country and 'natural' rights. At each social interface there arose heated discussion on the nature and rights of citizenship and on the right to citizenship. The Genevese commentator d'lvernois wrote in 1782 that 'the high-sounding title of political equality that they [the natives] heard repeated on every side for so long made possession of the prize all the more necessary for them'. A degree of class-consciousness emerged among the lower orders as the natifs thought of the citizens as 'the party of the poor against the rich, of the weak against the strong, of the oppressed against the oppressor, and above all the party of patriotism and morals'.8 Such revolts occurred elsewhere in Europe but rarely with so little violence or repression, and rarely in such pure theoretical terms. Geneva was not the only pot to boil in the eighteenth century - in the cantons there were risings in Neuchatel in 1768; Basle experienced tensions in 1677, 1718 and 1740; Berne had troubles over the so-called 'Henzi plot' in 1749; all matching particular issues in the Geneva risings of 1717, 1738, 1768 and 1782. Nor were these disturbances isolated outbreaks since something in the nature of an opposition philosophy arose in Geneva at least, to present a sustained challenge at the theoretical level to patrician rule. Edward Gibbon himself recorded an eloquent plea to the French king in which he exposed the grievances of the Vaudois against Bernese rule and against the 'silent inquisition' conducted by the authorities to exclude the unorthodox from office.9 The aim of these movements was not to topple the powers-that-be but to disseminate power. It should not, however, be assumed that their frequent appeal to legal precedent and fundamental constitutions necessarily had validity. The concentric councils which governed these states were not pyramids in which the wider body mandated the narrower, supreme councils. The councils seem to have been separate, independent bodies despite the election of syndics from one to another. Certainly the supreme councils usurped functions of the larger, representative bodies but it remains questionable whether the larger bodies ever effectively held real powers. When the Genevese supreme council vetoed bourgeois demands to convene the general council to debate public issues this was its right and in no way a usurpation. Never had the supreme council been a democratically accountable body, any more than the French monarchy. It is not the rights and wrongs of the affair that interest the modern historian however so much as the terminology of the debate which took place in the full dress of 75

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constitutional law and of natural law, as befitted an Enlightenment movement. Moreover both Voltaire and Rousseau were invoked at different stages in the quarrel by the bourgeois party and later by the natifs to place their arguments on a sounder theoretical basis. We no longer believe of course that Rousseau derived his constitutional theories from Genevese practice, yet we should beware of totally divorcing his theories from his Swiss background. Rousseau asserted his position as 'citizen of Geneva' in moral rather than political terms, and to mark his distinctness within a monarchy and absolutist regime. Yet there was also a very strong assertion in his title of the distinctive quality of the citizen, characterized by his republican 'virtue', and resistance to the corruptions of the French cultural and political climate. For Rousseau and the Genevese citizens, citizenship proclaimed a gospel of civic virtue, resistance to decadence, luxury, theatrical institutions, the grosser forms of social inequality and the loss of the capacity to defend one's freedom. However divided the Genevese may have been over the meaning of sovereignty, they were at one over the moral basis of citizenship, and each side claimed to be the guardian of this tradition, one which was the distinctive characteristic of the cantons and one which preserved a strong ethical dimension in the political debate of the century in Switzerland. Patriotism in the republican institutions of the cantons was certainly coloured by Greek and Roman antiquity, but it was not a scholarly nostalgia or anachronism. It was a socio-economic and ideological reality, in the process of being repainted in Enlightenment terminology. It is surely time that a serious study was made of political dissensions in the cantons and particularly in Geneva in the eighteenth century, since they form a test-tube for political reactions that were to occur on a broader canvas in the French Revolution and through the nineteenth century. The struggles in this parvulissime, minuscule republic, as Voltaire called it, raise important general issues among an unusually informed public. If the American Revolution was the primary seedbed for revolutionary ideas in France, the Swiss dissensions must not be dismissed entirely, and many Swiss revolutionaries were found among the French in the years following 1789. We should now turn to the intellectual revolution which affected parts of Switzerland in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These were remarkable years in Geneva and Zurich. J.R. Sinner wrote in 1781 that 'Geneva and Zurich are today the two Swiss cities in which there are the most enlightened minds and where science and the arts are pursued with greatest success.'10 Of the two, Zurich has been the better known through the assault made by Bodmer and Breitinger on the Leipzig school of Gottsched which gave birth, effectively, to modern German literature. Zurich was the 76

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Edinburgh of the cantons, and it produced Conrad Gessner and a galaxy of figures such as J.J. Scheuchzer in medicine and physics, and Lavater in physiognomy. In Geneva, however, there was no less remarkable a development when Jean-Robert Chouet and Jean-Alphonse Turrettin returned to their native city to occupy the chairs of philosophy and theology. The year 1669 marks a watershed in Swiss intellectual life, as well as in Genevese affairs. With it there came a commitment to the new Cartesian philosophy and to a liberal, undogmatic Protestant theology. At the same time Geneva assumed a major footing in the European intellectual scene. Their successors, the professors Gabriel Cramer and Jean Louis Calandrini, jointly held the chair in mathematics from 1724 and were the educators of Charles Bonnet's generation, teaching Newtonian natural philosophy, Cartesian rationalism and even Wolff's Platonism and rationalism. Whole dynasties of scholars were born in this changed atmosphere, so receptive to thought in England, France and Germany. Buffon acknowledged a considerable debt to Cramer in mathematics, and Genevese scientists and thinkers achieved a European reputation in many fields. The Tronchins, Turrettins, Saussures, Trembleys, Cramers and Pictets formed a unique galaxy of talent. The Genevese book trade was one of the most advanced in Europe and the educational institutions (the Academie and library) unusually distinguished and attractive to foreign scholars. There were similar talents elsewhere in the cantons too, the Bernouillis and Euler working in Basle, with the secretary of state Iselin. In Neuchatel there were Ostervald and Du Peyrou and a thriving book trade. Lausanne failed to attract the same range of talent, and important areas of teaching - for instance modern history - were vetoed by the Bernese overlords. Yet there was still an influential academie where the French Huguenot church in exile trained its ministers, and there were important libraries in both Lausanne and Morges. Again, men of the stamp of Voltaire, Gibbon and various Scots philosophers and historians passed through Lausanne or stayed there. Of all the major centres Berne seems to have remained longest under a preEnlightenment cloud. The commercial and military professions were deemed more useful than the intellect, and even Albrecht von Haller found Berne a little claustrophobic and completed his education at Tubingen, Leiden, London and Paris before taking the first chair in medicine at Gottingen University. Beat de Muralt had been exiled from Berne for his pietist beliefs. Apart from some very able and liberally minded administrators such as Abraham Freudenreich and Charles Emmanuel Bonstetten, Haller worked very much in isolation within his native city on his return from Gottingen. Names in themselves are unimportant, but they serve to remind us that Switzerland came back into the European intellectual scene during the Enlightenment after having faded from it with the demise of the great 77

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Reformation universities. After influencing the world under Erasmus, Zwingli and Calvin, Switzerland declined and was to regain her intellectual role only when she shed the rigorism of the early Calvinist faith. The intellectual renaissance in eighteenth-century Switzerland is therefore the development of a decisive intellectual conversion to Cartesian philosophy in the seventeenth century in those cities where the graft was allowed to take. It tended to be the preserve of the educated patriciate, the social elite, so we may not assume that the intellectual elite of scientists and literati were in any way linked with political stirrings, which in most cases they resisted. The emancipated educational system and cosmopolitan attitude to travel, trade, banking and study made of the cities strong reading centres, especially in Protestant areas which were part of the European 'Bible belt' where reading became a prominent aspect of education. There were public libraries and active book trades subsidized by export markets. Public education was as advanced as anywhere else in Europe outside Scotland. Political neutrality protected refugees from France who enriched the local intellectual scene. Private wealth offered the leisure to pursue scientific interests vocationally. Gibbon's accounts of his Lausanne tutors and Bayle's of his Genevese professors show considerable respect for their open-mindedness and their learning. The cantons had no one to rival Descartes, Leibnitz, Malebranche, Bayle, Grotius, Pufendorf, Newton or Locke in their respective fields. Yet if the major advances in political theory, psychology, mathematical physics, metaphysics and other domains of the intellect were made outside Switzerland, the eighteenth century witnessed a re-entry by the Swiss into the European intellectual movement, largely as observers and assimilators of advances elsewhere, but also through the few who like Burlamaqui, Barbeyrac and Rousseau were original thinkers. Much of this was due to the emancipation of the cities - or some of them at least - from the repressive antiintellectualism of the earlier period, and the first moves to make of the academies something other than seminaries for the local ministry. The Swiss had been guilty of a form of intellectual apostasy in abandoning the dominant position they had held in the Reformation. The return of intellectual vigour was remarkable both for its academic respectability and approval by the establishment of important city authorities, and also for its early date. If we may date this from the appointment of Chouet and Turrettin in 1669, rationalism and in due course empiricism establish themselves in significant parts of the Swiss cantons just as early as they do elsewhere in Europe. In one important area the reaction to dogmatism in Switzerland differed from reactions in France and England, since it occurred without a significant move towards deism or indifferentism. On the contrary it assumed the form of what we may usefully call Liberal Protestantism. Even pietism only took a weak hold and it came under vigorous repression from the authorities 78

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although it could not be stamped out. Liberal Protestantism gained control in Geneva and gradually became accepted in other Protestant centres. It began as a reaction against the harshness of the Protestant Confession of 1618 and the later Consensus, which had attempted to achieve unanimity on a firm doctrinal basis. In their place it substituted a rational, tolerant faith, Chouet and Turrettin in fact refusing to sign the Consensus on being appointed to their chairs. As a result the Academie of Geneva became the centre for one of the most advanced educational philosophies in Europe, and created the conditions for a modern scientific culture. By means of this 'enlightened' and Liberal Protestant climate the clergy were not confronted with deism as the only alternative to orthodoxy. Instead Liberal Protestantism veered away from dogmatic statements of faith to allow rational inquiry in religion, a development inconceivable a century earlier. Historical Calvinism was displaced by rational attitudes accompanied by toleration of differences that did not affect the problems of living. Pastors had the right of private dissent in matters of faith and conscience though the church maintained uniformity in its preaching from Scripture and moral questions. Bayle could write of his stay in Geneva that 'Philosophy flourishes here extremely well. Monsieur Chouet teaches Descartes5 philosophy with no small reputation and a large audience of foreigners.' n Accompanying Chouet's Cartesian philosophy-teaching was a liberal theology taught by Jean-Alphonse Turrettin who set out to unite, not by prescriptive beliefs, but by admitting the right of free critical enquiry and rejecting the Protestant tradition of intolerance which had led to the death of Servet in Calvin's day. Hence toleration made its first appearance as an accepted feature of Swiss Protestantism, though it naturally came under fire as latitudinarian from Catholics and other sections of the Protestant faith. Unity was achieved on the basis of a very small core of central beliefs beyond reasonable controversy. These had to be acceptable to the laity as well as the theologian, and of strict relevance to the business of living and to Christian morality. They also had to have a firm basis in Scripture. Beliefs not meeting these conditions or which were controversial effectively disappeared from religious education in Geneva. Turrettin had a profound effect on the pastorate as a preacher, and on entrants to the ministry whom he instructed. The extent of this liberalism in faith is clear from comments such as Gallatin's: 'Such then is the nature of the Christian faith: it is an enlightened conviction, a demonstration It is a service to truth to base it on critical inquiry and on reason.' 12 Ezekiel Gallatin was, moreover professor of philosophy at the Academie and finally rector, as well as a pastor of the church. Turrettin's work was continued by none more passionately than his pupil Jacob Vernet who wrote in his Traite de la religion chretienne (1730-47): 'Faith and reason are the two torches given us by God to light our path; they 79

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should never be opposed to each other.' 13 Under Vernet the trend towards the subordination of doctrine to moral instruction became even clearer. His contemporary Jacob Vernet preached that: A good shepherd [pastor] pays great heed to preaching on matters affecting faith and moral behaviour. He avoids all trivial or futile questions which merely satisfy the curiosity and the mind, or which obstruct his reason when they can have no possible influence on virtue or happiness whatever they may prove.14 The move in Liberal Protestant theology was therefore away from dogmatism to a rational faith which avoided dogmatic statements in all areas without relevance to the basic problems of living. Metaphysical questions, faith itself and the content of Revelation were beyond the reach of human reason, it was asserted, but their utility and necessity were obvious to the reason. There was no need of intuitive proofs given the 'reasonableness of Christianity' (to adapt an English deistic title). In every way the Protestant church was rationalist but within the confines of Christian faith which it saw as supported and not destroyed by reason. The pastors were suspicious of the intuitive and they simply dismissed rational attacks on religion as the misuse of reason. Religion and Christian Revelation were supremely logical and rationally defensible. No confusion was therefore possible with deism, which eliminated Revelation. Nor could the pastors be called 'Socinian' since the truths concerned were above the reason, and areas in which the judgement was simply suspended. Dissent was tolerated by Liberal Protestants precisely because they had ceased to be dogmatic and could not affect the basic tenets of their faith. Voltaire's insistence on labelling the Genevese church Socinian was therefore as inaccurate as it was offensive, or so the pastors proclaimed. He saw them as an organized religion ripe for enrolment in the cause of natural religion like some Swiss equivalent of his English Quakers. For the pastors, however, this Liberal theology allowed them to see their faith as consistent with the modern Cartesian and Newtonian science, and to state that there was no necessary conflict between Enlightenment and piety. 'True' Enlightenment did not lead inevitably to materialism, deism or, as in Rousseau, to the abolition of Revelation. For them the scientific or rational and the transcendental views of life were perfectly compatible. In the Swiss Protestant cantons, therefore, a situation arose in which dissidents were not forced into divorce with the church. Their scientific culture moved from Cartesian rationalism to Newtonian philosophy without strain, and it remained within the fold of the church without hypocrisy or sectarian strife. Jacob Vernet was in some ways the 'ideal type' of the Liberal Protestant, widely travelled, the friend of Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu, and even undertaking the publication of De VEsprit des lois in Geneva on the part of the author. Vernet did feel some doubts on Voltaire's arrival in Geneva, 80

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but he hoped with others of his cloth that they might win Voltaire to the true faith, just as he came to hope to win them for 'reason'. The conflict throws some doubt on the rationality of the pastors, as it does on Voltaire's awareness of the real issues. The issue of the Genevese theatre - which Voltaire dearly wished to inaugurate - also showed the rational piety of the pastors as heavily conditioned by Genevese customs and prejudices. How much of their rationalism was really open-minded re-examination of beliefs is open to some doubt. Nevertheless in important respects Liberal Protestantism in the persons of Chouet, Turrettin, Cramer, Gallatin and Vernet created the intellectual freedom in which modern science and philosophy could flourish without ecclesiastical anathema, even if the theologians were not always totally consistent in their own rational position. Trade, science and philosophy flourished in an atmosphere of rare toleration. There were clear exceptions where old intolerances survived, and there were clear cases of conflict where Enlightenment in the Liberal Protestant mould rejected Enlightenment in the anticlerical or materialist French mould. There were other instances where the Swiss mentality shied at French attitudes that centuries of antiCatholic or anti-French feeling had made taboo: the theatre, dress, luxury. Hence new Protestantism made no deep dent in the urban life-style of the cantons, and the sumptuary laws and attitudes were maintained with little modification. In this climate of opinion it was perhaps not merely for philosophical reasons that the Cartesian and the empirical revolutions in the cantons were signalled by a shift in intellectual allegiance from France to England and Germany. The clearest mark of this was Beat de Muralt's remarkable Lettres sur les Anglois et les Francois et sur les voiages published in 1725 but reflecting his

experiences on a visit to England in 1694. This document was not merely an important statement on the English institutions of the day, it was also an open criticism of the decadence of French institutions.15 In Zurich a similar shift was to be made from French to German influences, this time in literature rather than philosophy. Though Muralt's work is usually seen as unimportant in comparison to Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques, these latter followed the Swiss work by nine years, and it is salutary to note how many of Voltaire's criticisms of the French and how many of his philosophical comments on the English are anticipated by Muralt. 16 The latter had been educated in Geneva, not his native Berne, and it is interesting that his contacts with the new intellectual mood in Geneva preceded his traumatic visit to England. If the Cartesian revolution in Geneva reawakened the Swiss intellect after a long slumber, Muralt's Lettres are the first tangible sign of Switzerland's reentry into the European intellectual scene. In this 'discovery' of English thought and society, Switzerland led even France and Germany. Muralt's book also marked the assumption by Switzerland of the role of intellectual 81

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entrepot for English ideas on the Continent. She was to share this role with Holland and to a lesser extent with those few French who became Anglophiles. Holland's role as centre for the translation and vulgarization of English science and philosophy was to develop, but with no small help from Swiss emigres. Certainly Ernst charges the ruling class of many Swiss cities with being antiquarians, guardians of an ageing intellectual museum, 17 but over the course of the eighteenth century the cantons came to exert the role otgeistige Mittlerin, or intellectual entrepot, within Europe. Translation, publication and journalism were either centred in the cantons or heavily dependent upon Swiss labour. Pierre Clement translated Lillo, Jean Bertrand translated Mandeville, J.B. Merian translated Hume, J.H. Waser translated Swift, J. Tobler translated Thomson, K.F. Drollinger translated Pope, and from the pen of Bodmer came translations of Milton, Butler, Pope, Young and Percy.18 Such translations were hardly justified by domestic demand, and clearly the bulk of them were for consumption in France and other countries. Swiss travellers covered Europe bringing back philosophical and literary pollen. Rousseau, Benjamin Constant and Mme de Stael are obvious examples in literature, but we should not forget Fuseli in the arts, Clement and Leclerc in journalism. Economic conditions in Switzerland did not offer material security to the writer unless he exercised another profession. Haller was a scientist and a magistrate, Saussure of independent means, Bonstetten a magistrate, Bodmer, Breitinger, Lavater and Bridel pastors or professors. Those who could not live a life of scholarship on their private means or in a profession such as the pastorate or academy gravitated towards journalism. Bayle is no bad example. Leclerc undertook journalistic activities in Holland. Even in Switzerland the Neuchatel Mercure suisse survived under various titles between 1732 and 1784, and there was even a French-language Gazette de Berne. It was in book publishing that the Swiss rose to dominance, notably with works that encountered censorship difficulties elsewhere. Montesquieu, Brissot, Mirabeau and Raynal all published in the cantons, as did the most militant atheist of the century, the baron d'Holbach. Voltaire's Fabrique de Ferney inundated Europe with his proscribed works using Genevese publishers for the most part. A large part of the European underground press was therefore controlled by the Swiss and this played a major role in the dissemination of the Enlightenment where conventional publication was impossible. There were important publishing centres in Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchatel and Yverdon for French-language publications, and the Swiss maintained a healthy export trade for banned or pirated bestsellers. Other activities such as the Yverdon encyclopedia made life difficult for the Parisian and Dutch publishers. As a result of the book trade and the expansion in the academies there existed a livelihood for a small but crucially important 82

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population of scholars and writers to augment the number of those who had private means. Literary circles surrounded figures such as Voltaire, but indigenous literary circles grew around Madame Necker, Madame de Charriere and the Zurich writers. The correspondence of Swiss men of letters and scientists was voluminous, with fellow writers, the nobility and monarchies of Europe and also with the academies of Europe. If the picture of Switzerland as an intellectual centre was inconceivable at the beginning of the seventeenth century or even well into that century, by the early and mid-eighteenth century there had been a decisive transformation. A scientific and philosophical renaissance took place without incurring ecclesiastical anathema, while the political caste-system created a class of scholars and scientists within the patriciate. It has not been our intention in this brief survey to rehearse the well-known roles of Voltaire and Rousseau in the European Enlightenment, or for that matter to review their relations with the Swiss intellectuals of their day. There is a link between Rousseau and the opposed Genevese political groupings in their shared concern for citizenship as the basis of republican politics. There is a shared concern between Voltaire and his various contacts in Geneva, Lausanne and Berne for humanitarian action, constitutional government as a check on unbridled absolutism, the neutralization of the strength of the Roman Catholic church in France and the establishment of toleration by law. Yet it would be hard to claim that Voltaire's presence advanced the Swiss Enlightenment along these lines since these were seen as French problems. Nor was Rousseau's brief entente with the Genevese bourgeoisie decisive for either party. Far more important for the course of Swiss Enlightenment was the threat that both Voltaire and Rousseau seemed to imply to Liberal Protestantism itself. The anticlericalism to which they devoted so much of their writing was aimed at the organized church in France, but the sustained and even brilliant attacks they developed against the foundations of this French church - its apologetic founded on miracles, prophecies and Revelation itself- were clearly dangerous to Protestants as well, since the rational underpinning of Liberal Protestantism had been narrowed down to the authority of Christian Revelation. Whatever the benefit that accrued to the Swiss from contacts with these two central figures of the European Enlightenment, therefore, they could only appear to Protestant and Catholic cantons alike as deists who rejected the central core of the two established faiths of Switzerland. Even though both Voltaire and Rousseau saw much in common with Liberal Protestantism in particular, therefore, what they shared was uncontroversial and common ground. It was their differences that were crucial 83

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in forcing Liberal Protestants into a rigorist reaction to preserve the identity and distinctness of their faith when they had before this been content to leave these areas open, allowing a degree of dissent to avoid divorce. If we have so far seen the progress of the Enlightenment within the cantons largely in terms of theological liberalism and tended to guard against interpretations of political divisions in terms of the Enlightenment alone, this is perhaps to say no more than that Enlightenment affected the pastors and the patriciate profoundly but that the natural resistances of each, and their limits to rationality and Enlightenment, worked in different directions. Enlightenment does not reduce men of all conditions to a common stock, it affects them within the limits imposed by their education, vested interests and historical backgrounds. It remains to look briefly at science, or natural philosophy, since it was in science that Enlightenment made the most significant and indeed the most original advances in the cantons. In all other areas than religion and science the Enlightenment operated by imitation, attitudes being very largely derivative. In science, as in Liberal Protestantism, the cantons imposed their individual stamp on the Enlightenment within their frontiers and even exerted an influence beyond them. There were many scientists of note in the cantons, but we look here only at two: Albrecht von Haller of Berne and Charles Bonnet of Geneva. Haller grew up in a society far from being as open-minded or enamoured of scholarship as Geneva. For the Bernois Samuel de Werdt, 'the good works of literature were the Bible, the Helvetic confession, the chronicles of Berne, their laws and ordinances, and all the rest was pernicious'.19 Literary culture in Berne was backward and the educational system inferior to that in Lausanne and Geneva. In spite of the claustrophobic atmosphere the city still housed Elie Bertrand, one of Voltaire's most 'philosophical' acquaintances in the country and a contributor to the French Encyclopedie. Voltaire also at one stage courted the city fathers to secure a bolt-hole in case of need. Of Haller's eminence there is no doubt. His reputation - even outside his poetry - was European. He was called to Gottingen to found the first chair of medicine, and he subsequently returned to his native Berne to assume his patrician duties. He was rigorously orthodox in his external religious practices and he made himself a willing apologist of Christian Revelation. He denied in these writings the supremacy of the human intellect in all matters since it was potentially materialist or anarchical. Yet for all this public orthodoxy he was deeply disturbed by doubts of an intellectual and scientific order. Newton's mathematical certainties had afforded a certain space in which scientists of similar stamp could see a clear vision of a God-centred universe. The problems for scientists of Haller's generation arose from the massive expansion in the life sciences where the evidence for a thorough-

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going materialism seemed more convincing. Determinism was no longer simplistically seen in terms of the laws of chance and a purely mechanistic framework. La Mettrie and Helvetius had elaborated it in ways that allowed for human diversity and subtlety and yet showed much of our apparent 'freedom of the will' as conditioned by background or circumstance. With increasing knowledge of the transformation of species and of the reproductive systems of micro-organisms, too, the whole concept of the creative process had taken on new depth. The honest and open-minded scientist could no longer keep his piety free from all taint of doubt. The pious and the atheist differed in no way over the data, merely over their interpretation. 20 Many scientists of repute were plagued by attacks of scepticism and had to confess themselves freethinkers, or what we might now term agnostic, at some point in their life, and achieve a Christian faith which allowed them to live at peace with their intellects through some degree of unorthodoxy, or by reserving their private positions in areas they could not settle. Haller saw the choice as between uninhibited free thought and Christian belief, and chose the latter in terms that hardened as he became more concerned at the extremer forms of French materialism in the 1760s and 1770s, notably in the clandestine publications of d'Holbach. 21 He published letters on the most important truths of Revelation in 1772 and followed these with works defending Revelation against 'the seductive badinage of some Wits'. 22 'That which provides Hobbes with a cause for doubt affirmed Newton in his faith and the source of La Mettrie's badinage provided Boerhaave with an object of admiration and reverence.' Affected as we are by the pleasure principle and education these did not reduce us to being conditioned or determined in all our responses. Materialism was therefore unacceptable as a philosophy. He restated the divinity of Christ and his union with God, to assert the existence of free will since 'we/eel that we determine our own actions'. 23 It would be as easy to impugn the rationality of this scientist as it would that of the Genevese pastors, but we would merely be questioning the scientist's public position and reasons he saw for suppressing personal reservations in the interests of the need for commitment. Voltaire has been suspected of a similar distinction between public and private positions and Haller may surely be allowed the same freedom. The other major scientist to be considered here is Charles Bonnet, the 'sage of Genthod', a naturalist of the first rank and a founder of modern biology. He was an inexhaustible experimenter who refined to an unprecedented degree the techniques of observation of micro-organisms despite partial and intermittent blindness. He experimented to discover the mechanisms of photosynthesis and the general chemical mechanisms of plants, made pioneer discoveries in the parthenogenesis of aphids and played a dominant role in establishing the possibility of reproduction without the participation 85

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of the two sexes. He had absorbed the philosophies of Newton and Locke and his reputation brought him into contact with many foreign academies as member or correspondent. Jacques Marx has done no small service to the Swiss Enlightenment in setting out a basis of fact to aid in the understanding of this complex but brilliant scientist.24 With Bonnet as with Haller, in microbiology as with embryology and the other aspects of Haller's work, the life sciences posed unanswerable spiritual dilemmas. Bonnet was a no less committed Christian than Haller, being orthodox to the point of reaction in his public utterances and being on several important doctrinal commissions. Yet he still had strong personal reservations on which Haller teased him, charging him with shades of Socinianism. Bonnet's biographer believed that he 'certainly shared . . . the Socinian beliefs of which d'Alembert accused the Genevese clergy',25 and he could reconcile his faith and scientific judgement only by resorting to a private doctrinal indifferentism. Yet here too, with Bonnet as with Haller, fears of the dangers inherent in the mounting materialist upsurge in the 1760s and 1770s were decisive, and he wrote an apologetic of the Christian metaphysic which we might now find imaginative or speculative. His metaphysical statements do not match easily with his scientific certainties and yet he felt the need to reconcile them. He was both a sensationalist in the school of Newton, Locke and Condillac and a spiritualist. He perhaps hoped to achieve a synthesis similar to Leibnitz's and he certainly borrowed heavily from the German philosopher. For Jacques Marx, Bonnet illustrates 'the persistence of metaphysics at the height of the Enlightenment' and he proposed to 'integrate natural history and metaphysics and provide an objective scientific basis for the latter'.26 He rejected materialism and allied his efforts to those of Haller, Spallanzani and that other major Swiss scientist, Trembley, in refuting incredulity. Not all scientists underwent these tensions in reconciling the new science and Christian belief, since in many ways the scientific discoveries were common ground to believers and non-believers, Christian apologists, sceptics and atheists. If there were divergent interpretations of these fundamental data, tipping the balance between faith and loss of faith, one major factor in persuading otherwise impeccable scientists to override any personal reservations was the threat they saw in deism and atheism. The balance the Swiss Enlightenment achieved between piety and Enlightenment was not without strain, but it was at least in part the result of the transformations that had taken place in that religion with the creation of Liberal Protestantism. In this context the presence of Voltaire and Rousseau actively inhibited the progress of Enlightenment in important areas of Swiss intellectual life, and orthodoxy hardened its outlook. Incredulite, or unbelief, was the active reason for so many Liberal Protestants modifying their original tolerant, rational positions. A good instance of this early trend was Haller's poem: Gedanken uber 86

The Enlightenment in Switzerland Vernunft, Aberglauben und Unglauben (1729), which in many ways parallels

Pope's Essay on Man in reflecting the optimistic rationalism of the day. Haller attacked superstitious faiths which attempted to silence the reason - Roman Catholicism no doubt - and hailed reason as the true light to unprejudiced truth: Ein Weiser, der vielleicht mit riihmlichen Verdruss, Des Aberglaubens satt, die Wahrheit suchen muss, Hasst alles Vorurteil, und sucht, aus wahren Griinden, Beim Licht von der Vernunft sie in sich selbst zu finden ... Genug es ist ein Gott; es ruft es die Natur, Der ganze Bau der Welt zeigt seiner Hande Spur.27 In these early years many like Leibnitz, Pope, Voltaire and Haller shared the untroubled view that Providence was evident in Nature, where reason and science combined to offer increasing proofs of his creative hand. Voltaire was to abandon such a position as facile in later years and take up a position nearer to modern existentialism. Haller and Bonnet were less troubled by the question of evil than by the evaporation of this scientific certainty and the discovery of an alternative view of the functioning of nature and the creative process. Within the Protestant faith as it had developed, a personal compromise was at least a viable proposition until the terms of the debate were falsified by the need for a polemic reply to mounting materialism outside Switzerland and the possibility of its spread within the cantons. Another factor clearly relevant to the Swiss Enlightenment is the publication in the canton of Neuchatel of Barthelemy de Felice's Dictionnaire raisonne des connaissances humaines, based on Diderot's Encyclopedie. This 58-volume work

appeared between 1770 and 178028 and details of it are well known. It is the clearest indication that the Swiss Enlightenment was basically an urban, Protestant phenomenon, but acquiring a distinctive tonality in the hands of these same Protestants, distinguishing it from the French and English Enlightenments and even from Protestant Enlightenments in Holland, Germany and Sweden. Felice announced his work in 1769 and had trouble in persuading Swiss authors to collaborate, although in the end Haller, Migard, Chavannes, Bertrand, Jeanneret, Deleuze and of course Felice himself did work on the project. Even though no such work presents a uniform outlook or ideology, it took its stand on the basic tabula rasa, or methodical doubt of Cartesian philosophy. In every other way the dominant philosophy is Newtonian in science and Lockeian in psychology, coupled with a form of natural religion opposed to modern atheism. Yet the natural religion is less deistic than Protestant, its rational toleration mirroring the non-dogmatic Protestant position. It rejected French anticlericalism and claimed to be 'd'inspiration chretienne' and based on the 'lumieres d'une 87

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raison eclairee'. The appeal was to the orthodox, but an orthodoxy opposed to Catholic theology, alive to scientific evidence and reconciling faith with reason. Elie Bertrand, a Protestant friend of Voltaire, was closely involved and so too was Polier de Bottens of Lausanne who was also a pastor. Hence the attack on French philosophic in this characteristic product of the Swiss Enlightenment was founded on the Liberal Protestant position. Here again the new science and philosophy were assimilated within an orthodox doctrinal position precisely because that doctrine had already taken a major step in the direction of Enlightenment philosophy and science in the academies or universities, and rooted itself in the polite, academic and social elite. It was the creation of an enlightened intelligentsia composed of a wealthy, educated and governing elite that enabled the Enlightenment to take root in the cantons with minimum strain and without major conflict with the church. This is perhaps the major contrast with the Swedish situation and the reason why movements in the cantons were freer in some senses than they were in Protestant Germany, though sharing many of its characteristic features. It is the explanation why movements in Catholic cantons - as in Catholic Germany - were slower and more hog-tied by ecclesiastical and secular authorities. It also explains why the Swiss Enlightenment was not - as in France - diverted so substantially into anticlericalism and why materialism took so little root in Switzerland. Perhaps too it explains why fears of the charisma of the great French Enlightenment figures should have produced a marginal but significant setback in the advance of the Swiss Enlightenment, forcing some of its major figures into a firmer and more rigorist commitment to orthodoxy than might otherwise have been the case. The Enlightenment saw the final re-emergence of Switzerland and its associated cantons from intellectual stagnation and its re-entry into the European intellectual movement. The movement was largely confined to Protestant cantons, present evidence suggests, and to those speaking French rather than German. To this extent, then, Enlightenment has to be seen as the child of Liberal Protestantism, open to foreign influences and above all to the Cartesian and then the empirical, Newtonian revolutions. The main dissemination points were the Protestant academies and the scientifically minded patrician elite of the cities, though at the same time the educated literati gathered to them groups of writers, translators, publishers and journalists, and the pastorate and professions as well as the educated middle orders mixed more freely within these educated circles and intelligentsia. The educated became intellectually emancipated, even if social divisions were less yielding: a fact which produced considerable social strain, as we have seen. The new cosmopolitan mood created new links with England above all, and then with Holland and Germany, in which the Swiss became the natural entrepot for the dissemination of European philosophy and achieved a 88

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dominant position in the European book trade, rivalling Holland. France was at the same time the inheritor of the torch of Enlightenment from Newton's England in the mid-eighteenth century, and the seedbed of a dangerous atheistic or deist materialism in the 1760s and 1770s, and this, together with the natural Protestant hostility to Catholic France, made the Swiss take significantly different directions in their progress to Enlightenment to those taken in France, and even to those in England, Germany, Holland and Sweden, their Protestant friends. There was no progress towards scientific humanism or 'agnosticism' as occurred in the post-Darwin era among such families as the Huxleys. In Switzerland we witness instead an orthodox Enlightenment based on what Protestants saw as enlightened faith. In this context both deism and materialism were equally irrelevant. Socinian tendencies existed, certainly, but Enlightenment and piety remained compatible. If Switzerland created a species of Enlightenment, then it was to have a dominantly Protestant plumage and it created its habitat in the Frenchspeaking cantons, where it resisted the carnivorous tendencies of its cousins in France. No doubt this first attempt to discern the main currents in the Swiss Enlightenment will have underestimated the importance of aspects that future research will re-evaluate. It has certainly set aside many individuals who, though important, do not appear to represent any general movement. We have deliberately steered discussion into schematic lines, and in the process hope to have brought to light issues which have also come to light in studies of the Enlightenment elsewhere in Europe. This brief and selective survey may therefore serve as a beginning.

6 The Italian Enlightenment OWEN CHADWICK

The first Italian characteristic of the Italian Enlightenment1 is that Italy is a long mountainous country and by geography, history and politics was divided. Few thought about Italy. They thought of Lombardy, Venezia, the Papal States, Naples, Sicily, the duchies. Turin was psychologically not remote from Paris. Milan was near to Vienna. Naples was psychologically and politically much nearer to Madrid. Palermo felt to be near nowhere. As in every other country the Italian Enlightenment consisted of a series of small groups - learned marquises, liberal priests, angry anticlericals, cultured bibliophiles. These groups were of importance to a future Italy. But they were more isolated, they went a more solitary way, than similar groups in France or Germany. The second Italian characteristic depended upon the existence of the Pope. In Rome sat the only international figure of Italy. The authority which he exercised in the church was exercised directly within the Papal States. But all the Italian churches, with the possible exception of Venice, were more dependent upon the administration of the Curia in Rome than the churches of Austria, Bavaria, France, Spain or Portugal. The Enlightenment always contained a criticism of obscurantism inside the church. In Italy such criticism was bound to take unique forms. On the one hand it sometimes made it more Catholic; on the other hand it sometimes made it more ferociously anti-papal. The third characteristic was its tendency to be very practical. Italians thought about practical problems, economics, prosperity, government, penal reform, education. For the first time they applied to political philosophy that phrase, 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number'. They were not the only stimulus, but they were the principal stimulus in those years to Italian thinking upon relevant and contemporary themes. The fourth characteristic was, simply, the genius of Italians. Though the Italian States in these years came to feel that they fell behind the rest of Western Europe in the pursuit of prosperity and culture, they threw up an extraordinary series of original minds: Muratori to found modern scientific

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history, Beccaria to stimulate the new age of penal reform, Vico to put forward a new conception of the historical process, Genovesi and Galiani to become the expounders of economic theory, Luigi Galvani of Bologna or Alexander Volta in Lombardy leading physicists of the age, not to mention a series of mathematicians, astronomers and other scientists. The word 'genius' of course begs as many questions as the phrase 'national characteristic'. The word must point to something still in the continuity of the civic, ecclesiastical and cultural tradition of Italy; that is, the atmosphere of Italy in the Age of the Enlightenment keeps reminding the student that this was the land of the Renaissance, that the educational inheritance of the citystates was still alive, and that Bologna or Padua or Milan or Rome or Naples had a long history of higher education which suffered no breaks in continuity either by war or by obscurantism. European travellers - we can in this age begin to call them tourists usually regarded Italy as backward except in the realms of architecture, where the memory of Bernini was still green, and where the late baroque betrays the influence of Italian-trained architects in south Germany and France and Spain; and of music, where everyone accepted Italian dominance, and words like Adagio, Andante, crescendo, diminuendo, Vivace became

everyday words in every European language. In the realm of painting Tiepolo was seen by the north and by Spain as the last flowering of the Venetian genius. Young men on the Grand Tour must go to Italy. Yet paradoxically they regarded Italians as backward. Partly this was because the travellers were northern Protestants entering an unfamiliar Catholic country. 'Six weeks', says Gibbon contemptuously of his first visit, 'were borrowed for my tour of Naples . . . whose luxurious inhabitants seem to dwell on the confines of paradise and hell-fire'. As he passed northward, 'I hastened to escape from the sad solitude of Ferrara The spectacle of Venice afforded some hours of astonishment; the university of Padua is a dying taper.' 2 That year was 1764-5, and the University of Padua was not, or was not in all faculties, a dying taper. The eighteenth century was not the happiest time of universities, as every student of Gibbon at Oxford or Wordsworth at Cambridge knows. But in Italy several seminal minds occupied chairs, in Naples, Pisa, Bologna, Padua, Pavia. All the northerners regarded the Papal States as poor, obscurantist and backward. But its historic university at Bologna was the only university in the world to have two women among its professors. The northerners found it hard to understand Italy. The works of Galileo stood upon the Index of prohibited books. Northerners imagined therefore that no one might teach that the earth go round the sun. They could not understand it when they found that the seminary at Padua was one of the

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leading centres of Galileo-study in all Europe, and that the statue of Galileo set up in Florence was erected there with the complaisance of the Roman Inquisition. The universities were relatively well-endowed. Some seminaries (like that at Padua) were excellent places of advanced study. Many libraries were very good, both in monasteries and colleges, and were improving through the century. After so many years of subordination to Spain or Austria, Naples became at last an independent kingdom (1734) under Charles of Bourbon. No one doubts that this new independence was an impetus to the flowering and freedom of intelligence. Political subordination had somehow seemed to carry with it intellectual subordination, though this was in seeming rather than reality. But now they were responsible. Their prosperity concerned their thinkers. The faculty of economics became famous. Antonio Genovesi held the first chair of political economy ever created in Europe. Its academics began to develop their contacts with those in other States of Italy. Naturally economics must be political economy; in any circumstances, but especially in feudal Naples. Theories of trade met barons' power, internal tolls, ecclesiastical exemptions, tax-free status of monasteries, illiteracy of the people, lack of roads, everywhere caste and privilege and local antique power. They were very unsuccessful in influencing government, or government was very unsuccessful in achieving what it would have liked. This contrast was characteristic of old Italy; the liveliest discussion of fascinating and original ideas, accompanied by an almost total inability to make them bite anyone outside the lecture-room. Nearly every Italian state produced a prime minister who was 'enlightened' in the sense of doing his best to break exemptions and lessen the power of the church. In Naples Tanucci (prime minister 1759—76)3 was the most famous of all. His successes were not small, but his frustrations are still more obvious, even when we subtract something for the circumstance that temperamentally he was apt to feel more frustrated than reality warranted. In 1764 Naples suffered horrible famine, with thousands of deaths from starvation. The experience showed Tanucci at his most frustrated and gave new power to the reforming economists. Several cities of the kingdom acquired groups, disciples or readers of Genovesi, to propagate better agriculture, assail feudal interests and follow his advice that property must be redistributed if the country were to progress - or rather, if it were not to be destroyed by calamity. An occasional apccalyptic note prophesying a looming disaster can be heard amid the theorizing. The conservatives were not just ignorant countrymen or clergy. The lawyers of Naples were a phalanx. They were highly educated and disliked change. Genovesi's successors battered away not only at the law but the legal profession; and in vain. 92

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It was a high moment of Neapolitan culture: Filangieri, Grimaldi, Galanti and several others. The Naples group showed a refinement of mind, a profundity of thought, an originality, a precision of form, a subtlety of development and an energy of inquiry which could rival any group of minds in Europe. That is not to say that they did not learn much from the French, the Spanish and the English. They drew heavily upon the French Enlightenment and propagated the study of French thought, especially of Montesquieu and Voltaire. An Italian translation of L'Esprit des lois was published at Naples in 1750, simultaneously in quarto and octavo editions. Near the end of 1764 prime-minister Tanucci wrote to Galiani, who was then the secretary of the Naples embassy in Paris, asking not for the first time for information about the origins and circumstances of the Encyclopaedia;4 and received graphic pen-portraits of Diderot and d'Alembert. Equally important were the English. The fountain of so much in the Neapolitan Enlightenment, Antonio Genovesi, started as a much respected young priest in Salerno, became a passionate student of philosophy in Naples, and in 1741 at the age of only 28 an extraordinary professor of philosophy. The dominant idealist school of Descartes and Malebranche he found to be tired and repetitious. He first came at the English in the Platonic tradition, the Cambridge Platonists, especially Cudworth whom he knew in a Latin edition published in Germany at Jena; then he found the sermons of Tillotson but cannot have been much enlightened by them except by the discovery how fierce against the pope a Protestant archbishop could be; and then he turned to Locke and Isaac Newton and Clarke as critical tools to work upon his own philosophical pessimism. Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity made a deep impression on his mind. He treated them critically. He was a priest. He aimed at refuting their unorthodoxies, he was no deist. But under the impact of this study his own mind began to move fast. Authority already suspected him of going where they could not wish. In his very first year as a professor he had a clash, though he found it easy to defend himself. He was approaching the new doctrine, first formulated in Protestant Germany, of academic freedom, and of the right of a serious enquirer to follow his argument wheresoever it may lead. Soon he was reading and citing Bolingbroke, doubtless protected because readers in Naples would hardly know anything of Bolingbroke's real opinions. Probably his involved style protected him from too much trouble. He could never be a popular writer. The prose was heavy; 'an eagle at thinking, a hen at uttering what he thought', 5 Baretti said of him. He had no poetry in his soul. He wanted the chair of theology, but the archbishop and the papal nuncio were too strong. The failure of his candidature was a blow. It turned the direction of his mind away from theology and philosophy towards ethics, and originally as a part of ethics into economic theory. In economics he found his 93

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primary food for thought not among the English or French but among the recent Spanish economists who were simultaneously influential among the French fiscal reformers. But as he progressed he turned to the English mercantilist writers. Despite the swing away from theology into economics, he remained to the end of his life concerned for the ethical aspects of economic development and the moral consequences of a sudden rise in the standard of living among people hitherto at the level of subsistence. At this point the economic theory led towards another special feature of the Italian Enlightenment. If local sovereignties or baronial rights blocked the way forwards to prosperity, should we only apply our onslaught upon local rights to the rights as they exist within the kingdom of Naples, or should we widen the onslaught and attack the divided frontiers of all the peninsula? Did not the very argument which applied to internal customs within southern Italy apply also to the frontier between Naples and the Papal State? Here was a special feature of Italian Illuminism. Unlike the Enlightenment of the north, it began to hint - hardly as yet more than hint - at a particular political ideal, the future unification of Italy. This was a reason which led Italian historians to place Genovesi and his peers close to the intellectual origins of the Risorgimento. It was a vaulting vision, from professors in ivory towers out of touch with the possible. But as decades passed it was no triviality. In his old age, as discretion weakened, the ferocity of Genovesi's attacks upon Pope and canon law and clerical privilege grew ever more outspoken. He remained a devout priest, almost daily hearing mass and weekly at confession and communion, and he died a pious death. This combination or contrast, of a truly Catholic and religious assailant of the hierarchy, was more likely to be found in Italy than anywhere else in Europe.6 His pupils were still more frank. They went to Scottish historians like Hume and Robertson for historical argument against church privilege. They now 'discovered' their own genius Giambattista Vico, whose Scienza Nuova was published as long ago as 1725, and turned him into a seminal mind of the enlightened historical method, the thinker who penetrated to the essence of the society which they wanted to overthrow. Genovesi's deputy Francesco Longano,7 in a stout polemic against feudalism, translated a book of Thomas Hobbes, appealed to Grotius and Selden. Genovesi's pupil Francescantonio Grimaldi8 even began to use Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His elder brother Domenico Grimaldi, also a pupil of Genovesi, experimented in new agricultural machinery, starting industry, including better methods of producing olive oil. He turned the family estate at Seminara in Calabria into a model of modern methods; and visitors found it so exceptional amid the surrounding misery that its existence only disclosed the hopelessness of the radical plans. Filangieri's fundamental book on jurisprudence, La Scienza della Legislazione (1780-5) has a brooding vision of a common truth and a general 94

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law beneath every religion and every form of political order, and in the expression of this vision owed something to the ideals of the masons. The nastiest police officer of the Restoration said that it was written by order of the masons.9 In Filangieri's Scienza enlightened Italy took an excited pride. 'If England has its Locke', wrote Monsignor Bernardo della Torre on 26 August 1780, 'and France its Montesquieu, we can reasonably claim to have conquered both, because in a single young man we find united the quality, the enlightenment, the knowledge of both those famous men.' 10 (Filangieri was only 28 when the first two volumes were published.) Certainly the book had an English translation only eighteen years after his death, 11 a French and German translation much earlier. Benjamin Franklin became a regular correspondent during the last sick years of Filangieri's short life. Meanwhile the volumes continued with a steady denunciation of torture, secret government, entail, feudal rights; a systematization of general enlightened views on penal reform, a plea for national education. On 6 December 1784 the Congregation of the Inquisition condemned the first four volumes, and the Spanish Inquisition soon followed. It all seemed a long way from the real world: government redistributing property so that owners were numerous instead of few; a national guard instead of a standing mercenary army; equality before the law; widespread opportunities for elementary education; freedom of the press; national encouragement of the arts. 'What are the only aims of European governments nowadays?' was the famous beginning of La Scienza della Legislazione. 'Armaments, artillery, welltrained troops. Every single discussion in the cabinets is directed to one problem alone: what is the best means of killing most men in the shortest possible time?'

Filangieri had a sense that philosophy has come to the aid of the human mind, to banish darkness, that 'superstition exists no more'. What to do about religion? Here the masonic mysticism, and the unreality, reached a climax. Something about the Italian Enlightenment could not but be religious. But Filangieri despaired of the church which he saw in Naples; and so from his country retreat at La Cava the dying man saw the vision of a new and ill-defined religion about to be born.12 As the time passed, and society refused to change, and their anxieties or resentments started to despair, they grew more interested in Freemasonry, more like a sect than like the leaders of south Italian thought. Domenico Grimaldi was arrested as a Freemason in a round-up after the murder (1797) of the governor of Reggio.13 Most of them died before the revolution in Naples of 1799. But the Jacobins of 1799 looked to them for help and guidance. Some of their disciples perished in the Sanfedist massacres which overthrew that republic. Francesco Maria Pagano14 and Domenico Grimaldi's son were executed upon the scaffold. 95

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To the twentieth century Vico is the most original of all the students of Naples in that age. Professor of rhetoric at the university from 1697, on a tiny stipend and much poverty, he was emphatically within the tradition of jurisprudence which was for so long in the intellectual air of Naples; and this most original of Italian minds is one of those most easily seen in the context of a long intellectual inheritance. The Scienza Nuova was first published in 1725, the second edition of 1730 was virtually rewritten, a corrected edition appeared in 1744 the year of his death; it was the first serious and systematic attempt to ask why we have no science of history as we have a science of nature and to point to the principles on which such a science of history might be founded. But all this was very uninfluential until the ninteenth century; partly because Vico's style was often baffling, and partly because his ideas were strange within the normal processes of thought in the Enlightenment, which hardly regarded Vico as one of its leaders. At the opposite pole of the Italian Enlightenment was Milan, under Austrian rule. The year 1764 is taken to be the crux. In June that year was published the first number of the journal // Caffe,15 which the Verri brothers used as the focus of reforming ideas. (But it only lasted two years.) Almost simultaneously the young marquis Cesare Beccaria published Dei Delitti e Delle Pene [Of Crime and Punishment], the book which above all others interested the rest of Europe in the brilliance and originality of Italian enlightened thought. They were intellectually much nearer to Vienna or to Paris than to the Neapolitans. We have the diary of an enlightened nobleman of Cremona, Giambattista Biffi. On 28 July 1778 Biffi heard in Cremona the news of Rousseau's death, and wrote: The greatest genius of our age is dead; the person just like Socrates except in appearance; the learned, fair, just, true, wise man of our century is dead! He was my father, my guide, my master, my idol. His writings are the words of wisdom, and such as always to draw men away from vice and towards virtue. Other learned men of the eighteenth century have written nobly, but no one so sublimely, so truly, so honestly as he. His enemies were all fanatics, asses, priests, charlatans, traitors, liars. His friends are all good men, all sensitive spirits.16 That was not a universal enthusiasm, but Paris loomed much closer. The English and Scottish writers were less important. Some of the northerners started radical and developed into figures of the establishment, cogs in that administrative machine which guided the reforms of enlightened despotism. They might be frustrated, but not so frustrated as the pupils of Genovesi, because the Empress Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II were in their own way and according to their own lights guiding a series of reforms which no government in Naples had the force to undertake 96

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in safety. The Austrian governor in Lombardy, Count Firmian, was decidedly a man of the Enlightenment. Like so many leaders of the Italian Enlightenment, Cesare Beccaria came of an old family of aristocrats and was educated in the usual way, the Jesuit Collegio Farnesiano in Parma, the university at Pavia. Then he quarrelled violently with his family because he fell in love with a girl whom his father thought unsuitable. The two years of alienation from home turned his mind, he afterwards said, to philosophy. Such a sentence wholly understates the passion and agony of that time. He found himself again by being taken up by the Verri brothers into the circle of the Caffe. He started to read the French philosophes. He afterwards said that it was Helvetius's De VEsprit which most influenced his mind. The power of his book, when it came, rested upon a rare combination between passion and calculation. The most emotional of men, often moved to apostrophize, he could not bear the sight or idea of suffering, he had an almost physical compassion. Yet by constitution his mind was cold, hard, mathematical. He had nothing of the stuff of martyrs. When his book appeared and suddenly he was famous or notorious internationally, and governments started to issue their bans, he could not sleep for thinking that he might meet the fate of a Galileo or a Giannone and knew that he would never be able to endure. The basis was Rousseau's social contract, the idea of a society resting upon the consent of its members, tolerant and humane. To form a society men give up part of their liberty, as little as they can, to ensure their safety and tranquillity. This is the basis of the right of a society to punish. Only the legislators, that is the state, can punish because only the state represents the contracting society. No one can be punished except according to a law, the punishers or judges have only to carry out what the state lays down in law. Wherever punishment is found to be useless in preserving the society safe and tranquil, all right to inflict it vanishes. Thence he went on to the most urgent practical matters; the length of and the justification for the imprisonment of persons not yet tried and whose guilt is not yet proved; the superiority of open courts to secret, and the perils of injustice by using informers; the admirable nature of the jury system in England; on the wrongness of forcing an accused to take an oath to speak the truth; on the uselessness and the evil of torture ('the sure way to acquit robust criminals and convict infirm innocents'), and its failure to conform with the principle that no one must be punished until he is proved guilty; on the need for even-handedness, so that rich have no advantage over poor, and therefore also the wrongness of capricious pardons, or of sanctuaries in churches; on the desirability of making punishment so far as possible humane, since barbarity in a state makes the citizens barbarous; on the Tightness of abolishing the death penalty (except in a state of revolution where a state cannot survive if an imprisoned man of power goes on living), 97

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for Beccaria did not believe that capital punishment was more of a deterrent than life imprisonment, and knew cases where a man had been executed and afterwards was proved to be innocent; on the distinction between sin and crime; and on prevention as better than punishment. These considerations were placed, like so many of those enlightened political ideas in that century which is accused of being anti-historical, within a historical context; not really a historical treatment, for Beccaria was no historian, but a historical mood, as though the point which the world had now reached was a particular epoch within the general history of the society and its attitude to its unsocial members. Part of the strength of the book is clarity, part eloquence. This shrinker from pain could conjure visions of charred bones cracking and palpitating entrails still frying. It was a powerful and readable cry against every form of tyranny and injustice, evidently shot through with a powerful sympathy. Nothing in the Italian Enlightenment was regarded as so unique, and nothing as so European, as Beccaria's On Crime and Punishment. It was instantly famous, the French took it up, Voltaire praised it, translations followed into the other languages, when Beccaria visited Paris he was greeted as a lion for all his shyness and timidity, the science of penology was given impetus, Jeremy Bentham took him up, his phrase 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number' (first coined by the Scottish moralist Francis Hutcheson, but first applied by Beccaria to political philosophy) became the everyday language of political reasoning. Most men rejected his view that capital punishment is not the supreme deterrent. But even that doctrine helped to swell the fame and influence of the book. Jeremy Bentham, who was prosy by nature, once became ecstatic as he thought of this Italian: Oh, my master, first evangelist of reason, you who have raised your Italy so far above England, and I would add above France, were it not that Helvetius, without writing on the subject of laws, had already assisted you, and had provided you with your fundamental ideas You who have made so many useful excursions into the path of utility, what is there left for us to do? - Never to turn aside from that path.17 Of late years it has been argued that Beccaria's reputation was inflated.18 Posterity praised Beccaria as the man who ended torture, but the courts and the legal profession were ending torture before he wrote a word. The case is proven, in that Beccaria's attack on torture was a knock against a sorewounded (but never yet eradicated) practice. Nevertheless, the general and moral effect of a book may sum up the better opinion of an entire generation; and as such Beccaria's book marked an epoch in the history of the European mind. The controversy over Beccaria produced a small but unique Italian contribution to political vocabulary. Father Ferdinando Facchinei of the 98

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order of Vallombrosa published at Venice (1765) Notes and Observations on Beccaria's book, accusing it of sedition and irreligion, and its author of being an enemy of Christianity. Amid these notes he coined a word to describe the theories of society on which Beccaria based his view of crime and punishment. Father Facchinei called the philosophy socialismo, and its proponent a socialist.

Beccaria never wrote anything comparable, and consciously disappeared towards obscurity. A book on the nature of style (1770) was not calculated to provoke, and was denounced by Diderot as 'unintelligible, dry and hard, a book on style which was no style'.19 The Austrians made him a professor of political economy (1768-71) and then a state councillor. He had no spark of energy or intellectual passion, was hypochondriacal and absent-minded. He always retained a clear head, a gift of exposition and a rare power of reasoning. His memoranda to the government of Lombardy have been preserved. They advised on food supplies, money, trade, mining, forests, medical care, licences to carry guns, censuses, veterinary schools, labour relations, law reforms and sanitation. He preferred to be behind the scenes, he did not like to be a controversial symbol. Yet he signed the minority report on the commission for the new Lombard code of laws, recommending with two others the abolition of the death penalty. In public the battle over his ideas went on without his presence. He died, aged 56, in 1794.20 Paolo Frisi (1738-84) entered the teaching order of Barnabites and pursued his scientific studies to such effort that he outgrew both his order and his teaching, and after years of effort the Pope agreed (1768) that he might be secularized. One of the Caffe group, he became part of the establishment of enlightened reform, a scientific adviser to the Chancellor Kaunitz and the government in Vienna. Such a career made another contrast between north and south. The southern theorists were blest by patronage from ministers like Tanucci and Caracciolo and Sambuca and even Acton, but could do almost nothing but write and lecture. Their leading colleagues in the north became in effect civil servants. The masonic movement had its converts among them, but was a little less weighty, a little more of a ritual irrelevance in their mood of mind. Giambattista Biffi (1736-1807) became a member of the lodge at his birthplace Cremona until it was closed by order of the Emperor Joseph II. I have illustrated the south and the north, though much more might be said about other aspects of both, especially Venice and Turin and Palermo. But other parts of Italy had neither the means nor the men to take a leading part in the Enlightenment, and yet individuals among them were extraordinarily interesting. For example, Pasquale Paoli, whom the world thought of as primarily a 99

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leader of Corsican guerillas, a national war-hero; and yet in Paoli could be seen the attempt to link a primitive Corsican world with the interests and ideals of enlightened Europe. He was educated in Naples while his father was a refugee from Corsica. It is continually repeated that he attended Antonio Genovesi's lectures in political economy, and if so perhaps he was just a lone offshoot of the tree of inquiry that flowered within the University of Naples. But it has been shown that this is legend. The young Paoli was a soldier in the Neapolitan army and had no time to attend lectures.21 An English contemporary traveller, John Symonds, does tell us that Paoli managed to hear Genovesi lecture on ethics. But mostly he was self-taught on the classical historians from Thucydides to Tacitus. He acquired the vaguely anti-papal doctrines of the Neapolitans in the age of Tanucci; and like Tanucci himself remained full of religiosity and not devoid of superstition. In 1754 he returned to Corsica and was soon the symbol and head of the struggle for independence against Genoa. The revolt was blind resentment. Paoli converted it into patriotism, and the patriotism was a struggle for liberty. Some of it was eloquence and some of it illusion, but not all; he turned a world of feudal clans and rival villages and families in vendetta, for a few years, into a people battling against despots. It was a curious mingling of primitive peasant independence - every man has the right to bear arms and has access to the chief- with notions of a democratic state. The equality of the maquis was theorized into the equality of modernity. It had more than a touch of the unreal. But Paoli was really an amateur of the Italian Enlightenment, who cared for education and wise government, and read Montesquieu, and wished to diminish injustice and obscurantism. The Italian Illuminists were not mistaken in feeling a kinship with this island king. For Voltaire and Rousseau and other leaders among the French Enlightenment the Corsican struggle was a sign of the link which bound their ideas to a struggle for a better society. All over educated Italy the experiment was watched and commented. In Naples Tanucci legislated half-heartedly and was frustrated. In Habsburg Italy, that is in Lombardy and Tuscany, Italians helped a foreign sovereign to the reforms of benevolent despotism. Corsica was unique because for a few years it looked neither frustrated nor despotic. From a distance the republic among the mountains looked hazily like an imminent Utopia. At Mantua on his way into exile (1769) Paoli met the Emperor Joseph II; and according to the story said to him what would have been tactless if he really said it, but which all Italy believed him to say: 'Where there is liberty, that is my country; and where there is no liberty, it is not my country.' 22 At Leghorn in 1770 were published the Lettere Italiane sopra la Corsica (by Luca Magnanima) picking out Paoli's message to enlightened Italy. 100

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His real name was Luca Malanima and he changed it to Magnanima when he became an author. In Leghorn he got to know the books of Montesquieu, d'Alembert, Buffon and Voltaire. In Pisa University they held many discussions on the deficiencies of Italian education compared with the French, and therefore how slowly right ideas and new insights spread among the Italian people. Magnanima hoped to find the new inspiration in Paoli's Corsica; a people who for all its backwardness was deciding to have laws which would secure liberty. In all the long peninsula Italians who wanted better laws sat passive under despotic or oligarchic governments. Only in an island could be found the two necessities of the future, violent action, and the ideal of equality. Magnanima's Lettere Italiane sopra la Corsica tried to lift the island's fight into a European political ideal. Piedmont was really very conservative and shut mentally to new ideas. But it was half French in spirit and many of its citizens were French speakers and French readers. Therefore it kept showing glimmers of the French Enlightenment. But it was not an original force. The same was true, curiously of Venice, the old republic with its oligarchy; anti-curial, excellent in printing, civilized, not far from Vienna, influenced by Lombardy; but curiously unwelcoming to its citizens who had new ideas, too exclusive in its social system. This was odd because during the 1760s Venice was readjusting its church-state system with fierce controversy about the rights of the Pope and clerical power, a time when men might be expected to welcome fresh thinking. The centres were Habsburg Lombardy, Habsburg Tuscany23 and the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Florence, Milan, Naples - these were the cultural capitals: the Beccaria, Verri, Genovesi, Filangieri. The intellectual ferment is found in Venice, Rome, Parma, Modena, Genoa, Palermo; we find books and journals, the same type of men organizing the same modes of affecting public opinion, creating discussion groups, advocating new methods of farming, joining the continual battle between church and state. The aspirations appear everywhere, even in the backward or very provincial regions like the Corsican mountains or the Dalmatian coast. But the practical difficulties were greater. No despotic sovereign shared their opinions, as in Lombardy and Tuscany; no half-enlightened prime minister wanted to encourage their ideas, as in Naples under Tanucci. This is not true of the duchy of Parma, where under its new Bourbon regime the Frenchmen Du Tillot, becoming prime minister, behaved for a few short years like a less skilful Tanucci. Condillac worked for nine years in Parma. Venice and Rome were full of art, magnets of tourists. These were capital cities, with excellent traditions of education, cosmopolitan almost as much as Italian; and their high education, historic in its setting and structure, could 101

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not help but perceive and weigh and discuss the ideas of Enlightenment. The Venice of Goldoni and Guardi and Tiepelo was no cultural backwater. Giammaria Ortes in Venice was a retired, remote-seeming economist of originality. But the conditions were different. Verri founded // Cqffe in Milan in 1764, and he and his leading collaborators became high administrators for the Austrian government. In the very same year and for much the same purposes Francesco Griselini founded at Venice Giornale d}ltalia\ and unlike the young men in Milan, Griselini remained an impoverished journalist and finally emigrated to Milan.24 Genoa was another closed world. Gibbon said in 1764 that he knew no other country in which the governing classes had brought the people more often to despair and rebellion.25 Still, a man could hardly be educated in Genoa without being mentally near Marseilles and therefore not too ignorant of the Encyclopaedia. It was a Genovese who gave the Encyclopaedia an Italian translator; another Genovese translated Locke's On Civil Government. The Genovese government took no notice of these new ideas. In the duchy of Modena was the memory of Muratori, who died in 1750. His name was big throughout Europe, tremendous through Italy; the creator of modern history; the gentle devout unaggressive proponent of reform in religion and the laws. The dukes of the latter half of the century were suspicious of Muratori's ideas for all their humanity and gentleness. But for political reasons the duchy moved towards Lombardy; and to be drawn into the Habsburg orbit was to be drawn into a wider world of Enlightenment. Its reforming finance minister Ludovico Ricci, who published at Modena (1787) an able study of the way to reform charitable institutions,26 and whom some have seen as a theoretical predecessor of Malthus, ended his life as the finance minister of Napoleon Bonaparte's Cisalpine Republic. Up and down Italy, from Turin to Palermo, liberal ecclesiastics met in study groups and debated. This Catholic reforming movement had parallels in France and Spain and Germany, but shows unique features, especially because of the place of the Papacy in the system of Italian States. Its members were learned priests, librarians, professors, heads of seminaries. Often they needed to be cautious and private in their criticism. When they went into print and became public they were almost always the centre of controversy. Such reformers were generally known in Italy as Jansenists. Certainly some of them read with pleasure and profit the books of French Jansenists; but the name was used more vaguely and widely than in France. It came to mean anyone who criticized accepted doctrines or current practice in the Catholic church. Muratori was no Jansenist in the technical sense of the word. He accepted the bull Unigenitus (1713) which condemned French Jansenism. But several of the leading Italian and Austrian reformers, who had no intention of accepting the bull Unigenitus, looked upon him as their 102

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master in the reform of the people's religion and of the church. His book Delia Regolata Divozione dei Cristiani (Venice, 1747) became a textbook for their pastoral ideals. Some of them drew upon that European model of an anticlerical history, which was one product of the school of law in Naples, Pietro Giannone's Storia Civile. Their leading theorist was Pietro Tamburini, professor at Pavia, one of the most radical and intelligent but also profoundly religious minds in all Italy. They were strong in Brescia where they found a bishop to befriend them; had groups in Venice and Rome, Naples and Sicily; in Eustachio Degola in Genoa they had a priest who by letters and a journal held several of the Italian leaders in touch with the Jansenists over the Alps. In Tuscany under the Grand Duke Peter Leopold Bishop Scipione de' Ricci attempted to force through more radical changes in the church than either his episcopal colleagues or the Tuscan people could stomach. At the extreme left wing, pamphleteers abused as Jansenist easily merged into mere anti-Catholic pamphleteers, like Carlantonio Pilati, who needed to launch his acrid books and pamphlets from the haven of southern Switzerland. But such an extremist was not typical of Italian Jansenism and cannot properly be called a Jansenist. Scattered through Italy, from Piedmont to Sicily, were a few bishops who openly sympathized with and supported the academic critics. The Italian Jansenists were more a Catholic reform movement than an evident part of the Enlightenment as that is commonly understood. But since they called upon new knowledge, and wanted better education, and were against superstition, and denounced obscurantism, and wished to break the Jesuit stranglehold in higher education, and contributed to the fall of the Jesuits, and were not friendly to schoolmen, they shared most of the broad intellectual aims pursued by the men of the Enlightenment, so that we cannot define where one movement ends and the other begins. The Italian Jansenists were weighty in the unsettling movements of that age. A theologian like Tamburini was as important to the development of the critical spirit of Italy as an economist like Genovesi. Outside Italy one extraordinary Italian belongs to the heart of the Italian, or at least the Neapolitan, Enlightenment and yet made a special case because for ten years (1759-69) he was secretary of the Neapolitan embassy in Paris and therefore moved in a subtly different environment of ideas. Partly because of his delightful presence in Paris salons, and partly because of the sparkle of his literary work, Ferdinando Galiani gained a wider reputation amid enlightened Europe than any other Italian except Cesare Beccaria. Born in 1728 of a South Italian gentleman and royal official he studied at the University of Naples in Genovesi's time, and himself became a friend and protege of Genovesi's patron Bartolomeo Intieri. In 1751 he joined the raging debate on economics with an anonymous but soon famous book on 103

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money, Delia Moneta. He was as much a litterateur as an economist, engaging in the studies over the excavations at Herculaneum, writing in praise of Benedict XIV at the Pope's death (Benedict XIV had made him a canon of Amalfi). This panegyric set him on the side of quiet religious reform rather than violent change. But he looked and was a worldly priest, eager for gain, uncommitted to causes. In 1759 Tanucci sent him to be secretary of the Paris embassy. Galiani who disliked his ambassador and the Paris climate was not at first at home among the Parisians. But his charm and wit was soon known so widely that he became the delight of drawing rooms. Till then not particularly nor typically 'enlightened', he found himself at the centre of the French argument over Enlightenment and the Encyclopaedia. He was still an intelligent observer rather than a participant. He gives the impression of caring far more about stipend and social climbing than about ideas. He took no notice whatever of Corsica except as the struggle there might affect the political interests of Naples. Of the Verri brothers, // Caffe, Beccaria and the movement in Lombardy, he took notice only once, after he visited Milan and told Tanucci that he thought their Accademia di Pugni was one result of the good government of Count Firmian. As he lived through the Jesuit suppressions in various countries, he defended the destruction of the order, not originally on grounds of a need for better education nor of more freedom in ideas - the powers have killed them, it is far better for the Pope to accept, 'that is not to kill a living Jesuit body, it is to give decent burial to a corpse which lies by the roadside at the mercy of crows and dogs Does your eminence believe [he was writing to Cardinal Orsini27 who defended Jesuits] that an order of missionaries which has lost all its missions still exists?' 'But since we face a fait accompli, let us use the great chance to do all we can for education - and especially the chance [the IUuminist temper of the reverend abbe peeps out] to diminish the excessive multitude of priests and monks.' His epigrams, coming from the lips of a Catholic priest, were known to astonish or even shock. Voltaire heard a story and so reported to King Frederick of Prussia (29 July 1775) that Galiani said: 'Rome will never recover its splendour until it has an atheist Pope. '28 The man was a realist; the most practical man in the Italian, one of the most practical in the European Enlightenment; not uncommitted, whatever the appearances to the contrary; but always able to be detached, smiling, objective. His regular letters to Tanucci in Naples make a marvellous piece of reporting of the European scene as viewed from Paris. Though elegant in the same salons as Diderot, and admired by Diderot, and almost a friend of Diderot, whom he once put in parallel with Genovesi,29 he was never a rebel, he remained a Neapolitan of the ancien regime. Therefore everyone was surprised and historians are still surprised, when 104

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this tiny and amusing little clergyman suddenly came out on the French national stage in the argument over free trade in corn and the doctrines of the physiocrats. In the winter and spring of 1768-9 he wrote in French the Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds. It was an assault upon the doctrine that free trade is a principle or axiom of universal application; and contained the first discrimination between different kinds of society, agricultural or manufacturing, backward countries and advanced, and different conditions of society from climate and natural resources to customs or structure which affect the economy; in short, that every case must be taken as an individual case, practically, on its merits, without reference to economic dogma. He challenged the doctrine that in all countries, at all times, agriculture is bound to be the fundamental industry. The physiocrats, who were engaged in an effort to break down feudal survivals and old local barriers, disliked Galiani's thesis as reactionary, as a superficial and amusing defamation of well thought principles. Diderot on the contrary was excited, and defended him with passion. Axioms of free trade were well enough if they were not going to make thousands of people starve. In 1769 Galiani returned by order to Naples. Until his death (1787) he lived a quiet life as secretary of the Board of Trade and the adviser to the Treasury, nostalgic for his friends in Paris, always more critical of doctrinaires, writing on literary subjects and the Neapolitan dialect, bringing good but pedantic sense to bear upon the political and economic policies of the kingdom, curing abuses and backwardness, baronial power and mortmain, but with moderation; famous in all Europe as an Italian of the Enlightenment, yet mentally never quite a man of the Enlightenment in the sense of Genovesi or Verri, Beccaria or Filangieri.30 Everyone has marked the paradox of Galiani's personality; a monsignor and a mitred abbot who was the clown of the Paris salons, the enchanting mimic who without effort looked like a chicken when he told a story about a chicken, the raconteur of inexhaustible anecdotes who saw the ridiculous side of every subject; and simultaneously the single Italian economist whose work was studied by Karl Marx and became a classical moment in the history of economic theory. It has been said that such an incongruity would have been impossible for a Frenchman, and was only possible for an Italian, a people in which imagination and the artistic quality could superimpose upon the rational faculty; and if so, Galiani makes a quaint uniqueness in the Italian Enlightenment. But this last theory was propounded by a Frenchman. 31

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7 The Protestant Enlightenment in Germany JOACHIM WHALEY The Aufkldrung is one of the most misunderstood phenomena of German history. The dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, the experience of rapid economic development and industrialization, the emergence of nationhood and fervent aggressive patriotism have obscured the realities of the eighteenth century. On an intellectual level reaction against the Aufkldrung was very rapid: Romantic idealism formed the bridge to another age in which the ideals of the Aufkldrer appeared not only irrelevant but dangerous. By the early decades of the twentieth century the rejection seemed complete: in 1940 one textbook dismissed the Aufkldrung as a 'weapon manipulated by Freemasons and Jews'. 1 Nor has the so-called 'second enlightenment' of the Federal Republic fully restored the balance. The Aufkldrer have been rehabilitated, but they are still too often manipulated in an ahistorical sense. Lessing's pronouncements on the inevitability of social conflict and inequality are applied within the context of a modern capitalist society of which he was totally ignorant.2 The complex categories of modern scholarship have done little to elucidate the thoughts and actions of men who sought salvation in rational simplicity. Lessing and his contemporaries have been removed from the world in which they lived, a world which both inspired their thoughts and constrained their actions. On the one hand an effort has been made to harness their ideals to the political needs of the present. On the other, many have tried to equate the Aufkldrung with the Enlightenment understood as a European phenomenon, while at the same time magnifying the reaction of the Sturm und Drang and of the idealists in an attempt to discern the origins of the tragedy of later German history. Distortion has been the sole result, leading one French historian to conclude: 'Que l'Aufklarung n'existe pas, voila qui est evident.' 3 Many, if not most, educated people in late eighteenth-century Germany would have been surprised at this judgement. For from about 1760 onwards, Aufkldrung, its nature, aims and achievements formed a central issue of debate both public and private in most Protestant areas. Even its most bitter opponents were convinced that it was Aufkldrung which was gradually eroding the traditional structures of German Protestant life. Others spoke 106

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jubilantly and optimistically of the Age of Enlightenment, the Enlightened Age, or of the enlightened times in which they were privileged to live. Inevitably the terms were misused and distorted as they became part of the political and polemical vocabulary, or simply fashionable. Christian Gotthilf Salzmann claimed that some thought enlightenment lay in hair styles and French clothes; others believed it meant slandering God. 'I knew one young fop', he wrote, 'who thought he was enlightened simply because he could speak French.' 4 It was in an attempt to clarify the issue that Pastor Zoellner posed his famous question in the Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1783. 'What is enlightenment?', he asked. 'This question which is almost as important as what is truth? should surely be answered before one begins to enlighten.' 5 Kant's answer is well known. His statement that enlightenment meant liberation of the individual in a moral and intellectual but not in a political sense was accompanied by a series of qualifications which have intrigued historians although they were largely ignored by contemporaries. Claiming that his age was certainly one of enlightenment, though not an enlightened age, Kant argued that men must be taught how to use their reason in order to become free. Initially, freedom of thought was to be granted only in the religious sphere - hence he could talk of the Age of Frederick, for that monarch had at least lessened the obstacles to ultimate general enlightenment in this one vital area. In political terms, Kant's concept of liberation meant nothing for the present - the injunction to think was accompanied by the command to obey.6 Despite the scholarly obsession with the complexity and internal inconsistency of Kant's argument, there is no evidence that he himself ever attached much importance to it. His stray comments on enlightenment did not add up to a coherent view, and were probably not intended to do so anyway. Far more central to the long-term debate was Moses Mendelssohn's answer to the same question.7 He stressed the idea of enlightenment as the theoretical education of man. It was, according to him, not so much a mode of thought but a form of education and, in this sense, just as important as culture and knowledge to any society. At the same time, Mendelssohn's realization that the enlightenment of man might under certain circumstances conflict with the education of citizens raised an issue which was to become all-important after 1789. For objective truths which might be useful to mankind could be positively harmful and dangerous to men as social and political animals. The recognition of this problem and the attempts made to solve it characterized the Protestant Aufkldrung more than any other factor. Furthermore, the nature of the debates on this issue most clearly distinguished enlightened Catholic from enlightened Lutheran in eighteenthcentury Germany. There was a Catholic Aufkldrung, but it was circum107

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scribed by the church and the universities to a degree which made it fundamentally different from the Protestant version of the Aufklarung. The universities played an important early role in the north too, while the Protestant churches did much to foster the spread of enlightened ideas in many areas. But the most important feature of the development of enlightened ideals in the north was the way in which by the 1780s Aufklarung had become a sort of Protestant lay theology, derivative of university philosophy and Lutheran doctrines but transcending both in its concerns and its aims. This public debate was stimulated, ironically, by Frederick the Great in Prussia when he pressed the Berlin Academy to publish a competition for the best answer to the question 'Est-il utile de tromper le peuple?' 8 The problem became the leitmotif of the decade. The judicious academicians prudently divided the first prize equally between a negative and an affirmative answer and, for their own part, resolved never again to tackle such a dangerously topical issue. But it had been the most popular of all prize essay competitions in the Academy's history, and the interest it generated was immediately channelled into discussions in journals and newspapers like the Berlinische Monatsschrift where Pastor Zoellner's remarks provoked the most famous of all answers - Kant's. Two basic views emerged. Some held that the discovery and dissemination of objective truth would lead to salvation. Others believed that the process of discovery itself was paramount: ultimately truth and knowledge would be valuable but the development of powers of reasoning was the essential factor. Towards the end of the decade the debate was further confused by the issue of the extent to which enlightened ideas could be safely disseminated among all classes. Thus Frederick's question, which touched on the most fundamental principles of government, remained unresolved until it was overtaken by events outside Germany. In Prussia, as elsewhere, the spectacle of violence and disorder abroad produced food for thought at home. For the Revolution in France after 1789 seemed to confirm the wisdom of Mendelssohn's insight that the misuse of Aufklarung could lead only to stubbornness, egotism, irreligion and anarchy. More than just a literary and philosophical phenomenon, the Aufklarung was above all a practical reform movement deeply concerned with political and social realities. Nowhere is this commitment more clearly demonstrated than in the discussion of the diffusion of new ideas, which for most involved the hope of avoiding the dangers of political radicalism. Only a small minority looked forward to the promise of dramatic change. Karl Friedrich Bahrdt, for example, rejected the two prevailing schools of thought outright: enlightenment as understanding would mean that all men must be philosophers; while enlightenment as knowledge would mean that all men must be scholars. Instead he demanded 'absolute enlightenment' beginning at the 108

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very roots of society and working upwards. 'Our aim', he wrote in 1789, 'is enlightenment and its widest possible dissemination.' 9 But the majority view stressed a more utilitarian concept of enlightenment which provided a positive answer to Villaume's question of 1785 - 'Whether and in what manner the education of the individual should sacrifice his perfection to his social utility.' 10 The 'relative enlightenment' of thinkers as diverse as Campe, Villaume, Wieland and Salzmann did not envisage any all-embracing social movement. Recognizing the dangerous political implications of unlimited enlightenment, they sought to work within the existing social and political framework: all groups in society were to be educated but each in relation to its social position and economic function. Liberty and freedom as political ideals were not to be extended to the mass of the population. The masses were to be educated or enlightened only to the extent that this process would better enable them to fulfil their professional and social functions within the existing political framework.11 Indeed, for this very reason educational reform proved to be one of the most fruitful fields of action for progressive thinkers of the time. Basedow's Philanthropinum at Dessau was but one of the most spectacular examples of this kind of theory. In many other areas efforts were made to introduce some measure of basic general education; the concept of professional and vocational training became established not only for servants of the state but for labourers and craftsmen too. Trading academies and schools of commerce were more than a passing vogue - they were among the few innovations which survived the savage reassessment of enlightened educational ideas by the neo-humanists of the early nineteenth century. 12 Education was central, and the changes effected in this area were in some cases quite dramatic. But the vision of the Aufkldrer was not limited to this sphere alone. Medicine and religion, administration and finance, husbandry and home economy, criminal law and poor relief - indeed, all aspects of human existence came under their critical gaze. 13 For, as Rudolf Vierhaus has pointed out, enlightenment was more a mode of thought, a universally applicable set of underlying assumptions, than a clearly defined set of specific objectives.14 The message was complex and entailed a form of utilitarianism that was as radical and novel in its inception as it was conservative in its political implications. It was a message which received the widest possible publicity. In 1715 C.G. Hoffman had written that 'we are living in the century of the journalists.'. 15 By the 1760s a veritable cataract of newspapers of all kinds had emerged. What Wolfgang Martens calls 'the Gospel of Virtue', proclaimed in the moral weeklies of the early years of the century, was now being disseminated through countless periodical publications.16 The learned tomes of the Republic of Letters had been replaced by the journals of the 109

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educated classes, journals which were the most important medium of the Enlightenment in Protestant Germany. Journals were more than merely vehicles of communication. They published ideas and manifestos, but also served as repositories of knowledge crammed as they were with all manner of observations and commentaries on the contemporary world. The recovery of popular culture was not exclusively the achievement of the Romantic age. For the Aufkldrer quickly realized that the close and careful study of the known world, both natural and human, was the essential prelude to its reform. They did not find a tabula rasa but a rich and complex tapestry held together as much by tradition and superstition as by reason. They realized perhaps more acutely than anyone previously that there was a science of society which was as complex and as inscrutable as the science of nature, that man's behaviour in society was one of the last great unknown worlds to be explored. In Germany, journalists and editors rather than romantic poets and scholars were the first anthropologists.17 Journals and periodicals shed light not only on the content of enlightened thought but also on its geographical dissemination and social location. Werner Krauss once claimed that the centres of the Aufklarung lay not in the territories and principalities but in the largest cities - 'In Leipzig, and not in Dresden, in Berlin and not in Potsdam . . . in Hamburg and not in Copenhagen, in Gottingen but not in Kassel or Hanover.' 18 Yet the 'Gospel of Virtue', the 'true enlightenment', the credo of utilitarian 'relative enlightenment' was proclaimed in virtually all areas of Protestant Germany. Cities like Hamburg were exceptional but not unique. More journals were published there and they spoke to a larger audience. Yet in neighbouring Schleswig-Holstein a circle of progressive reformers published the ProvincialBerichte with no less success (or ultimate efficacy in terms of reforms achieved) for some forty years.19 More work is needed on the localization of the Aufklarung, but the existing evidence suggests that few areas were left untouched by the progressive entrepreneurs of the publishing trade. Similarly it is important to note which groups were being addressed. The articulation of ideas of 'relative enlightenment' made it clear that the vast mass of the population was excluded. The illiterate and semi-literate masses were to be the objects of limited enlightenment and not active participants in a universal process. The journals appealed above all to the educated classes, gebildete Sta'nde, who, according to one definition in 1795, included rulers, nobles, diplomats, officers, scholars and artists - in other words primarily the functionaries of the state and their masters.20 Other definitions also included the Protestant clergy, many of whom contributed significantly to journals like Nicolai's Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek and also used the pulpit as a podium of the Enlightenment.21 The emergence of this group was one of the most significant social no

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phenomena of eighteenth-century Germany. Including both nobles and nonnobles it constituted the single most dynamic element in German society, and its composition and socio-political functions were a striking contrast to the French Third Estate. An inherently conservative nobility in Germany could be enlightened since the 'true enlightenment' posed no threat to its position. And for at least some of the middle classes education offered the possibility of limited upward mobility into the bureaucracies and armies of the small states. The concept of a *burgerliche Emanzipationsbewegung' can thus be a misleading one. 'Bildung macht frei', declared Johann Heinrich Meyer.22 But the freedom implied here was not equivalent to the French Liberte et egalite of 1789. In Germany freedom for the educated and privileged few meant absorption within the category of state functionaries — a new Stand which was the creative prodigy of the small absolutist state. Even in a free republic like Hamburg 'emancipation' was not intended to be universal and certainly never egalitarian.23 New forms of social and cultural activity characteristic of the Aufkldrung in most European countries developed almost exclusively within this group. Reading societies, patriotic societies, masonic lodges - all drew their membership from this mixed yet limited elite. They not only received the 'Gospel of Virtue' and discussed it, but also attempted to put it into practice by means of plans for utilitarian educational and social reforms developed and implemented in patriotic societies.24 Even the Freemasons, with their secrecy and their occasional radical misfits, served this function. As Georg Heinrich Sieveking, the Hamburg Patriot and reformer, wrote 'There will always be differing grades in the order', but 'the highest grade is that of the League of the Enlightened.' 25 Most Aufkldrer were bound to the state in more than a purely personal sense. They also worked within religious and theoretical traditions which they amended but did not reject. Indeed, Friedrich Nicolai saw the new trends of his own age as the fruition of the Lutheran Reformation.26 Not all clergymen would have agreed and some, like Johann Melchior Goeze of Hamburg, were the most bitter opponents of the new ideas which they saw eroding the very fabric of religious and civil life.27 Yet in a sense Nicolai was right. It is possible to see in the Pietism of Spener and Francke attitudes closely related to those held by later thinkers, and similar attempts at utilitarian reform too.28 Nor did later accretions of English deism and French materialism significantly change this picture.29 Few Aufkldrer rejected religion outright. Even the infamous Spinozist, Johann Bernhard Basedow, who rejected the teaching of the Trinity and of Hell, believed in predestination and the miracles of Christ. According to his son, he called 'that which Christianity meant to him in contrast with natural religion, the most natural of all religions'.30 Like the timid Reimarus whose Schutzschrift fur die vernunf tigen Verehrer Gottes was published only in excerpts after his death, Basedow 111

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condemned only the brutal and blinkered aspects of orthodox biblical Christianity.31 Like Spener, the Aufkldrer espoused toleration in its broadest sense - an openness to new ideas and an attempt to come to terms with changing social and economic reality. Enlightenment may for some have entailed a rejection of the orthodox church, but not of Christianity. Enlightenment and piety went hand in hand. Progress was on the side of the angels. As Klaus Scholder has pointed out, the Protestant Aufkldrung is characterized by its close relationship with progressive theology and with the churches, rather than by radical criticism or opposition.32 To a limited degree this was true of the Catholic areas too. There the church itself was frequently an object of reform. Its complex and monolithic structure, which exercised control at varying social levels through channels as different as Jesuit schools and universities and land-rich monasteries and clerical overlords, provided a fertile field for enlightened criticism. The absence of a comparable ecclesiastical structure in Lutheran Germany inevitably left enlightened groups with more room for manoeuvre and less to criticize. Indeed, the Lutheran churches had been founded on an explicit rejection of the Catholic claim that the church had a right to exercise temporal authority. 33 It was precisely this claim which made secularization a prime issue in the south but not in the north. Luther's affirmation of the divinely ordained powers of the secular authorities and his stress on the Pauline injunction to absolute obedience on the part of the subjects played a central role in the political theory of the Protestant Aufkldrung. Far from running counter to the aims of the state, progressive Lutheran theologians tended to reinforce the position of their masters. Clergymen like Johann Gottlieb Tollner, Abraham Teller and Johann Salomo Semler reexamined their dogmatic inheritance, and by using the methods and questions of 'pragmatic history' formulated a version of the Christian message derived from the Bible but tailored to the needs of their own age.34 In political terms this involved something equivalent to the sanctification of the existing order. 'Human society', wrote Carl Christian Tittmann, 'is composed of rulers and subjects, and whatever its precise origins may be, it is divinely ordained . . . in Man's present condition it is indispensable.'35 Similarly, Gottfried Less expressed a common view when he wrote that the rights of subjects were on the whole limited to those laid down by the state itself: if due recourse to the courts of law failed, then emigration was the only permissible form of resistance. The inherent conservatism of this all-too-often overlooked strand of Lutheran thought rested primarily on the fear of revolution. Like so many Aufkldrer, the Protestant theologians were obsessed with the idea of gradual reform and peaceful evolution. Their message was thus considerably more radical in its social implications than in its political expression. It marked in 112

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fact the first systematic attempt within the Lutheran Church to formulate a code of social ethics based on the conviction that the church and its clergy should play a central role in the education of their congregations in the duties of responsible citizenship within the confines of an authoritarian state. Typical of this attitude was the advice given to preachers by Abraham Teller in 1792. Dogma as such should not be propounded in sermons: Preach rather throughout the whole year practical Christianity, active religion. In this way you must seek to increase the understanding of your listeners, so that they will realize that religion is a matter of the heart and of life, and not the concern of a mind which loses itself in profound contemplation, or of a memory stuffed full of formulae and phrases.36 It was this stress on practical piety which nineteenth-century critics of the enlightened clergy misunderstood. They saw uninspired pedantry where Teller and his colleagues saw the most important function of the church. For them, religious education meant social education. Hence inoculation was as valid a subject for the homily as pride, elementary forestry as useful to the rural Christian as pious reflections on vanity. The function of religion, they constantly stressed, was to help man rather than God.37 The worship of God could be justified only if it induced man to obey authority and at the same time assume the full weight of their responsibilities as members of a Christian society. In much the same way, the Aufkldrer inherited the cameralist philosophy of government. For cameralism, with its emphasis on the utilitarian relationship between society and the state and its all-embracing interventionist notion of the police functions of government, provided an almost ideal theoretical justification and practical guideline for the implementation of enlightened reform. The universities, especially the new foundations of Halle and later Gottingen, thus played a crucial role similar to that played by some branches of the Lutheran church. They both provided a source of inspiration and produced a group of educated men receptive to and active in the propagation of enlightened ideals. Without the universities, in short, the gebildete Stdnde could never have emerged.38 If the message of the eighteenth-century thinkers was new, their tools were not. Heinrich Friedrich Naumann, editor of the Schleswig-Holsteinische Provincial-Berichte, who had attended August Ludwig von Schloezer's Gottingen lectures as a student, recognized this quite clearly. He dreamt of uniting all the various branches of cameralism into one vast super-science of government and social control, capable of gradually implementing the 'true enlightenment' of society at all its 'relative' levels.39 Novelty and tradition, progress and what in other countries might have been labelled retrenchment, were thus blended in a unique mixture in the Aufkldrung. If, as Herder said, Germany was the terra obedientiae many "3

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contemporaries would have found cogent reasons to praise this as the best of all possible worlds - a world capable of gradual change without French anarchy.40 In other European countries the state and its institutions provided the skeleton around which other formal and informal groups congregated; but in the German principalities, the state took the form of a carapace within which the various groups in society moved. The state itself controlled the flourishing universities whose prime function was to train future administrators. The enrages of France and the free intellectuals of Britain were in Germany integrated parts of a state which was more than just a Stdndestaat. In a few places, like Hamburg, the course of the Aufkldrung was characterized by the emergence of a paternalist non-noble elite.41 But Hamburg was unique for its size and prosperity. Indeed, simply because of this, developments there were studied closely throughout the whole of Protestant Germany by both the protagonists and the opponents of Aufkldrung. If the Aufkldrer were to claim this city as their own, to praise it as a model worthy of emulation, so their opponents were loath to accept the betrayal of what they saw as the Zion of the North. Lessing, after all, was forced to leave Hamburg while Johann Melchior Goeze, the pope of Lutheran orthodoxy, ended his days there. Hamburg thus became a kind of battlefield. Journals and newspapers of all kinds followed the debate over religious toleration in the city — not only Nicolai's Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek but also the orthodox Lutheran Ada Historico-Ecclesiastica published in Weimar. The history of those struggles in Hamburg provides a healthy warning against the assumption that the Aufkldrung was an anodyne movement which succeeded simply because it was never effectively opposed. The current did not always flow in the direction of the future, at least in Hamburg. 42 The roots of Hamburg's Aufkldrung lay in the cultural renaissance which occurred in the city in the late seventeenth century. The foundation of the first permanent German opera house in the city in 1678 and the rapid growth of newspapers and journals made Hamburg into a leading cultural centre by 1700.43 But perhaps more decisive in the long term were the problems of internal rebellion, war and later plague which threatened to destroy the city's prosperity and independence at varying times up to the end of the second decade of the eighteenth century. Certainly the first steps towards a significant reform of the structure of urban government were taken as a direct result of the plague of 1713-15. For although the new constitution of 1712 marked the end of the constitutional conflicts of the seventeenth century, the uncertainty created by the Great Northern War and the devastating impact of the plague clearly revealed the poverty of urban government in Hamburg. 44 The creation of the first Patriotic Society in 1724 was largely a response to these problems. Its concerns have often been characterized as primarily literary and linguistic, and indeed its members were drawn almost exclus114

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ively from the educated elite, men like the poet Barthold Heinrich Brockes and the scholar-poets Michael Richey and Johann Fabricius. 45 But Brockes was also a senator; Richey and Fabricius were professors at the Gymnasium] and although the journal which they published for three years and which was to be their sole lasting public monument contained few proposals for reform, it was very much concerned with the present condition and future prosperity of the city republic. Der Patriot was more than a mere imitation of the English Spectator. Critical and satirical, it attempted to instruct as well as to amuse. Perhaps its most radical claim was that there was a form of morality which derived from reason and which was not necessarily coterminous with traditional Christianity. As the same time the authors stressed their wish to work within the existing framework of government and with the existing church: reason was to complement religion rather than replace it. 46 Patriotism entailed obedience and loyalty to tradition and authority as well as tolerance and forbearance towards others. Hence the Society ceased publication after three years with the declaration that they had said all they had intended to say: now it was essential to try and apply their new precepts to their daily work. The practical achievements of the Society were minimal. Some of its members were instrumental in the attempted reform of the poor-relief system during the 1720s. But in real terms even that was a failure.47 Just how little had changed was revealed during the second great financial crisis of the early 1760s. By that time most of the members of the original Patriotic Society were dead: the society had ceased to meet after about 1750. Now a new generation, many of them related to the first Patriots, moved towards the foundation of a new Patriotic Society in 1765, a society which was to become renowned throughout the whole of Germany and many areas of northwestern Europe as the model of an active and purposeful enlightened society. Inspired by the Royal Society of Arts in London and personally encouraged by its founder William Shipley, Johann Ulrich Pauli and his associates threw themselves into the task of practical reform.48 Unlike their predecessors the new Patriots acted on the assumption that the recent crisis had demonstrated the limits of government: they felt it their duty to marshal the resources of the private sector in order to contribute to the public good. The citizens of Hamburg must be educated to the duties of active citizenship which were the mark of a true Patriot. While the patriotic citizen of the 1720s had been enjoined to work hard at his own trade, to obey the government and to live according to the principles of Christian morality, the new Patriots envisaged a new sphere of activity where prosperous and thoughtful citizens might contribute to the good of society. Old-style Christian charity became utilitarian reform; the servant of God became the patron of his fellow men. The subsequent history of the second Patriotic Society more than justified "5

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the optimism of its early ideals. The Verhandlungen und Schriften, its official journal, reads at times like a textbook of practical enlightenment. Its most dramatic success was the foundation of the Allgemeine Armenanstalt in 1788 a poor-relief institution admired and imitated throughout the whole of Europe. 49 The relatively clear line of development in Hamburg from the literary and artistic to the practical and the popular, a development ultimately accompanied by a considerable broadening of the social composition of the second Patriotic Society in the late 1780s, was not duplicated elsewhere. No other city in Germany, whether Protestant or Catholic, could show such a wealth of enlightened projects both public and private. The reasons for this lay in Hamburg's prosperity but above all in its independence and in the international contacts of its elite who looked as much to London, Edinburgh and Amsterdam as they did to Berlin, Leipzig or Dresden. In most areas, by contrast, the progress of enlightened ideas was typified by the coincidence of progressive reforming officials with traditional paternalist rulers, not all of whom were enlightened.50 The Prussian example is well known and notable above all for the fact that the Beamtenstand ultimately liberated itself from royal control through the establishment of an independent admissions system based on talent rather than on patronage. One observer wrote in 1794 that 'the Prussian state, far from being an unlimited monarchy' is really 'but thinly veiled aristocracy', a state in which 'this aristocracy rules the country in undisguised form as a bureaucracy'. 51 The financial demands of the absolutist state were met by a dynamic administrative machine which did indeed transform the Prussian state after its disastrous defeat by the French.52 Prussia was exceptional both in its size and in the rapidity with which the Beamtenstand was able to secure its position. But other areas experienced a similar process. The educational reforms of Anhalt-Dessau and Lippe, both directly inspired by Basedow's ideas, the agrarian reforms which characterized the development of so many states in the late eighteenth century - all bear testimony to the reforming potential of the ancien regime in Germany.53 Economically backward since the Thirty Years' War, dominated by rulers who reigned over vast courts, the absolutist microcosm was a realistic object of enlightened reforming zeal largely because it was small, and because the machine which governed it was all-embracing. As General Superintendent Weerth commented on the Lippe reforms of the late eighteenth century: the plans which were drawn up did not merely, as is so often the case in larger countries, embrace certain classes of subjects, certain districts which are in some ways already privileged and because of this facilitate the promotion of their inhabitants by more purposeful education, they embraced all 27 square miles of the country with all its 70,000 subjects.54 116

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The German Protestant Enlightenment was thus primarily a utilitarian reform movement deeply committed to the traditional social order. Relatively free from anti-clericalism and rarely opposed to any but the most capricious tyrants, the Aufkldrer saw the state, and by implication the church which was subject to it, as the prime vehicle of reform. Recognizing with Lessing that 'human society cannot unite men without dividing them', they pursued the vision of a society where inevitable inequality could be made palatable by rational and benign government in a spiritual and material welfare state.55 For many these hopes were threatened by the spectre of revolution after 1789 and dashed by the dissolution of the Empire in 1806 after which their energies were directed to the task of constitutional reconstruction. They failed of course to create a society where, in Lessing's words, the only good works would be those which made good deeds in the traditional sense superfluous.56 But the Aufkldrer did at least ensure that the world into which the French intruded was neither lacking in inner resources nor politically indifferent.

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8 The Enlightenment in Catholic Germany T.C.W. BLANNING To the philosophes who marched under the banner of 'ecrasez Vinfdme\ the notion of an Enlightenment in Catholic Germany was a contradiction in terms, a monstrous hybrid analogous to grafting a philosopher's head and torso on to the hind quarters of an old, fat and malodorous sow. Nor was this kind of opinion confined to the French, who have never shown much appreciation of the intellectual life of Baron Thunder-ten-Tronckh's fellowcountrymen. The Italian Carlantonio Pilati, who at least had first-hand experience of the German educational system, recorded in 1777 that 'the German Protestants are infinitely more enlightened than the Catholics. [The latter teach] their children ideas which ruin their judgment and their reason: their minds are crushed and are steered towards error, futility and stupidity.' * Although local historians of Catholic Germany have always sought to do justice to the cultural achievements of their region, it was not until this century that revision on a national scale began.2 Even so, the image persists of the Catholic principalities as highly ornamental baroque troughs, in which epicurean prelates happily if sleepily wallowed. In a recent monograph on the German Enlightenment, for example, it is stated confidently that the major thrust of the Aufklarung can be deemed Protestant in nature German Catholicism did not experience a parallel intellectual development Catholicism was channeled in different directions. Instead offindingan outlet in critical reflection, the Catholic movement produced an amazing renaissance in the plastic arts, seen in the construction of the numerous pilgrimage churches that dot the Austrian, Bavarian and Swabian countryside.3 Quite apart from the eccentric chronology which underpins this observation, the reality of the Catholic Aufklarung - and with it the raison d'etre of this chapter - can be defended in three ways: subjectively, on the grounds that both adherents and opponents believed that it existed; objectively, on the grounds that the movement did promote 'man's emergence from selfincurred immaturity'; and formally, on the grounds that the reception of North German Aufkldrer such as Christian Wolff- and even Kant - can be identified. 118

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A link, if not an alliance, can even be established between Catholic Aufkldrer and anti-clerical philosophes, if only on the rather negative grounds that they shared a common enemy - the Jesuits. Indeed, the origins of the Catholic Enlightenment in Germany are to be sought in the revival of certain elements in the church which had been submerged but never eliminated during the Counter-Reformation. It was inevitable that sooner or later the opponents of scholasticism would return to the offensive and challenge the Jesuit monopoly of higher and secondary education. As the Jesuits' teaching methods and curricula began to seem increasingly old-fashioned, the criticism multiplied and intensified to form a movement.4 What is more surprising, perhaps, is the source of this initiative, for it stemmed from Benedictine and Augustinian monasteries. 'They sing, they eat, they digest', was Voltaire's hostile summary of the monks' contribution to society, but in Southern Germany, at least, some also found time for scholarly pursuits.5 In several houses in Swabia, Franconia and Bavaria, the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were marked not only by lavish building but also by a less flamboyant but ultimately more influential intellectual revival.6 In large measure, of course, this was but another round in the enduring struggle between two Catholic traditions, but a new element was introduced by the anti-Jesuits' adoption of methodologies borrowed from critical history and the natural sciences. Moreover, the ever-growing influence of exponents of'practical Christianity' such as Muratori ensured that the focus of the debate between defenders and opponents of scholasticism centred less on doctrine and more on education, liturgy and pastoral matters. This monastic movement - the Catholic 'Fruhaufklarung\ as Richard van Diilmen has termed it7 - developed into a self-conscious attempt to propagate an enlightened form of Catholicism, purged both of gothic barbarity and baroque excrescence. The best institutional example of this missionary impulse was the foundation in Munich in 1722 of a learned society - the Parnassus Boicus - by the Augustinian Eusebius Amort, to promote enlightened Catholic literature.8 If a revival of anti-scholasticism was likely in the calmer confessional waters which followed the Westphalian settlement of 1648, so was a revival of episcopalism. While it seemed possible that heresy might engulf all Germany, there was every reason for all Catholics to rally behind the papacy and its curia. But when the demarcation lines between the denominations had been stabilized, the German bishops could afford once again the luxury of anticurial gravamina. As early as 1673 the Rhenish episcopacy had launched a vigorous protest against such traditional targets as annates, the jurisdiction of nuncios and the like.9 The arguments used on this and other similar occasions, however, were traditional; it was not until the second quarter of the eighteenth century that a qualitatively new movement can be identified. At several Catholic universities, notably those at Trier, Mainz, Wiirzburg

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and Salzburg, a more vigorous, radical and broadly based episcopalism was developed by a methodology composed of a potent combination of archival research and rationalist natural law. Within a couple of decades, the episcopalist academics and bureaucrats had achieved such ascendancy in the ecclesiastical states that one historian of the period - Heribert Raab - has felt justified in speaking of an intellectual 'revolution' in Catholic Germany.10 Although the most celebrated and influential, Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim alias Febronius, whose De Statu Ecclesiae was published in 1763, was only one of a large and growing party aiming at a fundamental reform of relations between the church in Germany and Rome. 11 It was not only the structure of the church that concerned the reformers, however. Their opposition to the ultramontanism of the Jesuits was always accompanied, complemented and sometimes even overshadowed by their equally fervent opposition to the baroque forms of piety (barocke Frommigkeit) favoured by their opponents. Just as they were attracted by the decentralization of authority which they believed was characteristic of the ecclesia primitiva, so did they try to recapture the purity and simplicity of the early Christians. Here the major influence was Jansenism; not the Jansenism which agonised over problems of grace and free will but the Jansenism which sought the reform and revival of all aspects of religious life within the Catholic Church.12 Since to trace all the threads which ran from Bishop Jansen's Augustinus to what became the Catholic Enlightenment in Germany a century and more later would be a major exercise, only the main points of contact can be listed here. Most obviously, there was the personal friendship and correspondence between Jansenists in France and the Netherlands and their sympathizers in Germany. The indefatigable Dupac de Bellegarde was particularly active, writing to supporters in Mainz, Trier, Cologne, Wurzburg and Fulda. 13 More generally accessible were the Jansenist books translated into German and the German journals which propagated Jansenist views.14 The schismatic church at Utrecht, the Dutch and Belgian universities, most notably Ley den and Lou vain, and the Trojan horse in Rome - the Collegium Germanicum - were other important lines of communication.15 If the Catholic reform movement had been nothing more than episcopalism flavoured with Jansenism it would be difficult to award or penalize it with the adjective 'enlightened'. It is notoriously easy to demonstrate that every component part of any intellectual movement has a pedigree of innumerable quarterings and, owing to the antiquity of its host, the Catholic Aufkldrung is more vulnerable than most to the lament of Ecclesiastes. But, quite apart from a difference of tone - detectable only when the movement as a whole is surveyed - there is ample evidence to demonstrate the impact of enlightened influences. The chief source was not France, as might have been expected, but Protestant Germany, or - more specifically - the universities of Protestant Germany. Although this is a field of study which still cries out for 120

The Enlightenment in Catholic Germany

detailed and systematic investigation, it is already clear just how important these interdenominational links were. 16 In the course of the century a significant and growing number of Catholics went north to study at Leipzig, Jena, Halle or Gottingen and then returned to their alma mater with quite a new conception of what and how they should teach. This academic migration no doubt helped the rapid reception of Protestant Aufkldrung philosophy, most notably that of Christian Wolff and his follower J.G.H. Feder, which by the 1760s was being taught in several Catholic universities.17 The influence of the French Enlightenment, however, seems to have been much less penetrating, although little precise information is available. One might speculate that the sophistication, radicalism and anticlericalism of the philosophes limited their appeal in Germany to the aristocratic elites, whose urbane education and grand tours made them more cosmopolitan. When French thinkers did find an audience their ideas were refracted out of all recognition by native intellectual traditions. 18 Far more important were the Italians, whose moderate tone, confident ability to reconcile reason with revelation and ecclesiastical concerns made them most attractive to their German colleagues. The works of Illuministi such as Cesare Beccaria, and, above all, Ludovico Antonio Muratori were translated, read - and acted upon. 19 As early as the 1740s, a group of Muratori supporters had formed at the University of Salzburg (significantly Benedictine- rather than Jesuit-controlled), and was to exert an important influence on the Catholic reform movement in both the Habsburg Monarchy and the Reich as a whole.20 These repeated references to universities have been neither fortuitous nor unintentional, for it was the universities which played the crucial, determining role in the formation, dissemination and implementation of the Enlightenment in Catholic Germany. As a report from Freiburg of 1791 maintained: The Aufkldrung is usually divided into the academic Aufkldrung of the universities and the general Aufkldrung of the public at large. And quite rightly so. The former is the pathfinder of the latter, it bears the torch. An opinion may be expounded in the lecture-room for twenty, thirty years or more before it is accepted and is put into practice by the general public.21 In a recent study of the Catholic Enlightenment in Germany - Aufkldrung und katholisches Reich - Notker Hammerstein has identified the universities as its single most important distinguishing characteristic: unlike those of our Western neighbours, German universities have had a colossal importance since the Reformation. Despite occasional periods of decay, they have always revived, and it was they which first introduced the Reich to the Aufkldrung While in England and France during the period of the Enlightenment exactly the opposite happened and the universities relapsed into insignificance, in the Reich a new flowering began.22 121

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Part symptom and part cause of this renewed vitality were the successive waves of reforms which in many institutions had diluted if not destroyed Jesuit influence long before that order's dissolution in 1773. And by the time the French revolutionary wars destroyed several and made life difficult for the survivors, the Catholic universities which had not experienced a thoroughgoing reform of structure, teaching methods and curricula were in a small minority.23 Significantly, that small minority included the only Catholic university to be located in a Free Imperial City: Cologne. As this suggests, the Catholic Enlightenment was the work of the principalities, and, moreover, was conducted always under the supervision and often at the behest of the princes. From the time the prince-bishops first began to look to their professors for theoretical support in their struggle with the Roman Curia, the relationship between rulers and progressive intellectuals was intimate and harmonious. In the course of the eighteenth century, as the Catholic princes of the Reich sought to emulate their Protestant colleagues in transforming their territories into states, so did their need for properly trained administrators, educators and priests prompt them to remodel the universities which could supply them.24 For this reason, the theory of the Catholic Enlightenment in Germany was both much more limited than its equivalent in other parts of Europe, but also much more closely related to practice. There was no better personification of this nexus than Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim, who studied at Louvain and Leyden, maintained close contacts with Gottingen, was influenced both by the Jansenist Dupac de Bellegarde and by the Pietist von Spangenberg and who became suffragan bishop of Trier, vice-chancellor of the university there, a senior official of the Electorate and the most influential episcopalist theorist of his day.25 With the chanceries of many Catholic states dominated by men like Hontheim, there developed legislative programmes which went far beyond the increases in power and revenue of the princes which are often thought to have been the exclusive concerns of the old regime. In addition to the educational reform already referred to, which was extended to secondary and primary schools as well as universities, a multitude of changes in the content and administration of the law, in social welfare, in the church and in religious life in general, and the granting of toleration to non-Catholic and even non-Christian minorities, reflect clearly the practical influence of the Catholic Aufkldrung. This was Enlightened Absolutism, a phenomenon whose very existence has been denied by some historians but which in Catholic Germany at least is difficult to argue away. It was also a phenomenon with important implications for relations between state and society. In the words of Rudolf Vierhaus: Enlightened absolutism and the social interests of that group which may be described as 'the educated classes' (Gebildete) combined to ensure that the group which was 122

The Enlightenment in Catholic Germany potentially most active and most important for the development of a political and social consciousness in Germany did not adopt a position hostile to the governments but sought to take its reform proposals into the state and into the departments of state, in order to operate within them, and through them to develop further the social and political order not against but in cooperation with the rulers.26

Although the academic-bureaucratic character of the Catholic Enlightenment remained predominant, and to a far greater degree than in many parts of Protestant Germany, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century there were unmistakable signs of a popular movement developing popular in the sense that it had no formal ties with the government. In part, of course, this was the gratifying result of the educational reforms referred to earlier. Although by its nature an elusive phenomenon, the emergence and development of this popular Aufkldrung can be followed through the institutional forms it adopted. The clearest sign of a burgeoning public opinion was provided by the reading-clubs (Lesegesellschqften) founded across the length and breadth of Catholic Germany in the 1770s and 1780s, with the express purpose of providing - as the prospectus of the club at Mainz put it 'a suitable opportunity to read at a low cost new publications of all kinds and to enjoy social relationships in which literary and political knowledge will be exchanged'.27 The Mainz club subscribed to twenty-three literary and twenty-four political newspapers, forty-one periodicals and a large number of serially issued works of reference for its 200-odd members.28 This same impulse, to provide a common and congenial meeting-place for progressive intellectuals also played a major part in the contemporaneous spread of two other associations: the Freemasons and the Order of the Illuminati. Whatever the relationship between these secret societies and the Revolution may have been, they clearly deserve to be ranked with the reading-clubs as evidence of the development of a more spontaneous interest in the Enlightenment.29 So by the end of the eighteenth century what had begun as an intellectual revival in the monasteries had become a popular movement in the towns. Indeed, van Diilmen has identified three distinct chronological phases in the Enlightenment in Bavaria: first, a Catholic reform movement, which reached its climax with the foundation of the Academy at Munich in 1759, followed secondly - by the programme of reform sponsored by the absolutist state, followed finally by an era in which independent public opinion came to the fore and began the emancipation of nation and society from the state.30 While this pattern clearly works well for Bavaria, where the Elector Karl Theodor's early change to reaction created exceptional conditions, and while its general outlines can be detected elsewhere in Catholic Germany, the divisions between the individual phases must not be overdrawn. Particularly the last two overlapped or even ran simultaneously rather than succeeded each other. Thus two of the most important developments in the Enlightenment at the universities - the foundation of Bonn and the reform of Mainz 123

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Table i. The Reading-Club at Mainz31

Number

Groups Titled nobility without office or foreign diplomats Nobles in the service of the Elector Noble officers Higher regular and secular clergy Lower regular and secular clergy University professors Doctors and surgeons Lawyers Officials Scholars, writers, artists Manufacturing bourgeoisie Commercial bourgeoisie Total

12

7-5O

35

21.87

12

7-50 11.00

19 12

7-50

16

10.00

12

7-50 5.62 11.87 5.00

9 19

8 0

0

7

4.38

161

Table 2. The Illuminati at Mainz32 Groups

Number

Titled nobility without office or foreign diplomats Nobles in the service of the Elector Noble officers Higher regular and secular clergy Lower regular and secular clergy University professors Doctors and surgeons Lawyers Officials Scholars, writers, artists Manufacturing bourgeoisie Commercial bourgeoisie Students Total

4 8 4 4 5 2 2

7

9

8

16

8 8 10

4 4

14 18

2

4

0

0

1

2

2

4

50

occurred in the 1780s.33 Indeed, many Catholic universities demonstrated their continuing modernity and adaptability by absorbing with remarkable speed the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. 34 In many Catholic states - Mainz, Cologne, Trier and Wiirzburg, for example - it was the last decade before the Revolution which saw the climax of Enlightened Absolutism and it was in 1786 that both the episcopalist and reform movements reached their climax at the Congress of Ems. A caveat must also be entered regarding the social and political implications of this tripartite progression from monastery to state to public. While 124

The Enlightenment in Catholic Germany Table 3. The Illuminati 35

Nobles Clergy Officials and state employees Merchants and tradesmen Soldiers Lawyers Doctors Writers and journalists Painters, musicians and actors Private tutors Secretaries Students No occupation listed Totals

Membership definitely established J 3O (35-52%) 63 (17.21) 157 (42.90) 36 (9-84) 39 (10.66) 22 (6.01)

9 (246) 4

(1-09)

5

(i-37)

1 (0.27) 3 (0.82) 2 (0.55) 25 (6-83) 366

Membership not definitely established 30 (34-O9%) 15 34 1 7 7 2 2 1 1 1 J

(17-05) (38.64) (1.14) (7-95) (7-95) (2.27) (2.27) (1.14) (1.14) (1.14)

3 (340

4 (I5-91) 88

Combined total 160 (35.24%) 78 191 37 46 29 11 6 6 2 4

(17.18) (42.07) (8.15) (10.13) (6-39) (2.42) (1.32) (1.32) (0.44) (0.88)

5

(I-IO)

39 454

(8-59)

the forms of enlightened activity may have diversified, there was no change of corresponding dimensions in the social origins of the participants. Over the century as a whole there was certainly a relative shift from regular to lay clergy and from clergy generally to laymen, but at all times virtually all adherents of the Catholic Enlightenment in Germany were drawn from those bureaucratic, academic, legal and clerical groups which were always linked to if not dependent upon the political establishment. The movement did not have a class character, it was the achievement of a socially mixed intelligentsia, both lay and clerical, both noble and bourgeois.36 This is demonstrated by the accompanying tables, which reveal the social composition of the reading-club in Mainz, of the Mainz branch of the Illuminati and of the Order of the Illuminati in general. These figures in the tables should also supply adequate inoculation against the temptation to see the Enlightenment in this part of Europe at least as a bourgeois movement which led its adherents naturally if not inevitably to support social and political revolution. 37 While a handful of Illuminati and Freemasons did move into the revolutionary camp after 1789, the great majority remained loyal to the regimes which had sustained them both materially and intellectually.38 Thus, in 1791 the reading-club at Mainz, often claimed as the parent of the revolutionary club established during the French occupation, wrote an open letter to an anonymous donor of French propaganda, stating loftily that they were concerned with more noble products of the human mind and that 'under the mild, philanthropic 125

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and paternal government of their Most Gracious Sovereign, they enjoyed the sweetest joy that legitimate freedom can bestow'.39 If the Enlightenment did sire the Revolution, then the Revolution should be charged with parricide, for it was events in France during and after 1789 which transformed conservatives from outmoded alarmists into farsighted prophets. One Catholic prince after another checked, considered and then, with varying degrees of haste and thoroughness, adopted policies of repression. As a prominent journal of the Catholic Aufkldrung, the Oberdeutsche Allgemeine Literaturzeitung, lamented in August 1793: The empire of ignorance and superstition was moving closer and closer towards its collapse, the light of the Aufkldrung made more and more progress, and the convulsive gestures with which the creatures of the night howled at the dawning day showed clearly enough that they themselves despaired of victory and were only summoning up their reserves for one final demented counter-attack. Then the disorders in France erupted: and now they reared again their empty heads and screeched at the tops of their voices: 'Look there at the shocking results of the Aufkldrungl Look there at the philosophers, the preachers of sedition!' Everyone seized this magnificent opportunity to spray their poison at the supporters of the Aufkldrung.™ While the alliance between the Aufkldrung and absolutism was not yet entirely defunct - it reappeared in Bavaria after 1799, for example - those harmonious days of the 1770s and 1780s could never return. In future it was to be religious faith, social order or national loyalties which provided the cement to bind state and society.

126

9 Reform Catholicism and Political Radicalism in the Austrian Enlightenment ERNST WANGERMANN The last decade has witnessed the publication of numerous works on the Austrian Enlightenment. Yet not so long ago it was quite common to question the very existence of an Austrian Enlightenment. Historians belonging to the camp of Catholic conservatism saw the Enlightenment as something totally alien to the genuine Austrian tradition, and therefore presented the eighteenth century as a period when foreign, anti-Catholic influences penetrated Austria and achieved a temporary ascendancy.1 Historians belonging to the rival anticlerical and liberal camp, which was steeped in the 'great-German' nationalist tradition, viewed everything in Austria as a pale reflection of German developments, and therefore presented the Austrian writers of the later eighteenth century as not very successful imitators of Lessing, Wieland and the classicists at the court of Weimar. In both these contexts, the reverses suffered by Joseph II could be logically ascribed to his failure to take the specific conditions of his territories into account, both in what he tried to do and in the speed with which he tried to do it. Now that Austria is emancipating herself from the dual legacy of Catholic conservatism and great-German nationalism, the path seems at last clear to a proper historical assessment of the Austrian Enlightenment and its place in the social and intellectual development of the Habsburg lands. It is fitting that in the first essay making up this collection Roy Porter quotes Shaftesbury's reference to the 'mighty light which spreads itself over . . . these two free nations of England and Holland'. 2 For it was these two nations, Tree' undoubtedly in comparison to the rest of Europe, which gave birth to the Enlightenment. The quotation expressed the new confidence engendered by the advances in the control of nature which they had made. It expressed the equality of esteem which they accorded to those who contributed to these advances regardless of their birth or titles. Above all, it expressed the crisis of dogmatic certainty which the long religious conflict had at last produced in these two nations, and the resulting concern to put the Christian faith on what the leading English scientists in the age of Newton believed to be the secure foundation of the new scientific knowledge.3 127

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The purpose of this essay is to explore the developments which made the society and government of the Habsburg lands receptive to the ideas of the Enlightenment, and to trace the evolution of these ideas in a social and intellectual context very different from that in which they originated. Outwardly, intellectual life in the Habsburg lands in the first half of the eighteenth century was dominated by the Jesuits, whose devotion and ability had enabled them to take the lead in the struggle against Protestant heresy. Their domination was exercised through control of the main educational institutions, influence on the censorship, and a virtual monopoly as confessors to the members of the ruling Habsburg family. The Jesuit ascendancy was characterized by their benevolent toleration of the proliferation of religious fraternities and outward ceremonial observances in the religious life of ordinary people. This was accompanied by - perhaps one should say that it resulted in - a decline of intellectual standards in religious teaching. 4 By the middle of the century, both the Jesuit ascendancy in intellectual life and popular religious observances (barocke Frommigkeit) were confronted by a number of challenges. The nobility had become profoundly dissatisfied with Jesuit education, which took insufficient account of the social accomplishments and the vocational training which a young nobleman needed to acquire if he was to make his way in the world. More and more young noblemen were sent to Protestant universities like Leipzig, Halle and Leyden, because they offered a more modern and appropriate education, judging from the rapid promotion of Protestant converts in the imperial service. 5 The government, on the other hand, was becoming increasingly worried by evidence that neither Jesuit education nor baroque piety was preventing a resurgence of popular heresy. Dissatisfaction with the results of Jesuit techniques was widespread and resulted in a revival of interest in the work and ideals of the earlier Counter-Reformation, with its emphasis on parish work and improved education. Hence a new Catholic reform movement, acquainted with the philosophy of Leibnitz and Wolff, linked up with these earlier traditions, and advocated a drastic reduction in outward observances, feast days and monastic orders, a concentration on the mass and a greater concern for practical Christian charity. The writings of Ludovico Muratori and the close links between Austrian and Italian scholarship accelerated and widened the influence of the Catholic reform movement in the Habsburg lands.6 The political and military crisis which Maria Theresa inherited and which culminated soon after her succession in the loss of the rich province of Silesia, brought the Habsburg government and the Catholic reform movement together into an effective partnership. In its attempt to catch up with Prussia's military lead, the government embarked on an ambitious and comprehensive programme of reforms designed to develop the economy and 128

The Austrian Enlightenment

to improve education. At the same time, it was considering ways and means to improve and extend pastoral care. For the success of this programme, contributions from ecclesiastical endowments and funds were desirable if not essential. They would have accorded with the spirit of the reform movement whose adherents willingly cooperated in the execution of the reforms. But the Jesuits opposed the government's efforts and embarked on obstinate rearguard actions. This compelled the government to rely on and encourage the Jesuits' rivals within the Catholic Church, the Dominicans, the Augustinians, and among the latter above all the Jansenists. Something of a turning point in the ensuing struggle occurred in 1759, when the Jesuits were removed from their positions of control in the philosophical and theological faculties of the universities and in the censorship department. 7 This was not the end, however, but merely the end of the beginning. For, paradoxically, the triumph of the Catholic reformers in Vienna coincided with the triumph of their opponents in Rome, following the death of Pope Benedict XIV in 1758. The new Pope, who took the name of Clement XIII, guided by his Secretary of State Torrigiani, followed a 'hard' line and refused to give papal assent to any more reforms like the reduction in feast days agreed in 1751. Whatever the reasons for the change in papal policy may have been, the implications for Habsburg reform were clear: it could be continued only on the basis of emphatically Erastian principles of statechurch relations, on the basis of canon law propositions markedly different from those taught in Austrian schools in the period of Jesuit ascendancy. To overcome papal non-cooperation, Maria Theresa needed a these royale, analogous to the these royale with which Louis XV tried to overcome the obstruction of the Parlements.8 It was provided by Paul Joseph Ritter v. Riegger, Professor of Canon Law at Vienna University. It did not have to be invented. Riegger was able to draw upon a long-standing tradition of Habsburg anti-curialism, which had been asserted as recently as the War of the Spanish Succession and went back to the Middle Ages, as well as upon Jansenist-inspired canonists like Zeger-Bernard van Espen.9 Once Riegger's canon law was available in book form, it was imposed by decree as the basis for the teaching of the subject in all institutions. At the same time the Jesuits were banned from teaching the subject.10 Now the reform programme could be resumed, and indeed from 1770 to the end ofJoseph IPs reign it was prosecuted with undiminished momentum, despite some faltering during Maria Theresa's last years.11 However, the Rieggerian arguments with which State Chancellor Kaunitz was now able to counter papal protests in the official correspondence with the curia, did not secure the cooperation of the Austrian clergy. The opposition of the Jesuits mattered less now, for their order was dissolved in 1773. But the refusal of the curia to cooperate in the reform meant that only a handful of stalwart reformers among the bishops were willing to incur papal censure by offering 129

ERNST WANGERMANN

their cooperation. The non-cooperation of most of the hierarchy was potentially a serious obstacle, for many of the reforms, which conflicted with oldestablished and deeply rooted popular customs and superstitions, were disliked and aroused opposition.12 The curia's hostility therefore produced a strong sense of reciprocal dependence between the reforming monarchy and the Jansenists and other reformers in the church. One significant symptom of this was the new preponderance of Jansenists among the confessors to the members of the Habsburg family.13 The non-cooperation of most of the hierarchy also enhanced the importance and urgency of the educational reform within the reform programme as a whole. For not only was improved education a central concern of the Reform Catholics, but the ability to enforce the reforms as a whole now seemed to depend on the emergence of a new generation of parish priests and bishops, reared in the ideals of Catholic reform and the principles of Rieggerian canon law, and playing their role as the most influential 'teachers of the people' to convince them of the wisdom and justice of the government's measures. Through the educational reform, which after the dissolution of the Jesuit order had to be extended to the entire field of education, the Reform Catholics became a major channel of communication between the Enlightenment and the population of the Habsburg lands. The specifically Catholic and Austrian characteristics of the Enlightenment in the Habsburg lands are in great measure due to the mediating role of the Reform Catholics. We must therefore look more closely at the educational reform and the religion which it was designed to disseminate. The first priority was to raise the intellectual level of the parish clergy. Supporters of the Jesuits and the established ways thought it ridiculous that candidates for the priesthood should have to learn Greek and Hebrew and other 'learned things'.14 But to the Reform Catholics it was a scandal 'that hardly a single parish priest in town or country is capable of refuting with conviction the erroneous positions of a Protestant or Calvinist, not to speak of the subtle Socinians'.15 According to the finalized version of the theology syllabus worked out in 1774 by Stephan Rautenstrauch, abbot of Braunau [Broumov] in Bohemia and a major figure in Austrian Reform Catholicism, candidates for holy orders had to take the preliminary philosophy course followed by five years of theological studies. Franz Joseph Ritter v. Heinke, head of the ecclesiastical department at the Court Chancellery since its creation in 1768, summarized the new syllabus in 1781 in a memorandum for Joseph II: Great efforts have been made in the teaching of theology to give the clergy an adequate education. All branches of the study previously neglected are now taught the indispensable history of the Church, which was previously distorted by doctrinal disputes and studia partium, the art of thorough scriptural exegesis on the basis of the original sources, literary knowledge of the best authors, the proper use of the excellent 130

The Austrian Enlightenment works of the Fathers, the art of effective preaching and catechisation essential for the conviction of the people, finally a healthy moral theology corresponding completely to the word of God and the spirit of the Church and guidance on pastoral care appropriate to the present time in place of so many useless theological-scholastic controversies.16

Joseph II took a somewhat different view. He added a course on agriculture and natural history in a further year of study to enable the parish priest to give practical help to peasants in difficulty, and later made up for this by a reduction in the theoretical content of the course. In fact he agreed with the traditionalists in considering the new course excessively academic for the majority of theology students who would not get beyond the office of parish priest. But the reformers defended the theoretical content of the course against Joseph's more practical priorities. 17 The reader will have noted the reformers' concern with 'conviction'. Their overriding aim was to endow the priests with the ability to convince their parishioners of the truths and validity of the Catholic faith. They wanted to put the faith of the people on what they regarded as the only really sound basis - that of rational conviction. In future, the rational content of Christian moral precepts would be demonstrated, and the Catholic dogmas would be 'proved' by relevant quotations from the Scriptures, the true meaning of which would be elucidated by reference to the original text and the historical context. The closeness of the Reform Catholics to the basic assumptions of the Enlightenment is evident here. Yet it must be emphasized that theirs was a Catholic Enlightenment. They opposed intolerance and persecution of nonCatholics, because they considered Christian benevolence and rational persuasion to be more effective and appropriate means for maintaining and spreading the Catholic faith. They failed ultimately to persuade Maria Theresa of this view, and she ended her reign by renewing the sanction of transportation to Transylvania for the recalcitrant Protestants of Moravia. 18 Joseph II was much closer to the Reform Catholics on this question. He ended transportation for Lutherans and Calvinists (though he prescribed flogging for the so-called Bohemian Deists), and - very much in the spirit of Reform Catholicism - he reserved special clerical preferments for the most enthusiastic and successful converters of heretics by the methods of Christian charity and rational persuasion.19 Having reformed the education of the clergy, the Reform Catholics turned their attention to the education of children. Maria Theresa's decision to involve the state in a system of universal primary education was to some extent the result of their inspiration and enjoyed their enthusiastic support. But the teaching methods introduced by Johann Ignaz v. Felbiger, the abbot of Sagan in Silesia to whom she gave undivided control over primary education, were at variance with their approach, in that they relied far more

E R N S T WANGERMANN

on the children's power of memory than on their understanding. Therefore the Reform Catholics did not regret the disagreement between Felbiger and the Emperor on the education of the soldiers' children and his consequent removal from control. The men appointed by Joseph as supervisors of primary education, Joseph Anton Gall and Joseph Spendou, were in the mainstream of Reform Catholicism. They insisted on the introduction of new schoolbooks and teaching methods in which mechanical memorization was excluded even for the first stages of learning. Felbiger's Tabellen and memorization through recitation by the whole class in unison were now frowned upon. A new instruction issued in November 1785 obliged primary school teachers to impart rules by illustrating them with examples, asking the children questions about them and demonstrating their practical application.20 The teachers were instructed to teach all subjects by engaging their pupils singly in 'Socratic dialogue'. Religious teaching was explicitly included in this instruction. The 'moral tale' and tales from the Bible were specially recommended for this teaching. The children should be asked to comment on the thought and action of the characters in the tales and to give reasons for their judgements. Differences of opinion should be discussed. The children's attention should be drawn above all to the good and bad consequences resulting from the actions of the characters. In conclusion they should be asked what lessons could be learnt from the story about what to do to attain good and avoid evil. In this way, religious teaching was to be 'an exercise accompanied by constant thinking'. 21 The conviction of the Reform Catholics that the truths of the faith could be rationally demonstrated and understood (excepting the explicit 'mysteries'), left little room for the traditional 'fear of God', which was part of pre-Enlightenment Christianity in both its Catholic and Protestant varieties. According to Gall, this popular fear of God did not redound to his glorification.22 It was therefore only logical that teachers whose task it was to achieve recognition of the truth by rational conviction, were also told 'not constantly to threaten with the devil'.23 As God had endowed men with the faculty of reason, their love of him should not be based on fear but on a rational understanding of his wisdom and benevolence towards his creatures. And for what could there be more persuasive evidence, what could be more convincingly proved than God's benevolence towards his creatures? Here is some of the evidence as presented by Gall in a book the very title of which conveyed the force of his own conviction - God's Loving Arrangements and Order for the Goodness and Happiness of Men: Let us look at our earth, and see how God has made it into a beautiful and wellappointed dwelling; how the sun lights it up and warms it; how the air, the fertile rains, the springs, brooks and rivers cool and moisten it; how the plants in infinite variety, beauty and fertility grow out of the earth. These conditions make it possible for countless creatures to live on land, in the water and in the air. They find food and, 132

The Austrian Enlightenment as we can see, they enjoy their existence. But we human beings have cause to take special delight in our existence, since of all living creatures on earth we enjoy most of the good things. For this was God's chief purpose with us human beings, to make us his noblest creatures on earth and to make us exceedingly happy. God is our most benevolent father. 24

Once again, the closeness of the Reform Catholics to the main assumptions of the Enlightenment is evident. In his religious tract of 1787, Gall was expounding a Catholic version of the characteristic Enlightenment conception of nature, anticipating almost verbatim Gottfried van Swieten's libretto for Haydn's Creation and Seasons.2b This closeness to the mainstream of the Enlightenment facilitated in some cases the transition from Reform Catholicism to the vaguer, more secular 'natural religion', which excluded systematically anything not considered susceptible to rational comprehension. During the 1780s there were persistent reports and denunciations that students passing through the reformed theological schools were drifting into irreligion. In nearly every case which was actually investigated, it transpired that some of the students could not reconcile the teaching of the benevolent God with the doctrine of hereditary sin.26 There is no doubt that in the teaching of the Reform Catholics this doctrine was allowed to evaporate in the warm sunshine of their Enlightenment optimism. The role of grace was reduced to that of rendering necessary aid to men in their efforts to restrain their selfish inclinations and passions. Furthermore, there is evidence that in this age of intellectual ferment the exhortation not to take the preacher's word on trust but to examine everything critically and to read the Bible for oneself, could result after anguished and conscientious debate and thought in the adoption of deist, pantheist and atheist positions. Men who had become uncertain of their faith in this way discovered the (not very rigorously) prohibited sceptical and antireligious literature which circulated surreptitiously, asserting that heaven and hell were but deceptions perpetrated by priest-craft. By 1794, Niklas Mest, a cobbler who had regularly attended the reformers' sermons for some years, had come to the conclusion that 'neither reward nor punishment awaited man after death, but, since nature contains nothing wholly destructible, the body will dissolve, whereupon the dissolved parts will merge with the elements which, in turn, will form other bodies'.27 Though Reform Catholicism could be the gateway to natural religion, deism and atheism, and brought numerous artisans in the suburbs of Vienna to a well-thought-out and conscientious unbelief, this was not, as its opponents were (and are) inclined to argue, a necessary result of its positions. For in the Habsburg lands it also laid the permanent foundation for a new form of pietas Austriaca, which gave more scope to intellectual concerns than the traditional one, and in which emotions were expressed not with the outward 133

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gestures inspired by baroque exuberance, but with the sober inwardness which was the hallmark of neo-classicism. The social and intellectual developments which caused such ferment in the Catholic Church and transformed the relations between church and state affected other areas of society and politics no less radically. The programme of reconstruction and modernization on which Maria Theresa's government embarked with such vigour to make good the loss of territory and prestige inflicted by Frederick II, necessitated measures touching the interests of the nobility as much as those of the church, and arousing obstinate and articulate opposition. The government demanded more regular contributions from the nobility to the revenues of the state and significant improvements in the condition of the peasants whose taxes contributed most to these revenues, and from whom the rank-and-file soldiers were recruited. The nobility, through, the diets and estates in which they had a preponderance of representation, opposed the demands for regular taxes and agrarian reform on the grounds that their inherited legal property rights would be infringed. This opposition created a situation closely analogous to that created by the refusal of the papacy after 1758 to cooperate in the proposed ecclesiastical reforms. The nobility, too, were compelling the government to forge theoretical weapons to counter their legal and historical arguments. And just as Riegger, Professor of Canon Law, and Councillor Heinke constructed the theoretical foundation on which Maria Theresa could proceed with the ecclesiastical reforms, so Karl Anton v. Martini and Joseph v. Sonnenfels, professors of Natural Law and Public Administration (Polizeiwissenschaft) respectively, and Councillor Franz Anton v. Blanc constructed the theoretical basis required for proceeding with the agrarian reform, if necessary without the concurrence of the estates.28 Just as Riegger and Heinke both drew upon and helped to disseminate Reform Catholicism, Martini, Sonnenfels and Blanc both drew on and helped to disseminate the political Enlightenment. The fresh wind of new ideas proved no less stimulating in the secular than in the religious sphere, setting off a great ferment of social and political ideas which, before long, prompted some people to reach very radical conclusions. As far as the Habsburg lands were concerned, it would therefore be totally misleading to talk of an 'intimate and harmonious relationship' between reforming rulers and progressive intellectuals.29 Throughout his academic and political career Sonnenfels refused to confine himself to the theoretical justification of impending legislation. That is why his opponents referred to him as 'the insolent Sonnenfels'. As Lessing noted in a letter to Nicolai, 'he told the noble court mob the blunt truth', 30 in other words, his critique of the nobility went beyond what was required to refute their arguments against the agrarian reforms. Both in his periodicals and in his lectures, Sonnenfels 134

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attacked the guilds as impediments to production and the church's right to offer asylum to criminals as an impediment to justice long before the government decided to take up these issues. The purpose of the criticism was, of course, to influence government policy, and as a publicist, Sonnenfels had learnt how to mobilize public opinion to act as a lever applying pressure to government. Through this pressure he induced Maria Theresa's government to abolish inquisitorial torture only a few years after its place in judicial procedure had been solemnly reasserted in the notorious Nemesis Theresiana.31 Most significant of all was Sonnenfels's attempt to commit the government to an irreversible course of enlightened reform. Historical experience served as a warning to enlightened intellectuals like Sonnenfels that princely prerogative alone was a fragile foundation for enlightened reform. The progress made under a Henry IV could be reversed under a Louis XIV. He therefore proposed that certain general principles or aims of government should be agreed, of which individual laws and decrees should be seen as the practical application. These agreed principles should be enacted as fundamental constitutional laws to serve as a binding framework for future legislation. All laws and decrees would be drafted with a preamble explaining how they would contribute to the realization of the agreed principles. Existing laws and decrees not so contributing or in conflict with these principles would be repealed. Sonnenfels was asserting the right of the subjects not to have to take the wisdom and justice of their ruler and his laws on trust but to be rationally convinced thereof.32 And what greater satisfaction could a ruler enjoy than the knowledge that the obedience of his subjects was not based on fear or mere habit but on their rational conviction of his wisdom and justice? The analogy with the concern of the Reform Catholics to base men's love of God on their rational conviction of his wisdom and benevolence is surely not fortuitous. Though most of the senior ministers serving Maria Theresa and her successors were cool or hostile to these constitutional ideas, Sonnenfels was not an isolated dreamer. There is evidence that such ideas were 'in the air'. When Gottfried van Swieten as imperial ambassador in Berlin was informed of the educational law of December 1774 providing the framework for universal primary education, he expressed unbounded joy that Maria Theresa had decided to enlighten her subjects in order to enable them to understand how obedience to the laws was the source of their happiness, and thus to obey from 'conviction which alone can compel the human heart and guarantee its constancy'.33 When he himself was in charge of education in the Habsburg lands a few years later, children even in village primary schools were encouraged to think about and discuss their political obligations, a fact which was noted with a mixture of apprehension and mockery by opponents who held the more common view that the children of the poor should learn only what they had to know for earning their living.34 135

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The public debate about the reforms was vastly extended under Joseph II. Believing that great things had to be done at a stroke,35 he was eager to overcome the resistance to his drastic innovations which was to be expected from a population strongly attached to old ways and traditions. Accordingly he relaxed the censorship regulations and encouraged progressive writers and journalists to embark on a campaign to undermine traditional ideas on religion and piety, and to persuade the people about the desirability of his reforms. A particularly large number of pamphlets in favour of toleration and against monasticism were published.36 When Pope Pius VI announced his intention of coming to Vienna in 1782 to stem the tide of reforms, 'several writers of eminence and ability . . . employed their pens in representing to the bulk of the nation in short and cheap pamphlets the very narrow limits of papal power in the early ages'.37 There is no reason to doubt the impact of these purpose-made pamphlets, many of which were written with verve, wit and humour. The authors themselves were not backward in claiming a share of the credit for the successful enforcement of most of the reforms, and Joseph II defended them against the attacks of ecclesiastical authority in their more daring enterprises.38 But in 1784, when a storm of popular opposition compelled him to withdraw a decree on burials, Joseph gave vent to feelings of bitter disappointment with the work of the pamphleteers. He complained 'that an infinite number of pamphlets are merely scrawled, and not a single one had seen the light of day which had done credit to the nation's learning or contributed to the instruction of the public'.39 This peevish expression of resentment has too often been mistaken for a balanced historical assessment, and it has served as a convenient pretext for ignoring the pamphlets as material unworthy of systematic investigation. Now that some work on the pamphlets has been done,40 it is reasonable to surmise that Joseph's unfavourable judgement reflected a growing awareness of the discrepancy between his own considered policies and the political tendency of the pamphlets. In other words, Joseph may have become aware of a discrepancy or contradiction between his own reforming absolutism and the attitudes and aspirations engendered by the Enlightenment. Even the radical ecclesiastical reforms which Joseph had, as it were, commissioned the authors to champion, were not unreservedly endorsed by them. Alxinger spoke for many of them when, in a poem published in 1784, he flatly denied Joseph's claim to have enacted toleration; for toleration only existed where God's sacred image was honoured in every good man, regardless of the nature of his religious beliefs.41 So many pamphlets clamoured for the abolition of clerical celibacy (which was opposed also by many Reform Catholics), that Joseph who strongly approved of it, prohibited further discussion of the subject. More important than this, however, is the fact that from about 1784 the authors increasingly turned away from 136

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the targets which Joseph had held up for them to attack - the monks, the pope, the archbishop of Vienna, the preachers whose sermons were full of innuendoes against his reforms - and directed their shafts against Joseph himself. They criticized what they considered to be his inconsistencies which seemed to bode so ill for the long-term prospects of Enlightenment in the Habsburg lands, and complained about his arbitrary and autocratic methods. Johann Pezzl's Marokkanische Briefe, published in 1784, was the straw which showed the new direction towards which the wind was veering. Though it covered some familiar ground in its views on toleration, monks and clerical celibacy, it included a passage which, in retrospect, seems like the signal for the coming political offensive. No writer, he complained, 'had as yet attempted a complete analysis of the many-sided concept of the Enlightenment and to tell his fellow citizens precisely how many branches the tree of the true Enlightenment actually bears'. He continued: 'The greatest number still believe that the Enlightenment is concerned with almost nothing but religion.'42 In 1787, Franz Kratter, like Pezzl an immigrant from southern Germany, undertook explicitly to turn his critical searchlight from religion to politics: Everyone clamours against the evils of clerisy [Priestertum], fanaticism, superstition, and rightly so. But why don't we also clamour against the fanaticism of politics; the devastating plagues of murderous wars, the kidnapping of men by the army, which is carried out daily and sanctioned by the law; ... the unjust verdicts of condemnation by the judges; and the many arbitrary decisions affecting the weal and woe of so many millions of people? Only free states are capable of true Enlightenment. Absolute monarchies are but one step removed from despotism. Despotism and Enlightenment. Let anyone who can try to reconcile these two. I can't.43 After only four years of sole rule, Joseph had thoroughly shaken the optimism and confidence which the prospect of his accession to power had aroused for so many years. His inconsistencies (from the point of view of the Enlightenment) and his penchant for proceeding arbitrarily and autocratically, had thrown serious doubt on the whole prospectus of Enlightened Absolutism, which earlier had offered such a dazzling promise of progress without tears. The men of the Enlightenment were becoming deeply sceptical about the ability of a sovereign ruler, any sovereign ruler, to maintain a humane outlook for any length of time and to persevere with enlightened policies. This scepticism was clearly expressed in Paul Weidmann's epic Der Eroberer (1786), in which the prince begins as a humane and enlightened ruler* but succumbs to all the occupational hazards of his profession, and ends as a cruel, megalomaniac and aggressive despot.44 The men of the Enlightenment now saw themselves face to face with a historic challenge. Could they do anything to prevent the tragic development depicted in Weidmann's epic? Could they provide a remedy for the inherent 137

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shortcomings of absolutism? Two remedies were discussed and, to some extent, tried out before the onset of reaction extinguished all open political discussion and all initiatives from below. One was complete freedom of the press. This was persistently argued for in the pamphlets from 1784 onwards, and argued for explicitly as a safeguard against the abuse of power and despotism. The point was made clearly already in Pezzl's Marokkanische Briefe: The writers are the defenders of downtrodden reason, of injured humanity, of oppressed innocence and of lost freedom. They bring into the light of day the blows of tyranny, the evil designs of intrigue, the crimes of fanaticism It is to the writers that men owe the fact that they are men.45

Johann Jakob Fezer, another immigrant from southern Germany, made press freedom the key issue in his pamphlet Wahrscheinlichkeiten, published in 1785: 'Freedom of the press is the alluring companion of political toleration Without it, free peoples become slaves and descend to the level of animal stupidity.' 46 Believing the stakes to be so high, the advocates of press freedom as a guarantee against abuse of power and despotism were unwilling to countenance any systematic restriction on it, thus advancing beyond the wellknown position of Sonnenfels on this issue. Just as a child must learn to use a pair of scissors without cutting its fingers, so the citizen must learn to distinguish for himself the true from the false. 'The experience of all time and all men', wrote Fezer, 'teaches us that in this world we must get acquainted with good and evil simultaneously, if we are to learn the value of the former and to shun and guard against the latter.' 47 For his conclusion he chose an effective metaphor: 'The nation should be given the freedom to sail upon the ocean of knowledge and opinion with the compass of its own powers of judgement and to make new discoveries. Good sailing!'48 Kaspar Ruef, editor of Der Freimutige, the organ of Freiburg Reform Catholicism, reached the same conclusion, but used another metaphor: 'What good can it do to restrict press freedom?... Even if a sharp north wind occasionally drives some snow into our eyes, that is at least preferable to the terrible silence which precedes the storm.' 49 The second remedy advocated was associated particularly with the radical and rationalist wing of Freemasonry, the Illuminati. Their chosen weapon against despotism was the moral education of humanity. They were convinced that a nation maintaining high moral standards could not easily be ruled by despotic methods. They thought that the moral improvement of princes could be achieved, if it could be demonstrated to them that ruling justly and virtuously was in their own interest. Adam Weishaupt, the Bavarian founder of the Illuminati, taught his followers: 'The art of restraining one's needs is at the same time the art of attaining freedom; and the art of 138

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doing good to others is at the same time the art of attaining dominion.' 50 The Illuminati saw themselves as a 'secret school of wisdom', following in the footsteps of the priests of Ancient Egypt and of the early Christians. By teaching men about the consequences of their actions and their true interests, and by securing due reward for virtue (the practical example to illustrate the rule), they would bring about a world in which despotism would wither away: The whole plan of the order is based on the education of men, not by declamation, but by promoting and rewarding virtue The rulers of the earth will soon open their eyes and see that the practice of virtue brings them greater advantage and the perpetration of evil untold difficulties.51 In Vienna, the mineralogist Ignaz v. Born propagated the message of the Illuminati among his fellow masons. His efforts have been immortalized in The Magic Flute. The underlying theme of this work is the capacity of all men for moral regeneration - even of women and princes.52 Sarastro's speech at the beginning of Act II, to which Mozart drew the attention of an uncomprehending listener,53 is a clear formulation of the Illuminati programme and perspective: Let prejudice attack the initiated as much as it will. Wisdom and reason will tear it like a spider's web Evil prejudice shall disappear as soon as Tamino himself shall master the whole of our difficult art. Pamina has been destined by the gods to join the fair youth. That is why I took her away from her proud mother. The woman deems herself great, and hopes to deceive the people by tricks and superstition, and to destroy our temple. However, she shall not succeed. Tamino ... himself will help us to reinforce it, and as an initiate he will reward virtue and punish vice.54 When Mozart and his librettist(s) put this dazzling vision before the audiences of the Freihaustheater in Vienna in the autumn of 1791, the prospects of such a development had already receded. For the princes, Catholic and Protestant alike, had reacted strongly against the wave of criticism to which they were subjected. They were alarmed by the new standards against which their policies were being measured and at the alternative policies advanced. They took stern measures to nip this threatening development in the bud. The suppression and persecution of the Illuminati in Bavaria (1784/5), the subjection of the masonic lodges in the Habsburg lands to police control (1785), the establishment of a secret police organization by Joseph II and Count Pergen to specialize in the surveillance of public opinion through spies (1786-9), the Prussian Religionsedikt enforcing strict orthodoxy on the Lutheran clergy (1788), and the return to a much stricter censorship especially of political publications (1787-90), were all measures intended to be so many nails in the coffin of the Enlightenment which had emancipated itself from princely patronage - the 'false Enlightenment' as the supporters of absolutism naturally called it. The measures coincided with the

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emergence of a new conservative ideology, which was a reaction to the radicalization of the Enlightenment.55 The French Revolution cannot therefore be cast in the role of diabolus ex machina, disturbing the social harmony and destroying the Enlightenment in the lands of reforming absolutism. In any case, it was not possible to destroy the Enlightenment. The partnership between Habsburg reforming absolutism and the men and ideas of the Enlightenment, though far from harmonious, had already achieved too much. Reform Catholicism survived vigorously, supported by officials faithful to the 'Josephinian' tradition. Political radicalism declined during the period of reaction, but survived and had to find more indirect and allusive forms of expression. Both benefited from the continuing progress of popular education which the political reaction slowed down but could not reverse.

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10

Bohemia: From Darkness into Light * MIKULAS TEICH

Unexpectedly, I found the scholars in this place much disposed towards the Enlightenment and, in part, to possess good brains as well. G. Forster to S.Th. Sommering from Prague on 26 July 1784, in H. Hettner (ed.), Georg Forsters Briefwechsel mit S. Th. Sommering (Braunschweig,

1877), p. 102.

In order to understand the Enlightenment in Bohemia in proper historical perspective it is necessary to go back to the Thirty Years' War started by the uprising of the Bohemian estates. This was set in motion by the renowned Defenestration at the Prague Castle when the Emperor's representatives (together with their secretary) were thrown out of the window of the council chamber on 23 May 1618. The defeat of the rebel armies in the Battle of the White Mountain near Prague on 8 November 1620 had far-reaching effects. The Habsburgs consolidated their constitutional position in Bohemia, set up through the union of Bohemia, Hungary and their hereditary Austrian dominions after the Battle of Mohacs in 1526. By radically curtailing the powers of the Bohemian Diet and by declaring the Habsburg right to be hereditary kings of Bohemia without election, Ferdinand II (1618-37) paved the way for the establishment of Habsburg absolutism in Central Europe. The balance of influence within the Bohemian estates was also changed. The Catholic clergy, in the back seat since the Hussite struggles, regained its lost standing and took precedence over the other three estates: lords, knights and towns. The latter were restricted to the casting of one vote. By confiscating the property of the rebellious estates the Habsburg house intended to pay for war expenditures. From this situation the Catholic nobility - native and foreign - profited enormously because they could buy up confiscated domains very cheaply, while the rest of the population *To Arnost Klima, Professor of History in Charles University, Prague, and Corresponding Member of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, and a friend for many years, this essay is affectionately dedicated for his 65th birthday. 141

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suffered from rampant inflation resulting from the devaluation of the coinage.1 Conversion of Protestants to Roman Catholicism or, alternatively, their expulsion into exile, was decreed. This policy affected the greater and smaller nobility, burghers and peasants alike. The latter, however, tied to the soil, were effectively prevented from leaving the country, and their social and economic conditions deteriorated. A general cultural and educational decline also took place, coupled with the ascendancy of German, put on an equal footing with Czech as the official language. It is because of the adversities and sufferings which befell Bohemia after the Battle of the White Mountain that the period between 1620 and 1781 has become known in Czech historiography and literature as the Teriod of Darkness' (obdobi temna). Against this background the movement of the Enlightenment in Bohemia has to be viewed. After 1620, the already contiguous histories of Bohemia and Austria became even more closely interwoven. This also applies to the history of the Austrian Enlightenment, reflected in the reforms of Maria Theresa (1740-80) and, even more, of her son Joseph II (1780-90). If rejection of religious prejudices and condemnation of superstition, acclaim of humanity and espousal of reason were the watchwords of the Age of Enlightenment, then the Patent of Toleration and the Abolition of Serfdom, proclaimed by Joseph II in 1781, represent a tangible expression of this movement brought forth by and adapted to the reforming needs of Austrian absolutism. What is less appreciated is the 'Bohemian connection' of these celebrated Josephinian measures. THE TOLERATION PATENT

After 1620, the struggle for the supremacy of the Catholic faith with the Jesuits playing a dominant role was waged more relentlessly in Bohemia than in any other of the Habsburg dominions. The case of Count Franz Anton Sporck (1662-1738) one hundred years later illustrates that any step, however cautious, that could be interpreted as straying from the true Catholic road was still ruthlessly suppressed. 2 Sporck had inherited from his father (a cavalry general in the Thirty Years' War) large properties in central and eastern Bohemia. As a young man he visited Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands and England. Apart from broadening his general cultural horizons, the cavalier's tour enabled Sporck to become acquainted with ideas critical of formal Christian practice that were disseminated through Jansenism and other religious movements, concentrating on man's moral and inner life. At the same time Sporck became impressed by tendencies seeking to overcome the divisions within Christendom. On his return, prompted by the desire to give practical support to these efforts, he turned his hand to publishing with a view to spreading Christian 142

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beliefs opposed to the fanaticism and intolerance enforced by the Jesuits throughout the country. He had the advantage of wealth and position and also of the help of his two daughters, enlisted by him as translators from French. Sporck is known to have commissioned at least 124 publications, generally for free distribution. They were printed under his name or anonymously in Prague and elsewhere in Bohemia, but also in Nuremberg and other German towns, mostly in German, though some in Czech as well.3 In order to circumvent censorship he set up a private printing press in 1709 in one of his residencies (at Lysa), which was ordered to be closed down by the Prague archbishopric consistory two years later. All this was not to the liking of the Jesuits. They also considered the Count a thorn in the flesh on account of his eager inclination to engage with them (as indeed with others) in disputes over financial and legal matters, and they waited for an excuse to proceed against him. When in 1728 and 1729 the peasants of the Opocno domain again became restive the Jesuits struck. Not without reason, they connected the endemic unrest in the region with the crypto-Protestantism of the peasants, kept alive by the dissemination of forbidden literature.4 Sporck's large private library in his castle at the nearby Kuks (developed by him into a fashionable, now defunct, small spa) provided a welcome target for the Jesuit destructive zeal. Between 26 July and 1 August 1729 the library, containing about 50,000 volumes, was ransacked and taken away by the military to Hradec Kralove to be scrutinized by the bishopric consistory. At the end of October of the same year Sporck's palace in Prague was searched and books lacking the imprimatur were confiscated. Two and a half years later Sporck was fined the considerable sum of 6000 ducats5 for spreading heresy and publishing 31 books with either overt or suspected heretical content. Sporck, who was not a clandestine Protestant and had no intention of going against the Catholic faith, was brought into line. He was lucky compared with the fate of others in Bohemia found to owe secret allegiance to Protestantism - a crime that could be punished by death during the reign of Charles VI (1711-40). Maltreatment, imprisonment and deportation into Prussia of thousands of crypto-Protestants took place, following the reenactment of harsh measures against heretics in 1725. From the beginning of the 1730s, however, there were other considerations affecting government policy apart from religion. In 1731 and 1739 acts were issued curtailing the rights and privileges of craft guilds, indicating that the Habsburg state was coming to terms, albeit in a roundabout way, with the need to foster economic developments in the spirit of mercantilism.6 Although protracted they resulted in the unfolding of the 'manufactory' form of industrial production, still largely based on manual labour (manus, facere) but utilizing quite extensive division of labour. Thus from late seventeenth century onwards evidence accumulates for the expansion of this mode of industrial organization in the Bohemian textile H3

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industry, with predominating capitalist forms of production relations. It was accompanied by the setting up of manufacturing establishments depending on domestic labour but also on work-places where part or all of the operations were performed.7 In early eighteenth-century Bohemia there were enterprises of this character employing up to 400 workers. Because of financial worries which perennially plagued the Habsburgs, the authorities felt that these industrial activities should be encouraged, with Bohemia at the economic centre of gravity of the monarchy. Support took several forms, such as financial subsidies and significant privileges. Owners of the manufactories and their employees, for instance, were not liable to military service, and military personnel was not supposed to be billeted in the works. Not least, bearing in mind the rigorous anti-Protestantism of the Habsburg state, it became permissible to employ non-Catholic foreign labour and experts. Thus in the 1760s and 1770s government policy of promoting economic development began to outweigh Catholic militancy. 8 This was not an unimportant prelude to the legalization of religious toleration enacted by Joseph II, after he became sole ruler, and it enabled non-Catholic industrial experts and capitalist entrepreneurs to settle in the Habsburg dominions without having to obtain a special permit. To appreciate the interplay of religion, economics and toleration politics immediately preceding this reform, it is possible to turn to reports to Maria Theresa by the chancellor of state, Prince Kaunitz, dealing with outbursts of popular heresy in Moravia set in motion in 1777. In that year, on the basis of misleading assurances of immunity from punishment, apparently by one or two missionaries, whole Moravian villages (mainly in the district of Uherske Hradiste) openly declared themselves Protestant. Kaunitz argued that persecution of Protestants, decreed by Charles VI and reaffirmed by Maria Theresa, was as contrary to the spirit of true Christianity as it was against the real interests of the state. The recognition of the true faith was a divine gift and could not be imposed by force. The effect of driving out or deporting Protestant subjects was to harm the country economically because it meant reduction of its population. Allegiance to Protestantism was still punishable by death but Kaunitz and other advisers, including Joseph II, counselled moderation in the treatment of thousands of Czech-speaking Moravians, who had again surfaced as Protestants. This was the last major issue on which the Emperor-son clashed with the Empress-mother before her death. Whereas Maria Theresa advocated forcible measures, including the taking of children from their parents, Joseph unambiguously opposed them and even threatened to withdraw from the co-regency.9 In reality, the Toleration Patent of 13 October 1781 was restrictive because those who acknowledged themselves as Protestants had to choose between either Lutheranism or Calvinism.10 It did not take into account 144

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specific Czech historical conditions and did not permit a 'Czech confession'. Despite the militant Catholic Counter-Reformation operating for more than 150 years Czech Protestantism weathered the storm underground, eventually taking in the countryside of eastern Bohemia the form of popular so-called 'Visionary' sectarianism. Its separateness from the recognized Protestant religious bodies was revealed, for instance, in the Litomysl district in 1783, when out of 1615 non-Catholics 447 openly declared themselves as 'Lambs' and 75 dared to register as 'Deists' (the remainder described themselves as Calvinists). While members of the first-named sect seemed to lay great store by upholding man's freedom to search the Scriptures for himself and to expound them, followers of the latter represented the most radical wing of popular religious heterodoxy in eighteenth-century Bohemia, unwittingly producing pantheistic, indeed occasionally atheistic and materialistic notions of the universe.11 As bodies existing outside the two officially tolerated Protestant denominations they were short-lived. All the same, their contribution in Bohemia to 'the struggle for basic freedoms - the individual's right to choose his own religious beliefs and thinker's right to pursue the truth in his own way' which 'lay behind the assault upon the Roman Catholic Church' 12 should be appreciated. Among them the authentic Czech heritage in the social and religious spheres, descending from Hus, the Unitas fratrum and the Confessio Bohemica, survived into the Age of Enlightenment. In conformity with their reading of the Bible, the Visionaries rejected the institution of serfdom as iniquitous and inhumane, and this conviction led them to the most active participation in the big peasant rising of 1775. ABOLITION OF SERFDOM

As a result of the Thirty Years' War, epidemics, hunger and emigration, Bohemia's population had decreased. There are various estimates but it has been accepted that the population in Bohemia diminished from about 1,750,000 to about 950,000.13 Whereas in 1618 the number of landed peasant families was put at 150,000, in 1645 the report of the estates to the Crown showed the figure of 30,000. It was estimated that 230 towns and 6000 villages and manors existed in 1648, against 782 and 36,000 respectively before the conflict.14 Together with one-third of land remaining untilled this gives further indication of the heavy toll of the country's economy taken by the war. A direct by-product of this situation was the expansion of the manorial economy based on serfdom. It seems that demand for grain for German towns such as Nuremberg, Dresden and Leipzig became one of the stimulants of the growth of the manorial economy after hostilities ceased. Though the recovery was slow, it comprised the raising of cattle and sheep and fish (carp) in addition to

H5

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production of grain and milling, brewing and distilling. Apart from these more typical branches of rural activities, the making of bricks, iron and glass existed within a manorial economy. Indeed, the larger estate represented a complex agricultural - industrial system based on serfdom. Without going into the vexed question of the so-called 'second serfdom',15 it can be stated that it was the demand for a work force that extended and deepened the serf economy after the war, based on robota or forced labour.16 There are many reports of the way the robota system had operated. 'What is this beast', asked the celebrated Court preacher Abraham a Santa Clara in the 1680s and he replied as follows: 'Ask that poor worker in the field. Robot means that on Monday the peasant has to cultivate the land of his lord, on Tuesday to work in the vineyard of his lord, on Wednesday to cart wood to the castle, on Thursday to thresh or cut the straw, on Friday tofishin the pond or catch game for the table, on Saturday to do building work, on Sunday to serve as courier. Out of days make weeks, out of weeks months, out of months years, and you will understand the sort of Easter that the peasants have, and how it happens that they sometimes carry their bones and skin to market, for they really have nothing else.'17 During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the House of Habsburg depended essentially on the economy of Bohemia. In 1682 the quota of relative financial contributions by Bohemia and Austria was 1 if: 6j. The situation did not improve during and following the Wars of the Austrian Succession (1740-2, 1744-8) and the Seven Years' War (1756-63). According to the American historian Robert J. Kerner, in the latter Bohemia, of all the Lands, was most devastated by military expeditions yet at the same time paid into the coffers of the Treasury the Iarge3t sums of any state then belonging to the Monarchy. Besides carrying between 32 and 40 per cent of the ordinary public revenue of the Monarchy, Bohemia alone contributed four times as much as all the Hungarian lands, and, if both the ordinary and extraordinary war revenues were counted, it contributed between 20 and 40 per cent more than the Netherlands, the next richest source of revenue.18 If the picture might seem too dark then continuous peasant unrest leading to four large-scale uprisings (1680, 1738, 1771 ? 1775) and prompting the issue of four Robotpatents (1680, 1717, 1738, 1775) provide the other side of the Bohemian agrarian coin. Designed to pacify the serf, the patents attempted to regularize the robota system without putting it in jeopardy. 19 While this was paramount to government policy, a dichotomy between the interests of the state and the nobility gradually began to assert itself. It sprang from the need to ensure that the peasants had to support the state as well as the nobility. Satisfying both claims became increasingly hard, especially at times of bad harvests as in the early 1770s. After travelling extensively through Bohemia during the famine of 1770-1, Joseph II returned to Vienna convinced that the conditions of the peasants in Bohemia had to be substantially improved. But moves in this direction 146

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were blocked by the estates, i.e. by the nobility. Not until 40,000 troops and four cavalry regiments had suppressed the great peasants' revolt, in January 1775, was the fourth and the last Robotpatent (before the termination of the robota system in 1848) announced later in the year (on 13 August). A complex schedule of taxation was devised in order to safeguard the financial interests of the state while protecting the feudal privileges of the lords and pacifying the refractory serfs at the same time. On the basis of the size of the state tax imposed on them, the serfs were divided into eleven classes with defined robota duties. But whatever the demands amounted to, the serf was to work only between one to three days a week; the number of daily hours of work was also specified. In reality, the actual implementation of the patent's provisions was resisted by the nobles, as were propositions to commute robota obligations into money payments or to divide estate lands into leaseholds to be cultivated by freed peasants. It is indicative that the memorable Patent of the Abolition of Serfdom of 1 November 1781 not only did not contain a provision for the rescinding of the robota system but reaffirmed it expressis verbis. However, the serfs were no longer bound to obtain the permission of their masters if they wished to marry, learn a trade, study or move to another place. On the other hand, serf orphans had to perform labour services for up to three years; and seigneurial jurisdiction, although restricted, was not abolished. Deriving from social pressures and economic developments undermining the foundations of the feudal social order, the Patent simultaneously furthered and hindered the dynamics of the transformation from feudalism to capitalism. The question arises of the relationship between this reform and the Enlightenment. There can be no doubt that it was the incursion of the rebellious peasants into castles that compelled the Habsburg state to act 'enlighteningly'. This is not to belittle the impact of the ideas of the Enlightenment on the reform of the institution of serfdom in the Czech Lands (i.e. Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia). Nevertheless, they did not float in a social vacuum. In the preamble to the Patent 'reason' and 'humanity' were invoked to sanction the abolition of serfdom (Aufhebung der Leibeigenschaft) and its replacement by moderate subjection, i.e. villeinage (gemaessigte Unterthaenigkeit). But it was the 'most beneficial effect upon agriculture and industry' that served to vindicate the change in the first place.20 To discuss the ideas of the philosophers of the Enlightenment in aristocratic salons was one thing, to translate them into practice was another. While, understandably, the peasantry was revolting against the institution of serfdom, the aristocracy was unwilling to give it up. Even the most knowledgeable and travelled among them, who were well acquainted with the social, economic and intellectual aspects of contemporary life in France and England, and were attracted to them, held back if it meant doing away with robota. Take, for instance, Count Franz Hartig (1758-97), who in the form of 147

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extracts from letters, published an interesting account of his visit to France, Britain and Italy during 1775-21 A great admirer of Voltaire, he was very critical of physiocrats and of political conditions in France. On the other hand, he was full of admiration for what he saw in England. Agriculture, trade and laws formed a harmonious unity. The English aristocracy did not find it degrading to engage in commercial activities. Liberty and prosperity were the words pronounced more often in England than anywhere else, and the English people had the greatest right to do so because they enjoy great freedoms and privileges. Praise of the English people22 came through despite the aristocratic disdain for the common man: People are People everywhere, if one takes this word to mean the multitude of beings who judge without knowing, hate or love without reasoning, succumb always to impressions of the moment and often act as machines ... in order to reach their aim.23 Like others among the Bohemian nobility Hartig wanted to have his cake and eat it. How to transform eighteenth-century Bohemia into eighteenthcentury England without uprooting the serf sector of the economy they did not explain. A year later Hartig published a book about the rise and fall of agriculture among different nations, in which he also discussed the dramatic events of 1775, symptomatically identifying the rebellious peasants who clamoured for liberty as Hussites. Hartig attests that it was the peasants' revolt that brought about the reduction of robota obligations and the abolition of serfdom. While not exactly hailing it, Hartig expressed a substantial measure of agreement with the latter. Every humane nobleman, declared Hartig, would gladly give up a few rights and revenues. Besides, he accepted with satisfaction that mankind had entered into its natural rights: the peasant, rich or poor, was accorded legal protection against any oppression. It was characteristic of Hartig's attitude that he did not differentiate between feudal and capitalist production relations and equated economic entrepreneurial activities based on unpaid robota-labour and paid hired-labour. By pointing to the reported non-economic returns from state-run estates, where robota was abolished and the land was distributed to the serfs, Hartig finally gave it to be understood that it was doubtful whether such agricultural systems either improved the peasants' lot or proved to be economically viable or profitable to the feudal authorities operating them.24 Hartig is altogether an interesting though not unrepresentative member of Bohemian high aristocracy of the period. Wealthy, educated, cultured, fluent in several languages, he spent a number of years abroad in the diplomatic and, apparently, in the intelligence service of the Viennese government. When in 1794 the post of president of the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences became vacant the Emperor (Francis II) made it clear that he would like to see the election of somebody like Hartig to this position. The 148

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reason behind his candidature became clearer after Hartig was duly elected. Hartig demanded changes in the constitution of the Society that were to ensure that its members concerned themselves only with discoveries and scientific developments, useful to the Vaterland and not with writings and activities directed against religion and the state, as he had put it, by 'halflearnt and so-called modern philosophers' in other parts of the world. 25

RISE OF ORGANIZED SCIENCE26

Reference to the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences introduces another significant feature of the Enlightenment in Bohemia, i.e. the rise of modern organized science. The origins of the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences go back to the activities of an informal body of natural scientists and historians, the 'Private Learned Society', instituted around 1774.27 Its journal, Abhandlungen einer Privatgesellschaft in Boehmen, zur Aufnahme der vaterlaendischen

Geschichte und der JVaturgeschichte, under the editorship of Ignaz [Inigo] von Born (1742-91), appeared six times as an annual between 1775 and 1786. The establishment of the Private Learned Society in Prague was preceded by the foundation of scientific societies and academies in other European countries. This trend was closely connected with the manufactory stage of industrialization in certain economically active European states or regions, extending roughly from the middle of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century. These societies were concerned to a large degree with gaining systematic knowledge of nature for practical use including traditional methods of production and, as repeatedly pointed out with respect to the early history of the Royal Society, theology was excluded from their endeavours: The business and the design of the Royal Society is - To improve knowledge of naturall things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanick practises, Engynes and Inventions by Experiments - (not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetorick or Logick, etc.).28 Such an attitude was due not to militant atheism but practical considerations. Manufactories needed raw materials which could be ascertained through surveys of natural resources. Hence the surveying of natural resources became one of the important tasks which the scientific societies set themselves. The need for an organized scientific survey of the Habsburg dominions already been proclaimed by Philipp Wilhelm von Hornigk (1638-1712), the leading thinker of Austrian mercantilism, in 1684. Hornigk [Hornick, Hoernigk] recognized the importance of mathematics and mechanics for the development of manufactories. He emphasized that they should use native raw materials. He called for surveys and experiments on the acclimatization

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of foreign plants and animals. He also thought it highly desirable to publish a technological encyclopaedia which would explain the significance of physics and mechanics for productive purposes. This task - according to Hornigk could not be performed by a single person but by a group of disinterested specialists in various subjects who would not keep their knowledge to themselves but place it at the public's disposal.29 Hornigk's agitation against secretiveness and his request for specialists to combine their scientific and technical knowledge for production and commerce was not accidental. The principle of cooperation based on the division of labour, so characteristic of operations in manufactories, was also penetrating into the world of science. In some ways artisans and scientists had developed a similar attitude in refraining from divulging what was believed to constitute a 'trade' secret. With the growth of specialized scientific knowledge the need arose for exchange of observational and experimental results that could be tested and expanded, leading up to the foundation of scientific societies and journals. Through them scientific activity became 'socialized' both in terms of organization and also in that its results became public property, available at no cost to those interested in its practical utilization in industry, agriculture and medicine. 30 The conditions for Hornigk's suggestion for establishing an association of scientists for Austria's economic benefit matured only slowly, and it took more than a hundred years before one was founded in Bohemia. The background of the setting-up of the Private Learned Society will become clearer by referring to the exploration of natural resources of Bohemia and the Austrian Salzkammergut instigated by Maria Theresa and her husband Francis of Lotharingia, a leading entrepreneur himself, in the 1750s and 1760s. They charged with this task Jan Krtitel Bohac [Johan(n) Tauffer Bohadsch], a professor and leading official of the Prague medical faculty. One of the distinguished microscopists of his time, Bohac (1724-68) was also a commercial counsellor to the Bohemian Gubernium. A university professor not isolated from life, Bohac had not the slightest doubt that the development of the natural sciences, arts and manufactures formed an inseparable unity. With great clarity he defended the social function of scientific investigations against those who tended to underrate it. In the eighteenth century, under the influence of Linnaeus, systematics came to occupy a central place in natural history. Sometimes these endeavours degenerated into aimless classifications of plants, animals and minerals for their own sake. Bohac condemned such tendencies, holding that classification of natural objects should be a means of utilizing them in industrial production. His comprehensive approach to problems of production led him to appreciate the dependence of industry on agriculture. For instance, his concern with the cultivation of woad for animal feeding and dyeing indicates the connection between scientific, technical, economic and 150

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political aspects of his work.31 It was to be crowned by a comprehensive survey of the plant, animal and mineral wealth of Bohemia. However, because of Bohac's untimely death, it remained in manuscript and has been lost. There can be little doubt about the social and economic impetus that turned Bohac and others to apply their expert knowledge of properties and processes of nature, inanimate and animate, to practical fields, including the systematic survey of the natural wealth of Bohemia. But, unaided financially and working alone, this could be hardly completed by an individual. It could have been expected that Prague University would house such a body because it counted among its members prominent scientists interested in the practical use of natural knowledge like Bohac or the able mathematician and physicist Joseph Stepling (1716-78). At the order of the Empress Maria Theresa a kind of university scientific society presided over by Stepling had been established in 1753. University teachers used to meet and hold lectures, but within less than a decade the society ceased to function, possibly due to the antagonism of the Jesuit order still in control of university life and imbued by thought derived from the Aristotelian-Thomist synthesis.32 To complement the account one should mention the earliest scientific society in the Czech Lands and, indeed, in the Habsburg Empire. It was the short-lived Societas eruditorum incognitorum in terris austriacis at Olomouc (the

former capital of Moravia), founded in December 1746 with the backing of Maria Theresa by Joseph von Petrasch (1714-72), a former aide-de-camp of Eugene of Savoy. The Society of Unknown Scholars arose from informal gatherings of laymen, clergy and military officers interested in discussing literary and scientific developments at home and abroad in an atmosphere free from limitations imposed by the Jesuits on the spiritual life of the fortress and university town. Containing only reviews and no original contributions, two volumes of its journal Monathliche Auszuege Alt, und neuer Gelehrten Sachen

were issued in Olomouc in 1747 and 1748. Apparently to avoid censorship the third volume of the journal was printed outside Austria (in 1750) and afterwards its publication ceased.33 About two decades elapsed before the idea of a scientific society was taken up again by the well-known mineralogist, Born, in 1773. Writing to his friend Count F J . Kinsky[y] (1739-1805), Born emphasized that nobody has thought of setting up a learned society for the exploration of Austria's widespread territory in order to assemble the observations made by naturalists and scientists. This is an important pointer that a scientific society, centred on Austria as a whole, or restricted to Bohemia, did not exist before 1774Born criticized the aristocracy for its lack of comprehension of the utility of natural history. He stressed that those who took interest in it and had the ability to work creatively did not possess the means to explore nature. He

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explicitly mentioned the case of Bohac, who on his travels had collected natural objects at his own expense and on his death left his wife penniless. On the other hand, according to Born, the nobility had the means but did not encourage people of talent to investigate the natural wealth of the monarchy. Further in this letter he elucidates the usefulness of science to the economy, the state, the church, the doctor and the poet.34 He was also particularly concerned with the perniciousness of not making scientific observations and technical discoveries available to all, under the cloak of state secrecy. Born here was condemning an official practice which had almost already landed him with the charge of treason. In 1771 he had published Poda's description of machines used in the mining district of Banska Stiavnica, one of the classical texts on eighteenth-century mining in Central Europe. 35 At that time he occupied the post of assessor of the Mint and Mining Head Office in Prague, from which he chose to resign. The defence of open scientific communication was crucial to Born's drive to organize scientific life in Bohemia between 1770 and 1776, and afterwards in Vienna and, indeed, on an international scale.36 Major-General Count Frantisek Josef (Franz Joseph) Kinsky was descended from one of the ancient Czech aristocratic houses.37 A keen geologist and educationalist (he eventually became the head of the Military Academy at Wiener Neustadt) he supported Born's vision of putting scientific life in Bohemia on an organized basis, for economic, technical and educational reasons. Together with Born and aided by the head of the Gubernium, Prince Karl Egon Fiirstenberg, he was instrumental in founding a Natural History Museum (1775) and brought into being the Prague University Library (1777) of which he became the first director. Kinsky shared Born's concern that the aristocracy as a social class was apt to regard science and technology with disdain. In a letter to Born published in the first volume of Abhandlungen (1775), Kinsky complained that the nobility were not properly informed that the administration of their domains required knowledge of natural and agricultural sciences.38 In his answer Born wrote that a mineralogical and geographical description of Bohemia was needed, adding that there were only a few mineralogists availaible. According to Born, the example of Saxony ought to be followed where specialists financed by public funds were preparing a mineralogical map. 39 The Private Learned Society's transformation into a public body occurred when it became the Bohemian Society of Sciences in 1784 and the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences in 1790. The problems which the scientists in Bohemia tried to solve, especially those who were associated with the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences or came within its orbit during the first period of its existence, were closely related to the idea of a scientific survey of Bohemian natural resources. The Society approached the problem of a scientific survey of Bohemia 152

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basically from two angles. It launched prize essay competitions and organized expeditions for the purpose of surveying various regions of Bohemia. The aim of these endeavours was to collect a large amount of scientifically verified information for a map of Bohemia. It embarked upon this plan because its members were convinced that the development of manufactures depended above all on knowledge and utilization of domestic economic resources. However, the social, financial and personal situation did not favour the transformation of this awareness into reality. For the most part, agricultural and industrial activities within continuing feudal relations and undeveloped capitalism were carried out without resort to scientific method and knowledge. The Bohemian Society of Sciences was in continuous financial difficulties which were not made good by the support from a few interested aristocrats. In addition, the number of scientists able to perform a large-scale survey of the country was then small. The society included amongst its members the most distinguished scientists in Bohemia, but that amounted to no more than a few individuals. As a consequence it succeeded only partially in achieving its aim. BEGINNINGS OF MODERN CZECH HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP

In contrast to the Royal Society, the Private Learned Society included humanities from the outset as an integral part of its concerns as well as natural sciences. The ideology underlying its formation was the patriotism to which practitioners of disciplines in both camps confessed. They considered themselves heirs of a long and honourable tradition of learning effectively inaugurated with the foundation of a studium generale at Prague in 1348, the first university in Central Europe. Patriotism lay behind their call not only for the exploration of Bohemian economic resources but also of its historical past. They agreed that critical analysis and rationalism, so relevant to the scientific study of nature, could be equally successful in the scientific study of history. The scholar who initiated it for Czech history was the Piarist Gelasius Dobner (1719-90), one of the first members of the Learned Society. 40 He did this in 1761 by attacking the popular chronicle composed by Vaclav Hajek (of Libocany) and published with Habsburg support in 1541. Anti-Hussite and pro-feudal in tendency, this work contained a plethora of fabrications. Dobner concentrated on the early history of the inhabitants of Bohemia repudiating Hajek's notion that they were led by an aristocratic chief Cech (Czech) after whom they were said to be called. In ascribing the name to Zechs (Zichs), a Sarmatian tribe supposed to have come to Bohemia from the Black Sea during the great migration of peoples and to have moved on to the south, Dobner's solution did not prove valid either. Nevertheless, it started off the first scholarly controversy in modern Czech historiography, and by

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contending that the social organization of the Czechs was democratic in early times [primus democraticus patriae nostrae status) it brought out a concept of

social order different from the feudal hierarchical system glorified by Hajek, and still dominant in Dobner's time. For all his apparent non-conformity, Dobner in no way questioned the established feudal social order and Catholic Christianity and, actually, as he grew older, he did not approve of Joseph's measures curtailing the power of the nobles and the role of the church. Dobner's dislike of Hussites also deepened with time and although he was already aware in 1764 that a person by the name Jan Nepomucky had never lived (to counterweigh the memory of Hus, Nepomucky was canonized as a martyr to the faith in 1729) the Piarist-historian attempted to vindicate the myth twenty years later. But however heavily conservative religious and social considerations weighed with Dobner, in his historical pursuits he sought sound truth. This was to be extracted from documents regarded by him as the primary source of historical evidence, by analysis, classification, comparison - in short by methods applied by natural scientists in their work. As a scholar Dobner superseded his younger contemporary Mikulas Adaukt Voigt (1733-87), with whom he was linked through their membership of the Piarist community and the Learned Society.41 It was under the influence of Dobner that Voigt undertook the study of Czech coins, and brought into existence numismatics in Bohemia through a series of volumes published between 1771 and 1787. A year later, his work on the Spirit of Legislation in Bohemia through the Ages, which had won the prize of the

Bohemian Society of Sciences appeared posthumously. This gives some indication of Voigt's broad interests, extending to literary and natural history of Bohemia, including its economic aspects.42 It was in the sort of patriotism with which Voigt pursued this range of subjects that he differed from Dobner, for in Voigt's case it took a pronouncedly national form. It inspired not only the tracing of Bohemia's past but also the demonstration of its achievements, embracing the antiquity of Czech civilization and of the Czech language that had once been employed in courts and translations from Latin and Greek but had became stagnant of late. Great emphasis was placed on the role of the old national nobility, including its female members, in the development of learning in Bohemia. Starting in 1773 this argument was carried into practice by Voigt in a series of collective biographical sketches, in Latin and German versions, of prominent men of science, arts and culture in general, who had lived and worked in the Czech Lands. 43 Not the least remarkable feature of this enterprise, eight years before the Toleration Patent of 1781, was Voigt's combining of the national line with toleration by explicitly admitting non-Catholics into Bohemia's community of learning. Voigt showed it markedly, for example, by pointing to Hus's

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much-admired steadfastness, serenity and fearlessness when he was burnt at the stake. He went further still claiming that Hus was really a Catholic who went astray in contesting the power of the pontiff, objecting to monastic orders and disputing some church customs.44 The accent on toleration was also fully present in relation to two Jewish learned rabbis, Jonathan Eybenschiitz and David Oppenheimer, whose portraits and biographical sketches were incorporated by Voigt in the work: Toleration must be upheld in the Republic of Scholars more so than in any other society. We would commit a sin against this contract unanimously agreed between true scholars and against the thinking of our philosophical age if we would leave out a few worthy native scholars from our list. This only because they belong to a religious community which though different from ours has, on the contrary, at all times nourished in its midst great men of genius and enlightened heads.45 Earlier, in discussing the publication of Abbildungen, a reference was made to Frantisek Martin Pelcl [Pelcel, Pelzel] (i 734-1801), as Voigt's closest collaborator and as the person responsible for bringing out the third and fourth parts of the series.46 In contrast to the Piarists Dobner and Voigt, Pelcl was not a cleric but earned his livelihood in the employment of aristocratic families, first as tutor to the Sternbergs [Sternberk] for eight years and then as tutor, librarian and archivist to the Nostitzs [Nostic] for twenty-eight years, before obtaining the post of Professor of Czech Language and Literature at the Prague University in 1792. He was active in the Learned Society and, as holder of several offices, he was also an important figure in the Bohemian Society of Sciences. It was due to Pelcl's proposal that the society accepted the project of a Diplomatarium Bohemicum in 1786, a counterpart to the proposed map of the natural wealth of Bohemia. But, as in the case of the latter, the collecting of diplomas suffered from lack of funds to pay copyists of documents and never really took off the ground.47 However, in collaboration with Josef Dobrovsky he produced the first modern edition of narrative sources on Czech history, in two volumes (Scriptores rerum Bohemicarum, 1783-4), which was superior to Dobner in techniques of historical research. Pelcl carried the latter's critical historical reconstruction of Bohemia's history a step further by concentrating primarily on the period between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. Drawing on diplomatic material Pelcl threw new light on several aspects of the reigns of Charles IV and his son Wenceslas IV, and also on their relationship to German history. Altogether Pelcl surpassed Dobner and Voigt in placing his themes in broader contexts. This is revealed in this most influential work, which provided a general survey of Bohemia's history, Kurzgefasste Geschichte der Boehmen von den aeltesten bis auf die itzigen £eiten, that

first appeared in 1774. His concern was not so much to establish facts and to analyse them as to disseminate knowledge of Czech history and to strengthen

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the national consciousness of the aristocracy, the intelligentsia and the young. The national tendency was even more fully developed in the revised and enlarged Czech version of the book which appeared as the New Czech Chronicle successively in three parts (1791-6). 48 Pelcl's interpretation of Czech history was coloured by the high esteem in which he held kings and nobles and the low opinion he had of the common people. Nevertheless, he understood that without the mass of the rural and urban Czech speakers the Czech language could not have survived after the White Mountain catastrophe. Pelcl's recognition of the place of Hus and the Hussite struggles in the history of the Czech national cause, as well as his sympathies for Czech non-Catholics and his critical attitude towards the Jesuit policies during the Counter-Reformation, came through clearly. As Joseph's dreams faded Pelcl's goodwill for the Emperor and his reforms also evaporated.49 Closely linked with Pelcl by working and personal ties, also as members of the Nostitz household and of the Private Learned Society and its successor, was the philologist Josef Dobrovsky (1753-1828).50 In scholarly and intellectual terms as well as a human being he represents the Czech Enlightenment at its best. Born into the humble family of a retired army sergeant, Dobrovsky's mental gifts were recognized at an early age and he was given opportunity to obtain a Gymnasium education. He then had to study at the philosophical faculty (1768-71) before passing to the theological faculty (1771-2) of Prague University, while supporting himself as a private tutor. He was able to broaden his intellectual horizons under the transforming influence of Stepling and of Carl Heinrich Seibt (1735-1806), the first lay professor at the philosophical faculty for many decades. Though not profound, Seibt's lectures on aesthetics, morals and ethics contributed substantially to the change of the intellectual climate of Prague in the 1760s. For so long fed on a diet of fear and wonder of the next world, the public welcomed his raising of questions concerning human happiness and pleasures in this world. Moreover, Seibt's pragmatic notions of Christianity and education, and stress on the social obligations of citizens made him an acceptable ally of those in the government interested in changes in religious and teaching spheres in accordance with the requirements of the state. In 1772 Dobrovsky entered the Jesuit order at Brno, but on its disbandment a year later he returned to Prague to complete his theological studies, which he did by 1776. Except for a brief period between 1787 and 1790, when he was involved in teaching and administering in one of the newly founded general seminaries, he lived in Prague as a private tutor and savant aided by the Nostitzs and Sternbergs. Though economically dependent on the patronage of magnates, he regarded them as equals, as no other of his non-aristocratic contemporaries could quite do, and was accepted by them as 156

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such. Anything but a recluse, Dobrovsky kept in touch with the outside world through travels at home and abroad (described by Goethe as 'worthy of a Herodotus'), and through a large correspondence on wide-ranging spiritual and mundane matters. Among those with whom he exchanged letters on philology, literature, history, science, religion, education, philosophy and politics were renowned scholars as well as unknown country priests. Dobrovsky's main fields of studies were first Oriental languages and biblical texts and then Slavonic languages. He became the leading authority on the Czech language which was in a deplorable state owing to the developments after the Battle of the White Mountain. Even in Dobrovsky's mind there were serious doubts whether Czech could ever recover and develop as a modern literary language. He insisted both on making use of the literary Czech employed before 1620 and on taking over words used by ordinary people. Dobrovsky has to be regarded as the founder of comparative Slavonic studies.51 Pioneering as was Dobrovsky's contribution to philology, the persistence of his struggles against distortions of historical truth for 'patriotic' reasons was no less momentous. In 1778 Dobrovsky entered scientific controversy by showing that the supposedly original fragment of the Gospel according to St Mark, acquired by Charles IV and brought to Prague, was a sixth-century text. As late as 1824-8 Dobrovsky was still prominent by taking a stand against moves to prove the ancient nature of Czech poetry on the basis of forged manuscript material.52 For some fifty years Dobrovsky remained faithful to the bold objective he set himself, in the periodical he had founded for a review of the state of Czech culture and learning, which he described as follows: But I believe to owe more respect to my nation than that I should tell only anecdotes to amuse. The truth, plain, naked unvarnished truth, to tell (it) fearlessly is my main task. Also anecdotes can be truthful but on their basis no general conclusions can be arrived at.53 With Dobrovsky the indigenous Czech humanities came of age. SCHOOLING FOR INDUSTRY AND INDUSTRIOUSNESS

For an understanding of the Czech Enlightenment the sphere of primary education is of no less significance than its other components. In the preceding discussion some educational themes have been briefly touched upon. Thus the educational profit, gained by perceptive young noblemen touring European countries, has been indicated (Sporck, Hartig). Their intellectual progress and physical well-being were usually watched over by a private tutor (Hofmeister) who accompanied them. However, this form of education gradually outlived its usefulness, apart 157

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from the fact that only the wealthy among the aristocracy could afford it. Indeed, behind the setting-up of academies for the education of gentlemen (Ritterakademien) under Charles VI and, to some extent, the reform of universities under Maria Theresa, lay the awareness of the inadequacy of the education of men of noble rank, to train them to play the customary role in social, political, military and economic affairs of the country.54 Its shortcomings was vividly exposed in the Erinnerung ueber einen wichtigen Gegenstand von einem Boehmen by F J . Kinsky (1773). While believing in the Hofmeister system of education, this thoughtful Czech aristocrat effectively revealed its weaknesses in ignoring child psychology and in failing to develop the harmony of body, mind and morals on which he placed so much emphasis. Convinced that aristocratic privileges could not be separated from social obligations, he deplored that his fellow peers were not trained to face up to the harsher side of life. Thus pointing to misconceptions that peasants ate meat twice a day, Kinsky insisted that any pupil in his charge would have to familiarize himself with human misery wherever it could be encountered, not excluding prisons, hospitals and battlefields (§ 49). If he had wished to enlarge this list of places of wretchedness and suffering he could have added to it the child manufactory at Bela pod Bezdezem [Weisswasser] established in 1765.55 In fact, other members of the Kinsky family were variously involved in this venture and one of them, Count Josef Kinsky, a prominent entrepreneur and head of the Gubernium's commercial department, owned it partially since 1767 and fully by the middle of the I77OS. As indicated by the title of the printed booklet giving information on this enterprise, it occupies a special place in the industrial and educational history of Bohemia. In translation the title reads as follows: Description of the first newly set up nursery or manufactory afterwards workhouse in the Kingdom of Bohemia which Her Imp. Roy. apost. Majesty ... has most graciously consented to be

established in the year ij6j. The age of the young males working there was from 10 to 18 and of the young females from 10 to 20. They were mostly foundlings and it was expected that they would stay for at least seven years. So the average age was to be about 13, but there is evidence that much younger children (7 to 8 years) were taken in. They were employed in producing stockings and hats and also in metal working. It will cause no surprise that their conditions of life were bad. They were insufficiently fed, clothed and frequently beaten. The working day started at 5 a.m. and ended at 10 p.m. In all 1 if hours were devoted to the actual production processes and two hours (one hour in the morning and one in the afternoon) were allowed for learning the three R's; the rest of the day was given to praying and meals. Whether in actual practice the young persons received the intended parttime instruction is very doubtful. It does not seem that they appreciated its availability - they tended to abscond at the first opportunity. In 1767 a 158

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government inspector found that out of 80 children who were supposed to have been working in the child manufactory only 18 could be accounted for. The setting up of the child manufactory at Bela pod Bezdezem has to be seen as a practical consequence of ideas proposed by economic thinkers in Austria and elsewhere in conjunction with the growth of the manufactory mode of production in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By 1764 it became official government policy throughout the Austrian dominions to arrange work in orphanages, workhouses and prisons in accordance with the organizational framework of the manufactory. It was argued that in this way, apart from contributing to the upkeep of these institutions, their inmates could learn skills enabling them to fend for themselves and to become useful. Attempts at connecting education with production, such as at the child manufactory, were not successful.56 Nevertheless, they were not left fallow, as a result of the efforts of Ferdinand Kindermann (1740-1801), who as town priest of Kaplice in Southern Bohemia led the foundations of what became known as 'industrial schooling' between 1771 and 1774. Advanced by men like Seibt57 and Felbiger,58 the foundations of Kindermann's ideas were notions regarding Christian practice expressing itself in obedience to authorities, gaining useful knowledge and industrious work. According to Kindermann, it was not enough to instruct the prospective bricklayer and labourer or the male and female servant in religion, reading, writing, counting and music but it was also necessary to prepare them for the more immediate tasks of life. Concerned with the integration of the lower classes into the labour process, Kindermann believed that begging and idleness were to be combatted not by repressive workhouses but by schoolhouses geared to the learner's basic vocational needs at the later date. Apart from trying to prevent him from losing sight of his obligations and place in society in adult life, and to accept them willingly and even joyously, the school was to provide him with opportunities to acquire manual proficiency to maintain himself. Kindermann encouraged pupils to acquire one rather than many skills. While actually attending school they were expected to spend some time, possibly in association with a local manufactory, in gainful occupations such as spinning (flax, cotton, wool, silk) and the production of stockings, shirts, gloves, etc. Attention was also to be paid to agricultural activities, for example to vegetable and fruit growing, silkworm cultivation and beekeeping. Though an element of child labour exploitation was present in the Kindermann system - the children's earnings paid for school fees and its maintenance and contributed to the home budget - it was not a type of child manufactory that supposedly allowed some time for education. Rather it constituted a form of elementary schooling combined with training for industry and industriousness.59 Following the disbandment of the Jesuit order (1773) and in keeping with 159

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Maria Theresa's dictum about education always being a political matter, the Austrian state took control over it and by the end of 1774 the first general law relating to education in the Austrian dominions was issued. Essentially worked out by Felbiger, it established a three-tier system composed of elementary schools in villages and smaller towns; general secondary ('main') schools in larger towns; academic secondary ('normal') schools, one in each provincial capital, acting as a directive educational institution and also as a training agency for teachers of elementary schools.60 It has been recognized that the system by and large made more headway in Bohemia than anywhere else in the Habsburg monarchy. There were a variety of historical, social, economic, religious, cultural (music!)61 and political reasons for this, and their complex interaction has not been properly analysed. Thus indications are that in Bohemia primary education had, as it were, a flying start, with its seeds implanted in the 1760s and the early 1770s, before the state took over. By 1790, it has been estimated that about 191,000 children of school age, amounting to about two-thirds of those obliged to go to school, actually attended it. A considerable share in this success has to be attributed to Kindermann, who was put in charge of primary education in Bohemia, and it was under his direction that industrial schooling for both sexes became its distinctive feature.62 By 1790 Bohemia possessed just under 500 schools, that is about one-fifth of the total number, in which pupils were able to partake of this kind of training.63 The developments in primary education were as much a product of the Enlightenment as a factor facilitating its advance in Bohemia, and perhaps enough has been said to show that they cannot be left out of its history. PATRIOTISM AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION

In conclusion, I offer a few remarks about the ideological context of the road from darkness into light in Bohemia. In a way this constitutes the most difficult aspect of the story because of the inherent complexity of the subject and because, linked with it, little serious analysis and presentation of the reciprocal relations of practical activity and thought has been undertaken.64 The problem is not to establish a connection between the reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, say, with ideas propounded by Beccaria and Montesquieu. Nor is it a question of demonstrating the familiarity of the representative figures of the Enlightenment in Bohemia with the works of Locke and Newton, Linnaeus and Buffon, Muratori and Volta, Voltaire and Rousseau, Kant and Wolff, Schloezer and Lessing, and a host of other major and minor writers of the European Enlightenment. Diffusion of ideas to Bohemia from the outside occurred continuously but tracking them down, without taking into account the indigenous social and intellectual environment with which they interacted, is insufficient to throw light on the 160

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Enlightenment in its national context. Dobrovsky was certainly aware of this situation when he wrote to one of his correspondents in 1783: I read Raynal in German translation; and I could not make up my mind to read the patriarchs of French philosophy Voltaire and Rousseau. Why that? Because I shall certainly not find that what I should like to find. In time I shall do it in order to see whether on German soil it is possible to arrive there, where these Gentlemen had arrived. There are things said by others that we should never believe, but we should always first think for ourselves, and then compare our thinking with that of others..65 To understand these observations more fully it would be necessary to scrutinize more specifically Dobrovsky's philosophical, religious and social viewpoints. Then it would be possible to say whether, perhaps, Dobrovsky was apprehensive because he was basically at odds with these leading figures of the French Enlightenment. Or, maybe, he was persuaded that his home ground was not prepared for the reception of their ideas. In any case, this is not the place to examine Dobrovsky's Weltanschauung in detail. Nevertheless, the reference to 'German soil' should be looked into more closely because it raises general issues bearing on the 'national' theme of this volume. In a sense Dobrovsky does not do more than acknowledge that Bohemia and Germany shared a similar or common intellectual and spiritual climate. Nevertheless, the situation is not straightforward because of the emergence and spread of 'patriotism', not bereft of ambiguities in national and social terms, throughout aristocratic and intellectual Bohemia at that time. Let us look at Born, who came from a German Transylvanian aristocratic family and was admitted to a Bohemian knighthood in 1768. Identifying with the new country, where he settled and acquired landed property, he made patriotism a major ideological plank of his efforts to revitalize its scientific and literary life.66 However, Born's 'Bohemian' patriotism did not prevent him from upholding 'Austrian' patriotism especially after he left in 1776 for Vienna where he became equally active as organizer of scientific activities, reformer of Freemasonry, critic of monasticism and fighter for tolerance. Whereas Born did not speak Czech, Kinsky had a complete command of it. What is more, in the already mentioned Erinnerung ueber einen wichtigen Gegenstand von einem Boehmen he devoted a good deal of attention to convincing the Bohemian nobles that they should learn to speak Czech. Thus §79 begins as follows: I admit that as a good descendent of the Slavs I inherited the prejudice that if French is the mother-tongue of a Frenchman and German of a German, the one of a Czech [fuer einen Boehmen] ought to be also Czech [die boehmische].

Kinsky recognized that by and large his views were not shared by his confreres, and he also pointed out that he did not mean to start a controversy 161

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what should be regarded as the appropriate mother-tongue for a Czech. What he did wish was to make the aristocrats realize that knowledge of Czech was in their own best interests when it came to deal with their Czechspeaking serfs. Turning to Hartig again, we find that he also touched on patriotism and the national question. Hartig considered Bohemia as his Vaterland, but as part of the wider body — Germany. As to peasants, the most numerous social class, he distinguished between 'through and through Czechs' [ganz boehmische] and so-called 'German Czechs' [Deutschboehmen]. The Czech-speaking peasant was proud, indolent, raw, ignorant, quarrelsome, rebellious, thievish, physically strong, indefatigable if need be, suited for military service, unafraid and on the whole more determined than the German-speaking peasant. The latter was more industrious, well-behaved, inventive, disposed to comply with laws, but also more timid, softer and less fit to lead a soldier's life than the true [eigentlicher] Czech. 67

The ambiguous character of later eighteenth-century aristocratic thought in Bohemia on these topics is clearly brought out in the writings of a remarkable character, the scientist, industrialist and balloonist Joachim Sternberg (1755-1808). They bear witness that this member of one of the old Czech noble families sometimes liked to think himself as being German, at another time as being Czech.68 No doubt, as it has been widely accepted, moves and measures under Maria Theresa and Joseph II striking directly at the political and economic interests of the Bohemian nobility stimulated its 'territorial patriotism', essentially 'Bohemian' and not Czech or German in outlook. One result was that some aristocrats, mostly descendents of old Czech families, began to appreciate the significance of knowledge of Bohemia's past and present. For political, economic and cultural ends of which they approved, and in the name of patriotism, they supported pursuits that were to achieve them, and a very few also actively participated in them. It is not to disparage their work to state that the scientific and scholarly revival of late eighteenth-century Bohemia depended principally on contributions from persons with a bourgeois or lower social background. This is by no means to claim the existence of a developed modern bourgeois class in Bohemia at that time. It is precisely because it was in its incipient stage that intellectuals in Bohemia, with either Czech or German non-aristocratic roots, looked up to Bohemian aristocrats for political leadership and financial aid, and these (or at least some of them) were sufficiently attracted to respond favourably. Patriotism was the ideology that bound them together. In the first place the non-aristocratic intellectuals identified with aristocratic 'territorial patriotism'. They considered themselves Czechs [Boehmen] in the wider sense of the term and, within the framework of the Bohemian Society of Sciences, for example, national animosities played no 162

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role. However, as has been previously pointed out, Voigt had already introduced a strong Czech national tone into his work in the 1770s and he regarded himself as belonging to the Czech [boehmische] nation at the time of his death. This is the more remarkable since he was born into a German clothworker's family in Horni Litvinov and he was educated in German. In view of the patchy nature of our knowledge of the national question in Bohemia during the last three decades of the eighteenth century, it is difficult to say something definite. It would seem that Czech national consciousness had developed relatively early during the Middle Ages and the Hussite struggles reinforced it.69 After 1620 it did not become extinct, largely due to the physical survival of peasant and urban Czech speakers composing the majority of the Czech people. Not surprisingly, Germanization as an instrument of centralization pursued by Maria Theresa and Joseph II could not but arouse national resentment and opposition of Czechs in the long run. Compared with this development the peasant and urban German speakers in Bohemia were not 'nationalized' up to the end of our period. It was not until 1793—4 that the difference between 'true-born Czechs' [Stockboehmen] and German Czechs [Deutschboehmen] was statistically registered.70 Summarizing, let it be said that although the Enlightenment is a global movement its development in Bohemia as elsewhere followed a distinctive national course, during the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Here the road from darkness to light was part of a gradual, contradictory process during which church and aristocratic vested interests were broken down by government policies designed to strengthen the interests of the Habsburg state. The Toleration Patent and Abolition of Serfdom represented partial, albeit significant, solutions to some of the contradictions inherent in a situation where the government and also a good many of the nobility attached great importance to developments in industry, agriculture and trade in Bohemia, but hoped to achieve them without seriously undermining the existing feudal social order. Thanks to the interaction of political, social, economic and intellectual factors the idea grew that sciences and education might have an active role to play in this process. The belief found its expression in the formation of the Bohemian Society of Sciences and in raising the problem of the survey of natural wealth of Bohemia and in the introduction of'industrial schooling'. Last but not least, and interrelated with these aspects of the Enlightenment in Bohemia, was the emergence of the study of Czech history and language, and the awakening of modern Czech national consciousness, as its product and consequence.

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The Enlightenment in Sweden* TORE FRANGSMYR

In Sweden the Enlightenment never formed a truly coherent current of ideas or became a unified movement. And by the time it finally appeared in an assertive, propagandist form which might have borne comparison with the French models, the end of the century had arrived and we were on the threshold of a new era, Romanticism. Sweden thus had no Voltaire, no Hume, hardly even its Rousseau. But obviously there were sporadic elements of Enlightenment ideas, and French and English writers of the period were known - and contradicted and opposed - at an early date. The explanation for this is to be sought in the political and social background and in the resulting intellectual climate. Ideas never arise in a vacuum; there has to be the right soil for their germination and growth. Quite simply, they must have an application - it must be possible to assign them a function. THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC SITUATION

The long war waged by Charles XII had brought economic ruin to Sweden. His death in 1718 marked the advent of a new era, known as the Age of Freedom.1 This name refers to liberty from absolutism. The Swedish riksdag had seen the consequences of an autocratic king deciding everything. The time for that way had now passed; the estates were to rule and the king would be only formally the head of the realm. In order to provide ideological backing for their demands, the estates had John Locke's Treatises on Civil Government translated in 1726, for dissemination among the Swedish public. Locke was assigned in the service of political propaganda, after which he was forgotten and did not return to notice until the end of the century. The party which was in power in the years 1739-65, the Hats' party, embraced the mercantilist theories which were popular on the Continent. This meant that the government supported manufacturing industry in order to increase exports and reduce imports. The interests of agriculture were also * I wish to thank Mr Bernard Vowles for the translation of this essay. TF

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looked after, however; by improving the position of the peasants, who formed the most numerous social group, it was hoped to bring about an increase in the rate of population growth, which was one of the cherished goals of mercantilism. No industry worthy of note developed however from these efforts, the manufactories which were set up being kept alive by artificial respiration in the form of state subsidies. But the propaganda succeeded at times in leading people to believe that Sweden was on the way to becoming an industrial nation. The preoccupation of the government was practical economics. Its ideology was utilitarianism, economic benefit.2 By considering all decisions and reforms from the standpoint of economic utility they wished to rally the strength of the nation: Sweden would once again become a major European power, both economically and culturally. Firm central direction was to determine the detailed course of commercial development. Despite certain drawbacks, there was something new and exciting in this policy, a feeling of forward-looking optimism. The emphasis on industry and on the improvement of agriculture also made for a receptivity to modern science. There was an awareness that science could have a part to play in economic progress. In this connection the stimulus from England was of particular importance. In the ecclesiastical field, however, away from economics, policies were traditional and conservative. The orthodoxy of the seventeenth century still held sway and was confirmed by new religious laws, designed to preserve the Lutheran Church of Sweden from the encroachment of other religious currents from abroad. A system of government censorship monitored the books which were published, and, where theological matters were concerned, the church was the ultimate censoring authority. The universities were in a dependent position in their dealings both with the state and with the church. 3 The government could appoint university chancellors and professors over the heads of the university council, a power which they often exercised, and as far as what was taught was concerned, the church still had the last word. Theological faculties intervened on several occasions when sensitive theological questions were touched upon in doctoral dissertations. The basic antithesis was between a classico-theological concept of learning and a modern scientific one. It was indicated from above that the main task of the universities was the training of clergymen and public officials, and that scientific research should be left to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which was founded in a mercantilist spirit in 1739. In 1750 a commission proposed that instruction given by the universities should be of a more strictly vocational nature. The professors protested, wishing also to see research carried on at the universities. They did not want to abandon classical education yet at the same time they demanded more science.4 In 1750 Sweden's first chairs in physics and chemistry were established at 165

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Uppsala, with Samuel Klingenstierna and Johan Gottschalk Wallerius respectively as their first incumbents. By these appointments, science had truly got its foot in the door of the universities, a breakthrough which was significant in the emergence of what is known as the spirit of the Enlightenment. The actual French philosophy of the Enlightenment flourished not in the universities but in the fashionable Parisian salons. Sweden had no salon culture of an intellectual nature. True, there was one striking exception to this generalization at the court in Stockholm, and that was the queen herself, Lovisa Ulrika, sister of none other than Frederick the Great of Prussia. She detested the clergy and loved intellectual conversation, and in 1753 created an academy to cater for her interests. She kept modern French books in her library, exchanged letters with Voltaire and the encyclopaedists, and made d'Alembert a corresponding member of her academy. But her efforts did not have any far-reaching effect. One contributory reason for this was the involvement of the royal couple in an attempted political coup in 1756, which led to a decline in both their prestige and their power. RESISTANCE TO THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Nor was there a circle of independent literary figures in Sweden in the 1750s, although a few individual writers of an independent nature were appearing. The young poet Olof von Dalin wrote sardonically of wordly vanity and learned pedantry, and introduced Voltaire to Sweden, although admittedly only his early verse. The Danish author Ludvig Holberg enjoyed success with his witty and satirical comedies. He was critical and tolerant and drew inspiration from such sources as Bayle and Locke, much to the annoyance of the clergy. But such contributions were few. It must be recorded that intellectual debate was virtually confined to the universities, and that these establishments, still powerfully influenced by theological orthodoxy, were not particularly receptive to the new ideas of the Enlightenment. This does not mean that there was no awareness of them. On the contrary, it has to be said that there was a good state of preparedness. Putting it a little incisively, we may say that the fight against the Enlightenment was on even before the Enlightenment had secured a footing in Sweden. The main reason for this state of affairs was that there was already an established philosophy at the universities, a philosophy which the traditional church could encompass within its fold. This was the Wolffian philosophy, deriving from the German philosopher Christian von Wolff.5 It was a philosophy based on a mathematical and deductive mode of thought, and its fundamental principle was the use of strict logic in order to reach irrefutable conclusions. When in the late 1720s this philosophy was first introduced into 166

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Sweden it was received with great scepticism, not to mention hostility; for some years it was in fact proscribed. Wolff's views were originally held to be far too rationalistic; if they were taught freely the Christian faith would suffer. But the arrival of a new university chancellor in 1738 led to a sudden change in the whole situation. Wolff himself became increasingly orthodox with the years, and in his Theologia naturalis (2 vols, 1736-7) he used his philosophical method for the very purpose of combatting atheism and other forms of heresy and sectarianism. By this time it was also realized in Sweden that Wolff's philosophy could be used as a weapon against the rationalist currents of the period. The enemy would be intercepted on his own ground, as it were. The effect of this was that Wolffianism, with the support of the church, became the prevailing university philosophy of the 1740s and 1750s. Here was an outlet for the rationalist tendencies of the time. Reason was used to strengthen the Christian verities. Wolffianism became a handmaiden of the faith, ancilla Jidei, in the literal sense; that it was merely a means and not an end was emphatically made clear at a defence of an academic thesis at Uppsala in 1742 which attracted wide attention. The situation was a piquant one, to say the least, for Wolffians were strongly attacking a Wolffian dissertation; the theologians wished to define the boundaries of philosophical freedom once and for all.6 The author of the dissertation was a young student named Andreas Knos, who was considering the principles of and connection between natural and revealed religion.7 The entire dissertation is imbued with Wolffianism. The existence and omnipotence of God are demonstrated according to the logical model of the master. The creation, internal order and purpose of the whole universe prove that there is a higher power. Wolff and his faithful interpreters are cited repeatedly. In his foreword the author asserts that the best defence against the opponents of Christianity is to use natural theology and rational principles, but he emphasizes that natural theology can never compete with revealed theology. And he dissociates himself clearly from 'that most impious philosopher', John Toland. 8 Despite these assurances and despite the declared orthodoxy of the author there was vigorous opposition. The public defence went on for seven hours, and a series of theologians criticized the proportions of the dissertation. The substance of the criticism was that Knos had given reason too much scope. He ought to have tried to demonstrate the Trinity and the incarnation, and also the idea that God must necessarily have created the best of all possible worlds; none of this could be proved with the aid of reason and logic, belonging to Revelation. If the implications of the present line of reasoning were developed, they led to freethinking pure and simple, or 'naturalism' as it was termed. And then there was no knowing where things might end. Knos had the support of two powerful professors, the mathematician and .67

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physicist Samuel Klingenstierna and the philologist Johan Ihre, but this counted for little against the theological faculty. The theologians had attempted to stop the dissertation, but without success. They therefore sent a letter of protest to the chancellor of the university, and in an official letter the chancellor repeated the old regulation that it was forbidden to discuss theological matters outside the theological faculty. It was then a simple matter to block Knos's further career, and he became a country parson.9 The lines were now clearly drawn. Wolffian logic continued to be the main weapon against the Enlightenment, but that it should be subordinate to orthodoxy was no longer questioned. This view reached its peak with the establishment of a theological chair in Apologetics in 1755, with Nils Wallerius as the first professor. He was undoubtedly the right man in the right job. With implacable consistency, Wolffian logic and intolerance, he pounced on anything bearing the scent of the Enlightenment. Wallerius left nothing to chance where sniffing out new heretics was concerned, and kept au fait with the latest literature. In his very first year he made an application to purchase banned books, which, although not allowed into the country, were essential to the performance of his professional duties. This application was granted. The list of fourteen titles was a roll call of English and Scottish deists. It included Leland's work on the deists and, more particularly, the deists themselves: Toland, Collins, Woolston, Morgan, Chubb, Grove, Bolingbroke, Hutcheson, an anonymous work entitled Christianity not founded on arguments (1746), and Hume's Works.lQ The Frenchmen were dealt with elsewhere. Pierre Bayle was often attacked, Voltaire was mentioned as the greatest fraud of the time (nostrae aetatis impostor maximus), and La Mettrie's book UHomme machine was pulled to pieces in a special dissertation.11 With a battery of philosophical acumen, theological dogma and selected biblical quotations, Wallerius tried to destroy this 'blasphemous' work. No other reaction was to be expected, but it is of interest that La Mettrie should have been known so early in Sweden. Even though there was no leading Enlightenment figure within the country at that time, it is clear that its foreign spokesmen were sufficiently known to be regarded as a threat to the prevailing order. The theologians were not alone in their fight against the Enlightenment, however, and were in close alliance with the state. Just as the theologians actively countered Enlightenment tendencies in the religious sphere, the government attempted to check any move towards freethinking in the political field. Johan Ihre, who has been mentioned previously and who was the most radical professor of the period, was one who discovered this. By presenting theses of a politically sensitive nature on several occasions he attracted the suspicion of the authorities, and in 1747 he was put on trial. The result was that Ihre, as the 'seducer of the young', was fined a year's professional salary.12 Ihre showed in his other work a sound knowledge of 168

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Voltaire, Rousseau and other Enlightenment writers, without directly advocating their ideas. In a dissertation in 1754 on the subject of how far the pursuit of learning contributes to moral inprovement, he repudiates the wellknown first discours of Rousseau.13 Another noteworthy political dispute had the young Linnaean disciple Peter Forsskal as its central figure. In 1759 he was refused permission to defend a thesis on civil liberty, De libertate civili, which he therefore published in Sweden on his own account.14 The work was suppressed by the government, but not in time to prevent Forsskal from distributing the entire edition of 500 copies. The authorities succeeded in retrieving only 79 copies. Forsskal was censured and a royal edict ordered the confiscation of the work and forbade the buying and selling of copies. What was so dangerous about this paper? Forsskal demanded a series of liberties in the spirit of the Enlightenment, first and foremost freedom of the press, but also the right of all to hold public office, which should be awarded on the basis of competence not of'family connections, money and patrons'. Unrestricted press freedom was a guarantee against the abuse of power, argued Forsskal, for this freedom encourages science to flourish, exposes harmful regulations and official injustice, and indeed, is the firmest defence of the government in a free country. Compulsion leads only to violence and disturbances, and a wise government is careful to allow its subjects, 'to express their displeasure with their pens rather than with other arms'. 15 Forsskal had also tackled philosophical freedom, which was as restricted as political liberty. He had learned scepticism and tolerance in Gottingen, and he questioned the very basis of popular Wolffianism in a dissertation on 'doubts about the principles of the new philosophy'.16 The criticism was made perceptively and with good humour. The work was well received in Gottingen but aroused fiery opposition in Uppsala. When he returned, a fierce polemic followed between Forsskal and Nils Wallerius. The questioning of Wolffianism to Wallerius was a challenge to the whole concept of the universe which was so much a part of his Christian dogma. Forsskal was identified as a particularly suspect figure, comparable to Herbert of Cherbury, Hobbes, Spinoza and Bayle. The open conflicts with the political authorities and with the Wolffian apologist Wallerius flared up at exactly the same time, in the spring of 1759. It was no coincidence that ForsskaPs career came to a halt. He sought academic positions but was turned down. Philosophical, theological and political thinking ran on the same lines; church, university and state were equally opponents of subversive opinions. Forsskal accepted an invitation to take part in a Danish expedition to Arabia, recommended by no less a personage than Linnaeus, and he sailed in 1760. Three years later he died, aged only thirty-one, in a faraway land. Had he been able to work at home, Sweden would probably have had a pioneer of the philosophy of the En169

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lightenment. But he was before his time, and the forces of social conservatism were still too strong. THE INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE

Seen from a broader perspective, perhaps the influence of science was, after all, more important than that of philosophy. The utilitarian policies of the government gave science the opportunity to develop, and in the decades around the middle of the century the level of scientific work being done was high by international standards. This development led to a more modern and scientific way of thinking penetrating intellectual circles.17 The importance of science may be summarized by making two points. It acted as a general driving force in offering an alternative to the classical ideal of education; it thereby introduced, albeit under a cloak of economic utilitarianism, a more rational view of the world, a new way of thinking which was undoubtedly important in the long term. Secondly, it played an important part in direct confrontations on concrete issues where a classicotheological outlook was opposed to an empirico-rationalist one. The progress of science in this period was indisputable and it constitutes an essential part of what we may call the intellectual culture of the Age of Freedom. Important contributions were being made in one field after another. The first name to come to mind is of course that of Linnaeus, who reformed contemporary botany with his sexual system. But Linnaeus was not alone. Anders Celsius was the great astronomer of the day. In his youth he had taken part in Maupertuis's expedition to measure the length of one degree along the meridian in northern Sweden. As professor of astronomy at Uppsala he did important work, until he died, all too early, in 1744. Samuel Klingenstierna was a leading mathematician and physicist who made penetrating comments on Newton's findings in the field of optics; his experiments appear to have paved the way for John Dollond's design of the achromatic lens. Johan Gottschalk Wallerius had notable achievements to his credit in chemistry, particularly in agricultural chemistry and hydrology. Torbern Bergman was a leading chemist, improving the system of chemical notation and writing a Physisk beskrifning qfver jordklotet (1766: new edn 1773-4), which was well ahead of its time. He gave encouragement to Carl Wilhelm Scheele, the retiring apothecary of the provincial town of Koping, who discovered oxygen. And at this point we should also mention Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin. As secretary to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences from 1749 to 1783 he was in constant touch with the world's leading scientists. He was also a prominent astronomer, and it was he who introduced the form of population statistics which became a model for other countries in Europe.18 Indeed, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which was founded in 1739, probably played a crucial part in spreading a scientific attitude of 170

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mind. Its aim was to obtain concrete, practical results, and its proceedings were published in Swedish, not in Latin, in order to reach as wide a readership as possible. This did not mean, of course, that the findings of science were accepted without opposition. Conflicts arose at times in which science had to struggle against the accepted theological views. Linnaeus himself had his clashes with the theologians. He was criticized when in the physico-theological spirit of the time he expressed too free an opinion on the subject of the Creator and his intentions; only a practised theologian was allowed to pronounce on such weighty matters. Linnaeus often expressed a deep, religious feeling for nature, but he was certainly not particularly orthodox.19 The well-known 'diminution of the waters' controversy attracted particular attention. It had been observed earlier that the shorelines of the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Bothnia had receded, but it was not known whether this was attributable to a rise in the level of the land or to a fall in the level of the water. Relying on a variety of theories and calculations, most assumed that it was the water level which had dropped. Both Linnaeus and Celsius were of this opinion, the latter estimating the drop to be approximately one metre every hundred years (a calculation which came very close to the true figure). In fact the real process was a rise in the level of the land, resulting from the land's natural elasticity causing it to rise again after the surface had been pressed down by the weight of inland ice; but nothing was suspected of all this, for the glacial theory was still unknown. Olof von Dalin, of whom mention has been made earlier, made use of these theories, however, when he wrote his history of Sweden in 1746. He turned on the patriotic Swedish historiography proceeding from Olof Rudbeck, which saw Sweden as having been the cradle of all other cultures after the occurrence of the Flood. Dalin now stated that if the calculations of Celsius were correct, most of Sweden would have been under water at the time of the birth of Christ. For this reason Rudbeck's view of history must be wrong. This interpretation encountered opposition from two directions. Patriotic historians protested that Dalin was trying to besmirch the proud and glorious history of Sweden. The theologians objected that if there really had been a diminution of the waters, this can only have been due to the subsiding of the Flood. To assert otherwise was to doubt the word of the Bible. The ecclesiastical estate therefore registered a sharp protest against Dalin's historical interpretation in the riksdag of 1747.20 This event is very indicative of the intellectual climate in Sweden at that time. A humanist and historian uses scientific findings in his interpretation of the country's history, surely an enlightened approach: and he is promptly reprimanded and contradicted by theologians. There were several such examples of how new ways of thinking could run foul of older ones. One such question concerned the transformation of cereals.

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According to popular tradition, oats could be transformed into rye under certain conditions; various experiments appeared to confirm this state of affairs. The scientists said no; Linnaeus maintained that species had been constant since the Creation and that such a metamorphosis was unreasonable according to the laws of science. There were other problems. Another folk tradition stated that swallows wintered by sleeping on the bottoms of lakes. Here it happened that Linnaeus was on the opposite side, believing steadfastly that this was just what swallows did. But the versatile professor Johan Leche, of Turku, in Finland, pointed out that it was physiologically impossible for a creature with lungs like swallows to survive under water. Leche deemed such an idea to be 'an absurd fable' and its dissemination to be an epidemic delusion, error epidemicus. It was the duty of science to expose popular prejudices and, by careful experiment and with the aid of physics and mathematics, to build up a view of the world founded on fact.21 Another example, of a more sensitive nature, is that of the chemist Johan Gottschalk Wallerius. He was of a speculative turn of mind, and harked back to the old alchemists, asserting with emphasis that water was the original element from which all other elements emanated. When in 1783 he was finally elected president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences he passed severe judgement on the new chemistry, which he dismissed as 'often pure guesswork'. Wargentin, who was then the permanent secretary of the Academy, replied with a quiet reminder that the new generation of chemists probably ought not to be disdained. Wallerius was known to his contemporaries as 'our worthy Hermes Trismegistus', an apt description: he cited authorities far older than did any other chemist of the time. 22 We thus see how a scientific outlook shows through with increasing frequency in the mid-eighteenth century. It cannot be claimed that this was on every occasion the result of propaganda for the Enlightenment, but nor can it be said that the ideas of the Enlightenment were irrelevant. The modern scientific view of the world spread through Swedish society with a force which in the long term could not be ignored. Science had become a' part of its cultural heritage. THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND MYSTICISM

When we state that the Enlightenment did not gain a firm foothold in Sweden in the mid-eighteenth century, we must not give the impression that its ideas were unknown. Although the universities offered active opposition to the philosophy of the Enlightenment, reviews and poets mentioned the philosophes, and the culture of the nobility became increasingly French in its outlook. But there was no protracted struggle in which the ideas of the Enlightenment might be used as a weapon. The reviews made regular mention of the works of Voltaire, although often 172

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in a sceptical or critical tone. Apart from Voltaire, Helvetius appears to have received most notice, but nobody was willing to accept his view of the world; the prominent politician von Hopken described as 'appalling' his portrayal of human nature as nothing but egoism. The poets hardly saw Voltaire and Rousseau as irreconcilable opposites: they appreciated the wit and tolerance of the former but fell for the sentimentality of the latter. In a very general sense it was common to speak of 'our enlightened age'; reason became a catchword, an increasingly secularized utilitarian morality spread, and more and more people began to object to ecclesiastical dogmatism and religious intolerance. But it made no difference to the church. 23 The only discernable intimation of a long-drawn-out struggle is in the political field. The rigorous policy of centralization followed by the 'Hats' attracted increasing criticism. The demands for greater commercial freedom grew louder and there was a wish for an end to the many tolls and restrictions. In the same spirit the cry arose for freedom of expression and freedom of the press. The ideals of Forsskal came up for discussion again. One man in particular was the embodiment of these libertarian ideas: the clergyman Anders Chydenius from the Finnish province of Osterbotten. As a member of the parliament for the ecclesiastical estate he played his part in the overthrow of the Hats, by the 'Caps', in the riksdag of 1765/6. Chydenius appeared as a fully fledged liberal economist before Adam Smith. He demanded complete freedom — trade and commerce should suffer no compulsion. If people had freedom, they would spontaneously gravitate towards the branch of industry offering the best chance of gain. In this way the national and the private interest in profit would coincide.24 Chydenius was too radical and few dared go so far, but he was moving with the times. Those who criticized the paternalist policies of the 'Hats' were victorious in the riksdag. As far as freedom of the press was concerned, Chydenius enjoyed a more personal success. He upheld forcefully that the office of censor ought to be abolished; to make a single individual the arbiter of the intellectual life of a whole nation was quite unreasonable. After lengthy debate, Chydenius had his way, and in December 1766 a new act for the freedom of the press was passed, by which it became permissible to write and publish anything, provided that it was not contrary to the Gospel itself, critical of the constitutional laws of the realm or defamatory to the royal family. In theological matters the cathedral chapter should make a preliminary review, but in other cases the court alone could convict a writer of an offence under the act. This was nevertheless a big step forward - only a few countries had taken intellectual freedom so far in Europe. Chydenius did not enjoy the same degree of success after this, but he reappeared with renewed vigour to lend his weight to discussions of important questions of religious freedom and of the laws governing domestic servants. 25 The young crown prince Gustav had received a thoroughly French 173

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upbringing. He absorbed French teachings, particularly those of the physiocrats, who recommended a strong royal power, an 'enlightened despotism'. Sweden was divided by factious strife and shortly after acceding to the throne Gustav effected a coup d'etat, usurping power and putting an end to the era known as the Age of Freedom. Gustav III loved to see himself in the role of 'enlightened despot', patronizing the sciences and the arts, introducing French etiquette at court, putting a stop to torture as a method of interrogation, in accordance with the humanitarian ideals of the period, and in instigating various improvements in the sphere of religious freedom. But at the same time he curbed the freedom of the press: apparently the ideal of freedom was to be defined from the personal viewpoint of the enlightened monarch. 26 Cultural life under Gustav III brought many new features. Natural science proper was no longer so highly rated, and the great scientists gradually died off: Linnaeus, Bergman, Scheele, Wargentin. The Freemasons, Swedenborgians and other mystical orders and societies began to gain ground; the cultural tide was turning. But then, in the clash between rationalism and mysticism, the old ideas of the Enlightenment came into favour again. Suddenly, in the final decades of the century, we find that battle being joined — reason against mysticism. The struggle against mysticism, primarily represented by Swedenborg and the Mesmerists, was led by the poet Johan Henrik Kellgren.27 In Stockholms-Posten, in 1787, Kellgren proclaimed the formation of a new society, Pro sensu communi. An association of the friends of commonsense was obviously necessary at this particular time, wrote Kellgren, when reason was in the process of being banished 'from the kingdoms both of arts and sciences'. The great commemoration day of the society would be 29 August, the birthday of John Locke, 'the most sensible man that the world has seen'. Further articles presented a series of theses formulating the programme of Enlightenment; the first read 'Two plus two equals four'. The society was fictitious, of course. Kellgren was its only member. His articles were bitingly satirical, quite in the spirit of Voltaire. The mysticism of the orders degraded the human race and human reason: 'The ceremonies of the orders were formerly a means of keeping secret the knowledge which was possessed, now their purpose is to hint at knowledge which is not possessed.'28 The discussion which followed was vehement. The defenders of mysticism and the system of orders accused Kellgren and his sympathizers of atheism. These in their turn warned the church of the religious subversion which might ensue as a result of the spread of mystical movements. Both the rationalists and the mystics, having attacked the established church from their respective directions, now appealed to the same church for support. Even the relationship with Gustav III may appear paradoxical. The king was extremely interested in mystical movements and himself took part in 174

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seances and chapters. But at this period he was engaged in preparing for war with Russia and had no time for discussions and polemics in philosophical matters. He was persuaded that his opponents within the nobility also belonged to the leaders of the secret societies and so identified the mystics with enemies. Therefore the king remained neutral in the debate and could still be considered an enlightened monarch, despite his weakness for occultism. Another important manifestation was provided by Kellgren's companion in arms, Nils von Rosenstein, in his Tal om upplysningen (Speech about the Enlightenment) to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1789 (published in 1793).29 Rosenstein, who while at the embassy in Paris (1782-4) had come to know d'Alembert, Diderot and other leading philosophes, was now the tutor of the crown prince and the counsellor of the king. The speech was given after the outbreak of the French Revolution and set out, as its sub-title indicates, to demonstrate the 'nature, use and indispensability for society' of the Enlightenment. Rosenstein wished to allay political disquiet without renouncing his own ideas. He who fights for truth and justice always meets with strong resistance both from mental attitudes and from the social order. These disputes easily lead to fanaticism, violence, revenge and devastation. But this does not mean that the cause itself need be condemned. The two revolutions which accompanied the birth of Christianity and of the Reformation were bloody affairs, but we would not wish them undone for all that. But we may wish that it had been possible to implement such reforms without disturbance, and that rulers and subjects had been wiser.30 Rosenstein's oration was a fervent defence of the ideas of the Enlightenment, of the rationalistic endeavours of a whole century. But when it was printed the reaction had already set in. Following the assassination of Gustav III (1792), a regency followed, which quickly suspended such political and cultural freedoms as remained. Free press and free speech were restricted, books were withdrawn, judgements were pronounced. The poet Thomas Thorild had to go into exile after having criticized the government. Students in Uppsala backed French ideas of freedom, but the government intervened and stopped the clamour. The Swedish Academy, founded by Gustav III, was forbidden to hold meetings, since Rosenstein and his friends were suspected as dangerous. Swedenborgians and other mystics could go on with their activities, however, because they seemed to be able to look into the future. The ideas of the Enlightenment thus did not even now play any role of importance. The influence of the French culture had stopped at once because of the Revolution. The rationalistic attitude was abandoned for mysticism, French culture was followed by German Romanticism and this became the leading philosophy for the new century in Sweden. 175

12 The Russian Enlightenment PAUL DUKES

SOME CONTEMPORARY VIEWS

'Russia is as yet but little or indistinctly known', wrote Lord Macartney in his An Account of Russia, ij6y. 'She has no writers of her own growth, and foreigners have been either incurious or unsolicitous about the subject. It appeared like the view of an immense waste, the prospect seemed lost in its vastness, and wearied the eye with its gloomy distance.' 1 As 'our man' in St Petersburg, Macartney had been if anything more dismissive a year or so before, writing to Grafton in February 1766: Our error with regard to them is in looking upon this nation as a civilized one and treating them as such. It by no means merits that title, and notwithstanding the opinion that persons unacquainted with it may have conceived, I will venture to say that the Kingdom of Thibet, or the Dominions of Prester John, might as justly be honoured with the same appellation. There is not one of the Ministry here that even understands Latin, and few that can be said to possess the common roots of literature. Pride is the offspring of ignorance and of consequence Your Grace will not be surprised if the proceedings of this Court sometimes appear tinctured with hautiness and vanity. I might as well talk of Clark and Tillotson, to the Divan of Constantinople, as quote Grotius and Puffendorff to the Ministers of Petersburg. This really is no exaggeration.2 Of course, it really was a considerable exaggeration, although possibly it would not be clearly recognized as such by writers on the Enlightenment even today. Peter Gay, for example, in his impressive study makes reference to Russia only rarely, and then more often than not to attack the hypocrisy of Catherine the Great, especially concerning the problem of serfdom.3 Certainly any assessment of Russia's place in the Enlightenment must include discussion of the role of that controversial monarch, but it must also take full note of the circumstance that enlightened ideas were by no means completely lost in the 'immense waste' at the eastern extremity of Europe. There were many Russian writers in the eighteenth century and at least some of them were acquainted with Grotius and Pufendorf, at least a few were conversant with Latin. 4 Lack of curiosity or solicitude on the part of 176

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foreigners may have been and to some extent still is a barrier to understanding, but an even greater obstacle was and remains an outlook which is centred on Western Europe, especially France, and which loses focus and concentration as it moves to the eastern periphery. A view formed by an eighteenth-century Russian could be very different from that of Macartney and those of like mind. Denis Fonvizin, the dramatist and pamphleteer, wrote back home to relatives from Montpellier in late 1777 while on a tour abroad: I thought at first that France, according to the tales people spread, was a paradise on earth, but I was cruelly mistaken. Well, you know what they say about the grass being greener in the other fellow's yard! You would be astonished, my dear sister, at what ignoramuses there are here. The nobles, especially, don't know a damned thing. Many of them hear for the first time that there is such a place as Russia on the earth and that we in Russia speak a language different from theirs. The human imagination cannot conceive how, in the light of so many different ways of becoming enlightened, the land here is just filled with ignoramuses. Every day I encounter scenes that make us split our sides with laughter. One can say that the Russian provincial nobility is unspeakably better than the nobility here, apart from the fact that the local windbags make a better outward appearance. Only Paris remains for us to see, but if we are mistaken in our opinion of it, as we are of France in general, then I repeat that you couldn't get me out of Russia a second time on such a trip. And indeed Paris did turn out to be such a deterrent to further travel, especially its writers, of whom Fonvizin wrote: With the exception of only a very few, the lot of them not only do not merit esteem but are in fact worthy of scorn. Arrogance, envy, and insidiousness constitute their chief attributes. They say that in the old days the writers waged war among themselves no way else but by criticizing each other's works. But these days not only do they touch honour by exchanging bitter vilifications; they are even happy to destroy one another completely just like some other kind of animals. And actually, there is little that is human in them. The exceptions included Voltaire and Rousseau, but other philosophes received the full brunt of Fonvizin's contempt: Among their own kind, the D'Alemberts and Diderots are the same kind of charlatans I used to see every day on the boulevards. They all cheat the public, and the only difference between the charlatan and the philosopher is that to his love of silver the latter adds an unparalleled vanity. Fonvizin enjoyed the theatre, and admired the French Tor the masterful way they weave words'. But he came to lose respect not only for most Frenchmen of letters, but also for the French system of government, from which he learned 'to distinguish between liberty by law and true liberty'. If Russia did not possess the first superficial attribute, in many respects it did have the more profound second. While the French possessed the right of liberty, they 177

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lived in 'downright slavery'. As for their king, he was not limited by laws and had all the power to trample on them.5 The extent of French agreement with Fonvizin's opinions was revealed a dozen years later in the Revolution of 1789. The next year brought to Paris another Russian traveller, Nikolai Karamzin, who, unlike some of his fellowcountrymen, did not care for the great political upsets then under way, writing: When men shall come to realize that virtue is necessary for their own happiness, then the golden age will arrive and in every state man will enjoy a peaceful and prosperous life. But all violent shocks are ruinous, and every rebel prepares his own scaffold.... The French monarchy has produced great kings, great ministers, great men of every kind. Under its benign protection the sciences and arts have come of age, and society has been adorned with theflowersof civility O new Republicans, with depraved hearts: Open Plutarch and learn from Cato, the ancient, noblest, and most virtuous republican of all, that anarchy is worse than any government! England was more to Karamzin's liking, even though the Warren Hastings trial moved him to remark: 'An Englishman is a humanitarian in his own country, but in America, Africa and Asia he is all but a wild beast.' Such a strong reservation apart, Karamzin believed that 'The English are enlightened . . . it is not the constitution but the enlightenment of the English that is their real Palladium.' However, while asserting that 'The purely national is nothing next to the all-human,' and that 'Whatever is good for all mankind cannot be bad for Russians, and whatever the English or the Germans have invented for the use and benefit of man is mine', Karamzin also argued that 'All civil institutions must be worked out in conformity with the character of the people. What is good in England would be bad in another country.' Indeed, his travels abroad concentrated his thoughts on what was essentially Russian. His meeting with Pierre Levesque, author of a well-known Histoire de Russie, prompted him to reflect that there was still no adequate history of his fatherland 'written with philosophical understanding, a critical spirit, and noble eloquence' after the pattern of Tacitus, Hume, Robertson and Gibbon in which: all the characteristic features which mark the nature of the Russian people, the character of our ancient heroes, our outstanding personages, the truly interesting events should be vividly and strikingly portrayed. We had our Charlemagne Vladimir; our Louis XI - Tsar Ivan; our Cromwell - Godunov; and in addition a sovereign unlike any other anywhere - Peter the Great. Their periods comprise the most important epochs in our history, and even in the history of mankind.6 When he returned home, Karamzin soon turned to what was to be his major work, an at least partial realization of the ambition stirred in him after his meeting with Levesque. His History of the Russian State, although never 178

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completed, became in the nineteenth century a basic text in the education of many Russians who could say along with Dostoevsky 'I too grew up with Karamzin.' 7 THE RUSSIAN CONTEXT

As for us, the example of Karamzin, like that of Fonvizin, should afford ample illustration of the argument basic to this essay, that the Enlightenment in Russia needs to be seen as a local phenomenon in its own right at least as much as it is seen as the distribution from a French, English, Scottish or German centre of a civilizing influence into a backward, ignorant country without history or culture. To place it more exactly in the appropriate context, there is no possibility here and perhaps no necessity to characterize that history or culture, or indeed the Russian Charlemagnes, Louis XIs or Cromwells. But we must briefly go back to the reign of the original Cromwell's contemporary, Aleksei Mikhailovich, when some of the early seeds of the Russian Enlightenment may be said to have been planted, as Russia, like many other European states, attempted to adjust to new demands brought about by the Thirty Years' War. The consequent continental picture has been clearly sketched by E.N. Williams: Absolute monarchy arose out of the need for internal and external security which made a standing army as a royal monopoly essential. This army required higher revenues; the revenues required economic growth; they all required the formation of a royal bureaucracy to eliminate, or push aside, the manifestations of the corporate state.8

Also stimulated by the great conflict was the intellectual movement that has come to be known as the Age of Reason. In particular, two of its exemplars later to be adopted by Lord Macartney as embodiments of Enlightenment, Grotius and Pufendorf, were profoundly influenced by their often uncomfortable experiences associated with the war. And their writings on government and law were paralleled by others on the economy. Commenting in his customary informed and incisive manner on the most important bodies of thought in this area, Marc Raeff inclines to the opinion that in the seventeenth century mercantilism is best considered as 'the trade and tariff policy of cameralism, which in turn is a more comprehensive system of national economy', and he also believes that both should be seen as part of the process of modernization that began in the seventeenth century and developed in the eighteenth century and which consisted of 'society's conscious desire to maximize all its resources and to use this new potential dynamically for the enlargement and improvement of its way of life'.9 The contribution of Aleksei Mikhailovich and his immediate successors (together with their respective establishments) to the Russian variant of this 179

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process has been widely underestimated ever since the eighteenth century, owing to the tremendous impact made throughout Europe by Peter the Great. It is worth recalling in this connection that Peter himself, by no means a modest man, gave the credit for the formation of Russia's regular army to his father. Moreover, Lenin, no beginner when it came to history, dated the amalgamation of the Russian state into a whole comprising a national market and an appropriate social formation 'approximately from the seventeenth century'. And in the persons of A.L. Ordin-Nashchokin, A.S. Matveev and especially V.V. Golitsyn, among others, Russia already possessed before the assumption of power by Peter a number of individuals fully familiar with the ideas of mercantilism, cameralism and of the Age of Reason in general. Of course, Russia's early experience of modernization would possess certain distinctive features brought about not only by its history and culture but also by the manner in which it related in the late seventeenth century to other states undergoing the process. Of particular importance in this regard was Russia's contact with Poland as a percolator of the ideas of the West and, perhaps even more, its assimilation of the Ukraine. Other important bearers of new messages would be the foreigners resident in Muscovy, not least the Scots.10 And so, tidings of Newton were probably given to the young Peter the Great by Patrick Gordon, and certainly by Henry Farquharson;11 not that, in either case, illumination came pouring in with blinding suddenness as celebrated in Pope's famous epigram on Newton and a Russian pastiche of it on Peter: Russia for many years lay hid in night, God said, Let Peter be! and all was light. Both the early Enlightenment and Russia's adjustment to it were processes more gradual than has often been suggested. In this regard, Raeff asserts: the practices and intellectual presuppositions of seventeenth-century absolutism, as manifested in cameralism and police legislation, proved more significant and came earlier than the ideas of the philosophes in giving dynamic impulse to the process of modernization. In endowing these earlier impulses with its own rhetoric, the Enlightenment appears only as a response to, not a precondition of, Europe's embarking on modernity. Raeff puts forward a characteristically powerful argument which deserves much respect and concurrence, although inevitably some of his assertions are less generally satisfying than others. Perhaps he underestimates the distinct nature of the Enlightenment, in his dismissal of the movement as 'rhetoric', even if he goes on to concede that 'the rhetoric itself became a powerful force in its own right'. And, while he gives a convincing picture of the manner in which the European state and its bureaucracy evolved along with an 180

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increasingly secular culture, he is arguably less persuasive with regard to the specific shape assumed by that evolution in Russia, especially in his treatment of the parts played in it by Peter the Great and the nobility.12 Raeff argues that Teter's brutal didacticism . . . his desire to civilize his society at one blow and to establish rigid and all-pervading state controls over all aspects of public and private life' constituted nothing more than 'a straight copying and translating of earlier German Kanzleiordnungen\ Such an interpretation of the Tsar reformer's outstanding trait renders a passionate patriot into a foreigner in his own land and deprives a powerful personality of its most distinctive characteristic. In fact, not only did seventeenth-century Russian statesmen to some degree foreshadow the ideas of Peter, but at least a few of the tsars of earlier centuries, Ivan the Great, Ivan the Terrible and Boris Godunov, anticipated his style of ruling. Regarding the nobility, Raeff argues that the slow pace of Russia's adoption of modern administration and police was not so much the result of 'the more impulsive, direct and brutally coercive Russian ways' as the circumstance that 'Russian sovereigns could not rely on those social resources that were available to their European models'. Russia lacked 'estates', and so 'it was necessary to create a social matrix from which the ministers of the new administrative apparatus might be drawn'. 13 Here, it is difficult to understand why, in order to create a modern system of government, a medieval class arrangement had to be brought in. Already in the seventeenth century, obsolescent modes of procedure had been dealt a mortal blow with the abolition of mestnichestvo, the complex method of appointing the tsar's leading servitors to their appropriate places. The rearrangement of the chancelleries known as prikazy, the introduction of regular regiments, were already making the way for modernization of the bureaucracy and of the armed forces.14 Why, if a new machine were now to be imported in the eighteenth century, should its clock be turned back? The answer that might be given to this question is that 'estates' would have an existence apart from the will of the tsar, and that a degree of independence was necessary for at least the leading stratum if society were to be modernized. But such an answer is too juridical, and makes insufficient allowance for the de facto nature of the Russian polity, which was clearly developing after the death of Peter in the direction of an aristocratic alliance between the nobility and the 'legal' autocrat. 15 CATHERINE Il'S ENLIGHTENED ABSOLUTISM

Important though all these prolegomena have been, it is high time that we moved on to the Enlightenment proper, which in Russia coincides with the reign of Catherine II or Great. That basic fact constitutes one of the glories of the Russian Enlightenment, and also one of the chief obstacles to its full comprehension. For Catherine's amicable relations with the philosophes (and 181

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her hypocritical dealings with her people) have been so widely recorded that the activities of enlightened Russians have been subject to commensurate neglect. To put this imbalance in its context, consider the following passage from the Annual Register: At the accession of this princess, the Russian power, so newly created, seemed to be in danger of a decline, from the many revolutions to which the empire had been subject; and the institutions of Peter the Great, by which that extensive part of the world was drawn out of barbarism, began perceivably to decay, until her accession to the throne, when the former was put out of all question by the vigour of her government, and the latter cherished and promoted by the encouragement which she gave to every valuable art and science.16

This contemporary evaluation recalling many appraisals of the Empress Catherine actually comes from the Annual Register for 1762 and forms part of its obituary for the Empress Elizabeth. The applicability to Catherine of these observations on her less distinguished predecessor reinforces the thought that the Russian Enlightenment was by no means the creation of one monarch, and was already well under way before 1762. As Miliukov says, the Elizabethan age marked in its books, periodicals and plays a transition from the practical emphasis of Peter's time to the more philosophical concerns of Catherine's. And in the person of Lomonosov, Russia produced before the accession of Catherine a universal man of the Enlightenment defying easy typification.17 Yet, insofar as the eighteenth-century cultural movement was one of rhetoric and publicity, it was Catherine who to an extent infinitely greater than Elizabeth contributed to the distinctive flavour of the Russian variety. Not without an unusual amount of intelligence and energy, she did indeed make a remarkable contribution through her own labours and her patronage of the work of others. True, her cast of mind can hardly be called original and yet she was capable of skilfully adapting for her own purposes the work of others.18 This talent is most clearly in evidence in that piece of writing that has been called her political testament, the Instructions to the Legislative Commission, or the Nakaz. We will now briefly discuss this as an example of the manner in which she set about using the ideas of the philosophes. Catherine's borrowings from Montesquieu, Beccaria and others were not disguised by her and have become notorious since, but, as Iu. M. Lotman has written: 'to deny the originality of the Nakaz and the profundity of its links with the ideas of the Enlightenment is one thing, and to deny it seriousness as a political programme is another'. 19 Moreover, as Lotman also emphasizes, the Nakaz is no less interesting for what it did not borrow, for what its compiler deliberately omitted. Of prime importance in this regard are the ideas of Rousseau, the potential threat of which to Russian stability Catherine recognized soon after her accession to power, when she expressed her alarm 182

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that there were on sale 'books which are against the law, good morals, us ourselves and the Russian nation, which are forbidden throughout the whole world, such as: Rousseau's Emile, Memoires of Peter III, Jewish letters in French and many similar'.20 Any bookseller discovered with such works on offer should have his complete stock confiscated. Leaving aside the nature of the insidious dangers of the Memoires of Peter III and the Jewish letters, we can readily see how Catherine would recoil from such observations of Rousseau in Emile as 'these two words - fatherland and citizen - must be eradicated from contemporary languages'. Of at least equal seriousness and more specifically, the negative appraisal of the reform of Peter the Great in the Contrat social could have no use for Catherine. Rousseau argued that the assimilation by Russia of European civilization could have only disastrous consequences; Russia should remain independent, and reform should not consist of a change in its national foundations, but rather of the revival of popular sovereignty. Peter 'wanted first of all to make of his subjects Germans and Englishmen, when it was necessary to begin by making them Russians'. Moreover, in general the concept of the social contract was inimical to the picture of Russian government that Catherine wanted to present, and she omitted it from her Nakaz both directly, from Rousseau himself, and indirectly, from Beccaria - the 'Italian Rousseau', who had made it the basis for his work Dei Delitti e Delle Pene. For Catherine, Beccaria's book was useful principally as an argument in favour of the equality of all (except herself) before the law and as a support for the concept of progress as assisted by an enlightened sovereign.21 Other omissions were made from the Nakaz at the suggestion of advisers to whom Catherine showed a draft of her work in early 1767; according to her own account, 'they erased more than half of what I had written'. While a certain amount of rhetorical exaggeration might have been involved here, there seems little doubt that Catherine did tone down her remarks on serfdom, which Nikita Panin described as 'axioms to bring down the walls'. Any diminution of their property rights in general were unwelcome to the nobles in her entourage, who were also unhappy about mitigation of many punishments. On all these points, the Empress made significant revisions.22 Revision rather than omission was the keynote of the use made in the Nakaz of its author's 'prayerbook', Montesquieu's De VEsprit des lois. As is now well known, the early Soviet historian Pokrovsky was somewhat wide of the mark in his assertion that to call the Nakaz an original work written 'under the influence' of Montesquieu and others was the same as saying that a student's notes constitute an original work written 'under the influence' of the professor giving the course of lectures. If nearly half of the Nakaz was taken from Montesquieu's masterpiece and some of Catherine's plagiarism might have been careless, for the most part she stole for an explicit purpose, to construct a rationale for her own brand of government, which has since 183

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been identified as a variant of 'enlightened absolutism'. Thus, while the Empress could agree with her mentor that the size of Russia was conducive to the rule of one, she did not accept that autocracy necessarily meant despotism. While happy to accept Montesquieu's view of Peter the Great's reforms, which in contrast to Rousseau's stressed their appropriateness since Russia was essentially European, she did not want to take over from him a theoretical basis for the reformed state which she had inherited from Peter. If for Montesquieu, a constitution should be basically class-monarchical, for Catherine it was bureaucratic — autocratic. If in the former the principal intermediate power between the ruler and the ruled was constituted by the nobility, in the latter it was formed by the senate and the colleges.23 Such a tendency was reinforced by borrowings of almost equal significance although of far fewer number from another quarter, the 'police science' (Polizeiwissenschaft) school already referred to above, especially Bielfeld and Justi. According to one of the principal commentators on the Nakaz, F.V. Taranovsky: The logically inconsistent, but from the point of view of opportunism compatible, combination of French liberty with German prosperity and order corresponded in the greatest possible degree to that direction of enlightened policy which the Empress Catherine was able and essentially wanted to follow. But the editor of the definitive edition of the Nakaz, N. D. Chechulin, described the differences between the French and German writers in a manner which placed the members of the 'police science' school in a position of distinct inferiority, writing: Montesquieu talked in the most general, truly philosophical terms about the influence of the natural conditions of a country on the inhabitants - these writers talk in detail about the draining of marshes, the construction of canals and the improvement of the climate Montesquieu spoke about morals - these writers put forward and discuss a series of detailed measures for the observation of morality.... But the Empress ... did not gather the precepts for her Nakaz from Bielfeld or Justi, giving advice which was very detailed, apparently even profound, but actually very shallow and narrowly doctrinaire; Montesquieu, Beccaria and Diderot reign in the Nakaz, great minds and noble hearts.24 While great respect must be paid to Chechulin, two significant circumstances render his interpretation less acceptable than that of Taranovsky. First, the simple fact that Catherine herself was a German princess by origin and upbringing would probably make her more at home with 'police science' than with the doctrines of the French philosophes, whatever her protestations to the contrary.25 Secondly, as implied in the preceding argument, Russia constituted a variant of absolutism typical for the Centre and East of the European continent, into which the theories and practices of the West could not be easily imported.26 True, the dichotomy must not be made too clear 184

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cut; in the Nakaz there remains a 'basic duality' which may be found in 'simultaneous emphasis on personal freedom and bureaucratic control, on institutional mediation and autocratic supremacy, on economic progress and political immobility'. And such a duality remains apparent in Catherine's use of her other sources, the encyclopaedists, the physiocrats, Adam Smith and the Bible.27 But the tendency towards order rather than liberty became more marked under the test of time. Consider, for example, the volte-face in the educational policies of the Empress whose essence was well caught by Miliukov: Influenced by theories of enlightenment, full of enthusiasm, the Catherine of the sixties could dream of the creation of this new race. Cooled down by experience of life and disappointed, the Catherine of the eighties could see how insufficient for the execution of this grand scheme were the means within her hands.28 Still making reference to Montesquieu and Locke in her instructions of 1784 for the education of her grandsons, she emphasized two years later that textbooks translated for more general pedagogical purposes should be scrutinized for 'everything in them that needs to be corrected to make them coincide with the laws of our Orthodoxy and . . . with the circumstances of the citizens of our Empire'. 29 And most of these textbooks originated from another empire, that of the Habsburgs, as did Catherine's chief collaborator on the new project, F. I. Yankovich de Mirievo, a Serbian graduate of the University of Vienna who had recently been involved in the setting up in Hungary of schools of the Prussian type. The best known of the books, On the Duties of Men and the Citizen, laid great stress on patriotism, motivated by which Russians would not criticize their state or disobey its laws. As J.L. Black describes the book's principal message: The lower classes must show their patriotism by being unwaveringly obedient and hardworking; they must also be willing recruits for the defence of the homeland. The soldier must love his nation and be brave no matter what odds he faced. The clergy could fulfil its obligations by educating the people to be true Christians, and to love the fatherland and its rulers. The nobles, who are closer to the monarchy than members of any other class, must be the models of patriotism in all circumstances and above all be demonstrably faithful to the monarchy.30 The society envisaged in On the Duties of Men and the Citizen would obviously derive its principal cohesion from the clergy and the nobility. By the mid 1780s, Catherine had found it easy enough to reconcile an initial enthusiasm for the ideas of Voltaire with the necessity for giving her support to the Orthodox Church. Her famous correspondence with the sage of Ferney had not been taken too seriously on either side, but did have the positive result not only of extending her European reputation and deepening her human understanding but also of consolidating her acceptance of toleration and anti-superstition.31 As a result, she accepted Protestantism and 185

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Catholicism and even welcomed Jesuits into Russia, treated the Old Believers with increasing liberality after an initial showdown, and incorporated Muslims, if not Jews, more fully into her kind of enlightened state.32 Reaching a modus vivendi with the leaders of Orthodoxy after her secularization of church estates in 1764, she made few efforts to improve the lot of the parish clergy, a closed hereditary caste cut off from lay society and thereby constituting 'a festering social problem', but could be pardoned for viewing this as the responsibility of the Synod rather than of the Empress. For its part, the Synod was far from effective, and, generally speaking, Orthodoxy at this time was as undistinguished in its theology as in its leadership.33 Catherine's policy of toleration needs partly to be seen against a background of her desire to attract colonists into the vast open spaces of the Russian provinces34 and the circumstance that those provinces were growing throughout her reign in a rather remarkable manner. This expansion was celebrated by her in the following declaration: in the true glory and majesty of the Empire we taste the fruits and recognise the consequences of the actions of the Russian people subject to us, obedient, brave, undaunted, enterprising and strong, who with faith in God, loyalty to the throne which rules it, labour and love for the fatherland strives in its united strength for the general welfare above all, and in military and civil affairs the subordinates are stimulated by the example of the leaders to deeds which attract praise, honour and glory.35 THE NOBILITY AND THE INTELLIGENTSIA

The role assigned to the nobility in 1786 and in 1785, the year of its charter, from the preamble to which the preceding declaration has been taken, was also indicated by the traditions of East European absolutism and clarified during the crisis of 1773-5, the Pugachev Revolt. In a speech to the nobility of Kazan in 1774, Catherine had declared that their integrity, well-being and security were 'indivisible with our own and our empire's security and well-being'. In a speech of reply written by the poet G.R. Derzhavin, the Kazan nobility had declared their class and its members 'the veritable shield' of the state, 'the supports of the tsarist throne'. 36 And in a decree of 1774, the government had talked of the promises of the miscreant Pugachev leading to a degree of insubordination in which: 'It would be as if the Creator of every creature had not Himself founded human society in such a way that it could not exist without intermediate authorities between the Sovereign and the people.' 37 The strong implication was given that the administrators of the senate and colleges no longer constituted as much as they had in the Nakaz the 'intermediate authorities', such a part now being played by the nobility as a whole. Under the duress of peasant war, the famous axiom of Montesquieu entirely omitted from the Nakaz had now taken on new life: 'point de monarque, point de noblesse; point de noblesse, point de monarque'. 186

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But the axiom's revival was actual rather than theoretical. When we come to look at the Charter of the Nobility of 1785, we can readily see that the class whose rights, freedoms and privileges are described in it is far from that described by Montesquieu. It was from such a vantage point, or rather from that of broad Western concepts of nobility that Max Beloff could be dismissive of the dvorianstvo in Russia, writing: The nobles of that country seemed in 1785 to want little more than what free men generally possessed in the rest of Europe. However one may interpret the policies of Catherine, the nobility, at the end of the eighteenth century, was no less a subservient element in the Russian state than it had been under the masterful Peter one hundred years before.38 However, if we assess the decree without such preconceptions, we may readily agree with Helju Bennett that 'the Russian nobility's charter extended rights that went beyond any to be subsequently guaranteed the European'. The dvorianstvo albeit as a class rather than as individuals, was granted in 1785 the right to both service and rank, 'a pre-emptive right to a specific role, a monopoly, as it were, on the valued and honoured work that was available in Russia'. 39 Writing of the outlook of the nobility as early as 1767, V.N. Bochkarev could assert: Servilely declaring itself a non-entity before the boundless power of the all-Russian autocracy, the dvorianstvo was convinced that it alone held on its shoulders both the state and even the very power of the monarch, that only the 'noble' class was able, knew how and was obliged to administer Russia; it had to penetrate into all the organs of administration and unremittingly watch over every step of the government. At the time of the summons of the Legislative Commission, Bochkarev declared, the socio-political convictions of the average Russian noble amounted to 'The tsar's protection over the dvorianstvo, and the dvorianstvo's over all Russia'.40 What is this but a straightforward variation on the theme: 'point de noblesse, point de monarque?' In theory, by 1785 Catherine herself had dropped Montesquieu and most of the other pilots for the course which she had steered nearer the beginning of her reign. The Charter of the Nobility had no explicit foreign model, a possible reflection not only of Catherine's disillusionment with the philosophes, but also of her self-confidence growing in parallel with that of the nobility to the point where foreign models had become superfluous. Even ten years before, at the time of her reform of the provincial government, she had begun to talk of at least some of her former mentors as those 'liars', 41 and had turned to a more down-to-earth model 'Sir Blackstone'. 42 The influence of the system of administration developed in the Baltic provinces and of the views of the nobility as expressed at the Legislative Commission also weighed with her, but there seems little doubt of her agreement with one of her chief advisers and percolator of foreign influences, Jacob Sievers, who wrote in 187

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1779 that 'Liberty et Property sont toujours ma devise et ma but, et Fidelity et Loyalty les moyens pour y parvenir [Sic],' and in 1780 that England was 'that country which is without contradiction the most enlightened in Europe at present'. 43 (However, as Marc Raeff interprets the process, while the model for the path that Catherine now wanted to follow was England, 'what seems to have been there an autonomous social development was the result of state policy on the Continent', 44 especially in Russia. In his view, in the Charter of the Nobility, as well as in the Charter of the Towns of 1785 and a charter for the state peasants, drafted but never put into practice, Catherine was attempting to create by governmental fiat the corps intermediaries deemed necessary by Montesquieu. 45 Moreover, in the Statute of Good Order or Police of 1782, Catherine took further than in the supplementary Chapter 21 of her JVakaz the regulations of city life in a manner recalling not only cameralist precept but also Russian precedent. As Raeff puts it: The Russian police officials had to be drafted from the population in a way strongly reminiscent of the sluzhba (compulsory state service) practices of Muscovite and Petrine times that offered no counterpart advantages to those impressed and straightjacketed them in the rigid network of state service.46 True, although the statute was not primarily the affair of the nobility, which enjoyed exceptional privileges in the Rechtsstaat that the Empress was trying to construct.) By the 1790s, Catherine's disillusionment with the ideas of the Enlightenment was complete. In early 1794, she wrote to one of her client correspondents, Baron Friedrich Melchior von Grimm: And so, you were right, never expressing the wish to be included among the luminaries, the illumines and the philosophes, since experience proves, that all this leads to destruction; but whatever they have said and done, the world will never cease to need an authority It is better to prefer the foolishness of one, than the madness of many, infecting with fury twenty million people in the name of'freedom', of which they do not possess even the shadow, after which these madmen rush forward to ensure that it will never be achieved. For France, the Empress could see salvation only in the emergence of a Caesar; in Russia, she did all she could to avert the spread of revolution by behaving in such a dictatorial manner herself.47 A strong local reason for Catherine's alarm was the birth of an intelligentsia seeking independence from the kind of social consensus that she had been trying to maintain and develop. This essay would hardly be complete without some analysis of this significant development, although it has been given proportionately too much consideration in recent historical writing and 188

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Marc Raeff's stimulating study has led at least some readers into equating the intelligentsia with the entire nobility. 48 And so, this last part of our analysis must be placed against a background which consists of the vast majority of the educated elite basically satisfied with their lot and making use of such ideas as they had formed for the support of the status quo rather than opposition to it. As Miliukov emphasized, the birth of the intelligentsia is easy to discern precisely because it was the affair of such a few individuals; he himself described in a graphic manner the impact of the ideas of the Enlightenment, especially the French, on the generation of the 1770s and 1780s: The quavering Russian spirits were finally overwhelmed by this jolt, which sharply placed two antipathetic outlooks opposite each other. And so the youth of the generation which interests us first found itself at the cross-roads between the old and the new belief, forced to choose between one and the other. One can imagine that spiritual confusion, that panic which possessed the serious and conscientious youth, when he had to make that decisive choice and when in making this choice he felt himself completely left to himself. Something similar must have been felt by those medieval medical students who went to the cemetery at the middle of the night in order to study the secrets of life on corpses. Some could overcome their holy terror and resolve to cross the threshold of the sanctuary, into the school of logical philosophical thought. The less resolute hurried to chain themselves to the fragments surviving from the old mental furniture, and took enthusiastically to idealising the past just as if it were possible to return to its shelter. Even the boldest nevertheless finished with a compromise, trying to hide from themselves the size of the concessions already made by them to the new outlook.49 The boldest of all was probably Radishchev, whose intellectual biography has been written by Allen McConnell. As McConnell makes clear, Radishchev was indeed a Russian philosophe, thoroughly familiar with the leading ideas of his own and former times, but 'much more than a borrower' and 'not turned giddy by reading'. To take as an example the greatest influence on Radishchev, McConnell shows how Rousseau developed his disciple's sensibility, compassion and supreme trust in conscience without making anything like the same impact in the political direction. As McConnell puts it: One cannot find in Radishchev the political dogmas that abound in the Social Contract: that only a small state can be democratic; that people cannot be emancipated from serfdom before they are educated (Radishchev gave tragic examples from real life of serfs who were educated, making the humiliations of their life all the more intolerable); that people are 'a vulgar herd'; that censorship is necessary; that a Natural Religion must be professed by all citizens on pain of exile or death, and that there is no higher natural right which justifies disobedience to the General Will. Generally speaking, if Radishchev was 'in many ways a child of his age, a cultivated eighteenth-century enlightened European', his outlook was, 'for all 189

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his urbanity, Russian populist to the core'. Moreover, society and government and their problems were vastly different from France in Russia: Thus in France, the monarchy was attacked because it was basically incompetent and unable to defend itself; in Russia, the monarchy was obviously brilliant, energetic, forward-looking and popular through solid achievements - and had a strong will to defend itself ruthlessly. Radishchev concentrated his energies on trying to persuade his fellow nobles and their patroness to free a class in which the philosophes had little interest and for which they had less respect. To them, the outstanding problem was release of the tiers etat from unfair taxation and comparatively minor social discrimination. Finally, while the philosophes were a group and sustained by mutual interaction and an enthusiastic reading public, Radishchev was almost alone, kept going by a rich experience, his deep love of the people and 'sensitive moral vision'. 50 Radishchev was almost alone, but not quite. Soviet historians would have us believe that such individuals as Ia.P. Kozel'sky, LA. Tret'iakov, S.E. Desnitsky and D.S. Anichkov were with him in spirit, so to speak, in the early formation of a materialistic outlook. 51 And that is at least a subject worth discussion, although there is no opportunity for it here. Indeed, the whole richness of the experience of the contacts between Russians and the Enlightenment can only be hinted at here, where even the basic point, that the philosophes were for Russian writers what 'Sir Blackstone' was for their Empress - 'an inexhaustible supplier of matter and ideas,... but it is my yarn which I unwind in my own way' 52 - has been made in the most summary fashion. Perhaps the best way of finally ramming that point home is to take the two individuals we met at the beginning of the essay D.I. Fonvizin and N.M. Karamzin, and to illustrate in a couple of strokes the manner in which they, like Radishchev, unwound in their own way one of the greatest of the philosophes, Rousseau. While both writers had a long and involved intellectual relationship with Rousseau, Fonvizin could never accept the 'social contract' but saw a better basis for harmony in fundamental laws and in a state in which the most honourable order, the nobility, would defend the fatherland and in its entirety form along with the sovereign the nation. 53 (True, Fonvizin doubted that such a circumstance had been realized in Russia, and for this and other solecisms incurred the deep suspicion of the Empress during the French Revolution, if not to the same extent as Radishchev.54) And Karamzin did not agree with Rousseau's view of Enlightenment, asserting that above all it constituted 'the palladium of good behaviour' while on his way to becoming the first articulate spokesman for conservative nationalism. 55 There is no space left for even a few words concerning Karamzin's precursor, M.M. Shcherbatov,56 or about the journalist N.I. Novikov and 190

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the impact of Freemasonry,57 or on the relationship of Catherine and others with the encyclopaedists.58 A whole treatise could be given about the fate at the eastern extremity of Europe of the tiers etat and the articulation of its views by what has been called the 'democratic intelligentsia'.59 Our final remarks must be directed towards Russia and Russians at the periphery of the Enlightenment, or even beyond it. Catherine believed that she could find the culture of the capital in the town of Smolensk ten years or so after her provincial reform,60 but others were sceptical. One observer in the admittedly much wilder region of Ufa wondered what use equity judges could be in cases of 'whole villages discovered guilty of witchcraft, some as sorcerers, the others as the bewitched'.61 True, the assertion by some Soviet historians of a 'serf intelligentsia',62 like that by others of a 'democratic intelligentsia', cannot be dismissed without proper investigation. While it seems unlikely that there were many cases like those reported by foreign visitors at the beginning of the nineteenth century of serfs borrowing the works of Voltaire and Rousseau from their masters' libraries,63 there are implications of at least the dawn of an enlightened consciousness in the minds of Pugachev and some of his followers and indeed the minds of other members of the lower orders whose resistance to authority would be more passive or even non-existent.64 But in the reign of Catherine the Great, the years of the heyday of the Enlightenment, Russian participation in that great international movement was predominantly the affair of the Empress and of the nobility, and of use more for the maintenance or development of the legacy of Peter the Great than for its radical change or still less destruction.65 And so, the reception and adaptation by Russians of the ideas of the Enlightenment took place in a framework of absolutism which had taken shape over the course of several centuries in a manner conditioned by previous domestic history but also influenced by contemporary foreign theory. This absolutism consisted basically of an alliance between the autocrat and the nobility, although it was never explicit in the early years of Catherine's reign, when the Empress attempted to devise in the Nakaz a political philosophy which reduced or ignored the part to be played by the ruling class. For its part, the nobility never doubted its indispensable role, manning as it did the upper echelons of the administration and of the armed forces, and saw little need to discuss such an essential and long-established part of the national tradition. True, individuals within the dvorianstvo possessed no guarantee of security, whether simply falling from grace or in a more complex manner joining the tiny ranks of Russia's nascent intelligentsia.

Enlightenment and the Politics of American Nature J.R. POLE

During his brief term as President of the United States John Kennedy once invited all the Western Hemisphere winners of the Nobel Prize to dinner at the White House, where he made his most famous joke, addressing them as 'the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone'. 1 This story makes a suitable point of departure in our present search for the Enlightenment in its American context for two reasons: first, because with the possible exception of Franklin, Jefferson stands as the most complete and fully representative American of the Enlightenment; and secondly because, as president - a position to which Franklin would not have aspired - Jefferson epitomises the distinctively political aspects, and one might say the political culmination, of the Enlightenment in America. The presidential election of 1800, contested between John Adams and his old friend and colleague of the heroic years of the Revolution, Thomas Jefferson, is likely to remain the only presidential contest in which the rivals were respectively presidents of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society.2 In this light the election itself appears as a supremely political climax to the American Enlightenment, and at the same time a supremely American climax to the Enlightenment as a whole; to which the later correspondence between the two ageing patriarchs provides an absorbing and sometimes a profoundly moving coda, whose chords resound with fifty years of memories and controversies. There is surely nothing comparable in the records of any other country. Most of the considerable literature of the subject has been concerned with specific aspects of Enlightenment pursuits - studies of scientific investigations, of literature, of legal and social reforms, of political thinking and of religion; but recently certain scholars of varying temperament and interest have added new studies addressed, either to the concept of the Enlightenment considered as a whole or to important aspects of the political thought of the Revolution. Both Henry F. May's The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976) and Henry Steele Commager's The Empire of Reason (New York, 1977), 192

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in their very different ways, are general studies. They were narrowly preceded by Donald H. Meyer's general interpretation of the American Enlightenment as a democratic phenomenon.3 Almost simultaneously with May and Commager, Morton White and Garry Wills addressed their attentions to the principal texts of the Revolution in The Philosophy of the American Revolution (New York, 1978) and Inventing America (New York, 1978)

respectively. Professor Commager, at this late date, still holds that the Enlightenment in America can be subjected to a unified interpretation, with which he begins his book: 'The thesis of this book can be stated quite simply: The Old World imagined, invented, and formulated the Enlightenment, the New World — certainly the Anglo-American part of it — realized and fulfilled it.' 4 Professor May's conception of the subject is more complex. For him, in bare essentials, the Enlightenment depends on two propositions: 'first, that the present age is more enlightened than the last; and second, that we understand nature and man best through our natural faculties'.5 In sharp contrast to Commager, May holds that 'the Enlightenment has been too often homogenized'.6 Unlike Commager, he attaches great importance to developments in Protestant Christianity, and goes as far as to say that his book is 'not about the Enlightenment and religion, but about the Enlightenment as religion'.7 This orientation does not in fact prevent him from emphasizing the importance of the political modes of Enlightenment thought and their political consequences; and his determination to dwell on the religious aspects is intellectually possible only because he consciously takes for granted such 'well-torn topics' as the American Revolution and the formation of the Constitution (as well as the two Great Awakenings - these latter because, though religious phenomena, there have been studies enough to satisfy his curiosity) .8 Both the basically secular and rationalistic thought that identified itself as 'enlightened', and the evangelical inspiration which fired religious revivals through the grace of the New Light, were guided by the quality whose name appeared in both these expressions: light. But it is very clear that these two torches lit up very different landscapes, different paths to different forms of salvation. A major theological thinker such as Jonathan Edwards may have been compelled to enter into the dialogue proposed by Enlightenment questions, and therefore to share its language, but he and his disciples did not set themselves secular or rationalistic aims. Light itself was not a monopoly of the Enlightenment. America was discovered long before the Enlightenment began to form in European minds. English America itself grew up alongside the England of Bacon, Milton, Locke and Newton. In formal terms, Americans who interested themselves in natural and moral philosophy, in the principles of government and their relation to natural law, and in the implicit connections 193

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between Protestantism and liberty, owed - and often acknowledged - as much to these men as England did. In time they also came to owe much to later generations, represented (among others) by the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Cumberland, Hutcheson, Locke - on government as well as on understanding - Ferguson and Reid. Among great contemporary European thinkers only Montesquieu and Burlamaqui seem to have exerted powerful influences rather than representing acceptable views. Since all these names are familiar to students of the intellectual history of the period, I prefer to draw attention to a less frequently considered source of attitudes, political and religious, which so heavily influenced the shaping of American institutions that the American Enlightenment would be an empty affair without them. The American context for the reception of Enlightenment ideas was not only a natural environment very different from - and much emptier than Europe's, nor merely a context of particular clusters of community in that environment. It was also a specific context of political and ecclesiastical institutions. Apart from occasional interruptions, brought about when, from time to time, British authorities took it upon themselves to reorganize the empire, the colonials in America were very largely left alone to look after themselves. Their assemblies owed much to parliamentary precedents and procedures, but self-government soon became an acquired characteristic, transmitted, in Lamarckian fashion, from one generation of legislators to another with the seasoning of experience. It is worth recalling the familiar facts that in 1629 t n e founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony insisted in taking their charter away with them; and that in 1652 the colonial government of Virginia negotiated with the Commonwealth government of England on a basis which virtually assumed the status of an independent republic; and that that was four years before the publication of Harrington's Oceana. If we are to begin to understand the sense of self-sufficiency, as well as the capacity for territorial indignation, which gave Americans the moral energy and confidence required to carry their quarrel with Britain through to independence and the founding of a new republic, we should begin by looking to this ingrained habit of self-government. There is no need here to retrace the familiar ground of the predominantly republican elements of the mixed scheme of colonial government; what mattered to Americans (as it did to English radicals) was that these elements corresponded to those aspects of English government which, in common with enlightened continental thinkers of the same generation, they most admired as embodying the essentials of liberty. A closely parallel argument applies to the establishment of religion. American colonists did not imagine that they possessed a religion of their own, but their representative religious spokesmen did believe devoutly that they had an exclusive duty to maintain their own form of religion. The alarm 194

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aroused by periodic rumours that British governments were about to accede to the desire of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in England, and of zealous Anglicans in New England, for the establishment of an American bishopric, was the religious analogue of the reaction to encroachments on the colonies' political territory. There were authentic religious and political reasons for wishing to resist any advance of a new form of British-based authority into the colonies; and there were also what we may call these 'territorial' reasons, springing from the combative self-assurance of the New England Congregational churches and dating from the first migrations. The liberties most cherished by enlightened thinkers of the eighteenth century can thus be understood, in their American setting, not only as a concern for doctrine but as a long established and deeply valued care of American colonials. It would therefore be historically unrealistic to regard American institutions as creations of Enlightenment thought. On the contrary: English institutions (of which the American systems were offshoots and copies) actually provided the thinkers of the Enlightenment with both inspiration and example. They helped to prove that the old order was not inevitable and that respect for the liberty of the individual was compatible with political order. In its turn Enlightenment thought provided encouragement and supporting analogy for political and judicial institutions. After the creation of the American Constitution it became something of a commonplace to compare the system to the Newtonian cosmic order. The elements, each of which was impelled by a natural propensity to go in its own direction, were kept in place by the countervailing force of the others; in the federal system correct proportions were maintained by a similar balance, while the gravitational power of the federal government held the states in their orbits. (I do not know of any principle of Newtonian physics which attributed to the planets or stars an inherent tendency to aggrandize themselves at the expense of the others; cosmic analogies should also be subjected to appropriate checks and balances.) These basic concepts of order and harmony, depending always on proportion, became the foundation of the classical aesthetics of the eighteenth century. 'Beauty', declared Diderot, 'is founded on the eternal, original, sovereign, and essential rules of order, proportion, relation and harmony' - a view which entered easily into those kinds of judgement which assimilated beauty to propriety, rather than to the Romantic qualities.9 An illustrative example was offered by James Bowdoin in his inaugural address as president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1780), when he extolled the numerous volumes of transactions published by the society. 'These volumes', he said, are a noble collection of useful knowledge; and considered together in their miscellaneous state, strike the mind with a splendour, resembling the galaxy in the heavens, 195

J.R. POLE derived from the combined light of countless myriads of constellations: and like that too, when the several corresponding parts are viewed in their proper connections, they appear to be parts of a whole; and to constitute the most useful systems: systems distinguished by their beauty, regularity, and proportion.10

The applications of these ideas to the social order, if not exactly identical, were analogous to the implications of the Great Chain of Being. They are too obvious to need detailed explanation but at the same time a shade too general to stand that strain. They should have been obvious to Bowdoin, a conservative governor of Massachusetts who was thrown out in the elections of 1787 following Shays's Rebellion. The logical difficulty in the way of this type of explanation of the political order - a difficulty encountered in due course by the federal system itself - arises from the inherent tendency of social and economic systems to change. The Newtonian cosmos maintained its motions in perfect, harmonious stability; but the more demanding task before the makers of American constitutions was to design a system which would retain its structural harmony under the stresses of economic development and geographical expansion - and, in the course of time, of changing moral perceptions. As a criterion of the system's operation, however, the principle of proportion is by no means a useless guide. When the elaborate federal structure collapsed, it was in a strong sense because the different elements had got out of their original proportions, an irregularity for which the system as a whole contained no adequate means of correction. The analogy between the world of people and the structure of the cosmos implied another connection, fundamental to Enlightenment thought, and particularly significant in several aspects of the American experience. Under the influence of the analogy it became necessary to infer the moral laws governing human conduct from the laws of the natural order. Bacon, Newton and Locke, the trinity to whom Jefferson ascribed the foundations of his own principles, all applied their powers of observation to nature - a statement that is no less true of Locke's reflections on Human Understanding, in a sphere of the psychology of knowledge, than of Newton's optics or cosmology.11 The position contained a trap which contemporaries found it hard to discern. The concept of law was being used in different, not strictly consistent ways. The scientific emphasis on regularity in natural behaviour suggested that nature conformed to laws, the law of gravity being the most universal example. Nature was thus a system of laws, and investigations of nature were undertaken to discover and classify those laws. This concept impinged heavily on the long but different tradition by which 'natural law' determined the outcome of moral choice. The law of gravity, combined with the chemical composition of water, determined that water, when free, would run downhill; but water has never been free to choose to remain where it is. Natural law was also held to determine that treason, disloyalty or ingratitude were 196

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wrong; but the individual was free to make up his own mind as to whether intolerable oppression had morally freed him from his obligations. Both sides in such arguments could appeal to natural law with about equal hopes of getting a satisfactory answer. But it was generally the rebel who turned to the laws of nature against the power of an unjust ruler. Thomas Hobbes had been well aware of the dangers this procedure posed for civil stability, long before anyone dreamt of an Enlightenment or an American Revolution. 'The law of nature, and the civil law, contain each other, and are of equal extent.' 12 No room here for any appeal from the civil power to God or nature. Although Locke's political system depended on an ultimate sanction in natural justice, the Glorious Revolution and the subsequent constitutional settlements rested on firm foundations of English precedent and law. When the first Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in 1774 members were divided among themselves on the expediency of appealing from the British constitution to natural law. The radicals - who in this connection included John Adams - carried the point, and when on 14 October the Congress adopted resolutions which included an appeal to 'the immutable laws of nature', the radical success would have prolonged repercussions in Americans' own domestic contentions.13 By contrast, British political discourse eschewed this line of argument, both in the protracted quarrel with the colonies and in most of the debates which ensued at different periods over parliamentary reform. The difference of principle stands out very clearly in the contrast between official justifications of British policies, resting on parliamentary sovereignty and assisted by the emollient doctrine of virtual representation, and the Declaration of Independence, with its resounding appeal to 'the laws of nature and nature's God'. Enlightenment readings of politics certainly grounded themselves in the fundamental principle of the rule of law. But which law? The answer would depend on which side of the quarrel the speaker was on rather than on the transfusion of pure Enlightenment thought; and if British ministers had commented, as well they might, that they did not need the assistance of the Enlightenment to guide them in matters of British sovereignty, it may be recalled that continental thinkers did regard British law as one of the best sources of Enlightenment political principles. Once American independence was an established fact, the appeal to nature could be divisive, and, in any case, it had somewhat diminished value in face of the positive law of the Constitution. By the time of the debate over the framing and adoption of the Constitution, in 1787-8, the concept of interest had gone far to take the place of the earlier preoccupation with rights. This, however, reflected the clash of rival groups in the unsettled politics of the 1780s. With the opening of the debate over the unresolved issue of slavery, natural rights continued to be clearly at stake. Opponents of slavery, whether they were working within the Constitution or against it, did 197

J.R. POLE not hesitate to appeal to the natural rights premise of the nation's foundation document.14 These controversies emerged under a new system, which arose from the collapse of the previous, eighteenth-century political order, to which we must return. That order, according to Henry May's characterization, was governed by the Moderate Enlightenment, descending from Newton and Locke and prizing harmony and order, achieved through a just knowledge of human nature and the cosmic scheme. Although May's analysis of the Enlightenment in America depends on four contrasting phases, it may be said that they are unified by the prevailing belief in reason. An inspection of the natural order through reason and observation would reveal all that man needed to know about that order and, above all, of his place in it. The epitome of this school of thought was Pope's Essay on Man, which Commager rightly promotes as the age's 'most representative literary production'. 15 But Pope's Essay is not a product of a spirit of enquiry, nor does it encourage that disposition to ask irreverent questions which was important to the actual uses of reason for Enlightenment methods of enquiry. Pope's 'stupendous whole' was a closed system within which man had his proper place, but he had no business to address himself to questions beyond his own nature. (All that he needed to know about the universe was known through the works of Newton.) Pope's popularity among American readers may seem peripheral to our main problem, but it can hardly be irrelevant. I doubt whether any English writer occurs so frequently in quotations at the heading of essays and other contributions to eighteenth-century American newspapers. The best explanation no doubt lies in the same conventions of taste that explain Pope's following in Britain; we should not always look for sociological reasons when we find that excellence commands respect. Pope was the master of his art and had the advantages of being memorable, witty and particularly easy to quote. Beyond this, and given the values of human benevolence within a stable cosmic order which permeate the Essay on Man, it may be worth suggesting that these values could be reassuring to a people whose frontiers were never far from the wilderness - a wilderness that was certainly not an unmixedly friendly presence, and which Puritan preachers sometimes likened to the state of their parishioners' souls. In all its social implications the Moderate Enlightenment appears to be deeply conservative. Intellectually it implies that all the structural facts we need to know are known, so that when new ones are discovered they will merely fill in the gaps in an existing scheme of knowledge. The American social and political environments did not offer much hospitality to May's second phase, which he calls the 'Skeptical Enlightenment'. Except among the upper class of Virginia, he finds little trace of this frame of mind. The principal reason for this is no doubt included in the explanation often given 198

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for the comparatively mild American form of Enlightenment criticisms of contemporary institutions. It is true, as Louis Hartz pointed out, that American society grew up without a feudal past and without an inherited structure of feudal survivals.16 It grew up also without the vast encumbrance of a state church. Privilege certainly existed in America and so did distinctions of class and fortune. But privilege was not a principle; even the privileged tended to see themselves as earning their social keep. I think, however, that we can carry this argument a little beyond these rather familiar outlines. It is a commonplace that Americans with enquiring and sceptical minds confronted no such jungle of evil and abuse as Voltaire, Diderot and their contemporaries encountered in France. But the difference of condition had a far more positive character. The most enquiring minds in America were not those of the victims of privilege. In many important instances, throughout most of the colonies, the case was quite the contrary. The men of leisure, who enjoyed the use of libraries and the possibilities of correspondence with learned contemporaries both in America and Europe, were in many cases themselves the great men of their communities. Nothing in their circumstances was likely to dispose them to criticize the institutions on which their advantages rested. The intellectual products of enlightened enquiry in America never resulted from serious conflict with political or ecclesiastical authority. Where scientific investigation was in question, the assembly of Pennsylvania voted funds towards the observations of the transit of Venus in 1769; the assembly of Virginia voted more than once to terminate the importation of slaves from Africa, only to be disallowed by the crown. For a few years after the Revolution, manumission was encouraged. The vestigial privileges of the established church were removed, not by a revolt against existing civil power, but by means of a campaign mounted and successfully carried through in the legislature. Such important objects of Enlightenment thinking, which extended to Virginia's famous statute for religious liberty, lay within the grasp of American reformers because they reflected the convictions and interests of substantial portions of the ruling class.17 Although Virginia provided the most conspicuous example of this dominance, the most concentrated centre of enlightened thinking was Philadelphia. The scene there was entirely different, but the central point of this argument survives the test of difference. The enquiring minds whom Benjamin Franklin, as early as June 1727, gathered into a self-styled junta, and who clubbed their books to form the Library Company, were of course not aristocratic landlords like those of Virginia or the Hudson valley. But they were men on the make in a society which at that time offered exceptional advantages to men of ambition and intelligence. The famous Library Company of Philadelphia itself is proof of that. Later, in Franklin's own middle years, Philadelphia society became more exclusive, its upper classes 199

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more aloof; this pose helps to explain the bitterness of Pennsylvania politics after 1776. The intense struggles of that period involved the constitution of the new state itself, the problems of economic policy, the treatment of loyalists and above all, the Bank of North America. But in no sense did they arise from upper class or governmental resistance to the promotion of Enlightenment principles. Pennsylvania's political establishments, both before and after the Revolution, were very different from Virginia's, but in neither state did they ever take any interest in opposing the development of knowledge through books, clubs, newspapers or other publications. There was some censorship of the colonial press, especially when newspapers engaged in publications which were held to be breaches of assembly privilege; but it would be absurd to consider these restraints as belonging to the same class as the censorships of the ancien regime in Europe. When Parliament violated what Americans held to be their rights, the colonials recurred, not to the tenets of intellectual scepticism, but to their own first principles. These first principles were those of the British constitution and of natural law - summoned in that order. Nothing in this situation inspired Americans to question the fundamentals of government which they already held sacred; their arguments, as Bernard Bailyn has shown, were distinctively didactic and primarily defensive.18 When, therefore, the time came to establish new forms of government, they needed to find forms that would secure their existing rights - 'to secure these rights', as the Declaration of Independence said, 'governments are instituted among men'. The problem of rights, however, was not to be resolved merely by drafting resounding declarations. The natural law formula involved logical difficulties which were never successfully resolved within its own terms of reference; and these contradictions opened a door to the actual deprivation of rights which, in principle, the formula ought to have been able to protect. The doctrine required its adherents to believe what seemed a very simple proposition, namely that, by virtue of an act of equal creation, all men were endowed with attributes in respect of which they possessed equal rights. There could be no difference among men in their right to preserve their own lives, to enjoy liberty and to acquire and keep property, all of which together amounted to an undeniable right to pursue happiness. According to the significant language of Jefferson's Rough Draft of the Declaration of Independence, men derived their rights from the fact of equal creation.19 The reason which perceived these truths was reason applied to the observation of nature. However important to mankind's salvation might be the truths of revelation, or of grace, they could have no specific value as evidence of the truths of nature. This moral system, however, constituted a closed circuit. The great difficulty in grounding it into moral life was that it purported to derive its 200

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conclusions from observations which in fact conflicted with them. Observation did not show that all men were equally endowed even in respect of those attributes required to protect their equal rights; it did not conclusively support the view that they were all equally capable either of appreciating liberty and property or of protecting them. If nature bestowed on different men, or worse still on different orders of races of men, unequal endowments of natural qualities, then the idea of equality lost its force as a moral protest, because the basis of equality was itself found in the natural order. This contradiction, which John P. Diggins has called 'the pathos of the enlightenment', posed a peculiar dilemma for Thomas Jefferson.20 His premises postulated equal creation, a basic fact underlying - preceding - the natural order, upon which all the existence of the created order depended, from which it took both its life and its principles. From this equal creation Jefferson derived equality of rights; but within this natural order he discerned unequal conditions. However deeply he might be tormented by the blatant contradictions between slavery and the precepts of liberty, and however sincere his appreciation of the slaves' natural desire for liberty, this intellectual position did not create for Jefferson a formula for political militancy; moral anguish was, on the whole, a bearable alternative. Jefferson's acknowledged suspicion that Negroes were in some fundamentally biological sense inferior to whites can be interpreted as having reflected a less illiberal frame of mind than is generally recognized. Most whites appear neither to have concerned themselves with the problem nor to have spent much of their moral or intellectual resources in doubting the evidence of their senses. Whites were masters, blacks were slaves; and if that were not enough to convince the ordinary mind, whites could nowhere discern manifestations of Negro achievement that might challenge the implications of the basic inequality of the relationship. Exceptions, in the form of Negro talent, not to mention white stupidity, must of course have been frequently encountered in daily life; but as for these one can only say that the human mind can accommodate itself to almost any number of exceptions before it willingly alters a scheme on which its comfort depends. Garry Wills has recently argued that Jefferson attached more importance to the moral faculties which he discerned in Negroes than historians have recognized. In the light of the impression that seems to have been made in Jefferson's thought by the Scottish philosophers, the capacity for affection and loyalty which he noticed among Negroes assume a larger place in Jefferson's scheme of values - for Western political and economic thought have exalted the individual at the expense of the group. To say, therefore, that Jefferson thought Negroes possessed less capacity for intellectual abstraction, and at the same time less self-centred ambition, than whites, is not to say that he regarded either of these qualities as having superior value in the whole scheme of creation.21 201

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When all this has been said, Jefferson showed very little enthusiasm even for the best of black people's qualities and still less admiration for their abilities; he certainly admitted no inclination to change places with them. It is relevant in this connection to observe that his conclusions - although he hesitated to admit them as conclusions - did not reflect the only possible inference available, even from direct observation of nature. Benjamin Rush, a friend of Jefferson's and a fellow-member of the American Philosophical Society, speculating on the natural causes of Negro pigmentation, suggested that the so-called blackness of the skin was a form of leprosy; and however implausibly disagreeable this view might appear, it carried no implication of genetic inferiority. As a man of medicine, Rush believed that diseases could be cured. As president of the American Abolition Society, Rush signed a circular letter which held out the expectation of equal Negro achievement once the obstacles to equal opportunity had been removed.22 Several scientifically minded men expected Negro pigmentation to disappear under the Northern climate, and if this could happen with pigment then surely other improvements were equally possible. (No one seems to have doubted that alterations in the European direction were desirable.) Samuel Stanhope Smith, Witherspoon's successor as president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, regarded differences of natural environment as determinants of racial characteristics, from which he argued that man was a highly adaptable animal and that Negroes could be expected to turn gradually into whites. With memorable unworldliness he observed that he could see evidences that this was actually taking place among the Negroes who formed the class of house servants.23 All these views were capable of being entertained by intelligent persons applying their reason to the observation of nature. Certainly no one set of observations forced the enquiring mind ineluctably towards any one conclusion, and if Jefferson had been moved to take a more optimistic view he would have had good intellectual company. I am left with the feeling that his failure to anticipate - or even to hope for Negro progress suggests that he felt somewhat more comfortable with an inferior Negro than with an advancing one. Jefferson was under no illusion about the unequal distribution of natural endowments among whites, and even if the black race had never set foot in America he would have been provided with plenty of observed evidence to raise serious doubts about his basic principles. The problem is familiar from Jefferson's plans for a system of public education in Virginia. His much-quoted remark that, from a system of selective examinations, 'twenty geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually', 24 has not been regarded as the most optimistic encomium that the author of the Declaration of Independence could have paid to the talents of his fellow-countrymen. But Professor Morton White has recently suggested that the concept of differential endowment may have run more deeply in 202

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Jefferson's thought than we have been used to suppose, even entering into one of the crucial expressions in the Declaration itself. 'We hold these truths to be self-evident.' What could be clearer than that? If self-evident, then surely evident to the natural apprehensions of all. But Professor White, who brings to this subject a philosophical equipment not possessed by most historians - including those of the intellectual variety - goes back to Aquinas to demonstrate that even the concept of self-evidence has a long history. The best procedure here is to give White's own explanation. To say that a proposition is self-evident is to say that 'the predicate is contained in the notion of the subject'. Thus the notion of being rational is contained in the notion of man, so that the proposition that 'man is a rational being' is selfevident. But on the other hand, 'Aquinas says: "to one who does not know the definition of the subject, such a proposition is not self-evident. For instance, this proposition, Man is a rational being, is, in its nature, self-evident, since who says man, says a rational being; and yet to one who does not know what man is, this proposition is not self-evident."' Another example: '"to one who understands than an angel is not a body, it is self-evident that an angel is not circumscriptively in a place. But it is not self-evident to the ignorant because they do not grasp the fact than an angel is not a body." The point he stresses in this context is that self-evidence will not be perceived by one who fails to know the essence of something.25 Professor White then proceeds to ask, 'How democratic was Locke's Appeal to Self-Evidence?', and to show that Locke, too, allowed for the existence of a class who either through lack of natural faculties, or through defect of will, failed to perceive the self-evident. The salient quotation deals with the non-seers by nature, in whom, 'through natural defect the acumen of the mind is too dull to be able to bring to light those secret decrees of nature'. (And notice that they are 'secret' decrees, which is not very encouraging to the masses.) Remarks of a similar character reached Jefferson through the writings of Burlamaqui, leading White to conclude that Jefferson actually drafted the Declaration of Independence in a tradition which confided to the natural leaders of society a wisdom, and a consequent responsibility, which was denied to the multitude. To this, lest anyone should think he is writing about metaphysical abstractions, White adds his own comment: 'It is hard, therefore, to avoid the conclusion that many philosophical tutors of our founding fathers built into their theories of how we know the natural law a requirement that was the analogue of property qualifications for voters.' 26 These arguments are followed by a philosophically more technical argument that Jefferson made a mistake when he altered, or accepted the alteration, from his Rough Draft, in which he had said that these truths were 'sacred and undeniable'. White finds 'undeniable' more satisfactory than 'self-evident', essentially because it would enable Jefferson to derive a greater 203

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number of deductions; but here it is just possible that White loses sight of the contemporary audience. I think, however, that Professor White has stopped too soon. His comments prepare a way towards a significant addition to our existing ideas but he does not pursue them to a conclusion. To justify this comment it will first be necessary to review the intellectual context ofJefferson's own thinking. When Jefferson's plans for public education, put forward to the state legislature in 1778, are traced in this context, what survives is not so much the limited nature of his expectations but his intense conviction of the importance of education, not only because of its usefulness to individuals but because of its indispensable contribution to the survival of the republic. Similar ideas, varying a little from place to place, and in certain areas according to the precepts of religion, can be found in America both before and after the Revolution. Their special significance comes to light when enlightened educators are faced with the fact that the republic stands on its own feet, and can expect no ultimate security unless its population is informed, and, above all, virtuous. The needs of the new republic followed closely from those of the colonies. Here, for example, is the Reverend Francis Allison, the Presbyterian divine who headed the College of Philadelphia, and hoped to succeed to the presidency at Princeton, which actually passed to Witherspoon. In 1767 Allison described the situation as he had found it thirty years earlier: There was not a College, nor even a good grammar school in four provinces, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Jersey and New York; but on the other hand all that made pretensions to learning were branded as letterlearned Pharisees; and this desperate cause, of promoting learning in this Province, I undertook, encouraged by our Synod, who allowed me only twenty pounds currency, per an and fifteen for an Assistance;... and since that time Learning has become reputable.27 Allison, who was making major claims for the contribution of the Old Side in rekindling a love of learning among revivalists, was particularly concerned about the problem of providing not only ministers but public leaders among the rising settlement population. 'Farmers' sons must furnish ministers and magistrates for all our frontier inhabitants, or they must sink into Ignorance, Licentiousness, and all their harmful consequences,' he said.28 Other educators stressed the importance of education as a protection for order and a defence of property. John Witherspoon, in an advertisement for Princeton, described education as a promoter of the arts, virtue and industry, and a 'preservative' against riot and disorder.29 Benjamin Rush, who in 1786 published a Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools, wanted to turn men into 'republican machines'; in a further essay in 1798 he wrote of'producing one general, and uniform system of education' which would 'render the mass of the people more homogeneous, and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government'.30 204

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Jefferson's views about education emerged primarily from the new republican context rather than from the need, urgently sensed by Allison, to save the frontier from barbarism. Whatever their religion or standpoint, all these publicists articulate a very strong belief in the power of education to raise men's moral and spiritual condition and to give leadship to society. In the same connection, the college syllabus began to receive additions of an increasingly utilitarian character, based on the reforms of the Scottish universities and inspired by the Scottish conviction that college education could and should help to meet the material as well as the spiritual needs of the state.31 The most crucial need of the new republic was republican virtue. The issue caused great concern to a variety of the men who led America into independence. Jefferson's own convictions suggest a belief that education itself could prove a means for widening the base of responsible political sense in the country. This brings me back to the point at which I suggested that Professor White had stopped too soon when he explained the anti-democratic implications of Jefferson's and his contemporaries' ideas about self-evidence. Whether or not he had already perceived the point in 1776 Jefferson very soon came to believe that the narrow traditional basis for the availability for the concept of self-evidence could be made wider by education. In other words it was not determined solely by natural endowment. This conclusion, moreover, is wholly consonant with Jefferson's general, pervasive optimism and his reiterated faith in the good sense of 'the people', which to the end stood in such sharp contrast to the unenchanted realism of John Adams. No one could conclude Professor White's study without appreciating that to democratize epistemology is a decisive step towards democratizing society. Much of the Enlightenment's ferment of intellectual inquisitiveness was directed towards science. Outside the college, with its libraries and its equipment for natural philosophy, science was necessarily the pursuit of private men. The colonies did not possess the resources for elaborate experimental equipment, and most of their contributions took the form of individual observations. (The observation of the transit of Venus, a grand collective enterprise, was an outstanding exception.) It is easy to regard these as peripheral to the main centres of scientific and other forms of activity, some philosophical and some political, that went on in Europe. But after we have taken note of the more familiar achievements, such as the botanical gardens of John Bartram, who sent hundreds of specimens to Europe and whom Linnaeus thought the greatest 'natural botanist' of the age; the botanical investigations of the Reverend David Muhlenberg, who discovered and classified some fourteen hundred varieties of plants in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; the famous 'orrery' designed by David Rittenhouse, and his vital contribution to observing the transit of Venus;32 not to mention Franklin's electrical experiments and his design of the lightning rod - I think 205

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it a mistake to persevere with the conventional notion that Americans offer marginal, provincial contributions to a process essentially taking place in Europe. It is much more accurate to regard the Americans as active participants in a total system, every aspect of which was necessary to the vitality of the whole. No doubt that whole would have survived without some portion of the information which it comprised, but it would have survived as a smaller, less intelligent whole. From this point of view the whole of the Enlightenment, at its international best, was epitomized by an incident which occurred after the War of American Independence had come to involve France. American and French shipping were at war with Britain on the high seas and consequently private vessels were at considerable risk. It was known to the scientific community that Captain James Cook was returning from the Antipodes. In these circumstances the American minister in Paris, Dr Benjamin Franklin, FRS, and the French minister of marine, issued orders to the shipping of their respective countries that if Captain Cook were encountered he was not to be treated as an enemy but was to be given every assistance on his return to Britain. In the words of Edward Jenner, 'the sciences were never at war'. 33 The incident calls to mind a later episode in scientific history, when in 1935 Lord Rutherford realized that Peter Kapitza, who had returned to the Soviet Union for a holiday, would not be allowed to return to Cambridge. Rutherford's reply was to take Kapitza's equipment to Leningrad. One essential of enlightened thinking was optimism, itself a form of faith since reason could not alone prove that reason could work miracles. Another essential, and a necessary corollary, was scepticism, directed against every kind of unjustified privilege and every governmental invasion of the individual's liberty. America might well have been expected to export to struggling Europe medicinal doses of both optimism and scepticism: optimism because of rising population, a matter documented by Franklin as early as 1751, and because of such clear human gains as longevity, nutrition and a relatively high degree of civil and religious liberty;34 and scepticism although the colonies did not in general cultivate sceptical frames of mind precisely because so much of this had been achieved without dukes, marquesses or earls, without archbishops or bishops, and indeed even without kings, on American soil. Paradoxically, however, until many years after the Revolution had successfully established American credentials, the European Enlightenment's observations of America were dominated by scepticism rather than optimism. The existence of slavery at the base of such a free society undoubtedly provoked one strand of this scepticism, and gave rise to Dr Johnson's famous jibe about the loudest yelps for liberty coming from the slave-drivers of America. The French Encyclopedie devoted articles to slavery in which the word 'Negro' was interchanged for 'slave', and in which the British colonies were obviously as heavily implicated as the French. Adam Smith, 206

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who was committed by his general views on the economics of motivation to believing that slavery could not be profitable, was sceptical of the motives of the Quakers of Philadelphia for setting their Negroes at liberty. Their numbers, he remarked, could not be very large; people do not so easily relinquish the power of domination.35 Buffon's belief that the American natural environment produced degenerate forms of European species provoked Jefferson to several passages in his Notes on Virginia] and John Adams's Defence of the Constitutions of the United States (1786) was written primarily in

answer to certain strictures by Turgot, who thought that the state constitutions had lost sight of basic democratic principles when they established bicameral legislatures. French radicals gradually began to take courage from the American example, stimulated by the few who visited America on their own, by such writers as the marquis de Chastellux, by Lafayette, and by the officers and entourage of Rochambeau's army. During the Revolution, as Joyce Appleby has shown, French radicals used American models and American ideology.36 As the American example of civil and religious liberty was seen to permit peaceful alternations of government and the peaceable coexistence of rival sects, the republic gradually emerged as a beacon to liberals in Europe - and to innumerable migrants, to whom it offered the hope of betterment they could never expect at home. These were among the slowly perceived and long-drawn-out manifestations of Enlightenment in America and its contribution to Europe. It was natural that American scientific enquiry should apply itself to the American environment, newly discovered and in constant process of discovery. Part of that environment was the American Indian, who, from the Enlightenment point of view, occupied a fascinating position, combining in himself the attributes of a natural phenomenon and of man in a primitive state of society. This interest was reflected in Cadwallader Colden's History of the Five Nations, written in two parts in 1727 and 1747. Colden, a governor of New York, presented the Indians to American and British readers in a light comparable to the Greeks and Romans. He believed they stood in 'the original condition of almost every nation', and therefore that they revealed, more clearly than in works of learned speculation, 'the original Form of all Government'. Their many noble qualities were sullied by a barbarous lust for revenge, pursued with extreme cruelty, of which he recited many instances. 'But what have we Christians done to make them better?' he asked; 'instead of virtues we have only brought them vices, that they were entirely free of before that time'. In due course, he believed, their friendship might add honour to the British nation.37 These observations were intended to guide British policy, a consideration of increasing importance in view of the powerful French presence in North America, to which Colden constantly drew attention. Their more general intellectual implication, however, was to take the Indians out of the realms of myth or demonology and to present 207

J.R. POLE them as people who could be reasonably compared to Europeans, indeed to Greeks and Romans. These were far from being the only literary attentions to the Indians. Benjamin Rush investigated and theorized about their diseases, many others published accounts of travel among them, and Thomas Jefferson, that extraordinary polymath, collected volumes of notes on Indian languages. The loss of these in a wreck in Chesapeake Bay was a disaster for the study of linguistics. All these were scientific contributions which Americans were placed in a specially advantageous position to make. But it was in politics that Americans achieved the advance without which, as I have said, the American Enlightenment would miss much of its distinctive and exemplary character. America produced no formal treatise to compare with those which it admired in Europe and from which it learnt the grammar of politics and political theory. But it did produce the Constitution of the United States, to be followed immediately by The Federalist. Henry May feels that this subject is so well worn that it can be safely set to one side to make way for his analysis of the religious themes of American Enlightenment.38 At whatever cost in repetition of the familiar, a complete history would be bound to redress that imbalance, and would prove fatal to any notion of the centrality of religion. I have - be assured - no ambition to recount that complete history, here or elsewhere; but I feel that this essay would be still more incomplete if I left the subject without at least a few comments and suggestions. The Constitution begins from a voluntaristic principle of political cohesion. The colonies had grown up as a loose congeries of polities, townships, farmsteads and isolated frontier settlements. Each province, and in turn each state, represented a formally instituted Gesellschaft] and the Constitution in turn represented a tremendous attempt to bring together all the little Gemeinschaften of America, together with all the states, into one great, continental Gesellschaft. The obvious artificiality of the Constitution itself tended to remind people of the more neighbourly and domestic nature of their own state governments; by a process of reflection it bestowed on these local institutions a more Gemeinschqftlich character than they had formerly possessed. The organic, naturalistic character of these political entities made them fit subjects for the patronage of Enlightenment political thought. 'All the great laws of society are laws of nature', Thomas Paine said, and reflections of this view merged with the sense of historical personality in the states to explain the sentiment which surrounded them.39 I am arguing, in brief, that a style of thought which centred its values in natural things easily found both states and smaller local groups more 'natural' than the federal government. In this affection for values associated with the community, which placed 208

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society rather than the individual at the centre of the ethical system, Americans were characteristic representatives of eighteenth-century social values. In view of the intense individualism often attributed to the emerging laissez-faire political economy and its associated ethical system, it is becoming important to draw attention to the dominance of collective values. 'Eighteenth century ethics was, and was proclaimed as being, social ethics; it concerned itself with man's behavior in society, with his social relations to other men,' the late Jacob Viner observed shortly before his death.40 A recent study of Adam Smith's political views lays the same emphasis on social responsibility.41 Whatever may have been the long-term consequences of the pursuit of happiness that pursuit was conceived of in a sense which made individuals accountable to the community rather than as a shot-gun spray of private enterprises, in the philosophy transmitted from Scotland to America through the writings of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Ferguson, Thomas Reid and, rather later, Adam Smith, through such influences as Jefferson's teacher, William Small, or John Witherspoon at Princeton, Benjamin Rush, and the numerous other Americans who studied in the Scottish universities. European governments rarely attained the degree of unified authority that they usually claimed for themselves. But the monarchs of France, Prussia and Russia certainly claimed to be 'absolute' monarchs. The varying degrees of constitutional independence claimed by certain provinces, estates or marks, ran counter to the principles of absolute monarchy and was in process of gradual reduction before the central power. For political reasons it would have been impossible for any government on the American continent to have asserted, still less to have attained, such an order of unified power over the states. But the intense American preoccupation with local community values, based on a deep sense of the organic character of the community, stood in such sharp distinction to the artificial character of the federal structure - a structure, not a growth - as to suggest a fundamental distinction between American and European political thought, though both had been refreshed (not originated) by Enlightenment inspiration. The communities that mattered so much to the way of life of most Americans were local in both character and extent; and whether or not their inhabitants had been influenced by the thinkers we have mentioned - and it is safe to say that only a small minority read works of philosophy — their cast of mind did converge with much that was salient and valuable in contemporary thought in this emphasis on the community. Political virtue in America was inspired and stabilized at this local level. The safety and even the survival of the values which Americans had endured the War and Revolution in order to transmit to their children, depended on a wide diffusion and dispersal of political powers. The reformist impulse which helped to carry Jefferson to the presidency was inspired, not by a desire for positive government, but by a sense of 209

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urgent need to block the centralist drive of the Federalists. This was all very different from even the more comparable style of reform in Europe. There was, I think, very little on the continent of Europe by way of analogy with the country party philosophy in England, or with its analogue in America. In France, the only road to reform must lead from the monarchy to the provinces; there could be no practical conception of reform that did not begin with the central power. In the United States, on the contrary, the Constitution was the highest level of central authority that the states would willingly accede to; but even that authority was attained only at the expense of a diffusion of power so subtle and complex that I think we shall not go too far in calling it a redefinition of sovereignty. When James Wilson gave his lectures on law at the College of Philadelphia in 1790-1 he took sovereignty for granted: Tt is agreed, on all hands', he remarked, 'that, in every state, there must be somewhere a power supreme, arbitrary, absolute, uncontrollable.' 42 This remark appears in a discussion of discretionary power confided to juries, but it nevertheless stands in contrast to the generally anti-Blackstonian theme of Wilson's lectures. Yet, although Wilson had been a member of the Constitutional Convention, and was now speaking under the Constitution, it was too early to have grasped the subtle transformation that was in process. Where was this absolute, uncontrollable sovereign in the new United States? Not in the Constitution itself, for that was amendable by a prescribed procedure. Not in the states, for their powers were circumscribed - which meant in turn that the people, considered as citizens of the states, could do no more than their states could do. Not in the federal government, for its powers were laid down and limited by the Constitution. Sovereignty resided in the people, not of the states, but of the United States. A fine distinction, bearing in mind that the people could act only through either the federal government or their state governments, or in certain cases, through both. Even if a new convention were held its members would be elected in their states. By any existing standards this sovereign was a very strange beast, hardly fit to shake hands either with the sovereigns of Europe or with the figure on the frontispiece of Leviathan. James Madison, explaining the character of the new government in Federalist jg, sought to allay fears about the powers of the new government by pointing to those retained by the states, and argued that the federal government had been given no greater powers than were indispensably necessary to enable it to act in the general interest. The Constitution was part national, part federal.43 The definition of sovereignty was to be rendered still more elusive by the emergence of the practice of judicial review, which Alexander Hamilton explained in detail in Federalist y8.u Certainly the justices of the Supreme Court formed only one component part of the constitutional system; but equally certainly, their power of interpreting the Constitution resulted in redefinitions of the nature of American sovereignty; 210

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and the evidence of the debates on ratification leaves no room for doubt that an instrument that had been designed to include these extended powers, had it been submitted in that form to the voters, would never have received their sanction. In European tradition, the sovereign power might not always have been very effective but it was usually distinguished by visibility, usually in a single person. The Americans, without having set out to rewrite the science of politics, had created a system which effectively redefined sovereignty as a process rather than as a person or a seat of active and visible power. They caused it to be diffused in multitudinous particles among the people. A transfer of emphasis from the Father to the Holy Spirit. Or, to employ a more material metaphor, it was as though one were collecting power from a moving stream by a complicated system of locks, all of which had to be independently but harmoniously operated in order to complete any phase of the process. It fell to the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution whenever the powers exercised under its authority were alleged to have been abused. One of the clauses of the First Amendment concerned religion, and purported to establish a definitive separation between church and federal government. This achievement, largely contrived by James Madison as a member of the first Congress, and based on Virginia precedent, enacted a most important Enlightenment principle into constitutional law. It did not yield easy results. The founders took the Protestant character of the country so much for granted that they were inclined to mistake it for religious neutrality. After Roman Catholics had settled in the country in large enough numbers to affect political calculations, the challenge to this Protestant hegemony caused controversies which far outlasted any definition of the Enlightenment.45 The First Amendment was intended to keep the federal government's hands off religion and religion's hands off the federal government. This left the states free to determine their own preferences; when copied into state constitutions, it left people free to practise religion without any form of state guidance or inducement. I observed earlier that Henry May, whose book is suffused with religious concern, defines Enlightenment as being based on the premise that the age in question was more enlightened than its predecessor. This formulation, which short-circuits the question of what Enlightenment means, clearly presupposes a distinct optimism about human affairs. Optimism and reason: an attractive couple, until it is recognized that optimism is not necessarily reasonable. In some situations it can only be called blind, a substitute for facing facts. But Enlightenment in any recognized form was based on a fundamental conviction that the application of reason to human affairs would produce an actual amelioration of conditions. This faith spread rather infectiously even into the preserves of orthodox Calvinism. An example from our list of distinguished scientific 21 I

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practitioners is Dr Benjamin Rush, who in the early 1780s abandoned his own Calvinism for Universalism - the belief that God intended that all his people should eventually be saved. John Adams was another who remarked, late in life, that he had early abandoned his native Calvinism.46 Those who accepted the more optimistic expectations encouraged by the philosophy of benevolence found it hard to believe that a benevolent God intended to consign any portion of his creation to eternal damnation. There seems no particular reason to regard this hopeful mood as leading to more correct prognostications than those it intended to displace. Reason does not necessarily lead to gratifying conclusions, and, in any case, the interpretation that reasonably followed from benevolence followed from a hope, not from a better reason. It may be the case that God intends that children dead in infancy should swim eternally in lakes of fire; and if this is God's true intention then no amount of reason will make it untrue. Much the same may be said of the hope of universal salvation. The Reverend Timothy Dwight, one of the most influential Calvinist divines of the age, and a president of Yale, observed with appropriate gravity that I have been employed in the education of children and youth for more than thirty years, and have watched their conduct with no small attention and anxiety. Yet among the thousands of children, committed to my care, I cannot say with truth, that I have seen one, whose natural character I had any reason to believe to be virtuous.47

This remark was based on an inference drawn from close and prolonged observation of actual human behaviour; it conformed in this respect to the requirements of enlightened thinking about human nature, to the same extent as did Jefferson's observations about the abilities of Negroes. Jefferson was drawing inferences about natural faculties; the comparison fails only because Dwight departed from Enlightenment precepts not in his method but because of the theological presupposition that the behaviour of children proved the existence of an unalterable connection between Adam's first sin and the depraved nature, or sinful condition, of his descendants. Against this view, Unitarians were by the end of the century accusing Calvinists of making God the author of man's depravity. The controversies that raged over these charges were most bitter and prolonged. In 1821 Chauncy Goodrich argued at Yale that nothing could be called sin prior to the first act of moral agency; on which Lyman Beecher commented, 'The minute I heard that, I saw the end. I never felt so bad.' 48 The struggle was far from finished. While Universalists spread their hopeful message, and while Unitarians wrested power from the old Calvinism in the Congregational churches of New England, a revived school calling itself the New Divinity arose to reaffirm the truth of man's innate depravity.49 The Calvinist clergy exhausted many generations in worrying over the question of why people sin. Ministers who questioned these tenets within the 212

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church were liable to lose their livings. It is remarkable testimony of the power of a ministry that explicitly rejected Enlightenment that Samuel Stanhope Smith was forced to resign from the presidency of Princeton as a result of his theologically liberal views as late as 1812. Smith's position as a Presbyterian minister did not prevent him from speculating freely on the natural causes of mental phenomena; he was quick to perceive that religion could not serve its own cause by denouncing the observations and deductions of science. His belief in the powers of reason to unravel the meaning of morality and the causes of happiness were as satisfactory an example of Enlightenment thinking as any in America and of much in Europe. He even speculated on the possibility of natural causes for religious phenomena. We have already noted that he felt more comfortable than Jefferson on the possibility of Negro advance.50 A more fully naturalistic phenomenology of religion awaited the mature development of the thought of Horace Bushnell in the mid-nineteenth century.51 This is long past the statutory definition of the Enlightenment and past the outlines of this essay; but the point is instructive. Enlightenment, in its characteristic eighteenth-century forms, did not disappear, but in the new century it did face counter-insurgency from revived evangelical religion; meanwhile attitudes and speculations typical of Enlightenment modes of thought continued to take shape in the age of Darwin. In this sense a terminal point for the Enlightenment is as difficult to find as an accurate definition. Clear thinking had never been identical with Enlightenment thinking in the full sense. Alexander Hamilton, one of the clearest thinkers in the world of his day, echoed Hume's remark that man is rather a reasoning than a reasonable animal.52 After the slave rising and war in St Domingue, the horrors of the French Revolution and the outbreak of the great wars in Europe, and in face, moreover, of the failure of the American Revolution to produce any distinctive amelioration in the self-centred sinfulness of human nature, there were occasions when reasonable men might be doubtful of the improvements to be expected from the pure power of reason or the operations of benevolence. John Adams had always been scornful of the idea that the fundamentals of human nature could be altered by improved institutions, and throughout his life he rejected the notion of perfectability. In his Discourses on Davila, written in 1790, he adverted again and again to the dominant force of the passion for emulation and personal advancement, and on the natural tendency towards differentiation in rank and esteem. Human society's urgent need was to establish institutional arrangements devised to keep these forces under control. It is a clue to his thought that, in justifying his basically defensive form of social conservatism,53 in addition to the almost obligatory reference to Pope's Essay on Man, he quoted Ulysses's famous speech on degree from Troilus and Cressida. I suspect that he must be the only prominent American 213

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political figure who has ever attempted to make political capital out of that speech. As for equality, of which so much had been heard, Adams told Jefferson in 1813: Inequalities of Mind and Body are so established by God Almighty in his constitution of Human Nature that no Art of policy can ever plain them down to a level ... the golden rule; do as you would be done by; is all the Equality that can be supported or defended by reason, or reconciled to common sense. Here, then, was reason in the service of a profound scepticism directed not against claims to privilege or authority but against claims for the inevitability of progress - and directed, too, at Thomas Jefferson, who believed in reason, progress and Scottish common sense. 'Let me ask you, very seriously my Friend', Adams wrote, where are now in 1813, the perfection and perfectibility of human Nature? Where is now, the progress of the human Mind? Where is the amelioration of Society? Where are the Augmentations of human Comforts? Where are the diminutions of Pains and Miseries. ... When? Where? and How? is the present chaos to be arranged in order?54 The answer, so far as Europe was concerned, was to be the Congress of Vienna and the restoration of legitimacy - not precisely Jeffersonian principles, which can only have caused Jefferson to thank God once again that he was an American. But it is hard to conclude with the feeling that Adams had the worst of the argument. Jefferson remained undaunted by all this. He and Adams agreed that nature had its whigs and tories: the differences arose from temperament rather than from observation or reason. By 1816, when order had been restored in Europe, Adams's confidence was a little revived, and he was prepared to assure Jefferson that 'I am a Believer, in the probable improvability and Improvement, the Ameliorability and Amelioration in human Affairs; though I never could understand the Doctrine of Perfectability in the human Mind.' 55 But he never shared Jefferson's enthusiasm, nor his belief that good could come of so much evil, nor that the improved and ameliorated condition of man would amount to much more than that: improvement, amelioration. No millennial transformations, no perfection, were ever to be expected by the rational mind, either in America or elsewhere on earth. The Enlightenment in America was clearly coming to an end with the lives of these two great men. On 4 July 1826, being the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, John Adams roused himself to utter his last words: 'Thomas Jefferson survives.' Technically he was wrong, for Jefferson had died in the early hours with the question, 'Is it the fourth?' on his lips. But perhaps Adams was right and Thomas Jefferson did, and does, survive. If that is true, then we must agree that John Adams survives too. 214

Afterword MIKULAS TEICH

To say that such a volume as this is prolegomenal is not merely a formality. By its very nature, this collection provides not a synthesis but varying approaches to a common theme: the eighteenth-century Enlightenment seen in its national dimensions. The individual contributions reflect the many common and diverse facets of the Enlightenment as it developed in Europe and America. They equally express the varying methodologies employed by their authors to explore it, their different viewpoints on the historical process. It would be absurd to distil from these pieces another, 'quintessential' essay as it were, for the general reader. That is certainly not the aim of this afterword. Rather it is concerned with the nature and place of the Enlightenment in history. It goes without saying that this is a very large question, and the brief remarks that follow cannot pretend to answer it adequately. However controversial the matter, there is - or ought to be - a consensus of opinion that understanding the origins of modern man and society must involve a knowledge of the Enlightenment. But the question immediately arises: what does 'modernity' stand for? One way of answering this is to say the issue turns on the Enlightenment's concern with man's place in this world, as distinct from the medieval emphasis on the next. This shift - to spell it out further - was brought about by three distinctive but intertwined movements: the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Alike products of, and factors in, the replacement of the medieval world, they laid the foundations on which the modern world was built. By contrast with the first two the Enlightenment was geographically wider, and (in the eighteenthcentury European and American context) deserves the term 'global'. More specifically, the Enlightenment saw the final victory of the view that nature (inanimate and animate), following an original impetus from God, was matter in motion obeying laws that could be objectively observed and tested. Nature, however, was not limited to three kingdoms (minerals, plants and animals) but included the human world (man and society), with its own 'natural' laws. Further, it was assumed that these could be mastered by reason; knowing them could lead to the rational pursuance of human and social affairs, assumed to be naturally ordained. 215

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These bald statements - which are obviously not a complete statement of what the leading figures of the Enlightenment thought about nature and society — can serve as a summary of their common general position. In the separate contributions to this book it has been well documented that the representatives of the European and American Enlightenments shared beliefs in rationality, toleration, humanitarianism, utilitarianism - and the list of the notions they held in common could doubtless be extended. These essays have also pointed out that differences existed in their meaning and practical application as conditioned by local circumstances, national history and social interests. Was there some reason why the Enlightenment developed in particular ways in countries as different from each other as North America and Russia? In other words, was there a deep-seated historical force behind the movement of the Enlightenment, both uniting it internationally and dividing it nationally, and also linking it with the Renaissance and the Reformation? Or should we dismiss it as futile to look for historical necessities where they did not exist in the first place? Indeed, should it be taken for granted that it is meaningless to try to provide a more general context for the Enlightenment, seeing the difficulties of disentangling the numerous strands that knit it together? In this matter, I regard the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment as 'historically demarcated sequences'x of the long-drawn-out transition from feudalism to capitalism. The fact that North America and Russia, though untouched by the Renaissance and the Reformation, experienced the Enlightenment, reinforces this sort of approach. By the eighteenth century the influence of capitalism on trade and industry was global and pervasively affecting the contemporary social, economic, political and intellectual scene from North America to Russia. This is reflected in the convergencies and divergencies of the different Enlightenments. In no area is this more apparent than in the problem of 'unfree' and 'free' labour, one of the key issues of this period. North America and Russia were as different in this period as chalk and cheese. Yet, although without a feudal past colonial America had its unfree labour. It has been estimated that at the eve of the American Revolution 80 per cent of all immigrants to the colonies were indentured servants or black slaves.2 Their position - not unlike that of Russian serfs - was that of chattels, and of relevance to the American theoreticians and practitioners of the 'Rights of Man'. Most agreed that such 'Rights' could not be granted to the unfree. The modernization of the feudal states of Austria, Prussia and Russia, associated with enlightened despotism, was born out of responses to the social and economic forces engendered by capitalism. Opposition to the transformation of feudal agrarian property-relations into capitalist ones from 216

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owners of noble estates (dependent on servile labour) was at the heart of the limits of the Enlightenment in this part of Europe. In fact, in most countries physiocratic proposals for improvements in agriculture on capitalist lines found little favour with those who, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, welcomed progress in (say) industry or science but resisted it in agriculture if it meant the loss of their feudal rights and privileges. As the majority of the population of eighteenth-century Europe (or for that matter, the world) lived directly or indirectly off the land, the problem of whether agriculture was to operate within a feudal framework or to take the capitalist road (as in Britain where it occurred 'classically') became crucial. European and American champions of the Enlightenment broadly agreed at least in principle - on the desirability of improving conditions on the land, promoting commercial and industrial activities, reforming religious affairs, advancing education, developing sciences and the arts, and encouraging free thought. But they differed on the theoretical analysis of these issues, and even more so when it came to proposing practical solutions. Behind these divergencies lay varying ideological attitudes to national differences which had evolved historically as a result of the unequal impact of unequally expanding capitalism on a global scale. In conclusion, this raises the question of how to characterize the Enlightenment, more specifically in social terms. The promoters of the Enlightenment were socially a heterogeneous group, and from that point of view, the Enlightenment was a mixed 'aristocratic — bourgeois' movement. Insofar as it is possible to ascribe to it a common programme it was reformist. Insofar as it was undermining the reigning feudal social order and furthering the capitalist one it was revolutionary.

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Notes to the text

Chapter i: Porter, 'England', pp. 1-18 1. F.M. Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation (London, 1733), p. 53. 2. D.Diderot, Oeuvres completes, ed. J. Assezat, 20 vols (Paris, 1875-7), n> 80. Diderot claimed that Voltaire and Montesquieu, 'the true originators' among us of the Enlightenment, 'were the pupils and followers of England's philosophers and great men'. Quoted in P. Gay, The Enlightenment, An Interpretation, 1, The Rise of Modern Paganism (London, 1967), 12, from Oeuvres completes, III, 416. 3. In J. Texte, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature, English trans. (London, 1899), p. 260. 4. Edward Gibbon, Autobiography, ed. M.M. Reese (London, 1970), p. 78. 5. Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1971), p. 67. 6. Diderot, Oeuvres completes, in, 416, quoted in Gay, The Enlightenment, 1, 12. 7. Norman Torrey, Voltaire and the English Deists (New Haven, 1930); P. Gay, Deism: An Anthology (Princeton, 1968). For the use made of Toland in France see M.C. Jacob, 'Newtonianism and the Origins of the Enlightenment', Eighteenth-Century Studies, xi (1977), 1-25.

8. Venturi, Utopia and Reform, p. 60. 9. Cf. R.L. Cru, Diderot as a Disciple of English Thought (repr., New York, 1966), ch. 3. 10. J.-J. Rousseau, Confessions, bk ill, in Oeuvres completes ed. B. Gagnebin & M. Raymond (Paris 1959-), 1, i n . Quoted in Texte, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, p. 124. 11. See A. Rupert Hall, 'Newton in France: A New View', History of Science, xm (1975), 233—50; Henry Guerlac, 'Some Areas for Further Newtonian Studies', History of Science, xvii (1979), 75-101. 12. Quoted in Texte, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, pp. 86-7. 13. R. Collison, Encyclopaedias: Their History Through the Ages (London, 1964), ch. 4. 14. Cru, Diderot, p. 351. 15. Quoted in Texte, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Generally, see also G. Ascoli, La Grande Bretagne devant Vopinion frangaise au XVIIe siecle, 2 vols (Paris, 1930); I.O. Wade, The Structure and Form of the French Enlightenment, 2 vols (Princeton, 1977), 1, ch. 5, 'The English Influence'. 16. W.O. Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975)17. Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols, repr. with an introduction by Crane Brinton (New York, 1962), 11, 1855*. 18. Thus J.V. Price, 'Religion and Ideas' in Pat Rogers (ed.), The Context of English Literature. The Eighteenth Century (London, 1978), pp. 120-52, gets by without using the term at all. Though see J. Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England, 1660-1750 (London, 1976); G.S. Rousseau, 'Science and the Discovery of the Imagination in Enlightened England', Eighteenth-Century Studies, ill (1969), 108-35. 2l8

Notes to pages 3-5 19. Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 281; cf. G.M. Trevelyan, English Social History, pbk edn (Harmondsworth, 1977). 20. A.R. Humphreys, The Augustan World: Life and Letters in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1954); Pat Rogers, The Augustan Vision (London, 1974). 21. See for instance Douglas Bush, Science and English Poetry, a Historical Sketch ijgo-igjo, pbk edn (London, 1967), ch. 3. 22. L.M. Marsak (ed.), The Enlightenment (New York, 1972). 23. L.G. Crocker (ed.), The Age of Enlightenment (New York, 1969). 24. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. F.C.A. Koelln & J.P. Pettegrove (Princeton, 1951). 25. R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, 2 vols (Princeton, 1959-64). 26. Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution, p. 281. 27. Alasdair Macintyre, A Short History of Ethics (New York, 1966), p. 177. 28. Perry Anderson, 'Origins of the Present Crisis' in P. Anderson et al. (eds.), Towards Socialism (London, 1965), p. 17. 29. Gay, The Enlightenment, 1, 3. Gay's emphasis on the unity of the Enlightenment has been challenged by Betty Behrens in her review in Historical Journal, xi (1968), 190-5; and also by Franklin Ford, 'The Enlightenment: Towards a Useful Redefinition' in R.F. Brissenden (ed.), Studies in the Eighteenth Century (Canberra, 1968), pp. 17-29. George Boas also took exception to the view: 'In Search of the Age of Reason' in E.R. Wasserman (ed.), Aspects of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1965), pp. 1 —19. 30. Marsak, The Enlightenment, p. 3. 31. Gay, The Enlightenment,!, 10. 32. Crocker, The Age of Enlightenment, p. 2. 33. For a recent account of the overwhelming impact of the Act of Union of 1707 on ideas and letters in Scotland see Jane Rendall, The Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment (London, 1978). 34. Quoted by Gay, The Enlightenment, 1, 11, from B. Rand, The Life, Unpublished Letters and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury (London, 1900), p. 353. 35. R.L. Colie, Light and Enlightenment: A Study of the Cambridge Platonists and the Dutch Arminians (Cambridge, 1957); Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion; P.G.M.C. Hazard, The European Mind, 1680-1715, Eng. trans. byJ.L. May (Harmondsworth, 1964). 36. See for instance G. Davie, The Democratic Intellect (Edinburgh, 1961), with its passionate defence of the Scottish philosophical tradition. 37. H. Taine, History of English Literature, 2 vols, (Edinburgh, 1871), 11, 84. 38. In any case, certain systematic writings were indeed produced in Georgian England, such as Erasmus Darwin's new medical classification, the Zoonomia, or the first half of Bentham's immense oeuvres. 39. For the social conditions of the production of knowledge and letters see J.H. Plumb, 'The public, literature and the arts in the eighteenth century' in P. Fritz & D. Williams (eds.), The Triumph of Culture (Toronto, 1972), pp. 27-48; J.H. Plumb, The Commercialization of Leisure (Reading, 1973); I. Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London, 1957); A Beljame, Men of Letters and the English Reading Public in the Eighteenth Century, 1660-1744 (London, 1948); P. Rogers, Grub Street (London, 1972); J.W. Saunders, The Profession of English Letters (London, 1964). 40. [J. Addison and R. Steele], The Spectator, vol. 1 (London, 1712), 54 (Addison: number 10). Note that the very first Spectator paper contains the motto from Horace: Non fumum ex fulgore, sed ex fumo dare lucem Cogitat, ut speciosa dehinc miracula promat. 41. E.P. Thompson, 'The Peculiarities of the English', in The Poverty of Theory (London, 1978), p. 58. 219

Notes to page 6 42. J.H. Plumb, 'Reason and Unreason in the Eighteenth Century: The English Experience', in In the Light of History (London, 1972), p. 24. To illustrate Thompson's and Plumb's points about the wide diffusion of Enlightenment attitudes, cf. a letter in the Cambridge Chronicle newspaper for 1772, signed by a group of'Laymen' from Lincoln: To the printers of the Cambridge Chronicle: Three of us here have been disputing for some time about The definition of virtue, and can agree in nothing but referring it to the decision of some of your literary readers, who will by that means confer an obligation on us. In the next number came the reply: To the printers of the Cambridge Chronicle: In compliance with Laymen's request, you may inform them that the most obvious, and the best definition of virtue is (in the words of Dr Brown) 'the conformity of our affection with the public good', or 'the voluntary production of the greatest happiness'. Yours Clericus. Clericus was Rev. John Hey of Sidney Sussex College, as his papers at the College prove. 43. Gay, The Enlightenment, subtitle of vol. 1. 44. See the works cited above in n. 29, and Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976), esp. pp. viiif.; R. Darnton, 'In Search of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas', Journal of Modern History, XLIII (1971), 113-32; Wade, The French Enlightenment. 45. A.C. Kors, D'Holbach's Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris (Princeton, 1976). 46. See for example G.R. Cragg, Reason and Authority in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1964); M. Pattison, 'Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750' in Essays and Reviews (London, 1859) pp. 254-329; R.N. Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in EighteenthCentury England (Oxford, 1954). This point has been recently underlined by Susan F. Cannon, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian period (Folkestone, 1978): How different the English Enlightenment was from the French. Sheltered under Newton's great name, science and religion had developed a firm alliance in England, symbolized by that very British person, the scientific parson of the Anglican church (p. 2). Recent historians, such as Peter Gay in The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism, have interpreted the Enlightenment by taking the tumultuous French scene rather than the serene English one as normal. No Voltaire hurling the volumes of Newton and Locke into the face of clerical authority needed to occur in England, because the Church of England was as fond of Newton and Locke as were the French philosophes. Indeed Newton became a high point of education at one citadel of the church, Cambridge. Where even the classics withered except in a few colleges; and Locke shared the honors with Aristotle and the classics at the other citadel, Oxford (p. 266). 47. Chadwick, Secularization of European Mind, pp. gff. In any case, Carl Becker has argued that the function of the philosophes was simply to create an alternative, parallel faith: The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, pbk edn (London, 1964). 48. Or repugnance for, as in the case of Crocker. The effect is the same. 49. A.N. Wilson, 'The philosophes in the light of present-day theories of modernization', Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, LVIII (1967), 1893-1913; H.B. Applewhite & D.G. Levy, 'The Concept of Modernization and the French Enlightenment', Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, LXXXIV (1971), 53-96. 220

Notes to pages 6-g 50. Gay, The Enlightenment, 1, 3. 51. Plumb, In the Light of History, laments that 'very few' eighteenth-century Englishmen adopted a 'materialist philosophy' and puts this in the context of a revival of'unreason'. But outside French coteries such as d'Holbach's few were materialists. With men such as Hartley, Priestley, Erasmus Darwin and George Hoggart Toulmin, England had its fair share. 52. See Robert Darnton, 'In Search of the Enlightenment', where he calls the movement 'a pretty mild affair' (pp. 118-9); Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass., 1968); The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopedie, 1775-1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979). 53. Kors, D'Holbach's Coterie, has shown how conventional were the lives even of most of d'Holbach's circle - as one might expect from their overwhelmingly titled backgrounds. Grimm was a snob. Several of them were to oppose the French Revolution. 54. P.A. Brown, The French Revolution in English History (London, 1918). 55. Crane Brinton, The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists, pbk edn (Ann Arbor, 1966); E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pbk edn (Harmondsworth, 1968). 56. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, p. 58. For Thompson this explains why the English Enlightenment did not produce much systematic thought: The English experience certainly did not encourage sustained efforts of synthesis; since few intellectuals were thrown into prominence in a conflict with authority, few felt the need to develop a systematic critique. They thought of themselves rather as exchanging specialized products in a market which was tolerably free and the sum of whose intellectual commodities made up the sum of knowledge (p. 59). 57. J.H. Plumb, The Pursuit of Happiness (New Haven, 1977). 58. Before then, most opposition had been couched in the language of political traditions such as Jacobitism, the Good Old Cause, History, the Ancient Constitution and civic humanist Commonwealth ideology. See C. Robbins, The English Commonwealthmen (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); I. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: the Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, Mass., 1968); J.G.A. Pocock, 'Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies', and 'Civic Humanism and its Role in Anglo-American Thought' in Politics, Language and Time (London, 1972). 59. C. Hibbert (ed.), An American in Regency England (London, 1968), p. 47. 60. R. Nettel (ed.), Journeys of a German in England in 1782 (London, 1965), p. 33. 61. A.F. Prevost, Memoires et aventures d'un homme de qualite, ed. M.E.I. Robertson (Paris, 1927), P- i3 6 62. R. Brimley Johnson (ed.), Bluestocking Letters (London, 1926), p. 90. 63. Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy, 2 vols (London, 1766), 11, 197-8. See also C. Maxwell, The English Traveller in France, i6g8-i8i$ (London, 1932). 64. J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, ed. P. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), p. 46. See also J.L. Axtell, The Educational Works of John Locke (Cambridge, 1968). 65. For example, the development of political economy, for which see W.L. Letwin, The Origins of Scientific Economics (London, 1963), and J.O. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1978). Utilitarianism in general may be seen as the intellectual skills needed for a capitalist economy. See E. Halevy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (London, 1928). 66. No better patriotic picturing of liberty exists than James Thomson's poem of the same title {Works, 2 vols, London, 1736, H, 1-213). Characteristically, Thomson also wrote the words of Rule Britannia, and the celebration of industry, wealth and progress, 'The castle of indolence'. 67. The great popularity of Locke through the eighteenth century does not seem in dispute, 221

Notes to pages g-i i despite recent works proving that his political philosophy was unimportant in the Glorious Revolution. See J . P . Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, i68g-ij2O (Cambridge, 1977); H.P. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideologies in Eighteenth-century Britain (London, 1977). For one area of Locke's influence see K. Maclean, John Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1936). 68. For the idea of an opportunity state see C.B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford, 1962). For the parasitic and piratical nature of the Georgian grandees see E.P. Thompson, 'Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture', Journal of Social History (Summer 1974), pp. 382-405; and 'Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?', Social History, ill (1978), p. 139. 69. [John Gay], 'A Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle and Immediate Criterion "of Virtue' in W. King, An Essay on the Origin of Evil (Cambridge, 1721), pp. xvii—xviii. 70. W. Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (London, 1785), p. 61. 71. J . Priestley, Lectures on History, 2 vols (London, 1793), 11, 47. 72. See Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (London, 1726), sermon the first. 73. Priestley, Lectures on History, H, 231. See also J.A. Passmore, Priestley's Writings on Philosophy, Science and Politics (New York, 1965), p. 260. 74. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London, 1977): Madame du Bocage, Letters Concerning England, Holland and Italy, 2 vols (London, 1770), I, 28-9. 75. H.C. Robbins-Landon, Haydn in England iygi-iygj (London, 1976), p. 97. 76. E.P. Thompson, 'The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century', Past and Present, no. 50 (1971), 76-136. 77. J. Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man (London, 1970), pp. I58f. 78. M.C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, i68g-ij2O (Ithaca, 1976), chs. 10, 13, 1479. C.H. Vereker, Eighteenth-Century Optimism (Liverpool, 1967); A.O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1936). 80. The classic text is Bernard de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. P. Harth, pbk edn (Harmondsworth, 1970); see also J. Viner, The Role of Providence in the Social Order (Philadelphia, 1972). 81. Anthony, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit, in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3 vols (London, 1723), 11, 175. 82. Sir F.M. Eden, The State of the Poor, 3 vols (London, 1797), I, 468. 83. Englishmen were noted for the degree to which they could 'be themselves'. 'There is no place in the world, where a man may live more according to his own mind, or even his whims, than in London.' Pastor Wendeborn, A View of England, 2 vols (Dublin, 1791), 1, 184. 84. Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage, ch. 9; J.H. Plumb, 'The New World of the Children in Eighteenth-Century England', Past and Present, no. 67 (1975), 64-95. 85. See D. Owen, English Philanthropy, 1660-ig6o (Cambridge, Mass., 1965)^. Roach, Social Reform in England, 1780-1880 (London, 1978); W. LI. Parry-Jones, The Trade in Lunacy: A Study of Private Mad-houses in England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London, 1972); B. Rodgers, Cloak of Charity; Studies in Eighteenth-Century Philanthropy (London, 1949). It need hardly be said that in many respects the capitalist economy, licensed by the Enlightenment, was itself creating many of the ills which this greater humanitarianism wished to stamp out. 86. Thompson, 'Patrician Society'. 87. J.W. Von Archenholz, A Picture of England (Dublin, 1790), p. 24.

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Notes to pages i I—IJ 88. Madame du Bocage, Letters Concerning England, p. 44. 89. D.E.C. Eversley, 'The home market and economic growth in England, 1750-80' in E.L. Jones & G.E. Mingay (eds.), Land, Labour and Population in the Industrial Revolution: Essays presented to J.D. Chambers (London, 1967), pp. 206-59; E.L. Jones, 'The Fashion Manipulators: Consumer Tastes and British Industries 1660-1800' in L.P. Cain & P.J. Uselding (eds.), Business Enterprise and Economic Change: Essays in Honor of Harold F. Williamson (Kent State, 1973), pp. 217-20; N. McKendrick, 'Home Demand and Economic Growth: A New View of the Role of Women and Children in the Industrial Revolution' in N. McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J.H. Plumb (London, 1974), pp. 152-210. 90. Mme Roland, quoted in G. May, Madame Roland and the Age of Revolution (New York, 1970), p. 131. The whole of chapter 9 is illuminating. 91. D. Hay, 'Property, Authority and the Criminal Law' in D. Hay et al. (eds.), Albion's Fatal Tree (London, 1975), pp. 17-64. 92. See the suggestive remarks in M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Eng. trans. (London, 1977), and M. Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: Penitentiaries in the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (London, 1978). For pressure applied against popular entertainments see R.W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700-1850 (Cambridge, 1973). 93. Thompson, 'Patrician Society' for a gloss on this concept. 94. See n. 84, and also J. Woodward, To Do the Sick No Harm: A Study of the British Voluntary Hospital System to 1875 (London, 1974); M.G. Jones, The Charity School Movement (Cambridge, 1938). 95. Nettel, Journeys of a German in England, p. 69. 96. Ibid., p. 30. 97. M. Grosley, A Tour to London, or New Observations on England, 3 vols (Dublin, 1772), Hi, 168. 98. C. de Saussure, A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I and George II (London, 1902), p. 295. 99. Hibbert, An American in Regency England, p. 25. 100. Abbe Prevost, Adventures of a Man of Quality (London, 1930), p. 119. 101. The success of Nash in regimenting a socially heterogeneous crew into a civilized clockwork regime is stressed in [O. Goldsmith], The Life of Richard Nash of Bath (London, 1762), pp. 40-1:

Regularity repressed pride, and that lessened, people of fortune became fit for society. Let the morose and grave censure an attention to forms and ceremonies; and rail at those, whose only business is to regulate them; but tho' ceremony is very different from politeness, no country was ever yet polite, that was not first ceremonious. The natural gradation of breeding begins in savage disgust, proceeds to indifference, improves into attention, by degrees refines into ceremonious observance, and the trouble of being ceremonious at length produces politeness, elegance and ease. There is therefore some merit in mending society, even in one of the inferior steps of this gradation; and no man was more happy in this respect than Mr Nash. 102. 103. 104. I0 5-

[Tobias Smollett], The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, 3 vols (London 1771), 1, 70-1. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978). Thompson, 'Patrician Society'. [J- Newbery], A History of Little Goody Two Shoes (London, 1766), title page; see J.D.C. Buck, 'John Newbery and Literary Merchandizing, 1744-67' (diss., University of California, 1972). 106. Quoted by Simond in An American in Regency England, p. 52. 107. J. Lackington, Memoirs of the Forty Five First Years of the Life of James Lackington, 13th edn (London, 1810), p. 257.

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Notes to pages 13-16 108. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LI D, Everyman edn, 2 vols (London, 1946), 1, 424. 109. L. Goldmann, Immanuel Kant, Eng. trans. (London, 1971). 110. For some interesting attempts to relate cosmological notions, such as matter and spirit, to questions of eighteenth-century social relations in England see C. Wilde, 'Hutchinsonians, Natural Philosophy and Religious Controversy in Eighteenth-Century Britain', History of Science, xvm (1980), 1-24; Steven Shapin, 'The Social Uses of Science' in G.S. Rousseau & Roy Porter, The Ferment of Knowledge (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 93-142, and for the anthropological ideas underpinning these Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols (London, 197°)i n . P. Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (Oxford, 1965). 112. Obviously there is a parallel with the growth of political stability as traced by J.H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675—1725 (London, 1967). On the remoulding of man see J.A. Passmore, 'The Malleability of Man in Eighteenth-Century Thought' in E.R. Wasserman (ed.), Aspects of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1965), pp. 21-46. 113. May, The Enlightenment in America. May has admirably stressed how the Enlightenment mainstream (which he calls the Moderate Enlightenment) saw it as its main business to establish, for the first time, a body of reliable modern, credible standards for life. 114. Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation, p. 44. 115. Boswell's London Journal, ed. F.A. Pottle (London, 1950), p. 63. 116. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1, 6, quoted in Fussell, Rhetorical World, p. 33. 117. D. Hartley, Observations on Man, 2 vols (London, 1749), n, 255. 118. J. Brewer, 'The Commercialization of Polities', in J. Brewer, N. McKendrick & J.H. Plumb, The Birth of the Consumer Society (forthcoming). 119. Anthony, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times etc, 2 vols, ed. J.M. Robertson (London, 1900), p. 50. 120. H. Fielding, 'An Essay upon Conversation' in H.K. Miller (ed.), Miscellanies by Henry Fielding Esq. (Oxford, 1972), 123. 121. Shaftesbury, Characteristicks ..., p. 46. 122. On the importance of restraint to Boswell see F.A. Pottle (ed.), Boswell in Holland, 1763-1764 (London, 1952), pp. 3, 38. 123. On the development of the sociable presentation of self see R. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge, 1977), parts 1 and 2; F.L. Lucas, The Search for Good Sense (London, 1958), and The Art of Living (London, 1959); S.M. Brewer, Design for a Gentleman: the Education of P. Stanhope (London, 1963); N. Elias, The Civilizing Process; the History of Manners, 2 vols, Eng. trans. (Oxford, 1978), 1, ch. 2. Note also Blake's utter rejection of this mode: 'The Enquiry in England is not whether a Man has Talents & Genius, But whether he is Passive & Polite & a Virtuous Ass & obedient to Noblemen's Opinions.' G. Keynes (ed.), Blake: Complete Writings (London, 1969), pp. 452-3. 124. A. Pope, 'Essay on Man', in J. Butt (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope (London, 1965), P-5I5125. There are obvious exceptions, like the anarchist Godwin. And of course Enlightenment opinion was deeply troubled lest the state which maintained freedom be subverted by corruption. See the works of Pocock cited above (n. 58). 126. For Blake see J. Bronowski, William Blake and the Age of Revolution (London, 1972). 127. For which see E.P. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class; H. Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society (London, 1969). 128. Quoted in Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p. 184. 129. Quoted in D. Read, The English Provinces, c. iyoo-ig6o (London, 1964), p. 47. 130. The Carlile quotation is from Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p. 765; Place is cited in M.D. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 18.

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Notes to pages iy-22 Plumb has noted: 'We find an empiricist attitude sinking down into the lower orders of society, to the menu peuple, and a growing distrust of it amongst the governing and socially dominant classes': In the Light of History, p. 6. 131. E.g. M. Quinlan, Victorian Prelude (New York, 1941); M.Jaeger, Before Victoria (London, 1956). 132. J.R. Poynter, Society and Pauperism (London, 1969). 133. W. Roberts (ed.), Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs Hannah More, 4 vols (London, 1834), ", 357134. G. Canning, 'The Soldier's Friend' in Selections from the Anti-Jacobin, ed. L. Sanders (London, 1904), p. 29. 135. F.K. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians (Cambridge, 1961). 136. [T. Carlyle] 'Signs of the Times', Edinburgh Review, LIX (1829), 441-2, 453. Compare M. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1953); R.W. Harris, Romanticism and the Social Order (London, 1969). 137. C.B. MacPherson, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford, 1973); L. Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: the Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology (Chicago, 1977); K. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 2 vols (London, 1945); I. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (London, 1969).

Chapter 2: Phillipson, 'Scotland', pp. 19—40 1. The most accessible general introductions to the history of eighteenth-century Scotland and the Scottish Enlightenment are T.C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People, 1560-1830 (London, 1969); W. Ferguson, Scotland i68g to the Present (Edinburgh, 1968); Scotland in the Age of Improvement, eds. N.T. Phillipson & R. Mitchison (Edinburgh, 1970); A.C. Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment; a Social History (London, 1976); E.C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume (London, 1970). 2. T. Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. L.M. Knapp (Oxford, 1966), p. 233. 3. Allan Ramsay to Sir A. Dick, 31 Jan. 1762, quoted in Curiosities of a Scots Charta Chest, ed. Mrs Atholl Forbes (Edinburgh, 1897), p. 198. 4. There is no bibliographical history of the Scottish Enlightenment. This list is based on standard library catalogues. I am particularly grateful to Mr W. Kellie of the National Library of Scotland for his help with German data. 5. V. Cousin, La Philosophie ecossaise, 3rd edn (Paris, 1857), p. 23. 6. Useful general introductions to the 'Science of Man' are G. Bryson, Man and Society: the Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 1945); J. McCosh, The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, Critical, from Hutcheson to Hamilton (London, 1875); Cousin, La Philosophie ecossaise; H. Medick, Naturzustand und Naturgeschichte der burgerlichen Gesellschqft (Gottingen, 1973). 7. On the Scots' contribution to sociological thinking see Bryson, Man and Society. R. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1976); L. Schneider, The Scottish Moralists on Human Mature and Society (Chicago, 1967); A. Swingewood, 'Origins of Sociology: the Case of the Scottish Enlightenment', British Journal of Sociology, XXL (1970), 164-80. 8. This question was first suggested, albeit in rather a different form from that which is offered here, by J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975). My debts to him will be obvious. See also C. Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (New York, 1968). 9. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 427-32. There is a modern reprint of his principal political works, Fletcher of Saltoun: Selected Political Writings and Speeches, ed. D. Daiches (Edinburgh, 1979). 10. Selected Writings, pp. 2-26.

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Notes to pages 23-2g 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

Ibid., p. 136. Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., pp. 28-66. The Union is a contentious subject in Scottish historiography. The most recent account is P.W. Riley, The Union of England and Scotland; a Study in Anglo-Scottish Politics of the Eighteenth Century (Manchester, 1979). But see my 'Culture and Society in the Eighteenth Century Province: the Case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment' in The University in Society, ed. L. Stone, 2 vols (Princeton, 1974), 11, 407-20. The voluminous literature generated by the Union debate has been studied as economic debate by T.C. Smout, Scottish Trade on the Eve of the Union (Edinburgh, 1963), pp. 261-75. I have given an indication of the character of the political debate in 'Culture and Society'. A Letter to a Member of Parliament upon the igth Article of the Treaty of Union between the two Kingdoms of Scotland and England (Edinburgh, 1706). See, for example, The Smoaking Flax Unquenchable: Where the Union betwixt the Two Kingdoms is Dissected, Anatomized, Confuted and Annuled (Edinburgh, 1706); An Overture for Establishing a Society to Improve the Kingdom and all the Affairs of the Nation so as Every Man in it may live Happily (Edinburgh, 1698). D. Defoe, The History of the Union between England and Scotland (London, 1786), p. 316. See, for example, Some Very Weighty and Seasonable Considerations tending to Dispose, Excite and Qualify the Nation for the More Effectual Treating with England in Relation to a Union of Confederacy (Edinburgh, 1703); W. Seton, Some Thoughts on Ways and Means of Making this Nation a Gainer in Foreign Commerce andfor Supplying the Present Scarcity (Edinburgh, 1705). W J . Couper, The Edinburgh Periodical Press, 2 vols (Stirling, 1908), I, 244; A.F. Tytler, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home, Lord Kames, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Edinburgh 1814), 1, 228-9. Tytler, Memoirs of Kames, 1, 226-9. Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, ed. A. Allardyce, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1888), 1, 6-7. The Spectator, ed. D.F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford, 1965), vol. 1, introduction. Addison and Steele's ethics have never received the attention they deserve. But see E.A. & L.D. Bloom, Joseph Addison's Sociable Animal in the Market Place, on the Hustings, in the Pulpit (Providence, 1953); P. Gay, 'The Spectator as Actor', Encounter (Dec. 1967), pp. 2732. D.D. McElroy, Scotland's Age of Improvement, A Survey of Eighteenth-Century Literary Clubs and Societies (Pullman, 1969). The Anecdotes and Egotisms of Henry Mackenzie, 1745-1831, ed. H.W. Thomson (London, 1927), p. 179. 'Journal of the Easy Club', ed. A.M. Kinghorn, The Works of Allan Ramsay, 6 vols (Scottish Text Society, 1972), v, 28; McElroy, Scotland's Age of Improvement, pp. 13-19; Phillipson, 'Culture and Society', pp. 434-5. Scots Magazine, vol. 33 (1771), pp. 340-4. A.L. Drummond & J. Bulloch, The Scottish Church, 1688-1843 (Edinburgh, 1973); Ferguson, Scotland since i68g, ch. 4. A marvellous picture of clerical political life emerges from R. Wodrow, Analecta, 4 vols (Edinburgh, 1842-3). D. Withrington, 'Education and Society in the Eighteenth Century', Scotland in the Age of Improvement, pp. 169-99; R.G. Cant, 'Scottish Universities and Scottish Society in the Eighteenth Century', Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, LVIII (1967), 1953—66. A. Bower, The History of the University of Edinburgh, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1817); D.B. Horn, A Short History of the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1967). J.D. Mackie, The University of Glasgow. A Short History (Glasgow, 1954); Munimenta Almae Universitatis Glasguensis, 2 vols (Maitland Club, Glasgow, 1854). 'A Short Account of the University of Edinburgh, the Present Professors in it, and the Several Parts of Learning taught by them', Scots Magazine, vol. 3 (1741), pp. 371—74.

226

Notes to pages 2g-$5 33. See P.Jones's paper in I. Hont & M. Ignatieff (eds.), Wealth and Virtue: Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, forthcoming). 34. D. Murray, Memories of the Old College of Glasgow (Glasgow, 1927), pp. 507-9. 35. W.R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson, his Life, Teaching and Position in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge, 1900); Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, pp. 185-99. 36. W. Leechman, 'Some Account of the Life, Writings and Character of the Author' in Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, 2 vols (London, 1755), 1, xxxi, xxxvii. 37. What follows is based on my 'Hume as Moralist. A Social Historian's Perspective', Philosophers of the Enlightenment, ed. S.C. Brown (Hassocks, 1979), pp. 140—61. Serious historical study of Hume had best begin with Mossner, Life of David Hume; N. Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume (Oxford, 1970); J. Noxon's Hume's Philosophical Development (Oxford, 1973); D. Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975). 38. E.C. Mossner, The Forgotten Hume: le Bon David (New York, 1943). • 39. See, for example, his letter to Hugh Blair [1761], The Letters of David Hume, ed. J.Y.T. Greig, 2 vols (Oxford, 1932), 1, 351. 40. R. Maxwell, Select Transactions of the Hon. the Society for Improvement in the Knowledge of Agriculture in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1743). 41. R.L. Emerson, 'The Social Composition of Enlightened Scotland: the Select Society of Edinburgh, 1754-64', Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 114 (1973), 291-329; Phillipson,

'Culture and Society', pp. 442-8. 42. R.G. Smith, 'The Select Society of Edinburgh, 1754-64' (unpublished M.A. diss., Edinburgh University, 1975). 43. Minutes of the Select Society, (National Library of Scotland MS 98, 70). 44. N.T. Phillipson, 'Lawyers, Landowners and the Civic Leadership of Post-Union Scotland', Juridical Review (1976), pt 2, pp. 97-120. 45. J. Dalrymple, Considerations on the Polity of Entails in a Nation, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1765), p. 66. 46. There is as yet no published account of the Scottish militia controversy. But see R.B. Sher, 'Church, University, Enlightenment: the Moderate Literati of Edinburgh, 1720-93' (unpublished Ph.D. diss., Chicago University, 1979), ch. 6. The question was closely followed in the Scots Magazine. 47. A. Ferguson, Reflections Previous to a Militia (London, 1756); A. Carlyle, The Question Relating to a Scots Militia Considered (Edinburgh, 1760). 48. Carlyle, Scots Militia, pp. 24-5. 49. Ibid., pp. 31-2. 50. On the connection between Ossian and the militia campaign see Sher, 'Church, University, Enlightenment', ch. 6. See also R.M. Schmitz, Hugh Blair (New York, 1948), pp. 42-60. 51. Blair's 'Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian' was to be prefaced to nearly every English edition of The Poems of Ossian between 1753 and 1850. It was frequently translated and underpins Melchior Cesarotti's influential introduction to the Italian edition of Ossian. 52. It is possible to trace the intellectual and rhetorical origins of Ossian's sentimental, stoicism to the Union debate and to one of the most celebrated of all pieces of Scottish patriotic oratory, Lord Belhaven's 'visionary' speech about the fatal consequences of union for Scottish independence. The speech is reprinted in Defoe, History of the Union, pp. 316-18. 53. Smollett's Humphry Clinker strongly suggests the author's acquaintance with Hume's moral and political essays. Mackenzie's Man of Feeling, ed. B. Vickers (Oxford, 1967), owes much to Adam Smith's sentimental psychology. 54. In addition to the references given in note 7, see P. Stein, 'Law and Society in Scottish Thought', Scotland in the Age of Improvement, pp. 148-58; W.C. Lehmann, John Miller of Glasgow (Cambridge, i960), pt 11. 55. What follows is based on my forthcoming essay, 'Adam Smith as Civic Moralist', in Wealth and Virtue.

227

Notes to pages 35-42 56. There is an excellent modern text: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds. D.D. Raphael & A. L. McFie (Oxford, 1976). 57. A. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, eds. R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael & P.G. Stein (Oxford, I 977),P-33358. A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. E. Cannan, 2 vols (London, 1961), 1, 35-6. 59. Ibid., 1, 483. J.R. Lindgren, The Social Philosophy of Adam Smith (The Hague, 1973), pp. 72-83. 60. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 292. 61. A. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. D. Forbes (Edinburgh, 1966); D. Kettler, The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson (Ohio, 1965). 62. A. Ferguson, The Institutes of Moral Philosophy, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1783), p. 74. 63. Stewart needs a modern study. But see J. Veitch, 'Memoir of Dugald Stewart', The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, ed. W. Hamilton, 10 vols (Edinburgh, 1854-8), I, vii-clxxvii. On his influence abroad see H. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976), pp. 341-50; D. Meyer, The Instructed Conscience (Philadelphia, 1972); N.T. Phillipson, 'The export of Enlightenment', Times Literary Supplement, 2 July 1976; P.P. Dockwrey, 'Dugald Stewart and the Early French Eclectics, 1796-1820' (unpublished Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1976). 64. See my 'James Beattie and the Defence of Common Sense', Festschrift fur Rainer Gruenter, ed. B. Fabian (Heidelberg, 1978), pp. 145-58. 65. Quoted in W. Forbes, An Account of the Life and Writings of James Beattie, LL.D., 2nd edn, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1807), 1, 171. 66. The best introduction to Reid's philosophy is D. Stewart, 'Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Reid, D.D.', Collected Works, x, 245-328. See also S.A. Grave, The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense (Oxford, i960). 67. McElroy, Scotland's Age ofImprovement,^. 104-14. 68. Sher, 'Church, University, Enlightenment', passim; I.D.L. Clark, 'From Protest to Reaction: the Moderate Regime in the Church of Scotland, 1752-1805' in Scotland in the Age of Improvement, pp. 200-24. 69. See D. Lieberman's forthcoming paper in Wealth and Virtue. I.S. Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of his Day (Oxford, 1972), esp. ch. 12. 70. The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, vm, 148. 71. D. Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 4th edn (London, 1811), p. 36. 72. The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, vm, 23.

Chapter 3: Hampson, Trance9, pp. 41-53 1. Helvetius, for example, pointed out that, for the insect on a blade of grass, the sheep was a ravenous monster and the lion an avenger of the innocent. De VEsprit (Paris, 1758), p. 120 (BookII/2). 2. Montesquieu, Lettrespersanes, Gamier edn (Paris, i960), p. 94. 3. This is of course no more than the briefest sketch of one particular way of looking at the Enlightenment and not a summary of any kind of consensus. One may discount the attempt of some Marxist historians to present the movement as the ideology of a rising bourgeoisie. As G.V. Taylor has shown, notably in 'Types of Capitalism in Eighteenth-century France', English Historical Review, vol. LXXIX, 1964, the concept of a bourgeoisie, in the sense in which Marx understood it, is an anachronism when applied to the France of the ancien regime. A fair number of the philosophes were, in any case, noble. For other points of view, see C.L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-century Philosophers (New Haven, 1932); P. Hazard, The European Mind and European Thought in the Eighteenth Century, Eng. trans. (London, 1953 and

228

Notes to pages 43-47

4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

1954); L.G. Crocker, An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth Century French Thought (Baltimore, 1959); and P. Gay, The Enlightenment, An Interpretation, 2 vols (New York, 1967, i9 6 9)This is not to suggest that they sought to impose a uniform pattern on different societies. All of them to some extent, and Montesquieu in particular, allowed for local conditioning factors. They shared, however, the belief that all states ought to be governed in accordance with certain universal principles and the conviction that the nations of Europe were becoming what Voltaire described in the introduction to chapter 2 of his Siecle de Louis XIV as 'a kind of great republic divided between various states'. Rousseau deplored this tendency but agreed that it was actually happening. One should not minimize the importance of other revolutions, notably that in the Netherlands, but the successful European revolutions were all inspired, if not actually imposed, by the French. For an excellent discussion of Utopian thought in the later Enlightenment and the French Revolution, see B. Baczko, Lumieres de Vutopie (Paris, 1978). D. Roche, 'Milieux academiques et societe des Lumieres' in G. Bolleme (ed.), Lime et societe dans la France du dix-huitieme siecle (Paris, 1965), p. 161. The question of who actually read the works of the philosophes has been much discussed. One of the reasons for censoring them was to raise their price beyond the means of those who were already regarded as Us classes dangereuses. Diderot wrote to his publisher, 'There are . . . some readers whom I don't want and never shall; I write only for those with whom I could talk at my ease. My works are addressed to philosophes' (quoted in J.-P. Belin, Le mouvement philosophique de 1748 a 1789 (Paris, 1913), p. 73). D'Holbach thought that 'Books are designed only for that part of the nation whose circumstances, education and sentiments set it above crime' (ibid., p. 271). See also Bolleme, Litre et societe, and R. Mandrou, De la culture populaire au dix-septieme et dix-huitieme siecles (Paris, 1964). On the other hand, future revolutionary leaders of moderate means, even women like Mme Roland, had often acquired an extensive knowledge of the works of the philosophes. G.V. Taylor, in a communication to the conference on the French Revolution held at Bamberg in June 1979, showed that merchants were often hostile to the Enlightenment, especially if they had an interest in the colonies and the slave trade. Pleiade edn (Paris, 1957), p. 899. See Dale van Kley, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France, 1757-65 (New Haven, 1975). See D.W. Smith, Helvetius, a Study in Persecution (Oxford, 1965). Montesquieu, De VEsprit des lois, vni/6. For an account of how this affected Voltaire and Diderot see Gay, The Enlightenment, 11, 480-3. Despite the frequently critical temper of Enlightenment thought comparatively little was written about political reform. Even Montesquieu and Rousseau wrote mostly in general terms about the state or the distinction between different kinds of regime. Censorship, the bent of their own interests, or a combination of both, deterred them from discussing in any detail the actual government of France. Those who addressed themselves to concrete problems tended to concentrate on isolated issues, such as the grain trade. This is not to suggest that Rousseau actually began the cult of classical republicanism. As early as 1732, a Parisian crowd was applauding the parlementaires as de vrais Romains et les peres de la patrie. E.J.F. Barbier, Journal d'un bourgeois da Paris sous le regne de Louis XV (Paris, 1963 edn), p. 127. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Origins of Physiocracy (Ithaca, 1976), p. 305. For an example of this see R. Forster, The House of Saulx-Tavannes (Baltimore, 1971), p. 207. Oeuvres completes de Robespierre (Paris, 1910-),!, 670. 229

Notes to pages 48-54 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

D'Holbach, Systeme de la nature (London, 1771 edn), p. 93. Ibid., p. 71. Diderot, Pensees sur I'interpretation de la nature (Paris, 1754), p. 58. See H. Grange, Les Idees de Meeker (Paris, 1974); and K.M. Baker, Condorcet (Berkeley, 1975). See R. Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution (Berkeley, 1971). Robespierre, Oeuvres completes•, v, 207. M. Mercier, De Jean-Jacques Rousseau considers comme Vun des premiers auteurs de la Revolution, 2 vols (Paris, 1791), 1, 19; 11, 256-7. Rousseau was not unique in his root and branch rejection of what the majority understood by 'progress' and his insistence that, in theory at least, human will could prevail over the forces of social determinism. His bete noire, Helvetius, claimed that tout Vimaginable existera {De VEsprit, iv/26), and Morelly was seeking 'the situation in which it should be practically impossible for man to be depraved or wicked' [Code de la nature, Paris, 1953 edn, p. 40). Godwin, in England, held no less radical views. I have concentrated upon Rousseau because of the strength of his following in France and because of his unique influence upon the French Revolution. Peter Gay, in his concern to present all the philosophes as liberal reformers, is less persuasive about Rousseau in The Enlightenment, An Interpretation than in his earlier work, The Party of Humanity (New York, 1964). J. Macdonald, Rousseau and the French Revolution (London, 1965) is seriously misleading. J.L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London, 1952) is more concerned to father the sins of the twentieth century on Rousseau than to discover what Jean-Jacques intended to say. Marat, Les Chaines de Vesclavage (Paris, an 1 de la republique; a French edition of a work originally published in England - and in English - in 1774), p. 76. Robespierre, Oeuvres completes, x, 455. In his Lumieres de Vutopie Baczko shows the extent to which some kind of Rousseauist legislator plays the decisive part in most of the Utopias of the time. Rousseau, Discours sur Veconomie politique, Pleiade edn 4 vols (Paris, 1955-69), ill, 251. J. Gratien (ed.), Oeuvres de Saint-Just (Paris, 1946), p. 153. Robespierre, Oeuvres completes, v, 210; x, 467. Ibid., v, 145; from the conclusion to Saint-Just's Esprit de la Revolution (Paris, 1791); he would not necessarily have endorsed this point of view in later years. Moniteur, debate of 18 May 1790. Marat, Offrande a la patrie, ou discours au tiers-etat de France (Paris, 1789), p. 57. Robespierre, Oeuvres completes, v, 16. Van 2440 has been recently reprinted (ed. R. Trousson, Bordeaux, 1971). R.B. Rose, Gracchus Babeuf (London, 1978). Robespierre, Oeuvres completes, v, 293; x, 348. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 11, 9m. Quoted in A. Williamson, Thomas Paine, his Life, Work and Times (London, 1973), p. 251. C h a p t e r 4: S c h a m a , ' T h e N e t h e r l a n d s 9 , p p . 5 4 - 7 1

1. Typical was Diderot's view, recorded in his Voyage de Hollande, that: 'une des choses dont on est continuellement et delicieusement touche dans toute la Hollande e'est de n'y rencontrer nulle part ni la vue de la misere ni le spectacle de la tyrannie'. J. Assezat & M. Tourneous (eds.), Oeuvres completes de Denis Diderot (Paris, 1876), xvn, 378. Under precisely what conditions these cherished virtues would be best maintained had become a matter of serious contention within the Dutch Republic itself in the mid eighteenth century. For an account of that debate, and the characteristics of a Dutch 'whig' history, see I. Leonard Leeb, The Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution (The Hague, 1973), chs. I, II and Hi. 2. Cited in R. Murris, La Hollande et les Hollandais au XVHe et XVHie siecles vue par les Frangais

230

Notes to pages 54-58 (Paris, 1925), p. 176. 3. Jeroom Vercruysse, 'Voltaire et la Hollande' in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, xvi (1966), 17. Diderot, Oeuvres completes, xvil, 466 similarly described the Dutch Republic as 'la patrie de tous les amis de la liberte'. 4. Vercruysse, 'Voltaire et la Hollande', p. 142. 5. P.-J. Grosley en Hollande (Paris, 1813); see Murris, La Hollande, p. 164. 6. One of the few discussions of the subtle relationship between ideal and reality in the eighteenth-century republics is Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1971), ch. 1. As he implies, it took one lot of atrophied republicans - Venetians like Maffei Scipione and Andrea Tron - to recognize another. For their observations on the decay of the Netherlands, registered in a quite different tone to the philosophes, see P J . Blok (ed.), Venetiaansche Berichten over de Verenigde Nederlanden 1660-iygj (The Hague, 1909). 7. Mirabeau, Doutes sur la liberte de VEscaut reclamee par Vempereur (London, 1785), p. ii. 8. J. Wagenaer, Vaderlandsche Historie (Amsterdam, 1751-9); see also Verzameling van Historische en Politieke Tractaaten (Amsterdam, 1776-80). For a discussion of the political partisanship informing Wagenaer's history see Leeb, Batavian Revolution, pp. 75-85. 9. Jean Basnage, Annales des Provinces Unies (La Have, 1726), p. 2. 10. Vercruysse, 'Voltaire et la Hollande', p. 48. 11. Walter Gobbers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Holland, een onderzoek naar de invloed van de mens en het werk (Ghent, 1963). For other cases of marginal perception of the Netherlands by those residing in the 'Republic of Letters' see P J . Buijnsters, 'Les Lumieres hollandaises' in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, LXXXVII (1972), 197-215. Most remarkable of all is the case of the Baron d'Holbach who studied at Leiden University, had title to seigneurial property in Dutch Brabant and who visited the Republic several times during the 1740s, yet whose correspondence virtually erases the place from his career. For the mysteries of his Dutch connections see Jeroom Vercruysse, 'Holbach et les Pays-Bas', Documentatieblad, Werkgroep i8de Eeuw (June 1971), pp. 7-28. 12. E. Labrousse, Pierre Bayle (The Hague, 1963), pp. 188-9. 13. H.C. Hazweinkel, 'Pierre Bayle a Rotterdam' in Paul Dibon (ed.), Pierre Bayle, le Philosophe de Rotterdam (Paris, 1959). In 1695, when facing the onslaught from Jurieu and his formidable Dutch orthodox allies, Bayle admitted that 'La verite est que je ne me suis jamais mele que de mes livres et que j'ai eu peu de liaisons avec les gens de ce pays-ci.' 14. See his remarks on 3 October 1682, Murris, La Hollande, p. 206. For the impact of the refugies, see H J . Koenen, Geschiedenis van de vestiging en den invloed der Fransche vluchtelingen in Nederland (Leiden, 1846); for Leclerc, Annie Barnes, Jean Leclerc et la Republique des lettres (Paris, 1938). The most fruitful point of contact between the writers and editors of the 'gazettes' and Dutch vernacular culture was through the circle of Pieter Rabus, whose Boekzaal van Europa, established in 1702, was a genuine attempt to establish a Dutch version of 'gazette' journalism and sceptical polemics. See A.P. Manning, Naar inleiding van Pieter Rabus' Boekzaal van Europa. 15. See Abraham van der Meersch's contributions in J. de Hartog, Spectatoriate Geschriften 1741-1800 (Utrecht, 1890). 16. See H.L. Brugmans, 'Autour de Diderot en Hollande', Diderot Studies (1961), pp. 55-73; G. Charlier, 'Diderot et la Hollande', Revue de la litterature comparee, xxn (1947), 190-229. 17. Rights of carriageway for ambassadorial equipes in the diplomatic centre of The Hague had been a bone of contention ever since the 1660s, and breaches of delicate protocol led not only to indignant exchanges of correspondence and skirmishes between liveried men but general mayhem and even riot in the town, depending on which of the Republic's neighbours happened to be most unpopular at the time when the solecism was committed. Ceremonial entries and exits then were performances calculated for political significance. 231

Notes to pages 58-61 The most flagrant act of provocative insubordination was committed in 1786 when the Pensionary of Dordrecht, one of the leaders of the 'Patriot' regents, drove his coach through the 'Stadholders Gate' in the Binnenhof. 18. See Arthur M. Wilson, Denis Diderot (New York, 1972), 6i8ff.; on the unoriginality of Diderot's account, see Charlier, 'Diderot et la Hollande'. 19. Vercruysse, 'Voltaire et la Hollande', p. 32. 20. Murris, La Hollande, p. 24. 21. Diderot, Voyage de Hollande; p. 466. 22. Ibid., p. 424. 23. C.Adam & P. Tamery (eds.), Oeuvres completes, 1, 203. 24. That such sights - as well as the public display of quartered parts - were commonplace in Dutch towns is attested by the extraordinarily candid and matter-of-fact diary of the regent, Jacob Bicker Raye. His manuscript journal is preserved in the Amsterdam Gemeente Archief (B.54), but a useful abridgement is Fr. Beijerinck & M.D. De Boer (eds.), Het Dagboek van Jacob Bicker Raye 1732-1772 (Amsterdam, n.d). See for example (p. 131) his account of the crime and execution of the twenty-eight-year-old Hendrina Wouters in December 1746. For the social significance of punishment display in the eighteenth-century Republic, see H.G. Jelgersma, Galgebergen en Galgevelden (Zutphen, 1978) and the extremely perceptive and suggestive analysis offered by Pieter Spierenburg, De Sociale Functie van Openbare Strafvoltrekkingen (Centrum voor Maatschappijgeschiedenis, Erasmus Universiteit, Rotterdam, 1979). 25. See some of the cases documented in R.C. Bakhuizen van den Brink, L.Ph. C. van den Bergh & Jhr J.K.J. lejonge, 'De Baljuwen', Het Nederlands Rijksarchief (1857), pp. 235-303. I owe this invaluable source (and much else besides) to the omniscient erudition of my friend and colleague Dr C.H.E. de Wit. 26. See P. van Heijnsbergen, De Pijnbank in de Nederlanden (Groningen, 1925). 27. W.P.C. Knuttel, Verboden boeken in de Republiek der Vereenigden Nederlanden (The Hague, 1914). See also J . T . Bodel Nyenhuis, De wetgeving op drukpers en boekhandel in de Nederlanden tot in het begin der XIXe eeuw (Amsterdam, 1892). Among Voltaire's works that were banned in various regions of the Republic were (of course) La Pucelle, but more surprisingly the Dictionnaire philosophique (banned in Amsterdam, 1764); the Evangile de la raison (High Court of Holland, 1765) and even the Traite sur la tolerance (States of Friesland). On Elie Luzac and La Mettrie see Jacques Marx, 'Elie Luzac et la Pensee Eclairee', Documentatieblad, Werkgroep i8de Eeuw (June 1971), pp. 74-100; Aram Vartanian, La Mettrie's 'L'Homme plus que la machine': A Study in the Origins of an Idea (Princeton, i960). 28. On the Dutch book trade and its French and Swiss connections see Yves Dubosq, Le Livre frangais et son commerce en Hollande de 1750-1780 (Amsterdam, 1925); and I. van Eeghen, De Amsterdam boekhandel 1680-1725 (Amsterdam, 1960-7); A.M. Ledeboer, De boekdrukkers, boekverkopers, en uitgevers in Noord-Nederland sedert de uitvinding van de Boekdrukkunst tot den aanvang der negentiende eeuw (Deventer, 1872); A.C. Kruseman, Aanteekeningen betreffende den Boekhandel van Noord-Nederland in de i7de en i8de eeuw (Amsterdam, 1893). A most valuable archive of information concerning the organization of the Dutch book trade and including numerous auction and sale catalogues as well as library lists is preserved at the Bibliotheek der Vereeniging tot bevordering van de belangen des Boekhandels in Amsterdam, lodged somewhat obscurely above a warehouse. An incomplete catalogue was published by Frederik Miiller in 1855. For the thriving Hague trade, established in booths and stalls inside the hall which also housed the assemblies of the states of Holland and the States General, see the fascinating work of E. Kossmann, De Boekverkoopers, Notarissen en Cramers op het Binnenhof (The Hague, 1932). 29. Buijnsters, 'Les Lumieres hollandaises', refers to the remark as a common boutade of the time.

232

Notes to pages 62-66 So it may have been, but as far as Rousseau was concerned there was still some substance to it. Of the first printing of the Nouvelle Heloise Rey despatched two thousand to Paris, five hundred to Geneva and retained three hundred at Amsterdam, a number intended to cover the north German and southern Netherlands markets as well as the Dutch. The first translated editions of the Contrat social and the Discours sur Vinegalite did not appear until the 1790s. Just as Voltaire was better known in the Netherlands as a dramatist than a polemicist, so Rousseau's opera, Le Devin du village, spread his name more widely than his works on politics. Emile, however, had a wide public in the 1780s, though was never so popular as the educational works of Pestalozzi, Basedow and Campe. 30. Voyage en Italie, en Allemagne et en Hollande, in Baron Albert de Montesquieu (ed.), Voyages de Montesquieu (Bordeaux, 1894-6), vol. 2, p. 221. 31. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 222. 32. Pensees et fragments inedits, ed. Baron Gaston de Montesquieu (Bordeaux, 1899-1901), 1, 552. 33. Vercruysse, 'Voltaire et la Hollande'. 34. Raynal, Histoire du stathouderat depuis son origine jusqu'd present (The Hague, 1748). See also A. Feugere, 'L'Abbe Raynal et les Pays-Bas', Revue Belgique (1912). 35. Gabriel-Francois Coyer, Voyages d'Italie et de Hollande (Paris, 1775), pp. 288-9. 36. Vercruysse, 'Voltaire et la Hollande', p. 73. 37. Ibid., p. 142. 38. A. Sayous, Histoire de la literature frangaise a VHranger depuis le commencement du XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1853), I, 29 n. 1. 39. Vercruysse, 'Voltaire et la Hollande', p. 145. 40. See Dubosq, Le Livre frangais, and for the now classic account of publishing practices and malpractices, Robert Darnton, The Business of the Enlightenment, A Publishing History of the Encyclopedic, iyy^-1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), especially ch. iv. 41. Vercruysse, 'Voltaire et la Hollande', p. 143. 42. See the useful catalogue published by Nijhoff, The Freedom of the Press in the Dutch Republic, 1581-1795 ( T h e Hague, 1969). 43. Raynal, Histoire, pp. 214-15; Diderot, Voyage, p. 416. 44. Sayous, Histoire de la litterature frangaise, p. 45. Justus van Effen's change of direction from Francophone culture to a more authentically native idiom in his journals was symptomatic of the more inward temper of'burgher' culture in the mid century. It used the stock idioms of stoic - republican renewal but expressed them in a peculiarly patriotic vernacular. See W. Bisschop, Justus van Effen geschetst in zijn leven en werken (Utrecht, 1889); W. Zuydam, Justus van Effen; een bijdrage tot de kennis van zijn karakter en zijn denkbeelden (Gouda, 1922). 45. Bernardus Nieuwentydt, L'Existence de Dieu demontree par les merveilles de nature (Amsterdam, 1760). 46. For Belle van Zuylen/Thuyll alias Mme de la Charriere see Philippe Godet, Madame de la Charriere et ses amis (Geneva, 1906); Simone Dubois, Belle van ^uylen, Leven op Ajstand; and the informative collection of papers published by the Werkgroep i8de Eeuw in June 1975 as Actualite dTsabelle de Charriere. 47. This tone of preaching social and political reform through moral revival was common to the journalism of the time. Pieter Mayer's De Rhapsodist (1771-83), for example, expressly took it on itself to combat deism and unbelief as well as nepotism, venality and 'tyranny'. Earlier examples of the same sort of genre were De Patriot (Amsterdam, 1748); De Nederlandsche Spectator (Leiden); De Philanthrope (Amsterdam, 1756-61); De Denker (Amsterdam, 1763-75); De Philosooph (Amsterdam, 1766-9); De Grijzaard (Monninkendam, 1767-9); De Opmerker (Amsterdam, 1772-8) and De Spectator der Studenten (1773-4). There was even a journal expressly for women, De Vrouwelyke Spectator (1760-71). 48. Even carefully euphemized deism ran into serious difficulties. At the end of the seventeenth century Balthasar Bekker, whose Betoverde Weereld had attacked the credulous legends of

233

Notes to pages 66-y 2

49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60.

witches and sorcerers, was violently assailed by the orthodox church, and in 1752 the hosier Pieter Bakker, an apostle of Zinzendorf, published his De godsdienst zonder bijgeloof (Religion without Superstition) under an assumed name. The book was promptly banned by the States of Holland and the Amsterdam church council and Bakker, whose pseudonym proved an imperfect disguise, led a semi-fugitive intellectual existence, dying in mysterious circumstances. For this history and a lucid and entertaining account of the climate of eighteenthcentury religion and culture, see R.B. Evenhuis, Ook Dat Was Amsterdam, vol. iv (Amsterdam, 1974). On the Burman circle at Kasteel Santhorst and the Dutch Belisaire controversy, see Leeb, Batavian Revolution, pp. 97-104. See Alice Carter, 'Amsterdam and the "Onbekend Soort van Zee Worm" in 1730', Jaarboek Amstelodamum, (1978), pp. 239-349. A large number of popular prints illustrating, not always accurately, the anatomy and voracious appetite of the all-conquering mollusc contributed to popular panic. Many of them are preserved in the Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam and indexed in the Fr. Wiiller catalogue of history prints. MJ.A. De Vrijer, 'De Storm om het crimen nefandum in de jaren 1730-2', Nederlandse Archie/voor Kerkgeschiendenis, vol. 25 (1932), pp. 193-239; G.M. Cohen Tervaert, De Grietman Rudolph de Mepsche (The Hague, 1921); a typically fanatical sermon preached against the 'plague' and published was H.C. van Byler (the most ardent of the homosexual-hunting predikants), Helsche Boosheit ofGruwelyke £onde van Sodomie (Groningen, 1731). Diderot, Voyage, p. 428. O n the 'Patriot Economic Movement' see J . Bierens de Haan, Van Oeconomische Tak tot Nederlandsche Maatschappij voor Nijverheiden Handel iyj2-ig^2 (Haarlem, 1952); Joh. de Vries, 'De Oeconomisch-Patriottisch Beweging', Nieuwe Stem, vil (1952), 723-30, and the same author's De Economische Achteruitgang der Republiek (Amsterdam, 1959). Evenhuis, Ook Dat Was Amsterdam, vol. iv. Sara Burgerhart (Amsterdam, 1782); see the collection of essays published as Boeket voor Betje en Aagje (Amsterdam, 1954). See J. de Witte van Citters, Contracten van Correspondentie en Andere Bijdragen (The Hague, 1973); for a more scholarly discussion of social stratification in the Republic, see H. van Dijk & D. Roorda, 'Sociale Mobiliteir onder regenten van de Republiek' in Tijdschrift van Geschiedenis (1971), pp. 306-28. See Simon Schama, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780-1813 (London, New York, 1977), ch. in. See E.H. Kossmann, Verlicht Conservatisme: over Elie Luzac (Groningen, 1966); Jacques Marx, 'Elie Luzac et la Republique des Lettres', Documentatieblad, Werkgroep i8de Eeuw, (1970). Another of the Dutch 'men of letters', the young prodigy Rijklof Michael van Goens, whose library at Utrecht was said to have four thousand volumes, fell foul of the Patriot movement in the 1780s and went into exile; in a similar evolution, Belle van Zuylen's brother Willem Rene initially waxed enthusiastic about the political reform movement of the 'Patriot regents' in the early 1780s - he was himself a regent of the city - only to rally to the Stadholder in 1786 once the agitation showed signs of developing into a campaign for democracy. Leeb, Batavian Revolution, p. 135. Mirabeau, Aux Bataves sur le Stadhouderat (Amsterdam, 1788). Chapter 5: Taylor, 'Switzerland', pp. 72-89

1. J . Marx, 'Charles Bonnet contre les lumieres', Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, nos 2. 'II fallait un arret pareil pour retablir l'honneur de l'Eglise de Geneve. Dans mes voyages le

234

Notes to pages J2-81

3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

reproche general etoit deja que les Protestants n'avaient point de religion.' Albrecht von Haller to Bonnet, 21 June 1762, in R.A. Leigh (ed.), Correspondence complete de Jean Jacques Rousseau (Geneva, Oxford, 1965-), letter 1891, note. Gedanken u'ber Vernunft, Aberglauben und Unglauben (1729), in D.A. von Haller, Versuch schweizerische Gedichte (Gottingen, 1762; repr. Bern, 1969), pp. 57-80. See above, R. Porter, 'The Enlightenment in England'. P. Wernle's work Die schweizerische Protestantismus im XVIIle Jahrhundert, 3 vols (Tubingen, 1923—5), is now in need of replacement though still useful. See note 1 above; also: J.S. Spink, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et Geneve (Paris, 1934); C. Guyot, Le Rayonnement de VEncyclopedie en Suisse frangaise (Neuchatel, 1955): L.-E. Roulet, Voltaire et les Bernois (La Chaux-de-Fonds, 1950): U.Im Hof, Aufkldrung in der Schweiz, Monographien zur schweizer Geschichte, no. 5 (Bern, 1970); idem, Geschichte der Schweiz (Stuttgart, 1974); idem, Ancien Regime, Aufkldrung, Revolution und Fremdherrschaft 1648-1815, Quellenhefter zur schweizer Geschichte, no. 6. The bulk of studies on the Enlightenment period in the cantons concern individuals or particular cantons. In many cantons the patrician 'aristocracy' was untitled and technically a part of the bourgeoisie, but in real terms there is a clear distinction to be drawn between members of the hereditary governing families and those bourgeois not included in this patrician class. We therefore reserve the term 'citizens' for bourgeois not belonging to the patriciate. 'Le grand mot d'egalite politique qu'ils entendaient depuis longtemps repeter autour d'eux, leur rendit encore plus necessaire la jouissance de ce bien . . . parti des Representants [citizens], qui etait a leurs yeux le parti du pauvre contre le riche, du faible contre le puissant, de l'opprime contre l'oppresseur, et surtout celui de la patrie et des moeurs.' [DTvernois], Tableau historique et politique des revolutions de Geneve dans le dix-huitieme siecle ... (Geneve, 1782), pp. 314-15. Miscellanea Gibboniana, (eds.) G. de Beer, G.A. Bonnard & L. Junod, Universite de Lausanne publ. de la Faculte des Lettres, no. 10 (Lausanne, 1952), p. 135. [Sinner], Voyage historique et litteraire dans la Suisse occidentale, 2 vols (Neuchatel, 1781), 11, 106. Pierre Bayle, quoted in A. Ferrazzini, Beat de Muralt et Rousseau (La Neuveville, 1952), p. 23. Ezekiel Gallatin, Sermons sur divers aspects de VEcriture Sainte (Geneve, 1720), pp. 54, 67, quoted in Spink, Rousseau et Geneve, p. 130. Jacob Vernet, Traite de la religion chretienne (1730-47), Book 11, introduction. J. Vernes, Trois Sermons prononces dans Veglise de Constance (Constance, 1786), pp. 55-61. Muralt is described by his editors as 'le premier a poser le probleme anglais devant la conscience europeenne'. See B.L. de Muralt, Lettres sur les Anglois et les Francois et sur les voiages, eds. C. Gould & C. Oldham (Paris, 1933), p. 10. Muralt was of course followed by Voltaire, Montesquieu, Leblanc, etc. See also G. Watson (ed.), The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 11 (1660-1800) (Cambridge, 1971), cols 78-80, 220-2. The English Muralt 'pretendent avoir devance les autres nations dans les sciences de pas moins d'un siecle Parmi les Anglois il y a des gens qui pensent plus fortement et qui ont de ces pensees fortes en plus grand nombre que les gens d'esprit des autres nations' (ibid, p. 108); 'En matiere de Religion vous diriez presque que chaque Anglois a pris son parti, pour en avoir tout de bon, ou pour n'en point avoir du tout' (ibid., p. 112); 'Les Anglois supportent assez bien la grandeur et n'en paraissent guere entetes; jamais je crois on n'entendit s'ecrier, les hommes de ma qualite, une personne de mon rang' (ibid, p. 112). [The English claim to lead other nations in science by at least a century Among the English there are those who think more originally than men of culture and wit in other countries, and who do so more prolifically; In religious affairs you would conclude that Englishmen have opted either to accept one, or to reject them all; The English wear their rank without becoming obsessed with it; never, I believe, did we hear anyone calling out 'Men of my rank and station, a person of my rank.']

235

Notes to pages 82—g^ 17. 'So verhangnisvoll ist es fur ein Volk sein Haus in ein Museum zu verwandeln.' See F. Ernst, Die Schweiz als geistige Mittlerin von Muralt bis Jakob Burckhardt (Zurich, 1932), p. 182. 18. See New CBEL, 11, cols 90-186, and Ernst, Die Schweiz. 19. 'Les bons ouvrages ce sont la Bible, la confession helvetique, les chroniques de Berne, les lois et les ordonnances; tout le reste est pernicieux.' Quoted in Roulet, Voltaire et les Bernois, p. 17. 20. I am indebted to Clarissa Campbell Orr for references to S.A. Roe, 'The Development of A. von Haller's Views on Embryology' in Journal of the History of Biology, no. 8 (1975), pp. 167-90; also A. Vartanian, 'De La Mettrie, Trembley's Polyp and the EighteenthCentury French Materialism', Journal of the History of Ideas, no. 11 (1950), pp. 259-86, and his edition of De La Mettrie, L'Homme machine. Ms Orr's own study of Jean Andre DeLuc will clarify this area. 21. D'Holbach's Systime de la nature (London, 1770) was in fact reprinted in Neuchatel. 22. A. von Haller, Lettres sur les verites les plus importantes de la Revelation (Yverdon, 1772), p. 5. 23. Ibid., pp. 6, 191. 24. Marx, 'Charles Bonnet'. 25. Ibid., p. 700. 26. Ibid., p. 141. 27. Von Haller, Versuch schweizerische Gedichte, pp. 75-9: 'A wise man, who, perhaps with commendable annoyance, tired of superstition and hating all prejudice, is impelled to seek the truth and to look for it, on a solid basis, within himself by the light of reason Enough: there is a God; nature proclaims it, and the whole frame of the universe shows the trace of his hands.' 28. The Felice encyclopaedia is fully described by Guyot, Le Rayonnement de VEncyclopedie en Suisse frangaise. See also J.P. Perret, Les Imprimeries d3 Yverdon au XVHe et au XVI He siecles (Lausanne, 1945).

C h a p t e r 6: C h a d w i c k , 'Italy', p p . 9 0 - 1 0 5 1. The best general studies are Franco Venturi, Settecento Riformatore, 2 vols so far (Turin, 1969-); G. Compagnino, Gil Illuministi Italiani (Bari, 1974). 2. Edmund Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life and Writings (1887 edn), p. 85. 3. Cf. Rosa Mincuzzi, Bernardo Tanucci Ministro di Ferdinando di Borbone iyjg-iyy6 (Bari, 1967); Rosa Mincuzzi (ed.), Lettere di Bernardo Tanucci a Carlo HI di Borbone (Roma, 1969); H.M. Acton, The Bourbons of Naples (London, 1956). 4. Galiani to Tanucci, 12 Nov. 1764, printed in Illuministi Italiani, VII (Milan, Naples, 1965), 9J4-i55. Giuseppe Baretti, La Frustra Letteraria, 15 Oct. 1763, ed. Luigi Piccioni (Bari, 1932), I, 40. Baretti was reviewing Genovesi's Meditatazioni Filosofiche sulla Religione e sulla Morale, vol. I (Naples, 1758). 6. For Genovesi, a selection of his most important work is in Illuministi Italiani, vol. v, ed. Franco Venturi, with a brilliant introduction (Milan, Naples, 1962). The panegyric delivered after his death by Giuseppe Maria Galanti (Elogio Storico del Signor abate Antonio Genovesi, Naples, 1772) is historically important for more than one reason. Venturi, ibid., pp. 43-6, has the necessary bibliography, and reprints the Vita written during Genovesi's lifetime between 1757 and 1760. The biography by Giancomo Racioppi (Naples, 1871) is a valuable book and after Venturi remains the best general survey of Genovesi's life and work. For Genovesi's religion see G. Galasso, 'II Pensiero Religioso di Antonio Genovesi', Rivista Storica Italiana, 82 (1970), 800-23. 7. Venturi reprinted Francesco Longano's autobiography in Illuministi Italiani, v, 347-67, and some extremely interesting extracts from his Viaggio per la Capitanata (Naples, 1790).

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Notes to pages g4~ioj 8. 9. 10. 11.

For Francescantonio Grimaldi see Illuministi Italiani, v, 5ogff.; bibliography, p. 525. Canosa, cited in ibid., p. 614. Ibid., p. 625. William Kendall published in 1791 An Analysis of the Science of Legislation and a first volume of translation the next year. 12. La Scienza delta Legislazione, v, 8. For Filangieri see Illuministi Italiani, v, 603-57; bibliography, PP- 657-913. For Domenico Grimaldi see Illuministi Italiani, v, 412-505; bibliography, pp. 429-30. 14. For Pagano see ibid., pp. 784-937. 15. For // Cqffe, apart from the articles themselves, see Carteggio di Pietro e di Alassandro Verri dal 1766 al 1797, 12 vols, to 1782 (Milan, 1910-42); for study, Venturi, Settecento Riformatore, vol. 1. 16. Illuministi Italiani, ed. Franco Venturi (Milan, Naples, 1958), in, 412. 17. E. Halevy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (London, 1928), p. 21; Marcello Maestro, Cesare Beccaria and the Origins of Penal Reform (Philadelphia, 1973), p. 131. 18. John H. Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Regime (London, Chicago, 1977). 19. Illuministi Italiani, in, 17. 20. For Beccaria, Maestro, Cesare Beccaria; James Heath, Eighteenth-Century Penal Theory (London, 1963); Marcello Maestro, Voltaire and Beccaria as Reformers of Criminal Law (New York, 1942). The edition of Dei Delitti e Delle Pene by Franco Venturi (Turin, 1965) has useful notes and relevant documentation. Illuministi Italiani, vol. ill prints a selection of other works and memoranda and letters as well as Dei Delitti e Delle Pene. Beccaria's works were edited by S. Romagnoli, 2 vols (Florence, 1958). Thanks to the French translator Morellet and a certain high-handedness, the history of the text of Dei Delitti is complex. 21. Illuministi Italiani, vn, 722. 22. Ibid., p. 734; bibliography, pp. 741-3. For the effect of Paoli's struggle on the Italian mainland see Franco Venturi, 'II Dibattito in Italia sulla Rivoluzione di Corsica', Rivista Storica Italiana, 88 (1976), 40-89. 23. For Tuscany see now Franco Venturi, 'Scienza e Riforma nella Toscana del Settecento', Rivista Storica Italiana, 89 (1977), 77-105. 24. For Venice see especially G. Tabacco, Andrea Tron (1712-1785) e la Crisi delVAristocazia Senatoriaa Venezia (Trieste, 1957). 25. Gibbon's Journey from Geneva to Rome, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (London, 1961), p. 79 (1 June 1764). For the Enlightenment in Genoa see S. Rosa (ed.), L'llluminismo a Genoa: Lettere di P.P. Celesia a F. Galiani (Florence, 1974). 26. Ludovico Ricci, Riforma degli Istituti Pii della Citta di Modena (Modena, 1787). 27. Galiani to Cardinal Domenico Orsini, 5 Oct. 1767, printed in Illuministi Italiani, vol. vi. 28. Voltaire's Correspondence, ed. T. Bestermann, xci (Geneva, 1964), no. 18,457, p. 132. 29. Galiani to Tanucci, 12 Nov. 1764, printed in Illuministi Italiani, vi, 913-17. 30. Cf. Opere di Ferdinando Galiani (eds. Furio Diaz & Luciano Guerci) in Illuministi Italiani, vol. vi, biography by L. Diodati; Sainte Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, 26 Aug. 1850 (Paris, 1851), II, 395-415; E. Gaudemet, L'Abbe Galiani et la question du commerce des bles a la fain du regne du Louis XV (Paris, 1899): G. Weulersse, Le Mouvement physiocratique en France de 1756 a 1770, 2 vols (Paris, 1910); many general histories of economic theory; F. Venturi, 'Galiani tra Enciclopedisti e Fisiocrati', Rivista Storica Italiana, 72 (i960), 45-64; Venturi, Settecento Reformatore, 1, 490-509, etc.; anecdotes of the less serious side in Acton, Bourbons of Naples; Convegno Italo-Francese sul Tema: Ferdinando Galiani, Rome, 25-27 May 1972, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, anno ccclxxii (Rome, 1975); excellent, reasoned bibliography by Luciano Guerci in Illuministi Italiani, vi, cvii-cxxvii. 31. Gaudemet, L'Abbe Galiani, p. 41.

237

Notes to pages 106-no Chapter 7: Whaley, 'Protestant Germany', pp. 106-117 1. F. Kopitzsch (ed.), Aufklarung, Absolutismus und Burgertum in Deutschland (Munich, 1976), Introduction, p. 14. See also R. Vierhaus, 'Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert: Soziales Gefuge, politische Verfassung, geistige Bewegung', in Lessing und das £eitalter der Aufklarung. Vortrdge gehalten aufder Tagung der Joachim Jungius Gesellschaft der Wissenschqften Hamburg am 10. und 11 Oktober ig6y (Gottingen, 1968), pp. 11-12. 2. See the critical comments in W. Schneiders, Die wahre Aufklarung Zum Selbstverstdndnis der deutschen Aufklarung (Freiburg, Munich, 1974), pp. 7— 11; and H. Moller, 'Die Interpretation der Aufklarung in der Marxistisch-Leninistischen Geschichtsschreibung', Zeitschrift fur historische Forschung, iv (1977), 438-72. On the 'second Enlightenment' see G. Sauder, '"Verhaltnismassige Aufklarung". Zur biirgerlichen Ideologic am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts', Jahrbuch der Jean Paul Gesellschaft, ix (1974), 102-26. 3. D. Bourel, 'Orthodoxie, Pietisme, Aufklarung', Dix-Huitieme Siecle, x (1978), 31. 4. H. Stuke, 'Aufklarung' in O. Brunner, W. Conze & R. Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1972), I, 2455. Stuke, 'Aufklarung', p. 244. For a full account of the debate see N. Hinske (ed.), Was ist Aufklarung? Beitrdge aus der Berlinischen Monatsschrift, 2nd edn (Darmstadt, 1977) and Schneiders, Wahre Aufklarung. 6. Stuke, 'Aufklarung', pp. 265-72. Kant's essay is translated in H. Reiss (ed.), Kant's Political Writings (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 54-60. 7. Stuke, 'Aufklarung', pp. 271-4. 8. Schneiders, Wahre Aufklarung, pp. 18-25. The idea seems to have originated from d'Alembert in a letter to the king in 1769: W. Krauss, 'Eine politische Preisfrage im Jahre 1780', in idem, Studien zur deutschen und franzosischen Aufklarung (Berlin, 1963). The texts are reprinted in W. Krauss (ed.), Est-il utile de tromper le peuple? Ist der Volksbetrug von Nutzen? Concours de la classe de philosophie speculative de I'Academie des Sciences et de Belles-Lettres de Berlin pour Vannee IJ8O (Berlin, 1966). 9. Stuke, 'Aufklarung', pp. 275-8, passim. 10. Ibid., pp. 260-2. See also R. Vierhaus, 'Bildung' in Brunner, Conze & Koselleck, Grundbegriffe, 1,519-20. 11. Sauder, 'Verhaltnismassige Aufklarung', passim. 12. Vierhaus, 'Bildung'; H. Kiesel & P. Munch, Gesellschaft und Literatur im 18 Jahrhundert. Voraussetzungen und Entstehung des literarischen Marktes in Deutschland (Munich, 1977), pp. 6 7 73; H. Matthei, Untersuchungen zur Friihgeschichte der deutschen Berufsschule (Hamburg, 1967). 13. For the best summary of the scope of enlightened reforms see Kopitzsch, Aufklarung, pp. 41-9714. R. Vierhaus, 'Zur historischen Deutung der Aufklarung. Probleme und Perspektiven', Wolfenbutteler Studien zur Aufklarung, iv (1977), 39-54. 15. W. Schone, Ze^ungswesen und Statistik, Eine Untersuchung u'ber den Einfluss der periodischen Presse auf die Entstehung und Entwicklung der staatswissenschaftlichen Literatur, speziell der Statistik (Jena, I924)> P-56. 16. W. Martens, Die Botschaft der Tugend. Die Aufklarung im Spiegel der moralischen Wochenschriften (Stuttgart, 1968). On periodicals see P. Raabe, 'Die Zeitschrift als Medium der Aufklarung', Wolfenbutteler Studien zur Aufklarung, 1 (1974), 99-136; and P. Raabe, 'Zeitschriften und Almanache' in E. L. Hauswedell & C. Voigt (eds.), Buchkunst undLiteratur in Deutschland 1750 bis 1850, 2 vols (Hamburg, 1977), 1, 145-95. 17. K. D. Sievers, Volkskultur und Aufklarung im Spiegel der Schleswig-Holsteinischen Provincialberichte (Neumiinster, 1970); Raabe, 'Zeitschriften'; the most recent survey with a useful bibliography is U. Kutter, 'Volks-Kunde - Ein Beleg von 1782', Zritechriftfor Volkskunde, LXXIV

238

Notes to pages

IIO-IIJ

(1978), 161-6; compare also P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978), pp. 3-22. 18. W. Krauss, 'Zur Konstellation der deutschen Aufklarung' in W. Krauss, Perspektiven und Probleme. %urfranzosischen und deutschen Aufklarung und andere Aufsdtze (Neuwied, Berlin, 1965), p. 212.

19. Sievers, Volkskultur, passim. 20. Vierhaus, 'Bildung', p. 525. 21. H. Moller, Aufklarung in Preussen. Der Verleger und Publizist Friedrich Nicolai (Berlin, 1974), pp. 246-54. W. Schiitz, 'Die Kanzel als Katheder der Aufklarung', Wolfenbutteler Studien zur Aufklarung, L (1974), 137-71. 22. Raabe, 'Zeitschriften', p. 145. 23. P. Jeannin, Gekrduselt, gepudert, mit untadeliger Anmut. Hamburg und die Franzb'sische Revolution (Hamburg, 1977), pp. 13-36. See also J. Schlumbohm, Freiheit. Die Anfdnge der burgerlichen Emanzipationsbewegung im Sfiegel ihres Leitwortes (IJ6O-I8OO) (Dusseldorf, 1975); and Vierhaus, 'Deutschland'. 24. On reading societies see M. Priisener & H.G. Gopfert, 'Lesegesellschaften' in Hauswedell & Voigt, Buchkunst, pp. 285-303; and Kiesel & Munch, Gesellschaft, pp. 174-9. On patriotic societies see H. Hubrig, Die patriotischen Gesellschaften des 18. Jahrhunderts (Weinheim, 1957); and Moller, Aufklarung, pp. 229-45. 25. R. Vierhaus, 'Aufklarung und Freimaurerei in Deutschland' in R. von Thadden, G. von Pistohlkors & H. Weiss (eds.), Das Vergangene und die Geschichte. Festschrift fur Reinhard Wittram zum yo. Geburtstag (Gottingen, 1973), pp. 23-41. 26. Moller, Aufklarung, pp. 580-1. 27. See G.R. Rope, Johan Melchior Goeze. Eine Rettung (Hamburg, i860). There is no good modern study of Goeze; his importance is stressed by H. Schultze, 'Toleranz und Orthodoxie. Johan Melchior Goeze in seiner Auseinandersetzung mit der Theologie der Aufklarung', Neue ^eitschriftfur systematische Theologie, iv (1962), 197-219. 28. H.W. Musing, 'Speners Pia Desideria und ihre Beziige zur deutschen Aufklarung', Pietismus undNeuzeit, ill (1976), 32-70. For the most recent interpretations of pietism see M. Greschat (ed.), Zur Neueren Pietismusforschung (Darmstadt, 1977). 29. W. Philipp, Das Werden der Aufklarung in theologiegeschichtlicher Sicht (Gottingen, 1957); M. Greschat, 'Die Aufklarung. Ein Prozess gegen das Christentum?', Kerygma und Dogma. Zeitschriftfur theologische Forschung und kirchliche Lehre, xxn (1976), 299-316. 30. Quoted in V. Wehrmann, Die Aufklarung in Lippe. Ihre Bedeutung fiir Politik, Schule und Geistesleben (Detmold, 1972), p. 80. 31. W. Grossmann, 'Edelmann und das "Offentliche Schweigen" des Reimarus und Lessing. Toleranz und Politik des Geistes', Zeitschrift fiir Kirchengeschichte, LXXXV (1974), 358-82. On Spinozism in Germany see W. Schmidt-Biggemann, Baruch de Spinoza. i6yy-igyy. Werk und Wirkung. Ausstellungeskataloge der Herzog August Bibliothek Nr. ig (Wolfenbiittel, 1977). 32. For the following see K. Scholder, 'Grundziige der theologischen Aufklarung in Deutschland' in Kopitzsch, Aufklarung, pp. 294-318. The best survey of enlightened Protestant theology is still K. Aner, Die Theologie der Lessingzeit (Halle a.d. Saale, 1929). 33. The most useful exposition of the principles of Lutheranism is Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1978), 11, 3-19. 34. On historical methods see P.H. Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley, 1975), esp. pp. 43-4. 35. Scholder,'Grundziige', p. 311. 36. Ibid., pp. 301-2. 37. Ibid., pp. 307-8. 38. The best introduction with full bibliography is M. Raeff, 'The Well-Ordered Police State and the Development of Modernity in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Europe; An

239

Notes to pages i IJ- 116 Attempt at a Comparative Approach', American Historical Review, LXXX (1975), 1221-43. See also H . Maier, Die altere deutsche Staats- und Verwaltungslehre (Polizeiwissenschaft); ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der politischen Wissenschaften in Deutschland (Neuwied am Rhein, 1966). The importance of universities is stressed by N. Hammerstein, 'Zur Geschichte der Deutschen Universitat im Zeitalter der Aufklarung' in H. Rossler & G. Franz (eds.), Universitdt und Gelehrtenstand 1400-1800 (Limburg Lahn, 1970), pp. 145-82; see also N. Hammerstein, Jus und Historie. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des historischen Denkens an den deutschen Universitdten im spdten iy. und im 18. Jahrhundert (Gottingen, 1972). 39. Sievers, Volkskultur, pp. 18-32. 40. F . M . Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought. From Enlightenment to Nationalism (Oxford, 1965), p. 6. See also the stimulating essay by F. Valjavec, 'Die politischen Auswirkungen der Aufklarung', Ostdeutsche Wissenschaft, 11 (1955), 276-96. 41. In general see Kopitzsch, Aufklarung, p. 45 and the literature cited ibid., pp. 125-6; and F. Kopitzsch, 'Gotthold Ephraim Lessing und Hamburgs Gelehrte 1767-1781' in H-D. Loose (ed.), Gelehrte in Hamburg im 18. und ig Jahrhundert (Hamburg, 1976), pp. 11-55. 42. See Schultze, 'Toleranz'. 43. On the opera see H J . Marx, 'Geschichte der Hamburger Barockoper. Ein Forschungsbericht', Hamburger Jahrbuch fiir Musikwissenschqft, ill (1978), 7-34. On newspapers see C. Prange, Die Zjeitungen und ^eitschriften des iy. Jahrhunderts in Hamburg und Altona. Ein Beitrag zur Publizistik der Fruhaufkldrung (Hamburg, 1978), and J. Whaley 'New Light on the Circulation of Early Newspapers, the Case of the Hamburgischer Correspondent in 1730', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, ill (1979), 178-87. 44. O n the constitutional conflicts: H . Riickleben, Die Niederwerfung der Hamburgischen Ratsgewalt. Kirchliche Bewegungen und burgerliche Unruhen im ausgehenden iy. Jahrhundert (Hamburg, 1970); the early eighteenth-century crisis is analysed by A. Wohlwill, 'Hamburg wahrend der Pestjahre 1712-1714', Jahrbuch der Hamburgischen Wissenschaftlichen Anstalten, x, 2 (1892), 289-406. 45. J. Rathje, '"Der Patriot". Eine Hamburgische Zeitschrift der ersten Halfte des 18. Jahrhunderts', Zjzitschrift des Vereinsfiir Hamburgische Geschichte, LXV (1979), 123-43. 46. J . Scheibe, "Der Patriot" (iy24~iy26) und sein Publikum. Untersuchungen u'ber die Verfassergesellschaft und die Leserschaft einer £eitschrift der friihen Aufklarung (Goppingen, 1973), PP- !55- 6 747. W. von Melle, Die Entwicklung des qffentlichen Armenwesens in Hamburg (Hamburg, 1883), pp. 54-61; and Scheibe, "Der Patriot", pp. 182-8. 48. H. Liebel, 'Laissez-faire vs. Mercantilism. The Rise of Hamburg and the Hamburg Bourgeoisie vs. Frederick the Great in the Crisis of 1763', Vierteljahresschrift fur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, LII (1965), 207-38; H J . Braun, Technologische Beziehungen zwischen Deutschland und England bis zum Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts (Dusseldorf, 1974), pp. 127-33; Hubrig, Gesellschaften, pp. 31-8. 49. O. Brunner, 'Die Patriotische Gesellschaft in Hamburg im Wandel von Staat und Gesellschaft', in idem, Neue Wege der Verfassungs- und Sozialgeschichte, 2nd edn (Gottingen, 1968), pp. 335-44; Hubrig, Gesellschaften, pp. 46-54, 110-38; Matthei, Untersuchungen, passim', G. Kowalewski, Geschichte der Hamburgischen Gesellschaft zur Befdrderung der Kiinste und niitzlichen Gewerbe (Patriotische Gesellschaft). Gestiftet imjahre iy6$ (Hamburg, 1897). 50. See for example W. Fischer, Das Fiirstentum Hohenlohe im £eitalter der Aufklarung (Tubingen, 1958), p. 221, passim. 51. H . Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy. The Prussian Experience, 1660-1815 (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), p. 221. On bureaucrats in Prussia and elsewhere see W. Bleeck, Von der Kameralausbildung zum Juristenprivileg. Studium, Prufung und Ausbildung der hb'heren Beamten des allgemeinen Verwaltungsdienstes in Deutschland im 18. und ig. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1972).

240

Motes to pages

116-120

52. E. Weiss, 'Absolute Monarchic und Reform im Deutschland des spaten 18. und friihen 19. Jahrunderts' in Kopitzsch, Aufkldrung pp. 192-219. 53. Wehrmann, Aufkldrung, pp. 64-82; and Weiss, 'Monarchies'. 54. Wehrmann, Aufkldrung, p. 66. For an illuminating example of reforms in a small state see C. Ochwadt (ed.), Wilhelm Graf zu Schaumburg-Lippe. Philosophische und Politische Schriften (Frankfurt am Main, 1977), esp. pp. 281-6. 55. G.E. Lessing, 'Ernst und Falk. Gesprache fur Freimaurer' in K. Lachmann (ed.), Gottfried Ephraim Lessings sdmtliche Schriften. 3 auf's neue durchgesehen und vermehrte Auflage besorgt von Franz

Muncker, 23 vols (Stuttgart, Leipzig, Berlin, 1886-1924), xm, 357. 56. Ibid., p. 349.

Chapter 8: Blanning, 'Catholic Germany', pp. 118-126 1. Quoted in Franco Venturi, 'History and Reform in the Middle of the Eighteenth Century' in J.H. Elliott & H.G. Koenigsberger (eds.), The Diversity of History. Essays in honour of Sir Herbert Butterfield (London, 1970), p. 238. Some recent work on primary education suggests that this picture of Catholic backwardness is greatly exaggerated. See, for example, Etienne Frangois, 'Die Volksbildung am Mittelrhein im ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert. Eine Untersuchung iiber den vermeintlichen "Bildungsriickstand" der katholischen Bevolkerung Deutschlands im Ancien Regime', Jahrbuchfur westdeutsche Landesgeschichte, vol. ill (1977). 2. The work of Max Braubach deserves a special mention, in particular his numerous studies of the Enlightenment in the Electorate of Cologne. For a complete bibliography 1923-1963 see Spiegel der Geschichte. Festgabe fur Max Braubach zum 10. April ig64, ed. Konrad Repgen & Stephan Skalweit (Miinster, 1964), pp. 964-76. 3. Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley, Los Angeles, 4. Richard van Diilmen, 'Antijesuitismus und katholische Aufklarung in Deutschland', Historisches Jahrbuch, LXXXIX (1969), 53-5. Heribert Raab, 'Kirchengeschichte im Schlagwort. Schlagworter des spaten 18. und friihen 19. Jahrhunderts', Annuarium historiae conciliorum, vm (1976), 5O75. Walter Brandmiiller, 'Die kirchlich-religiose Entwicklung von der Mitte des 16. bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts', Handbuch der Bayerischen Geschichte, ed. Max Spindler, vol. 3, pt 1 (Munich, 1971), p. 446. For a comment on the flourishing condition of the Bavarian monasteries see Georg Schwaiger, Die altbayerischen Bistumer Freising, Passau und Regensburg zwischen Sdkularisation und Konkordat (1803-181 y) (Munich, 1959), p. 3. 6. For a list of the most important monasteries involved see Richard van Diilmen, Propst Franziskus Tbpsl (iyi i-iyg6) und das Augustiner-Chorherrenstift Polling. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der katholischen Aufkldrung in Bayern (Kallmiinz, 1967), p. 4. 7. Ibid., p. 5. 8. Leonhard Lenk, 'Die Aufklarung in Bayern', Bayerische Symphonie, ed. Herbert Schindler, 11 (Munich, 1968), 409. 9. Heribert Raab, Die Concordats Nationis Germanicae in der kanonistischen Diskussion des iy. bis ig. Jahrhunderts. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der episkopalistischen Theorie in Deutschland (Wiesbaden, 10. Ibid., p. 7. The phrase 'katholische Ideenrevolution1 was first coined by Ludwig Timotheus von Spittler in 1787; see Raab, 'Kirchengeschichte im Schlagwort', p. 509. n . Heribert Raab, 'Georg Christoph Neller und Febronius', Archiv fiir mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte, xi (1959), 189-94. 12. For an excellent recent study ofJansenism see Peter Hersche, Der Spdtjansenismus in Oesterreich (Vienna, 1977). Although concerned mainly with Austria it contains much of relevance and importance for the Catholic Enlightenment in the Reich as a whole. 241

Notes to pages 120-123 13. E. Preclin, 'L'Influence du jansenisme frangais a l'etranger', Revue Historique, CLXXXII (1938), 3314. Ibid. See also F.G. Dreyfus, Societes et mentalites a Mayence dans la seconde moitie du dix-huitieme siecle (Paris, 1968), p. 411. 15. Hersche, Der Spdtjansenismus, pp. 87-9. W. Deinhardt, Der Jansenismus in den deutschen Landen (Munich, 1927), p. 81. 16. See, for example, Raab, Die Concordata Nationis Germanicae, pp. 123-4. 17. Van Diilmen, 'Antijesuitismus', p. 77. Robert Haass, Die geistige Haltung der katholischen Universitdten Deutschlands im 18. Jahrhundert (Freiburg, 1952), p. 39. Notker Hammerstein, Aufkldrung und katholisches Reich. Untersuchungen zur Universitdtsreform und Politik katholischer Territorien des Heiligen Romischen Reichs deutscher Nation im 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1977), p. 257. Joseph Hansen, Quellen zur Geschichte des Rheinlandes im ^eitalter der franzbsischen Revolution, 1 (Bonn, 1931), 165 n. 1. 18. See, especially, the highly illuminating article of Rudolf Vierhaus, 'Montesquieu in Deutschland. Zur Geschichte seiner Wirkung als politischer Schriftsteller im 18. Jahrhundert', Collegium Philosophicum. Studien Joachim Ritter zum 60. Geburtstag (Basle, Stuttgart, 1965). 19. For an excellent recent account of the development of Muratori's influence in Italy see Franco Venturi's masterpiece: Settecento riformatore. Da Muratori a Beccaria, 1 (Turin, 1969), esp. ch. 2. For an authoritative general comment on the importance of Muratori for the Catholic Enlightenment in Germany see van Diilmen, Propst Franziskus Topsl, p. 2. 20. Eduard Winter, Der Josefinismus. Die Geschichte des b'sterreichischen Reformkatholizismus, 1740184.8 (Berlin, 1962), pp. 24-7. 21. Quoted in Hammerstein, Aufkldrung und katholisches Reich, p. 12. 22. Ibid., p. 11. 23. Max Braubach, 'Die katholischen Universitaten Deutschlands und die franzosische Revolution', Diplomatie und geistiges Leben im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Gesammelte Abhandlungen (Bonn, 1969), p. 664. For general accounts of the reform of Catholic universities see Hammerstein, Aufkldrung und katholisches Reich, passim', Notker Hammerstein, 'Zur Geschichte der deutschen Universitat im Zeitalter der Aufklarung' in Hellmuth Rossler & Giinther Franz (eds.), Universitdt und Gelehrtenstand 1400-1800 (Limburg, 1970); Haass, Die geistige Haltung der katholischen Universitdten, passim. Of the very numerous monographs, the following deserve special mention: Max Braubach, Die erste Bonner Hochschule. Maxische Akademie und kurfurstliche Universitdt, 1774I77 bis 1798 (Bonn, 1966); Emil Zenz, Die Trierer Universitdt, 1473-1798 (Trier, 1949); Helmut Mathy (ed.), Die Universitdt Mainz 1477-1977 (Mainz, 1977). 24. Hubert Jedin (ed.), Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte, vol. v: Die Kirche im ^eitalter des Absolutismus und der Aufkldrung (Freiburg i. Br., 1970), pp. 591-2. 25. Ibid., pp. 564-5; Leo Just, 'Hontheim. Ein Gedenkblatt zum 250. Geburtstag', Archiv fur mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte, iv (1952), 206, 210; Zenz, Die Trierer Universitdt, p. 64. 26. Rudolf Vierhaus, 'Aufklarung und Freimaurerei in Deutschland' in Rudolf von Thadden, Gert von Pistolkohrs & Hellmuth Weiss (eds.), Das Vergangene und die Geschichte. Festschrift fur Reinhard Wittram zum 70. Geburtstag (Gottingen, 1973), p. 28. For further stout defences of the reality and importance of enlightened absolutism in Germany see Rudolf Stadelmann, Deutschland und Westeuropa (Schloss Laupheim, Wiirttemberg, 1948); Eberhard Weis, 'Absolute Monarchic und Reform im Deutschland des spaten 18. und des friihen 19. Jahrhunderts' in Friedrich Prinz, Franz-Josef Schmale & Ferdinand Seibt (eds.), Geschichte in der Gesellschaft. Festschrift fur Karl Bosl zum 65. Geburtstag (Stuttgart, 1974); Ernst Walder, 'Zwei Studien iiber den aufgeklarten Absolutismus', Schweizer Beitrdge zur Allgemeinen Geschichte, xv (1957); Karl Otmar Freiherr von Aretin (ed.), Der aufgekldrte Absolutismus (Cologne, 1974.) The literature on the reforms in the Catholic principalities is vast but fragmented and often located in obscure local history journals. For an excellent modern account of developments in the most important secular state, Bavaria, see Spindler, Handbuch der

242

Notes to pages 123-125

27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

Bayerischen Geschichte. Accounts of reforms in four of the largest ecclesiastical states can be found in Max Braubach, Maria Theresias jiingster Sohn Max Franz, letzter Kurfiirst von Kb'ln und Fiirstbischof von Miinster (Vienna, Munich, 1961), T.C.W. Blanning, Reform and Revolution in Mainz, 1743-1803 (Cambridge, 1974), and Barbara Goy, Aufkldrung und Volksfrb'mmigkeit in den Bistiimern Wiirzburg und Bamberg, Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte des Bistums und Hochstifts Wiirzburg, vol. xxi (Wiirzburg, 1969). The second volume of Heribert Raab's biography of Clemens Wenzeslaus will perform the same service for the Electorate of Trier. On the crucial question of toleration see Hermann Stevens, 'Toleranzbestrebungen im Rheinland wahrend der Zeit der Aufklarung (Kurmainz, Kurtrier, Kurkoln, Reichsstadte Koln und Aachen)' (Bonn Ph.D thesis, 1938). Quoted in Blanning, Reform and Revolution in Mainz, p. 195. Ibid. For information about reading-clubs in other parts of Catholic Germany, see Hansen, Quellen, 1, 16-18, 77-8, 215; Winfried Dotzauer, 'Bonner aufgeklarte Gesellschaften und geheime Sozietaten bis zum Jahre 1815 unter besonderer Beriicksichtigung des Mitgliederbestandes der Freimaurerloge "Freres courageux" in der napoleonischen Zeit', Bonner Geschichtsbldtter, vol. xxiv (1971); Albert Becker, 'Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte der siidwestdeutschen Grenzmark, 1760-1848', Archivfiir Kulturgeschichte, xxvi (1936), 298-9. The literature on the Illuminati and Freemasonry in this period is vast. A useful guide will be found in Richard van Diilmen's Der Geheimbund der Illuminaten (Stuttgart, 1975), which has superseded all previous work on the order. See also the valuable articles of Winfried Dotzauer, 'Die Koblenzer Freimaurerloge "L'Union desiree"', Jahrbuch fur Geschichte und Kunst des Mittelrheins und seiner Nachbargebiete, vol. xxn (1970/1971); 'Mainzer Illuminaten und Freimaurer vom Ende der kurfiirstlichen Zeit bis zu den Freiheitskriegen', Nassauische Annalen, vol. LXXXIII (1972); 'Die Mitglieder der Kolner Freimaurerlogen, insbesondere der Loge "Le Secret des trois Rois" vom Ende des alten Reichs bis zu den Freiheitskriegen', Jahrbuch des Kolnischen Geschichtsvereins, vol. XLIV (1973); and Helmut Mathy, 'Gelehrte, literarische, okkulte und studentische Vereinigungen und Gesellschaften in Mainz am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts', Jahrbuch der Vereinigung 'Freunde der Universitdt Mainz' (1969). Richard van Diilmen, 'Zum Strukturwandel der Aufklarung in Bayern', £eitschrift fur bayerische Landesgeschichte, xxxvi (1973), 662. This stimulating article also provides an excellent guide to literature on the Bavarian Enlightenment. Dreyfus, Societes et mentalites a Mayence, p. 500. For further information on the social background of the members of the Mainz club see Hans Hainebach, Studien zum literarischen Leben der Aufkldrungszeit in Mainz (Giessen, 1936), p. 71. Dreyfus, Societes et mentalites a Mayence, p. 502. Cf. Dotzauer, 'Mainzer Illuminaten und Freimaurer'. Braubach, Maria Theresias jiingster Sohn, pt 2, ch. 5; Karl Georg Bockenheimer, Die Restauration der Mainzer Hochschule im Jahre 1784 (Mainz, 1884). On the reception of Kant at Catholic universities, see Hansen, Quellen, 1, 165 n. 1; Hammerstein, Aufkldrung und katholisches Reich, p. 141; Haass, Die geistige Haltung der katholischen Universitdten, pp. 35, 73; Braubach, 'Die katholischen Universitaten Deutschlands', p. 669; Franz Xaver Munch, 'Die philosophischen Studien an der kurkolnischen Universitat zu Bonn, mit besonderer Beriicksichtigung der philosophischen Arbeiten Johannes Neebs', Annalen des Historischen Vereins fur den Niderrhein, vol. LXXXVI (1909); Gustav Schniirer, Katholische Kirche und Kultur im 18. Jahhundert (Paderborn, 1941), p. 267. Kantian philosophy can even be found in a number of Benedictine monasteries: see Romuald Bauerreiss, Kirchengeschichte Bayerns, vol. vn: 1600-1803 (Augsburg, 1970), p. 402; Konstantin Maier, 'Auswirkungen der Aufklarung in den schwabischen Klostern', ^eitschrift fur Kirchengeschichte, vol. xxiv (1975). The figures are taken from the lists published by van Diilmen, Der Geheimbund der Illuminaten, PP- 439-53-

243

Notes to pages 125-128 36. 'For the social history and the history of political consciousness in Germany, the material and intellectual union of significant sections of the nobility and the educated middle classes with the state through the civil service is of an importance which can hardly be exaggerated' - comment by Rudolf Vierhaus, 'Standewesen und Staatsverwaltung in Deutschland im spaten 18. Jahrhundert' in Rudolf Vierhaus & Manfred Botzenhart (eds.), Dauer und Wandel der Geschichte. Aspekte europdischer Vergangenheit. Festgabe fur Kurt von Raumer (Miinster, 1966), P- 356. 37. Horst Moller, 'Die Interpretation der Aufklarung in der marxistisch-leninistischen Geschichtsschreibung', ^eitschrift fiir historische Forschung, vol. IV (1977). 38. Vierhaus, 'Aufklarung und Freimaurerei', p. 37; Hansen, Quellen, 1, 41-74; Haass, Die geistige Haltung der katholischen Universitdten, p. 165; Max Braubach, 'Neue Funde und Beitrage zur Kulturgeschichte Kurkolns im ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert', Anndlen des Historischen Vereins fur den Niederrhein, vol. CLXXII (1970); Eberhard Weis, Montgelas 1759-1799- Zw^scnen Revolution und Reform (Munich, 1971), pp. 34-6. As Rogier has observed: 'With regard to almost every country except Germany, the concept "Catholic Enlightenment" seems inappropriate. In the Romance-speaking countries, anyone who fell out with the Church turned his back on it and attacked it from the outside. In Germany, anyone who criticised the Church and clergy was looking for improvement from within. This fact differentiates the Enlightenment in Germany from the Enlightenment in France and other Romancespeaking regions.' L J . Rogier, 'Die Kirche im Zeitalter der Aufklarung und Revolution' in L J . Rogier, R. Aubert & M.D. Knowles (eds.), Geschichte der Kirche, vol. iv: Die Kirche im Zeitalter der Aufklarung, Revolution und Restauration (Einsiedeln, Zurich, Cologne, 1966), p. 100. 39. Hansen, Quellen, 1, 843. For a recent restatement of the myth see Walter Grab, 'Eroberung oder Befreiung? Deutsche Jakobiner und die Franzosenherrschaft im Rheinland, 17921799', Archiv fur Sozialgeschichte, x (1970), 18. Even Gerteis, while pointing out that the political significance of the German Lesegesellschaften has been greatly overestimated, stated that the Mainz Lesegesellschaft developed into a political association; 'Bildung und Revolution. Die deutschen Lesegesellschaften am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts', Archiv fur Kulturgeschichte, LIII (1971), 129-30, 136-7. What in fact happened was that a few individual members of the Lesegesellschaft supported the new regime, following the French occupation of the city in October 1792. For a general comment on the non-revolutionary character of German freemasonry see Rudolf Vierhaus, 'Politisches Bewusstsein in Deutschland vor 1789', Der Staat, vi (1967), 184. 40. Quoted in Braubach, 'Die katholischen Universitaten Deutschlands', p. 673. This hostile attitude towards the Enlightenment then proceeded to dominate the historiography of the period throughout the following century, at least until Sebastian Merkle's celebrated lecture at the Berlin Congress of 1908, Die katholische Beurteilung des Aufkldrungszeitalters (Berlin, 1909). For a more recent comment on the enduring topicality of the debate for and against Aufklarung Catholicism see Franz Xaver Haimerl, 'Probleme der kirchlichen Aufklarung als Gegenwartsanliegen', Miinchener Theologische Zeitschrift, vol. 12 (1961). C h a p t e r 9: W a n g e r m a n n , 'Austria', p p . 127-140 1. A. Jager entitled one of his articles on this period 'Das Eindringen des modernen kirchenfeindlichen Geistes in Osterreich', Zeitschrift fur katholische Theologie, vol 11 (1878). 2. See above, p. 4. 3. Cf. Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution (Ithaca, 1976), esp. pp. 143-61. 4. Peter F. Barton, Jesuiten, Jansenisten, Josephiner, Studien u. Texte zur Kirchengeschichte u. Geschichte, Zweite Reihe, iv (Vienna, 1978), pp. 58-137. 5. Grete Klingenstein, 'Vorstufen der theresianischen Studienreform in der Regierungszeit Karls VI', Mitteilungen des Instituts fur b'sterreichische Geschichtsforschung, LXXVI (1968), 343-77.

244

Notes to pages

128-132

6. After many years of neglect there is now a growing body of historical literature on Reform Catholicism. A start may be made with E. Winter, Der Josefinismus. Die Geschichte des osterreichischen Reformkatholizismus (Berlin, 1962), pp. 22-99; G. Klingenstein, Staatsverwaltung und kirchliche Autoritdt im 18. Jahrhundert (Osterreich Archiv) (Vienna, 1970), pp. 92-110; Adam Wandruszka, 'Der Reformakatholizismus des 18. Jahrhunderts' in Festschrift Hermann Wiesflecker (Graz, 1973), pp. 231-40; Elisabeth Garms-Cornides, 'Zwischen Giannone, Muratori und Metastasio: die Italiener im geistigen Leben Wiens', in Formen der europdischen Aufkldrung, = Wiener Beitrage zur Geschichte der Neuzeit, vol. 3 (Vienna, 1976); this last is particularly interesting for its reference to the reformers' interest in English thought and developments (pp. 239-41). 7. Klingenstein, Staatsverwaltung und kirchliche Autoritdt, pp. 184—97. 8. Peter Gay, Voltaire's Politics (Princeton, 1959), pp. 87-116. 9. Erich Zollner, 'Bemerkungen zum Problem der Beziehungen zwischen Aufklarung und Josephinismus', Osterreich und Europa. Festgabefiir Hugo Hantsch (Vienna, 1965), pp. 203—19; Paul P. Bernard, The Origins of Josephinism, Collorado College Studies, no. 7 (Collorado, 1964); Peter Hersche,- Der Spdtjansenismus in Osterreich, Veroffentlichungen der Kommission fur Geschichte Osterreichs (Ost. Akademie d. Wissenschaften), vol. 7 (Vienna, 1977), pp.212-16. 10. Wittola to Dupac, 10 Dec. 1771, F. Kenninck (ed.), 'Extraits des lettres de M. le cure MarcAntoine Wittola . . . a M. Dupac de Bellegarde', Revue Internationale de Theologie, xxn (1898), 32311. For Maria Theresa's frequent delays and changes of mind during her last years see Ernst Wangermann, 'Matte Morgenrote: Verzug und Widerruf im spaten Reformwerk Maria Theresias' in W. Koschatzky (ed.), Maria Theresia undIhre £eit (Salzburg, 1979), pp. 67-71. 12. Klingenstein, Staatsverwaltung und kirchliche Autoritdt, pp. 111 - 1 3 . 13. Hersche, Spdtjansenismus, pp. 134-48. 14. Cf. Johann Joseph Khevenhuller's entry in his diary, quoted by Klingenstein, Staatsverwaltung und kirchliche Autoritdt, p. 111: 'Und unter anderem . . . wurde sehr lacherlich befunden, dass man alle Priester zur Erlernung der griechisch- und hebraischen Sprach anhalten und gleichsam sub poena anstrengen und binden wollen, dass sie eine . . . bestimmte Zeit . . . diesem oder sonstig gelehrtem Studio obliegen sollen.' 15. Allerunterthanigste Ausserung Heinkes, 14 March 1781, F. Maass (ed.), Der Josephinismus. Quellen zu seiner Geschichte in Osterreich ij6o—ijgo, 5 vols (Vienna, 1951-61), vol. ill: Fontes Rerum Austriacarum, 11: 73, p. 263. 16. Ibid. 17. Ernst Wangermann, Aufkldrung und staatsbiirgerliche Erziehung. Gottfried van Swieten als Reformator des osterreichischen Unterrichtswesens IJ8I bis iygi (Osterreich Archiv) (Vienna, 1978), pp. 34-40. 18. R J . Wolny, Die josephinische Toleranz unter besonderer Berucksichtigung ihres geistlichen Wegbereiters Johann Leopold Hay, Wissenschaftliche Materialien und Beitrage zur Geschichte der bohmischen Lander no. 15 (Collegium Carolinum). (Munich, 1973), pp. 63-7. 19. Bohmische Gubernialverordnung, 23 March 1782, Sammlung der k.k. landesfurstlichen Verordnungen und Gesetze in materiis publico-ecclesiasticis (Prague, 1782-7), II, 147: the All Saints Benefice in Prague was to remain vacant for the time being, 'in order to reward with it the priest who under the system of toleration now in force shall behave in the most reasonable manner and shall bring back the largest number of erring sheep to the way of truth by apostolic means, gentleness and persuasion'. 20. Wangermann, Aufkldrung und staatsbiirgerliche Erziehung, pp. 62-4. 21. Ibid., pp. 64-6. 22. Ausserung Galls, 2 June 1790, in 'Actenstiicke zur Geschichte des osterreichischen romischkatholischen Kirchenwesens unter Kaiser Leopold IF, Archiv fur Kunde osterreichischer Geschichts-Quellen, 3jg., iv (1850), 113.

245

Notes to pages 132-

ijg

23. Augustin Zippe, Anleitung zur Sittenlehre der Vernunft und Offenbarung, 2nd edn, (Vienna, 1789), pp. ix-xi. 24. Joseph A. Gall, Liebreiche Anstalten und Ordnung Gottes die Menschen gut und gluckselig zu machen (Vienna, 1787), pp. 18-9. 25. Cf. for instance Creation, No. 31: 'Erkennen sollst du dann welch unaussprechlich Gliick der Herr uns zugedacht', and Seasons, No. 12: 'Wer spricht sie aus die Freuden alle, die deine Huld in uns erweckt'. 26. One example in Wangermann, Aufkldrung und staatsburgerliche Erziehung, p. 89. 27. Vortrag der Untersuchungskommission, Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv, Vienna, Polizeihofstelle 197 ex 1794; for the evidence concerning the spread of atheism, cf. E. Wangermann, From Joseph II to the Jacobin Trials, 2nd edn (London, 1969), pp. 16-20. 28. Karl-Heinz Osterloh, Sonnenfels und die osterreichische Reformbewegung im Zjiitalter des aufgekldrten Absolutismus, Historische Studien, no. 409 (Liibeck, Hamburg, 1970), pp. 83-4; E. Wangermann, The Austrian Achievement iy00—1800, Library of European Civilisation (London, 1973), PP- 68-71. 29. Cf. T.C.W. Blanning's essay in this collection, chapter 8 above. 30. Lessing to Nicolai, 25 Aug. 1769, G.E. Lessings sdmmtliche Schriften, xvn (Leipzig, 1904), 298. 31. Wangermann, The Austrian Achievement, pp. 131-4. 32. Osterloh, Sonnenfels und die osterreichische Reformbewegung, pp. 206-7; Wangermann, From Joseph II to the Jacobin Trials, pp. 21-3. 33. Wangermann, Aufkldrung und staatsburgerliche Erziehung, p. 15. 34. Ibid., pp. 15-16. 35. Denkschrift Josephs II (1765), A. v. Arneth (ed.), Maria Theresia und Joseph II. Ihre Correspondenz (Vienna, 1867-8), in, 360. 36. The element of governmental prompting is clearly indicated in Wittola to Dupac, 15 Nov. 1781, Kenninck, 'Extraits des lettres ...' p. 590, reporting the publication of Wittola's pamphlet on toleration. 37. Report of the British ambassador in Vienna, Sir Robert Murray Keith, 2 March 1782, quoted by Wangermann, The Austrian Achievement, p. 136. 38. O. Sashegyi, £ensur und Geistesfreiheit unter Joseph II, Studia Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, no. 16 (Budapest, 1958), pp. 182-3. 39. Ibid., pp. 226-7. 40. Wangermann, The Austrian Achievement, pp. 136-47; Leslie Bodi, Tauwetter in Wien. Zur Prosa der osterreichischen Aufkldrung (Frankfurt am Main, 1977). 41. Alxingers sdmtliche poetische Schriften (Leipzig, 1784), Anhang, p. 4. 42. Johann Pezzl, Marokkanische Briefe (Frankfurt, Leipzig [really Vienna], 1784), pp. 174-5. 43. Franz Kratter, Philosophische und statistische Beobachtungen vorziiglich die osterreichischen Staaten betreffend (Frankfurt, Leipzig, 1787), pp. 23-4. 44. Cf. the excellent analysis of this work in Bodi, Tauwetter in Wien, pp. 359-65. 45. Pezzl, Marokkanische Briefe, p. 245. 46. Johann Jakob Fezer, Wahrscheinlichkeiten, von einem unpartheyischen Beobachter entworfen (Philadelphia [really Vienna], 1785), p. 95. 47. Ibid., p. 166. 48. Ibid., p. 174. 49. This is a passage from his doctoral theses which he defended at the University of Freiburg on 9 August 1785, and from which Schlozer published extracts in his Staatsanzeigen, vm, 32 (March 1786), pp. 494-6. 50. Adam Weishaupt, 'Anrede an die neu aufzunehmenden Illuminatos dirigentes' (1782) in Richard van Dulmen, Der Geheimbund der Illuminaten: Darstellung, Analyse, Dokumentation (Stuttgart, Bad Cannstatt, 1975), p. 171. 51. (Weishaupt), 'Allgemeine Ubersicht des ganzen Ordenssystems' (1782), in ibid., pp. 212-13.

246

Notes to pages 139—143 52. On this point see also Jacques Chailley, The Magic Flute, Masonic Opera (London, 1972), pp. 74-9. 53. Mozart to his wife, 9 Oct. 1791, Mozart: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, iv (Kassel, 1963), 160. 54. The Magic Flute, Act 11, sc. 1. 55. Klaus Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism (Princeton, 1966), passim.

Chapter 10: Teich, 'Bohemia', pp. 141-163 1. Arnost Klima, 'Inflation in Bohemia in the Early Stage of the Seventeenth Century', Proceedings of the Seventh International Economic History Congress (Edinburgh, 1978), pp. 375-86. 2. Much the best treatment of the life of Sporck is still to be found in H. Benedikt, Franz Anton Graf von Sporck (1662-1783): £ur Kultur der Barockzeit in Bdhmen (Vienna, 1923). After a comparative neglect by Czech historians there is an article on Sporck recently written by Josef Hanzal, 'F.A. Sporck a pocatky osvicenstvi v Cechach' [F.A. Sporck and the Beginnings of the Enlightenment in Bohemia], Sbornik historicky, xxv (1977), 45-87. It is a perceptive attempt to assess Sporck's activities and contradictory character in relation to the contemporary social, political and religious situation abroad and at home. The author worked on hitherto untapped material in Czechoslovak archives (correspondence, diaries, accounts, etc.). 3. Among the publications, as far as can be ascertained, there were two linked with English religious history. One was Reginald Pole's letter to Thomas Cranmer translated from French, see A.M. Quirini (ed.), Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli S.R.E. Cardinalis et aliorum ad ipsum (Brescia, 1757), v, 238-74. The letter contains a strong defence of the Catholic position on the form of the Eucharist. One can only speculate about the deeper reasons that led Sporck to publish it. In one sense the publication demonstrated Sporck's loyalty to the Catholic faith. In another, it brought out Sporck's concern with Christian unification. Regarding this issue, Dermot Fenlon points to Pole's association with the neglected movement in the Catholic Church to avert the Counter-Reformation: 'The object of this movement was to establish reunion with the Protestants of Northern Europe.... His return to England coincided with the aftermath of his eirenic hopes.' Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter Reformation (Cambridge, 1972), pp ix-x. It is also not without interest to read in the authoritative New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1967), xi, 413, that Cranmer 'was never a Lutheran or Zwinglian in his doctrine of the Eucharist'. The other piece of English origin was the German translation of W. Beveridge's Private Thoughts upon Religion. This was strictly speaking not a book printed by Sporck. Apparently, Sporck acquired copies of the first German edition (1716) from the Nuremberg printer Montag and furnished them with a new title-page bearing the crest of the Sporck family. See Benedikt, Sporck, pp. 435-6. Early in 1722, reading Robinson Crusoe in French, Sporck was so taken in by it that he decided to translate the text into German, but nothing came of it. Apparently, the book strengthened his resolve to get to the bottom of the essence of man and to bring Christianity nearer to the people. Cf. Hanzal, Sporck p. 54. 4. Cf. F. Rackowsky, Kurze Erzdhlung aus der Lebensbeschreibung Ihro Excellenz Herrn Herrn Franz Antoni Graf en von Sporck verfasst von seinem Pagen . . . zu Kukus am 1. Septembris 1778. Mit Einleitung und Anmerkungen E. Back (Schatzlar [Zacler], 1938), p. 40. It has frequently been asserted that Sporck established the first masonic lodge in Bohemia and that this lay behind the action against him. However, there is no evidence for this. There is as yet no reliable historical treatment of Freemasonry in Bohemia. 5. One ducat contained 3441,905 mg gold and weighed 3490,338 mg. 6. K. Pfibram, Geschichte der b'sterreichischen Gewerbepolitik von 1740 bis i860 Auf Grund von Akten (Leipzig, 1907), 1, 9-12. For a recent paper on this subject see Herman Freudenberger,

247

Notes to pages 144-146

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

'Economic Progress during the Reign of Charles VT, Beitrdge zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte, v (1978), 625-44. Festschrift fur Hermann Kellenbenz (ed. J. Schneider): Wirtschaftskrdfte und Wirtschaftswege, vol. 11: Wirtschaftskrdfte in der europdischen Expansion. It is of interest to note (as the relevant documents in the Hofkammerarchiv in Vienna reveal) that the setting-up of the first Newcomen engine outside Britain at Nova Bafia [Konigsberg] in Slovakia during 1721-2 was due to Charles VFs direct ruling, in opposition to the sceptical and indeed negative attitude from his advisers on this matter. The basic work on the development of the manufactory stage of industry in Bohemia is A. Klima, Manufakturni obdobi Cechdch [The Manufactory Period in Bohemia] (Prague, 1955). For a discussion of methodological problems regarding the concept 'manufactory' see also Akos Paulinyi, 'Zum Problem der Manufaktur und des sozial-okonomischen Charakters der Produktionsverhaltnisse im Eisenhiittenwesen in der Slowakei', Sbornik jilozqfickej fakulty Univerzity Komenskeho Historica, xvi (1965), 31-44; Milan Myska, 'Pre-industrial Ironmaking in the Czech Lands: the Labour Force and the Production Relations circa 1350 circa 1840', Past and Present, no. 82 (1979), pp. 44-72. Arnost Klima, 'Mercantilism in the Habsburg Monarchy, with special reference to the Bohemian Lands', Historica, xi (1965), 95—119; Pfibram, Gewerbepolitik, pp. 145-8. F. Maass, Der Josephinismus. Quellen zu seiner Geschichte in Osterreich ij6o-ijgo, 5 vols (Vienna, 1951-61), 11, 217-25, 226-8, 240-53. For the text of the Toleration Patent see Maass, ibid., pp. 278-9. Originally, it was intended that it should go only through internal channels and not be officially proclaimed, cf. ibid., pp. 272-3, 278. Apart from Protestants, Orthodox believers were permitted to practise their religion openly. As to Jews, their situation became the subject of separate discussions. They were triggered off by Joseph's Handbillet of 13 May 1781 resulting in the promulgation of a patent on 2 January 1782. While ostensibly directed at the Viennese and Lower Austrian Jewry and in many ways still restrictive, it undoubtedly sowed the seeds of Jewish enfranchisement in the Habsburg monarchy. See A.F. Pfibram, Urkunden und Akten zur Geschichte der Juden in Wien, 2 vols (Vienna, 1918), 1, 440-500; Paul B. Bernard, 'Joseph II and the Jews: the Origins of the Toleration Patent, 1782', Austrian History Yearbook, iv-v (1968-9), 101-19; Wolfdieter Bihl, 'Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des josephinischen Patents fur die Juden Ungarns vom 31. Marz 1783' in H. Fichtenau & E. Zollner (eds.), Beitrdge zur neuern Geschichte Osterreichs (Vienna, Cologne, Graz, 1974), pp. 281-98. Jan Kucera, 'Pfispevek k problemum lidoveho nabozenstvi v 17. a 18. stoleti' [A Contribution to Problems of Popular Religion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries], Sbornik historicky, xxm (1976), 5-35. H.B. Garlandt, R.G. Grimsley (ed.), J. Preston, D. Maxwell White, The Age of Enlightenment iyij-iy8g (Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 19 [Introduction by R.G.] Recently it has been suggested that the fall amounted to about one quarter of the population. Cf. Alois Mika, 'K narodnostnim pomerum v Cechach po tricetilete valce' [On the National Conditions in Bohemia after the Thirty Years' War], Ceskoslovensky tasopis historicky, xxiv (1976), 535-63. R.W. Seton-Watson, A History of the Czechs and Slovaks (repr. Hamden, 1965), p. 130. Cf. Arnost Klima, 'Probleme der Leibeigenschaft in Bohmen', Vierteljahrsschrift fur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, LXII (1975), 214-28. Significantly, the word found its way into German, rendered either as die Robot or der Robot. It is, perhaps, also of interest that it was the Czech writer Karel Capek who in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), written in 1920, applied the term 'robot' to human-like automatons. Quoted by Seton-Watson, Czechs and Slovaks, p. 132. R J . Kerner, Bohemia in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1932), p. 36. On this subject a good deal has been written by historians in Czechoslovakia since 1945. Cf.

248

Notes to pages 147-149

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

Pfispe'vky k dtjindm tfidnich boju v Cechdch [Contributions to the History of Class Struggles in Bohemia], intermittently appearing in Ada Universitatis Carolinae Historica and Philosophica et Historica, since 1955. These include as monograph no. XLII the best introduction to the events in 1755, by J. Petran, Nevolnicke povstdni 1775, Prolegomena edice pramenu [The Serf Uprising 1775, Prolegomena to the Edition of Sources] (Prague, 1972). There is a useful account in English by W.E. Wright, Serf, Seigneur and Sovereign: Agrarian Reform in Eighteenth Century Bohemia (Minneapolis, 1966). See also Arnost Klima's most recent contribution: 'Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Bohemia', Past and Present, no. 85 (1979), pp. 49-67. The German and Czech texts of the patent were published by Josef Kalousek, 'Rady selske a instrukce hospodarske 1781-1850' [Peasant Ordinances and Economic Instructions 1781-1850], Archivfosky,xxv (1910), 25-8. There is a significant amount of new historical material on the negotiations of the Czech and Moravian estates with the court regarding the patent in Josef Koci, 'Patent o zruseni nevolnictvi v ceskych zemich' [Patent of the Abolition of Serfdom in the Czech Lands], Ceskoslovenskyfasopishistoricky, xvn (1969), 69-108. F.d. H[artig], Lettres sur la France, VAngleterre et Vltalie (Geneva, 1785). Ibid., p. 80. Hartig composed a poem called L'Angleterre of which the first strophe reads as follows: O fortune Pays! bien heureuse Angleterre! A tes superbes voeux le sort paroit soumis: Par les Arts bienfaisans tu regnes sur la Terre Le Trident de Neptune en tes mains est remis. Ici de sages Lois, que L'Universe renomme, Elevent la raison avec la verite, Le moindre Citoyen jouit des droits de l'homme Des droits de la Nature & de la Liberte. {Ibid., pp. 131-2). Ibid., pp. 79-80. F.v. Hartig, Kurze historische Betrachtungen ueber die Aufnahme und den Verfall der Feldwirthschaft bey verschiedenen Voelkern (Prague, Vienna, 1786), pp. 409-27. See Mikulas Teich, Krdlovskd teskd spolecnost nauk a pofdtky vedeckeho pruzkumu pfirody v Cechdch [The Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences and the Beginnings of Scientific Surveys of Natural Resources in Bohemia] (Prague, 1959) pp. 22-3. This section draws, in part, on some of my previous work: Krdlovskd teskd spolecnost nauk; 'The Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences and the First Phase of Organized Scientific Advance in Bohemia', Historica, 11 (i960), 161-81; 'Tschirnhaus und der Akademiegedanke', Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte Osteuropas, vn (i960), 93-107. The principal general work on the history of mathematics, astronomy, physics and chemistry in Bohemia and Moravia is in collective form by J. Folta, Z. Horsky, L. Novy, Irena Seidlerova, J. Smolka and M. Teich, Dejiny exaktnich ved v Ceskych zernich do konce ig. stoleti [History of Science in the Czech Lands to the End of the Nineteenth Century] (Prague, 1961). The beginnings of the Private Learned Society - the earliest date mentioned is 1769 - has received perhaps more attention than any other period in the whole history of science in Bohemia. It seems unlikely that it existed before 1774. For a review of the topic see Jifi Beran, 'Vznik Soukrome spolecnosti nauk v Cechach' [The Origin of the Private Society of Sciences in Bohemia], Vistnik Ceskoslovenske akademie ved, LXXVII (1968), 563-80, 653-71. A different standpoint not excluding the year 1769 is expressed by Vaclav Vanecek, 'Glosy k otazkam 200. vyroci vzniku Kralovske ceske spolecnosti nauk' [Glosses on Questions Regarding the 200th Anniversary of the Origin of the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences] Vhtnik Ceskoslovenske akademie vSd, LXXVIII (1969), 318-22. From the draft preamble to the Statutes of the Royal Society, composed by Hooke in 1663. See C.R. Weld, A History of the Royal Society, 2 vols (London, 1848), 1, 146.

249

Notes to pages 150-154 29. [Ph. W. Hornigk], Oesterreich ueber alles wann es nur will, 2nd edn (n.p. 1685), pp. 94f., 261-3. 30. K. Marx, Capital (London, 1938), 1, 383. 31. J o h a n n Tauffers Bohadsch, Beschreibung einigen in der Haushaltung und Faerbekunst nutzbaren Kraeutern ... (Prague, 1755); Abhandlung vom Gebrauch des Waides in der Haushaltung (Prague, n.d.); Der Dienst- und Nutzbarer Vorschlag ... (Prague, 1758). See also Zdenek Frankenberger, 'Jan Kftitel Bohac,' Vfctnik Krdlovske ieske spolefnosti nauk, xn (1950), 1-122. 32. Except for scattered remarks in eighteenth-century records there is little solid information on these meetings, called variously consessus philosophicus, consessus philosophici and consessus litterarii. As to Jesuits in Bohemia, it is necessary to differentiate between the unprogressive attitude of the order delaying the advance of science and the progressive role of its individual members in furthering and participating in astronomical, mathematical and physical enquiries (e.g. J. Stepling). Cf. also Eduard Winter, 'Die katholischen Orden und die Wissenschaftspolitik im 18. Jahrhundert' in E. Amburger, M. Ciesla & L. Sziklay (eds.), Wissenschaftspolitik in Mittel- und Osteuropa (Berlin, 1976), 85—96. 33. Although there are a number of articles on the Societas incognitorum there is as yet no reliable treatment of the subject. Under these circumstances what can be said, in general, is that the Societas incognitorum embodied an effort to organize scientific and cultural life at an early stage of the Enlightenment in the Habsburg dominions but the social, intellectual, local and personal circumstances that engendered its birth were not adequate to keep it alive. Cf. Eduard Wondrak, 'Die Olmiitzer "Societas incognitorum". Zum 225. Jubilaum ihrer Griindung und zum 200, Todestag ihres Griinders' in E. Lesky, D.K. Kostic, J. Matl & G. v. Rauch (eds.), Die Aufkldrung in Ost- und Siidosteuropa (Cologne, Vienna, 1972), pp. 215-28; A.S. Myl'nikov, Vznik ndrodnt osvicenske ideologie v ceskych zemich i8.stoleti [The Origin of the National Enlightenment Ideology in the Czech Lands in the Eighteenth Century] (Prague, 1974), pp. 143-6. 34. 'Schreiben des Herrn Ignatz von Born . . . an Herrn Franz Grafen von Kinsky', Ueber einen ausgebrannten Vulkan bey der Stadt Eger in Boehmen (Prague, 1773), pp. 1-3, 11-16. 35. N. Poda, Kurzgefasste Beschreibung der bey dem Bergbau zu Schemnitz in Nieder-Hungarn errichteten Maschinen (Prague, 1771). 36. Mikulas Teich, 'Ignaz von Born als Organisator der wissenschaftlichen Bestrebungen in der Habsburger Monarchic' in Amburger, Ciesla & Sziklay (eds.), Wissenschaftspolitik, pp. 195205; Mikulas Teich , 'Born's Amalgamation Process and the International Metallurgic Gathering at Skleno in 1786', Annals of Science, XXXII (1975), 305-40. These articles contain further references to the life and work of Born, but the definitive study of this leading figure of the Enlightenment in the Habsburg monarchy still remains to be written. 37. Kinsky has received little serious attention. For a recent appreciation see Josef Haubelt, 'Frantisek Josef Kinsky', Vfctnik Ceskoslovenske akademie ved, LVIII (1969), 560-77. 38. 'Schreiben des Herrn Grafen von K . . . an Herrn von Born ueber einige mineralogische und lithologische Merkwuerdigkeiten', Abhandlungen einer Privatgesellschaft in Boehmen zur Aufnahme der Mathematik, der vaterlaendischen Geschichte, und der Naturgeschichte, 1 (1775), 243-52. 39. 'Antwort des Herrn von Born, auf das Schreiben des Herrn Grafen von K...', ibid., 1 (1775), 253-6340. The paragraph on Dobner draws considerably on two studies by Milan Kudelka: Spor Gelasia Dobnera 0 Hdjkovu kroniku [Gelasius Dobner's Controversy over Hajek's Chronicle] (Prague, 1964); 'Gelasius Dobener', Vfctnik Ceskoslovenske akademiefvH, LXXVIII (1969), 205—22. 41. The principal historical study on Voigt is still that of J. Hanus, Mikulds* Adaukt Voigt, Cesky buditel a historik [Mikulas Adaukt Voigt, a Champion of Czech Revival and Historian] (Prague, 1910). For an interpretation of Voigt's theoretical and practical activities in their social relations see Frantisek Kutnar, 'Mikulas Adaukt Voigt profil historika a vlastence' [Mikulas Adaukt Voigt, a Profile of a Historian and Patriot], Vfctnik Ceskoslovenske akademie vid, LXXIX (1970), 75-84.

250

Notes to pages 154-158 42. 'Adaukt Voigts aus den frommen Schulen Abhandlung ueber die Naturgeschichte Boehmens', Abhandlungen der Boehmischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, 1 (1785), 43-104. This was one of two answers submitted in response to the prize essay competition on the state of knowledge of natural resources in Bohemia launched by the Bohemian Society of Sciences in 1784. 43. A. Voigt, Abbildungen Boehmischer und Maehrischer Gelehrten und Kuenstler nebst kurzen Nachrichten von ihrem Leben und Wirken, 4 parts (Prague, 1773-82); Effigies virorum eruditorum atque artificum Bohemiae et Moraviae, una cum brevi vitae operumque ipsorum enarratione, 2 parts (Prague, 1773-5). From the beginning the venture had the encouragement and financial support of Born. Voigt was responsible for parts 1 and 2. After he was made Professor of universal and literary history at the Vienna University and also the first curator of the University Library in 1777, the task of publishing and editing of the rest of the series fell on the shoulders of his main collaborator and friend Pelcl. 44. Voigt, Abbildungen, 1, 61-7. Voigt's sympathies did not extend to the Taborites and their military leaders Zizka and Prokop Holy and, in general, to the social aspects of the Hussite movement. On the other hand, he treated appreciatively the Unity of Brethren and its famous bishop Jan Amos Komensky [Comenius]. 45. Ibid., pp. 118-22. Among studies prepared for press just before he died was one called Geschichte der Juden in Boehmen. See Hanus, Voigt, p. 95. 46. See reference to Pelcl in Voigt, Abbildungen, n. 43 above. What follows is based primarily on Zdenek Simecek, 'Frantisek Martin Pelcl', Vfctnik Ceskoslovenske akademie vSd, LXXVIII (1969), 410-25.

47. Cf. J. Prokes, PoMtky Ceske spoletnosti nauk do konce XVIII. stoleti, Dil I. iyy4~iy8g [The Beginnings of the Bohemian Society of Sciences to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Part I, 1774-1789] (Prague, 1938), pp. 227-31. 48. That the book met a real need is testified by the fact that its German version went through three editions during the author's life (1774, 1779, 1782) and there was a posthumous one with a somewhat changed title (1817). The fourth part of the Czech version covering the period 1375 to 1429 remained in manuscript. 49. F.M. Pelcl, PamUi [Memoirs] (Prague, 1931). 50. Dobrovsky has received much critical and uncritical attention. M. Machovec's Josef Dobrovsky (Prague, 1964) is a useful if brief attempt at synthesis though it falls into the latter category. It contains references to earlier literature, a chronological list of Dobrovsky's work and also a number of excerpts from it (in Czech). 51. Dobrovsky's basic works in this area are: Ausfuehrliches Lehrgebaeude der boehmischen Sprache ... (Prague, 1809), revised as Lehrgebaeude der boehmischen Sprache (Prague, 1819); Geschichte der boehmischen Sprache und Litteratur (Prague, 1792), revised as Geschichte der boehmischen Sprache und aeltern Literatur. Ganz umgearbeitete Ausgabe (Prague, 1818); Institutiones linguae Slavicae dialecti veteris ... (Vienna, 1822). 52. Fragmentum Pragense euangelii S. Marci vulgo autographi, see B.Ryba (ed.), Spisy a projevy J. Dobrovskeho [Works and Addresses of J. Dobrovsky] (Prague, 1953), p. v; 'Literarischer Betrug (1824)'; 'Vorlaufige Antwort auf des Herrn W.S. Ausfalle im Archive Nr. 64 vom 28. Mai 1824'; 'Geschichte der bohmischen Literatur . . . von Joseph Jungmann...', see M. Herman (ed.), Spisy a projevy J. Dobrovskeho (Prague, 1974), vi, 152-66, 194-210; I.V. Jagic (ed.), Pisma Dobrovskago i Kopitara [Letters of Dobrovsky and Kopitar] (Wiesbaden, 1966), pp. 605-26. This is a photographic reproduction of the edition published in St Petersburgh [Leningrad] in 1885. 53. Boehmische und Maehrische Litteratur auf das Jahr iy8o (Prague, 1780-4), pp. 5-6. The periodical appeared under two other titles at intervals between 1779 and 1787: Boehmische Litteratur auf das Jahr iyyg (Prague, 1779); Litterarisches Magazin von Boehmen und Maehren (Prague, 1786-7). 54. Cf. Grete Klingenstein, 'Vorstufen der theresianischen Studienreformen in der Regierungs251

Notes to pages 158-160

55. 56.

57. 58. 59.

zeit Karls VT, Mitteilungen des Instituts fur osterreichische Geschichtsforschung, LXXVI (1968), 327-77. On this subject consult Klima, Manufakturni obdobi, pp. 396-407. On the relationship between education, the economy and the state in Austria during this period see Gernot Heiss, 'Erziehung der Waisen zur Manufakturarbeit Padagogische Zielvorstellungen und okonomische Interessen der maria-theresianischen Verwaltung', Mitteilungen des Instituts fur osterreichische Geschichtsforschung, LXXXV (1977), 316-31. C.H. Seibt, Von dem Einflusse der Erziehung auf die Glueckseligkeit des Staats (Prague, 1771), reprinted in Beitrdge zur Osterr. Erziehungs- und Schulgeschichte, vm (1906), 115-35. Johann Ignaz Felbiger (1724-88), Augustinian abbot at Sagan in Silesia; he was asked by Maria Theresa to advise on the reorganization of lower education in the Monarchy. F. Kindermann, Nachricht von der Landschule zu Kaplitz in Bohmen unter dem Schutze Sr. Excellenz des Herrn Graf en Bouquoi (Prague, 1771), reprinted in J. Aigner, Der Volk- und Industrieschulen Reformator Bischof Ferdinand Kindermann (Vienna, 1867), pp. 40-78. See also J.A. Helfert, Die Grundung der osterreichischen Volksschule durch Maria Theresia ( = Die osterreichische Volksschule), 1

(Prague, i860), 429-34. 60. In view of the importance of the Gymnasium it may be of interest that only thirteen of these institutions were permitted to continue to operate, ibid., 419. 61. Cf. 'I crossed the whole kingdom of Bohemia, from south to north; and being very assiduous in my enquiries, how the common people learn music, I found at length, that, not only in every large town, but in all villages, where there is a reading and writing school children of both sexes are taught music' P.A. Scholes (ed.), An Eighteenth Century Musical Tour in Central Europe and the Netherlands Being Dr Charles Burney's Account of his Musical Experiences (London, 1959), pp. 131-2. The journey took place in 1772. 62. As an educator Kindermann was both practitioner and thinker. For a general statement of Kindermann's views on education which he saw as an integrated system composed of three levels (low, middle and high) it is possible to consult his speech made at the opening of the normal school in Prague (15 Nov. 1775), Von dem Einflusse der niedern Schulen auf das gemeine Leben, auf die mittlern und hohen Schulen (Prague, 1776). His approach was based on proceeding from the concrete to the abstract, from what could be perceived or experienced directly to the remote. If the function of schooling was to produce citizens useful to the state and worthy members of the church, then the most important virtues to be taught were obedience, orderliness, cleanliness, diligence and industriousness. Cf. 'The most enlightened countries convince us of the truth that the more enlightened a nation is, the more industrious it is. In contrast, laziness and indolence are always a consequence of stupidity' (p. 15). As Bishop of Litomefice (1790) - he took the name 'von Schulstein' - Kindermann was explicitly concerned with peasants' disobedience and he condemned their revolts. See Ueber den Gehorsam vier Anreden an das Landvolk gehalten von dem Leitmaritzer Bischof, von Schulstein bey der kanonischen Visitazion im Jahre 1792 (Prague, 1793). 63. Josef Hanzal, 'K dejinam nizsiho skolstvi pred rokem 1775' [On the History of Elementary Education Before 1775], Ada Universitatis Carolinae - Historia Universitatis Carolinae Pragensis, vi ( ! 965)5 67-83; idem, 'Vzdelanost a lidova osveta v pocatcich narodniho obrozeni' [Culture and Popular Education in the Beginnings of the National Revival], Sbornik historicky, xvm (1971), 39-69; E. Wangermann, Aufkldrung undstaatsburgerliche Erziehung Gottfried van Swieten als Reformator des osterreichischen Unterrichtswesen 1781-1791 (Vienna, 1978), p. 59. For material on 'industrial schooling' consult A. Weiss, Geschichte der Theresianischen Schulreform in Bohmen (Vienna, Leipzig, 1906), I published in Beitr'dge zur Osterr. Erziehungs- und Schulgeschichte, vn (1906). 64. Cf. Jiri Cerny, 'K nekterym problemum osvicenskeho mysleni v Cechach' [On Some Problems of Enlightened Thinking in Bohemia] in J. Popelova-Otahalova & K. Kosik (eds.), Fibsqfie v dijindch leskeho ndroda [Philosophy in the History of the Czech Nation] (Prague,

252

Notes to pages 161-168

65. 66.

67. 68.

69. 70.

1958), pp. 90-108. See also the discussion pursuant upon this paper, which was presented at a national conference on the history of Czech philosophy in 1958, ibid., pp. 108-10. J. Klabouch, Osvicenske prdvni nauky v Zeskjch zemich [Enlightened Legal Sciences in the Czech Lands] (Prague, 1958); K. Kosik, Ceskd radikdlni demokracie [Czech Radical Democracy] (Prague, 1958); Arnost Klima, 'Die tschechische Friihaufklarung im Zusammenhang mit der Entwicklung des Manufakturwesens', Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte Osteuropas, vn (i960), 234-44; B. Slavik, Od Dobnera k Dobrovskemu [From Dobner to Dobrovsky] (Prague, 1975); MyPnikov, Vznik. Dopisy Josef a Dobrovskeho s Augustinem Helfertem [Letters of Josef Dobrovsky and Augustin Helfert], see J. Volf & F.M. Bartos (eds.), Spisy a projevy J. Dobrovskeho, xx (1941), 21. [I. v. Born], 'Vorrede', Abhandlungen einer Privatgesellschaft in Boehmen, zur Aufnahme der Mathematik, der vaterlaendischen Geschichte, und der Naturgeschichte, 1 (1775), 2-3; idem, 'Vorbericht', ibid., 11 (1776, n.p.); also 'Schreiben Born . . . an Kinsky', Vulkan. Hartig, Aufnahme und Verfall, pp. 381, 407-8. Mikulas Teich, 'Joachim Sternberg in der Geschichte der wissenschaftlichen Beziehungen zwischen Bohmen, Russland und Deutschland', Jahrbuch fiir Geschichte der UdSSR und der volksdemokratischen Lander Europas, vil (1963), 439-56. Regarding this theme consult Frantisek Graus, 'Die Bildung eines Nationalbewusstseins im mittelalterlichen Bohmen (Die vorhussitische Zeit)', Historica, xm (1966), 5-45Eugen Lemberg, 'Die nationalen Verhaltnisse in den Prager Kreisen zur Zeit der Aufklarung', see F. Liewehr (ed.), Slavistische Studien Franz Spina zum sechzigsten Geburstag von seinen Studenten (Reichenberg [Liberec], 1929), pp. 118-46. The history of the awakening of Austrian national consciousness, so important for the understanding of the 'German' national question, has yet to be elaborated. Cf. Anton Burghardt & Herbert Matis, 'Die Nation-Werdung Oesterreichs - Historische und soziologische Aspekte', Berichte, xm (1976), 1-69 (published by Osterreichische Gesellschaft fur Wirtschaftssoziologie). C h a p t e r 11: F r a n g s m y r , 'Sweden', p p . 164-175

1. The literature dealing with the Enlightenment in Sweden is generally in Swedish. Therefore I will refer to a very select bibliography. A special generosity is, however, shown to literature in English. For the political background see Ingvar Andersson, A History of Sweden (London, 1956); Eli F. Heckscher, Economic History of Sweden [Cambridge, Mass., 1954; new edn 1968]; and B J . Hovde, The Scandinavian Countries, 1720-1865, vol. 1 (New York, London, 1943; new edn 1972), ch. iv. For the Enlightenment see S. Lindroth, Svensk Idrdomshistoria, 3 vols (Stockholm, 1975-8), vol. ill: Frihetstiden, pp. 497-571; and H. Schiick & K. Warburg, Illustrerad svensk litteraturhistoria, 7 vols (Stockholm, 1926-32), vol. ill. 2. S. Lindroth, Kungl. Vetenskapsakademiens historia, Ij3g-i8i8,1:1 (Stockholm, 1967), 217-377, for the economic propaganda. 3. S. Lindroth, A History of Uppsala University, itfj-igjj (Uppsala, 1976), pp. 92-146. 4. T. Segerstedt, Den akademiska friheten under frihetstiden, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, no. 22 (Uppsala, 1971). 5. T. Frangsmyr, Wolffianismens genombrott i Uppsala, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, no. 26), with an English summary: 'The Emergence of Wolffianism at Uppsala' (Uppsala, 1972), PP- 215-376. Ibid., pp. 156-69. 7. J. Ihre, preses, De principiis et nexu religionis naturalis et revelatae, A. Knos, respondens (diss., Upsaliae, 1742). 8. Frangsmyr, Wolffianismens, p. 158. 9. Ibid., pp. 163-6. 10. Ibid., pp. 188-205.

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Notes to pages 168-178 11. N. Wallerius, preses, Diss. sistens particulam primam vindiciarum religionis contra D:num De la Mettrie, G. Norden respondens (diss., Upsaliae, 1756). 12. C. Annerstedt, Upsala Universitets historia, 11 vols (Uppsala, Stockholm, 1877-1931), 111:1, 219-24. 13. Lindroth, Svensk Idrdomshistoria, p. 511. 14. P. Forsskal, Tankar om borgerliga friheten (Stockholm, 1759). 15. Frangsmyr, Wolffianismens, pp. 205-14. Cf. J. Dellner, Forsskals jilosoji (Stockholm, 1953). 16. P. Forsskal, Dubia de principiis philosophiae recentioris (Goettingae, 1756). 17. Cf. T. Frangsmyr, 'Swedish Science in the Eighteenth Century', History of Science, xn (1974), 29-42. 18. Lindroth, Kungl. Vetenskapsakademiens historia, pp. 378-455. 19. Cf. E. Malmestrom, Carl Von Linne (Stockholm, 1964), and T. Frangsmyr, Geologi och skapelsetro, Lychnos-Bibliotek, no. 26, with an English summary: 'Geology and the Doctrine of the Creation' (Uppsala, 1969), pp. 216-27. 20. A.G. Hogbom, Nivafb'rdndringar i Norden (Goteborg, 1920), and Frangsmyr, Geologi och skapelsetro, pp. 198-216. 21. S. Lindroth, 'Naturvetenskaperna och kulturkampen under frihetstiden', Lychnos (1957/8), pp. 181-92, with a summary: 'Science and Enlightenment in Sweden 1740-1765'. 22. Frangsmyr, Geologi och skapelsetro, p. 231. 23. Lindroth, Svensk Idrdomshistoria, pp. 501-14. 24. C.G. Uhr, Anders Chydenius ij2g-i8oj. A Finnish Predecessor to Adam Smith, Meddelanden fran Nationalekonomiska institutionen vid Handelshogskolan vid Abo Akademi, no. 6 (Abo, 1963)25. Segerstedt, Den akademiska fribeter, pp. 26-9. 26. S. Boberg, Gustaf HI och tryckfriheten 1774-1787 (Stockholm, 1951). Cf. O. Siren, 'Kina och den kinesiska tanken i Sverige pa 1700-tal', Lychnos (1948-9), pp. 1-84, for the physiocratic influence on Gustav III. 27. For mysticism see M. Lamm, Upplysningstidens romantik, 2 vols (Stockholm, 1918). Cf. Karin Johannisson, Magnetisorernas tid. De animala magnetismen i Sverige, Lychnos-Bibliotek, no. 25, with a summary in English: 'Mesmerism in Sweden' (Uppsala, 1974), pp. 50-110. 28. Stockholms-Posten, 2/1, 3/1 (1787). Cf. Schiick & Warburg, Illustrerad svensk litteraturhistoria, iv, 260-348. 29. N. von Rosenstein, Fors'dk till en afhandling om upplysningen (1793), in Samlade skrifter, 3 vols (Stockholm, 1838), 11, 133-400. 30. Ibid., p. 375. Chapter 12: Dukes, 'Russia', pp. 176-191 1. Lord Macartney, An Account of Russia, 1767 (London, 1768), p. vi. 2. Sbornik imperatorskogo russkogo istoricheskogo obschchestva [Collection of the Imperial Russian Historical Society], 148 vols (St Petersburg, 1867-1916), xn, 248. 3. For comments on this, see Paul Dukes, 'Catherine IPs Enlightened Absolutism and the Problem of Serfdom' in William E. Butler (ed.), Russian Law: Historical and Political Perspectives (Leyden, 1977), especially pp. 93-4. 4. See, for example, the essays by James Cracraft, 'Feofan Prokopovich', and by Marc Raeff, 'The Enlightenment in Russia and Russian Thought in the Enlightenment', in John G. Garrard (ed.), The Eighteenth Century in Russia (Oxford, 1973), especially pp. 29-30, 76; Walter Gleason, 'Political Ideals and Loyalties of Some Russian Writers of the Early 1760s', Slavic Review, xxxiv, no. 3 (1975), pp. 560-75; and P.N. Miliukov, Ocherki po istorii russkoi kuVtury [Essays in the History of Russian Culture], 3 vols (Paris, 1931-7), HI, 249-58. 5. D.I. Fonvizin, 'Letters from My Second Journey Abroad, 1777-1778' in Harold B. Segel,

254

Notes to pages 178-185 The Literature of Eighteenth-Century Russia, 2 vols (New York, 1967), 1, 311, 325, 338, 339. 6. N.M. Karamzin, Letters of a Russian Traveler, ij8g-ijgo, trans. Florence Jonas (New York, London, 1957), pp. 195, 218-19, 221, 322, 332. 7. Quoted in J.L. Black, Nicholas Karamzin and Russian Society in the Nineteenth Century (Toronto, i975),P-xv8. E.N. Williams, The Ancien Regime in Europe: Government and Society in the Major States, 1648-iy8g (London, 1970), p. 17. And see B.F. Porshnev, 'Les rapports politiques de l'Europe occidentale et de l'Europe orientale a l'epoque de la guerre de trente ans', in Xle Congres international des science historiques, rapports iv: histoire moderne (Goteborg, Stockholm, Uppsala, i960), pp. 136-63. 9. Marc Raeff, 'The Well-Ordered Police State and the Development of Modernity in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Europe: An Attempt at a Comparative Approach', American Historical Review, LXXX, no. 5 (1975), pp. 1222-4. 10. See, for example, L.R. Lewitter, 'Poland, the Ukraine and Russia in the Seventeenth Century', Slavonic and East European Review, xxvn (1948-9), 157-71 and 414-19; S.F. Platonov, Moscow and the West, trans. Joseph L. Wieczynski (Hattiesburg, 1972), pp. 97-141. 11. Paul Dukes, 'Some Aberdonian Influences on the Early Russian Enlightenment', CanadianAmerican Slavic Studies (forthcoming). 12. Raeff, 'The Well-Ordered Police State', pp. 1242-3. 13. Ibid., pp. 1230, 1234. 14. This process is well described in the contributions to N. M. Druzhinin et al., Absoliutizm v Rossii, XVII-XVIIIvv. [Absolutism in Russia, xvii-xvm Centuries] (Moscow, 1964). 15. See, for example, Brenda Meehan-Waters, 'The Russian Aristocracy and the Reforms of Peter the Great', Canadian-American Slavic Studies, vm, no. 2 (1974); S.M. Troitskii, Russkii absoliutizm i dvorianstvo XVIIIv.: Formirovanie biurokratii [Russian Absolutism and the Nobility of the 18th Century: The Formation of the Bureaucracy] (Moscow, 1974). 16. Annual Register for the Tear 1J62, p. 11. 17. Miliukov, Ocherki, in, 218-507; Boris N. Menshutkin, Russia's Lomonosov: Chemist, Courtier, Physicist, Poet (Princeton, 1952). 18. Miliukov, Ocherki, ill, 304, writes: 'Her belief in the power of ideas and in the unlimited power of her position, in its turn, was indissolubly linked with her belief in herself; in her own psychological make-up she found what was lacking in the other sources of her belief.' 19. Iu. M. Lotman, 'Russo i russkaia kul'tura XVIII veka' [Rousseau and Russian Culture of the Eighteenth Century] in M.P. Alekseev (ed.), Epokha prosveshcheniia: Iz istorii mezhdunarodnykh sviazei russkoi literatury [The Epoch of the Enlightenment: From the History of the International Connections of Russian Literature] (Leningrad, 1967), pp. 231, 235. 20. Sbornik, vn, 318; Lotman, 'Russo', p. 215. 21. Lotman, 'Russo', pp. 231-5. 22. Paul Dukes (ed. and intro.), Russia under Catherine the Great, vol. 2: Catherine the Great's Instruction (Nakaz) to the Legislative Commission, IJ6J (Newtonville, 1977), pp. 11-12. 23. Ibid., pp. 9-10, 14-16. 24. Taranovsky and Chechulin quotations from ibid., p. 18. 25. See, for example, V.O. Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia [Works] 8 vols (Moscow, 1956-9), v, 6 - 8 . 26. I accept the typification of Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974). 27. Dukes, Russia under Catherine, 11, 19-20. 28 Miliukov, Ocherki, 11, 75-8. 29. Quoted in J.L. Black, Citizens for the Fatherland: Education and the Teaching of History in Eighteenth-Century Russia (forthcoming). 30. J.L. Black, 'Citizenship Training and Moral Regeneration as the Mainstay of Russian Schools', Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, CLXVII (1977), 449-50. See also Max J. Okenfuss, 'Education and Empire: School Reform in Enlightened Russia', Jahrbiicher fur

255

Notes to pages 185-1 go Geschichte Osteuropas, Neue Folge, vol. 27, pt 1 (1979). 31. Miliukov, Ocherki, ill, 298-301, 399-400. And see A. Lentin (ed.), Voltaire and Catherine the Great: Selected Correspondence (Newtonville, 1974). 32. Miliukov, Ocherki, HI, 399-400; Robert O. Crummey, The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist (Madison, Wis., 1970), p. 196; A.W. Fisher, 'Enlightened Despotism and Islam under Catherine I F , Slavic Review, xxvn, no. 4 (1968); M.T. Florinsky, Russia: A History and An Interpretation, 2 vols (New York, 1955), 1, 557, 605. 33. Quotation from G.L. Freeze, 'Social Mobility and the Russian Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century', Slavic Review, XXXIII, no. 4 (1974), p. 662. See also G.L. Freeze, The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), especially p. 222. On theology, see Robert L. Nichols, 'Orthodoxy and Russia's Enlightenment, 17621825' in Robert L. Nichols & Theofanis G. Stavrou (eds.), Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime (Minneapolis, 1978). Nichols takes a somewhat more optimistic view than most writers on the subject. 34. See Roger P. Bartlett, Human Capital: The Settlement of Foreigners in Russia, 1762-1804 (Cambridge, 1979). 35. Paul Dukes (ed. and trans.), Russia under Catherine the Great, vol. 1: Select Documents on Government and Society (Newtonville, 1978), p. 162. 36. Quotations from Catherine and Derzhavin in John T. Alexander, Autocratic Politics in a National Crisis: The Imperial Russian Government and Pugachev's Revolt (Bloomington, 1969), p. 89. See also Miliukov, Ocherki, m, 374-5. 37. Dukes, Russia under Catherine, 1, 124. 38. Max Beloff, 'Russia' in A. Goodwin (ed.), The European Nobilities in the Eighteenth Century: Studies of the Nobilities of the Major European States in the Pre-Reform Era (London, 1953), p. 189. 39. Helju Aulik Bennett, 'Evolution of the Meanings ofChin\ University of California Slavic Studies, x (1977), 28. 40. Quoted in Paul Dukes, Catherine the Great and the Russian Nobility: A Study based on the Materials of the Legislative Commission of 1767 (Cambridge, 1967), p. 179. 41. Miliukov, Ocherki, in, 376-7. 42. See Marc Raeff, 'The Empress and the Vinerian Professor: Catherine IPs Projects of Government Reform and Blackstone's Commentaries', Oxford Slavonic Papers, new series, vol. VII (1974). 43. Quoted by R.E.Jones, The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility, 1762-1785 (Princeton, 1973), p. 268n. 44. Raeff, 'The Well-Ordered Police State', p. i239n. 45. Ibid., p. 1238. The implication of my essay is that, for the nobility at least, the intermediary bodies already enjoyed a de facto existence. For a good description of how at least one group of nobles fulfilled such a role, see David L. Ransel, The Politics of Catherinian Russia: The Panin Party (New Haven, 1975). 46. Raeff, 'The Weil-Ordered Police State', p. 1237. 47. Sbornik, xxm, 593, 503. 48. Marc Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility (New York, 1966), in fact by no means equates the intelligentsia with the entire nobility; on p. 12 he implies that nobles who were not members of the intelligentsia were 'inert', and on p. 13 makes clear that these would comprise the vast majority of the class. 49. Miliukov, Ocherki, m, 403-4. 50. Allen McConnell, A Russian Philosophe: Alexander Radishchev, 1749-1802 (The Hague, 1964), pp. 200-8. 51. See, for example, Iu. la. Kogan, Ocherki po istorii russkoi ateisticheskoi mysli XVIIIv. [Essays on the History of Russian Atheistic Thought in the Eighteenth Century] (Moscow, 1962). 52. Quoted by Raeff, 'The Empress', p. 18.

256

Notes to pages igo-ig2 53. D.I. Fonvizin, 'Rassuzhdenie o nepremennykh gosudarstvennykh zakonakh' [Dissertation on Immutable State Laws], Sobranie sochinenii [Collected Works], 2 vols (Moscow, Leningrad, 1959), p. 265. Fonvizin's views are put into context in Ransel, The Politics. 54. Radishchev was at first condemned to death and then sent into exile in 1790; Fonvizin was no longer allowed to publish his works, but was allowed to remain at home and was still writing until his death in 1792. 55. N.M. Karamzin, 'Nechto o naukakh, iskusstvakh i prosveshchennii' [On Science, Art and Enlightenment], Izbrannye sochineniia [Selected Works], 2 vols (Moscow, Leningrad, 1964), p. 140. Karamzin continues in apostrophe to Rousseau: 'And when you, to whom a superior power has entrusted the fate of man, want to spread on earth the province of virtue, love learning and do not think that it can be harmful.' 56. See, for example, A. Lentin (ed. and trans.), M.M. Shcherbatov: On the Corruption of Morals in Russia (Cambridge, 1969). 57. On Novikov, see various articles by W. Gareth Jones, including 'The Closure of Novikov's Truten\ Slavonic Review, no. 118 (1972); 'Novikov's Naturalized Spectator', in Garrard, The Eighteenth Century. Fonvizin and Karamzin as well as Novikov were involved in the masonic movement, which Miliukov characterizes as a typical response by young Russians to their intellectual confusion in the 1770s and 1780s. See his Ocherki, ill, 405-38. On the origins of Russian Freemasonry, see A.G. Cross, 'British Freemasons in Russia during the Reign of Catherine the Great', Oxford Slavonic Papers, new series, iv (1971), 43-5. 58. See, for example, Ivan K. Luppol, 'The Empress and the Philosophe' in Marc Raeff (ed. and intro.), Catherine the Great: A Profile (New York, London, 1972); Arthur Wilson, 'Diderot in Russia' in Garrard, The Eighteenth Century. Also omitted from this essay for reasons of space have been Russian developments in agriculture and the natural sciences. On these, see for example M. Confino, Domaines et seigneurs en Russie vers lafindu XVI He siecle: Etude de structures agraires et de mentalites economiques (Paris, 1963); the contributions by G. L'E. Turner, Iu. Kh. Kopelevich and R.W. Home to the panel chaired by W.F. Ryan on 'The Institutionalisation of Science in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Russia' in A.G. Cross (ed.), Great Britain and Russia in the Eighteenth Century: Contacts and Comparisons, Proceedings of an international conference held at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, n - 1 5 July 1977 (Newtonville, 1979). 59. M.M. Shtrange, Demokraticheskaia intelligentsiia Rossii v XVIII veke [The Democratic Intelligentsia in Russia in the Eighteenth Century] (Moscow, 1965). 60. Miliukov, Ocherki, 111, 387-8. 61. G.S. Vinskii, Moe vremia [My Time] (St Petersburg, 1914), reprinted Newtonville, 1973, pp. 42-3. 62. For example, see M.D. Kurmacheva, 'Ob uchastii krepostnoi intelligentsii v Krest'ianskoi voine I773~i775gg-' [On the Participation of the Serf Intelligentsia in the Peasant War of 1773-1775] in L.V. Cherepnin et al., (eds.), Kresfianskie voiny v Rossii XVII-XVIII vekov: problemy, poiski, resheniia [Peasant Wars in Russia in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Problems, Investigations, Conclusions] (Moscow, 1974). 63. L.A. Kogan, Krepostnye voVnodumtsy XIXv. [Serf Freethinkers of the Nineteenth Century] (Moscow, 1966), p. 55. 64. Kurmacheva, 'Ob uchastii'. 65. This is not to say that tsarism was not shaken by the French Revolution. See Paul Dukes, 'Russia and the Eighteenth-Century Revolution', History, vol. LVI (1971). Chapter 13: Pole, 'America', pp. 192-214 1. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (London, 1965)^.632.

257

Notes to pages ig2—2o8 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

As remarked by Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976), p. 278. Donald H. Meyer, The Democratic Enlightenment (New York, 1976). Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason (New York, 1977), p. xi. May, Enlightenment, p. xiv. Ibid., p. xv. Ibid., p. xvii. Ibid., p. xviii. Quoted in Commager, Empire, p. 73. Quoted in Alexandra Oleson & Sanford C. Brown (eds), The Pursuit of Knowledge in Early America (Baltimore and London, 1976), pp. 1 0 - n . May, Enlightenment, p. 293. Leviathan, II, s. 4. Worthington C. Ford (ed.), Journals of the Continental Congress (Washington, 1904), 1, 163-73. Duncan J. MacLeod, Slavery, Race and the American Revolution (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 21, 59, 99, 182. Commager, Empire, p. 1, although he introduces it with a misquotation. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955). On the slave trade question see MacLeod, Slavery, pp. 31-4. Bernard Bailyn (ed.), Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750—1766 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965)The Rough Draft is printed, among other places, by Carl Becker in The Declaration of Independence (New York, 1922; repr., N.Y., 1942), pp. 141—51. John P. Diggins, 'Slavery, Race, and Equality: Jefferson and the Pathos of the Enlightenment', American Quarterly, XXVIII, 2 (Summer 1976), 206-28. Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (New York, 1978), pp. 223-8. The course of Jefferson's intellectual life, however, reminds us of the importance he attached to intellectual interests and abilities; even within his own scale of values, his comments on Negroes can hardly be regarded as flattering. Many of Mr Wills's conclusions in this and other parts of his book are overdrawn. L.H. Butterfield (ed.), The Letters of Benjamin Rush (Princeton, 1951), 11, 757-8, 785-6. Samuel Stanhope Smith, Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1787), ed. Winthrop D.Jordan (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), pp. 11, 19, 28-30, 71-2, !O3-5Merrill Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (New York, 1970), p. 148. Morton White, The Philosophy of the American Revolution (New York, 1978), pp. 20-3. Ibid., pp. 36-41; 50. Douglas Sloan, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal (New York, 1971),

PP- 73-428. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Ibid., p. 81. Ibid., pp. 112-15. Ibid., p. 201. Ibid., pp. 23; 63-4; 82 Commager, Empire of Reason, pp. 16, 81. Ibid., pp. 5, 21. Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (Philadelphia, 1751). Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R.H. Campbell & A.S. Skinner (Oxford, 1976), 1, 388. 36. Joyce Apple by, 'America as a Model for the French Radical Reformers of 1789', William and Mary Quarterly, XXVIII (April 1971), 267-86. 37. Cadwallader Colden, History of the Five Nations (Ithaca, 1958), pp. vi, vii, xxi. 38. May, Enlightenment, p. xvii.

258

Notes to pages

208-216

39. Commager, Empire of Reason, p. 36, quoting Philip Foner, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York, 1945), 11, 2iff. 40. Jacob Viner, The Role of Providence in the Social Order (Philadelphia, 1972), p. 59. 41. Donald Winch, Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (Cambridge, 1978), PP- 133-34, i57> J7o42. Robert G. McCloskey (ed.), The Works of James Wilson (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 11, 506. 43. Jacob E. Cooke (ed.), The Federalist (Middletown, 1961), p. 257. 44. Ibid., pp. 521-30. 45. J.R. Pole, The Pursuit of Equality in American History (Berkeley, London, 1978), chs. 3 and 4. 46. Sloan, Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 197-8; May, Enlightenment, p. 279. 47. H. Shelton Smith, Changing Conceptions of Original Sin: A Study in American Theology since 1750 (New York, 1955), p. 68. 48. Ibid., p. 97. 49. Ibid., pp. 71-3. 50. Sloan, Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 149-84. 51. Shelton Smith, Original Sin, pp. 146-95. 52. May, Enlightenment, pp. 253-4. 53. John Adams [anon.], Discourses on Davila: A Series of Papers on Political History Written in the Tear ijgo, and then published in the Gazette of the United States By an American citizen (Boston, 1805), pp. 28-9, 31, 32, 38-9, 46, 48, 71, 72, 77. 54. Lester Cappon (ed.), Adams — Jefferson Letters (Chapel Hill, 1959), 11, 354-6; 358. 55. Quoted by Meyer, The Democratic Enlightenment, p. 147 Afterword: Teich, pp. 215—217 1. D.S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus. Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, 1969), p. 1. 2. D.S. Foner, Labor and the American Revolution (Westport, London, 1976), p. 80.

259

Further reading

This bibliography is divided into two sections. The first consists of general works on the Enlightenment, and the second lists the suggestions of the authors of the individual papers for further reading. Both sections are intended as brief guides for students, and supplement the more detailed references contained in the notes to each essay.

General There is a wide and critical bibliography of general Enlightenment studies up to the late 1960s in Peter Gay's history listed below. Notices and critical reviews of works since then can be found in such journals as Eighteenth Century Studies and the Philological Quarterly. The following are intended as a broad introductory guide. Applewhite, H.B. & D.G. Levy, 'The Concept of Modernization and the French Enlightenment', Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, LXXXIV (1971), 53-96 Becker, C , The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, pbk edn, London, 1964

Behrens, Betty, review of Gay, Enlightenment, in Historical Journal, xi (1968), 190-5 Bene, E. (ed.), Les Lumieres en Hongrie, en Europe centrale et en Europe orientale, Budapest, I97 1 Bene, E. & I. Kovacs (eds.), Les lumieres en Hongrie, en Europe centrale et en Europe orientale, Budapest, 1975 Berlin, I., The Age of Enlightenment, New York, 1956 Boas, George, 'In Search of the Age of Reason' in E.R. Wasserman (ed.), Aspects of the Eighteenth Century, Baltimore, 1965, pp. 1 —19 Brinton, C., The Portable Age of Reason Reader, New York, 1956 Cassirer, E., The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. F.C.A. Koelln & J.P. Pettegrove, Boston, 1955 Cobban, A., In Search of Humanity, London, i960 Crocker, L., An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth-Century France, Baltimore, The Age of Enlightenment, New York, 1969 Darnton, R., 'In Search of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas', Journal of Modern History, XLIII (1971), 113-32 Ford, Franklin, 'The Enlightenment: Towards a Useful Definition' in R.F. Brissenden (ed.), Studies in the Eighteenth Century, Canberra, 1968, pp. 17-29 260

Further reading Gay, P., The Enlightenment, An Interpretation, 2 vols, London, 1967-70 Deism. An anthology, Princeton, 1968 The Party of Humanity, New York, 1971 The Enlightenment, New York, 1973 Hampson, N., The Enlightenment, Harmondsworth, 1968 Hazard, P. The European Mind 1680-1J15, Eng. trans, J.L. May, Harmondsworth, 1964 European Thought in the Eighteenth Century, Eng. trans. J.L. May, Harmondsworth, 1965 Ischreyt, H. et al. (eds.), Studien zur Geschichte der Kulturbeziehungen in Mittel- und Osteuropa, vols. i-v (1972-9) Marsak, L., The Enlightenment, New York, 1972 Rossi, P., introd., Lezioni sulVIlluminismo, Milan, 1980 Soboul, A., G. Lemarchand & M. Fogel, Le siecle des lumieres, 2 vols, Paris, 1977 Venturi, F., Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment, Cambridge, 1971 Wilson, A.M., 'The Philosophes in the Light of Present Day Theories of Modernization', Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, LVIII (1967), 1893-1913 Winter, E. et al, (eds.), Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte Osteuropas, (1958-)

England There are hardly any books dealing with the Enlightenment as such in England. At best there are books covering aspects of eighteenth-century English ideas, and many of these are somewhat dated. Clifford, J.L. (ed.), Man versus Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge, 1968 Colie, R.L., Light and Enlightenment. A Study of the Cambridge Platonists and the Dutch Arminians, Cambridge, 1957 Cragg, G.R., Reason and Authority in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, 1964 Halevy, E., The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, Eng. trans., London, 1928 Harris, R.W., Reason and Nature in Eighteenth-Century Thought, London, 1968 Nicolson, M.H., Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, Ithaca, 1959 Plumb, J.H., The Commercialization of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century England, Reading, 1973 Raphael, D.D., British Moralists 1650-1800, 2 vols, Oxford, 1969 Read, D., The English Provinces, c. ij6o-ig6o, London, 1964 Redwood, J., Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England, 1660-1750, London, 1976 Rousseau, G.S. & Roy Porter (eds.), The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science, Cambridge, 1980 Schofield, R.E., The Lunar Society of Birmingham, Oxford, 1963 Willey, B., The Eighteenth-Century Background, London, 1949

Scotland The best introductions to eighteenth-century Scottish history are T.C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People, 1560-1830 (London, 1969) and Scotland in the Age of 261

Further reading Improvement, eds. N.T. Phillipson & R. Mitchison (Edinburgh, 1970). A.C. Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History (London, 1976) sketches the social and institutional background. E.C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume (London, 1970) is a classic biography of the greatest of Scottish philosophers and an important account of the social world of Scottish letters. L. Schneider, The Scottish Moralists on Human Nature and Society (Chicago, 1967) and J. Rendall, The Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment 1707-76 (London, 1978) provide useful collections of documents on different aspects of the moral, social and historical thought of the Scottish writers. G. Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 1945) is a classic if dated analysis of the subject. Wealth and Virtue: Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, eds. I. Hont & M. Ignatieff (forthcoming), promises to be an important contribution to the study of the science of man from a civic-humanist perspective. The history of Scottish science, neglected in this essay, is best approached through A. Donovan, Philosophical Chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1975) and History of Science, vol. xn, pt 2 (1974) which is entirely devoted to the subject. The history of eighteenth-century Scottish literature is the subject of D. Craig's brilliant and provocative Scottish Literature and the Scottish People, 1680-1830 (London, 1961).

The important question of the impact of Scottish culture on America can be approached via William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 11, which is devoted to the subject, and A. Hook, Scotland and America: A Study of Cultural Relations, 1750-1835 (Glasgow, 1975). Finally, no one anxious to read their way into the social world of the Scottish Enlightenment should ignore two contemporary documents, A. Carlyle, Anecdotes and Characters of the Times, ed. J. Kinsley (Oxford, 1973) and, above all, James Boswell's private papers and journals, one of the most remarkable of Scotland's literary achievements. The Tale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell have been appearing under different titles and the names of different editors since 1950.

France Baczko, B., Lumieres de Vutopie, Paris, 1978 Belin, J-P., Le Mouvement philosophique de 1748 a i78g, Paris, 1913 Bolleme, G. (ed.), Livre et societe dans la France du dix-huitieme siecle, Paris, The Hague, J 6 9 5 Darnton, R., Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France, Cambridge, Mass., 1968 Ehrard, J., L'Idee de nature en France dans la premiere moitie du dix-huitieme siecle, 2 vols, Paris, 1963 Gay, P., Voltaire's Politics, Princeton, 1959 Hazard, P., The European Mind, and European Thought in the Eighteenth Century, Eng. trans., London, 1953, 1954 Mornet, D., Les Origines intellectuelles de la revolution frangaise, 1715-1787, Paris, 1933 Payne, H.C., The Philosophes and the People, New Haven, 1976 Tocqueville, A. de, L'Ancien Regime et la revolution, Paris, 1955 262

Further reading Netherlands That there is as yet no major work of synthesis in any language dealing with the Enlightenment in the Dutch Republic suggests not only how ambitious, but how ambiguous, any such undertaking might be. There are, however, several helpful and illuminating scholarly studies on the various constituent aspects of the phenomenon discussed in this chapter. The most helpful introduction as well as the most thorough and up-to-date bibliographical guide is P J . Buijnsters 'Les lumieres hollandaises' in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century LXXXVII (1972), 197-215. Jeroom Vercruysse has for many years been a pioneer in eighteenth-century Dutch intellectual history, and his 'Voltaire et al Hollande' in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. xvi (1966) goes well

beyond its immediate brief to consider wide-ranging issues of the relationship between the philosophes and their Dutch counterparts. My own views, such as they are, lean heavily on Vercruysse's scholarship and insight. Buijnsters and Vercruysse have also written on the Franco-Dutch connection in 'Litteraire betrekkingen tussen Frankrijk en Nederland in de i8de eeuw' in Documentatieblad Werkgroep i8de Eeuw (1970). This study group on the eighteenth century, meeting annually and publishing its papers is the major source for publishing the results of research and work in progress on Dutch cultural and intellectual history of this period. Many of the papers are in French, a few in English, and any student of the topics I have treated will find the documentatiebladen indispensable. Other useful studies on the influence or the experience of the philosophes in the Netherlands are G. Charlier, 'Diderot et la Hollande', Revue de litterature comparee (1947), pp. 190-229, and W. Gobbers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Holland, een onderzoek naar de invloed van de mens en het werk (Ghent, 1963). See also S. Dresden, 'L'Encyclopedic aux Pays-Bas' in Cahiers de VAssociation Internationale des Etudes Frangaises (1952), pp. 23-30. Gobbers and Dresden both come to negative conclusions concerning the impact of the 'lumieres' in Holland. Two major works concern themselves with the role of the Dutch in diffusing sceptical and enlightened ideas in Europe; Eugene Hatin, Les Gazettes de Hollande et la presse clandestine aux XVII

et XVIIIe

siecles and Yves Dubosq, Le Livre frangais et son

commerce en Hollande de 1750 a IJ8O (Amsterdam, 1925). For further works on the organization and activities of the Dutch printing and publishing trade see note 28 above (p. 232). The major authority is I. van Eeghen, De Amsterdam boekhandel 1680-1 y25 (Amsterdam, 1960-7). Works on particular Dutch writers and philosophers in languages other than Dutch are very few. Mention should be made of W J . O . Pienaar, English Influences in Dutch Literature and Justus van Effen as an Intermediary and the edition of Frans Hemsterhuis', Lettre sur VHomme et ses rapports published by Georges May (New York 1964). For the earlier period there is C. Louise Thijssen-Schoule, Nederlandse Cartesianisme (Amsterdam, 1954), and for the more political and historical aspects of Dutch culture Kossmann's study of Elie Luzac (note 58 above, p. 234), and Leeb's sensitive and shrewd account of the role of history in eighteenth-century ideology, The Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution (The Hague, 1973). Any reader concerned to catch the flavour of Dutch culture and in particular its religiosity should not omit the splendid R.B. Evenhuis, Ook Dat Was Amsterdam, vol. iv (Amsterdam, 1974), one of the most individual and striking of all Dutch history books written in the last decade. 263

Further reading Switzerland Bonnet, C , Memoires autobiographiques de Ch. Bonnet de Geneve, Paris, 1948 Guyot, C , Le Rayonnement de VEncyclopedie en Suisse frangaise, Recueil des travaux de la faculte des lettres, no. 26, Neuchatel, 1955 Im Hof, U., Aufkldrung in der Schweiz, Monographien zur schweizer Geschichte, no. 5, Bern, 1970 Ancien Regime, Aufkldrung, Revolution und Fremdherrschqft 1648-1815, Quellenhefte zur Geschichte der Schweiz, Stuttgart, 1974 Jost, F., J.J. Rousseau, Suisse: etudes sur sa personality et sapensee, 2 vols, Fribourg, 1961 Marx, J., 'Ch. Bonnet contre les lumieres 1738-1850', Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, nos. 156-7 (1976) Mockli-Cellier, M., La Revolution frangaise et les ecrivains suisses-romands iy8g-i8ij, Neuchatel, Paris, 1931 Morton, M., Switzerland from Roman Times to the Present, trans. J. Innes, London, 1971; first published 1924 Muralt, B.L. de, Lettres sur les Anglois et les Frangois et sur les voiages, eds. C. Gould & C. Oldham, Paris, 1933 Rivoire, E., Bibliographie historique de Geneve au XVI He siecle, 2 vols, Geneva, 1897 Roulet, L.-E., Voltaire et les Bernois, La Chaux-de-Fonds, 1950 Spink, J.S., J.J. Rousseau et Geneve, Paris, 1934 Wernle, P., Die schweizerische Protestantismus im XVIII. Jahrhundert, 2 vols, Tubingen, 1923-5 Italy For further reading in the English language, see in general: Venturi, Franco, Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century, ed. S. Woolf, London, 1972 For the political background in the South: Acton, H.M., The Bourbons of Naples, London, 1956 For the social background: Vaussard, M., Daily Life in Eighteenth-Century Italy, Eng. trans., London, 1962 For biography: Boswell, James, An Account of Corsica, the Journal of a Tour in that Island, and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli, London, 1768 Haynes, R., Philosopher King: The Humanist Pope Benedict XIV, London, 1970 Maestro, Marcello, Cesare Beccaria and the Origins of Penal Reform, Philadelphia, 1973 Thrasher, P.A., Pasquale Paoli, London, 1970 For the Enlightenment in Lombardy see the bibliography under Austria in this volume. For the reforming Catholic movement in Tuscany: Bolton, C.A., Church Reform in Eighteenth-Century Italy, The Hague, 1969 Protestant Germany Bruford, W.H. Germany in the Eighteenth Century. The Social Background of the Literary Revival, Cambridge, 1935 264

Further reading Kiesel, H. & P. Munch, Gesellschaft und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert. Voraussetzungen und Entstehung des literarischen Marktes in Deutschland, Munich, 1977 Kopitzsch, F. (ed.), Aufkldrung, Absolutismus und Burgertum in Deutschland, Munich, 1976 Piitz, P., Die Deutsche Aufkldrung, Darmstadt, 1978 Vierhaus, R., Deutschland im Zeitalter des Absolutismus, Gottingen, 1978 Catholic Germany Aretin, Karl Otmar Freiherr von (ed.), Der aufgekldrte Absolutismus, Cologne, 1974 Blanning, T.C.W. Reform and Revolution in Mainz 1743-1803, Cambridge, 1974 Braubach, Max, 'Die katholischen Universitaten Deutschlands und die franzosische Revolution', Diplomatie und geistiges Leben im iy. und 18. Jahrhundert. Gesammelte Abhandlungen, Bonn, 1969 Maria Theresias jiingster Sohn Max Franz, letzter Kurfiirst von Kb'ln und Fiirstbischof von Miinster, Vienna, Munich, 1961 van Diilmen, Richard, 'Antijesuitismus und katholische Aufklarung in Deutschland', Historisches Jahrbuch, vol. LXXXIX (1969). 'Zum Strukturwandel der Aufklarung in Bayern', ^eitschrift fur bayerische Landesgeschichte, vol. xxxvi (1973) Der Geheimbund der Illuminaten, Stuttgart, 1975 Goy, Barbara, Aufkldrung und Volksfrdmmigkeit in den Bistumern Wiirzburg und Bamberg, Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte des Bistums und Hochstifts Wurzburg, vol. xxi, Wurzburg, 1969 Haass, Robert, Die geistige Haltung der katholischen Universitaten Deutschlands im 18. Jahrhundert, Freiburg, 1952 Hammerstein, Notker, 'Zur Geschichte der deutschen Universitaten im Zeitalter der Aufklarung', Universitdt und Gelehrtenstand 1400-1800, eds. Hellmuth Rossler & Giinther Franz, Limburg, 1970 Aufkldrung und katholisches Reich. Untersuchungen zur Universitdtsreform und Politik katholischer Territorien des Heiligen Rdmischen Reiches deutscher Nation im 18. Jahrhundert, Berlin, 1977 Hansen, Joseph, Quellen zur Geschichte des Rheinlandes im Zeitalter der franzb'sischen Revolution, vol. 1, Bonn, 1931 Lenk, Leonhard, 'Die Aufklarung in Bayern', Bayerische Symphonie, ed. Herbert Schindler, vol. 11, Munich, 1968 Merkle, Sebastian, Die katholische Beiirteilung des Aufkldrungszeitalters, Berlin, 1909 Preclin, E., 'L'Influence du jansenisme franc.ais a l'etranger', Revue Historique, vol. CLXXXII (1938)

Raab, Heribert, Die Concordata Nationis Germanicae in der kanonistischen Diskussion des 17. bis ig. Jahrhunderts. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der episkopalistischen Theorie in Deutschland, Wiesbaden, 1956 Rogier, L.J., 'Die Kirche im Zeitalter der Aufklarung und Revolution', Geschichte der Kirche, eds. L J . Rogier, R. Aubert & M.D. Knowles, vol. iv: Die Kirche im Zeitalter der Aufkldrung, Revolution und Restauration, Einsiedeln, Zurich, Cologne, 1966 Wagner, Hans, 'Die politische und kulturelle Bedeutung der Freimaurer im 18. Jahrhundert', Beforderer der Aufkldrung in Mittel- und Osteuropa. Freimaurer, Gesells265

Further reading

schaften, Clubs, eds. Eva H. Balasz, Ludwig Hammermayer, Hans Wagner & Jerzy Wojtowicz, Berlin, 1979

Austria Barton, Peter F., Jesuiten, Jansenisten, Josephiner, Studien und Texte zur Kirchengeschichte und Geschichte, 2nd series, vol. 4, Vienna, 1978 Bodi, Leslie, Tauwetter in Wien. %ur Prosa der b'sterreichischen Aufkldrung

iy8

Frankfurt am Main, 1977 Kovacs, Elisabeth (ed.), Katholische Aufkldrung und Josephinismus, Vienna, 1979 Thomson, Katharine, The Masonic Thread in Mozart, London, 1977 Wangermann, Ernst, The Austrian Achievement iyoo-1800, London, 1973

Bohemia Background reading excluding works mentioned in the notes would include: Auty, R., Czech and Slovak Thought in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century, R a p p o r t

presente au Colloque slavistique sur le theme 'Le mouvement des idees dans les pays slaves pendant la seconde moitie du XVIII siecle, Uppsala, 20-21 August i960, Tirage special, Edizioni di Richerche Slavistiche, n.d. Bosl, K. (ed.), Handbuch der Geschichte der bohmischen Lander, 4 vols, Stuttgart, 1967-74,

vol. 11 Hroch, M., Die Vorkdmpfer der nationalen Bewegung bei den kleinen Volkern Europas. Eine vergleichende Analyse zur gesellschaftlichen Schichtung der patriotischen Gruppen, Prague, 1968

Macek, J., Jean Hus et les traditions Hussites (XVe-XIXe siecles), Paris, 1973 Otahal, M., 'Die Anfange der tschechischen Politik (bis 1848)' in V. Precan (ed.), Ada Creationis: Independent Historiography in Czechoslovakia ig6g-ig8o,

presented to

the XVth International Congress of Historical Sciences, Bucharest, August 1980, n.p., 1980, pp. 92-146 Polisensky, J., The Thirty Tears' War, London, 1971 Schaller, K. et al., Jan Amos Komensky Wirkung eines Werkes nach drei Jahrhunderten,

Heidelberg, 1970 Winter, E., Barock, Absolutismus und Aufkldrung in der Donaumonarchie, Vienna, 1971

Sweden Andersson, I., A History of Sweden, London, 1956 Frangsmyr, T., Wolffianismens genombrott i Uppsala, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, no. 26, with an English summary: 'The Emergence of Wolffianism at Uppsala', Uppsala, 1972, pp. 215-37 'Swedish Science in the Eighteenth Century', History of Science, xn (1974), 29-42 Hovde, B.J., The Scandinavian Countries iy20-1865, vol. 1, New York, London, 1943; new edn 1972, ch. iv Lindroth, S., A History of Uppsala University i^yy-igyy, Uppsala, 1976 266

Further reading Russia General interpretations of the Enlightenment in English such as Gay, Hampson and Hazard say very little about Russia, nor is there any single specialist study. As is obvious from the essay, the writer who has made the most challenging contribution in recent years has been Marc Raeff, whose books and articles are listed in the notes. One of Raeff s pieces, as well as other worthwhile contributions, is to be found in John G. Garrard (ed.), The Eighteenth Century in Russia (Oxford, 1973). Another useful collection is A.G. Cross (ed.), Great Britain and Russia in the Eighteenth Century: Contacts and Comparisons, Proceedings of an international conference held at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, 11-15 July 1977 (Newtonville, 1979). The journal Canadian-American Slavic Studies has announced some forthcoming issues exclusively devoted to Russia and the Enlightenment. Among helpful works not cited in the essay is Hans Rogger, National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1969). For an introduction to works in Russian, see M.P. Alekseev (ed.), Epokha prosveshcheniia: iz istorii mezhdunardnykh sviazei russkoi literatury (Leningrad, 1967), and A. G. Kuz'min, 'Russkoe prosvetitel'stvo XVIII veka', Voprosy istorii, vol. 1 (1978). America This list does not include works mentioned in the notes. Boorstin, Daniel J., The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson, Boston, 1948 The Americans: The Colonial Experience, New York, 1958 Cremin, Lawrence A., American Education: The Colonial Experience, New York, 1970 Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823, Ithaca, 1975 Foner, Eric, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, New York, 1976 Haraszti, Z., John Adams and the Prophets of Progress, Cambridge, Mass., 1952 Hawke, David Freeman, Paine, New York, 1974 Hindle, Brooke, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, I735~i78g, Chapel Hill, 1956 Hofstadter, Richard, America at 1750: A Social Portrait, New York, 1971 Howe, John R., The Changing Political Thought of John Adams, Princeton, 1966 Jefferson, Thomas, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden, New York edn, 1972 Labaree, Leonard W. et al. (eds.), The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, New Haven, 1964 Woolf, Harry, The Transits of Venus . . . Princeton, 1955

267

Index

Abraham a Santa Clara, 146 absolutism, 126, 138-9, 141, 164, 180, 184, 186, 191; enlightened, 122, 124, 137; reforming, 136, 140 academic freedom, 93 Acton, General, 99 Adams, J., 192, 197, 205; Defence of the Constitution of the United States; 207, 212; Discourses on Davila, 213, 214

Addison, J., 2, 5, 26, 27, 29, 30, 34, 35 aesthetics, 156 agriculture, 92, 105, 131, 148, 150, 163-5, 217 Aleksei Mikhailovich, 179 Alembert, J.le R. d', 7, 93, 101, 166, 175, 177 Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek, 11 o

Alxinger, J.B., 136 American Revolution, 216 Amort, E., 119 Amsterdam, 116 Amsterdam Athenaeum Illustriae, 67 Anglophilia, 1,2, 36, 46, 56 Anhalt-Dessau, 116 Anichkov, D.S., 190 Archenholz, W. von., 11 Argens, Marquis d', Lettres juives, 54 aristocracy, 96, i n , 116, 125, 141-2, 146-7, 151-2, 156, 162-3, X77> !8i, 185-7, 191,217 arts, 95, 150, 156°., 174, 178, 182 astronomy, 91, 170 atheism, 133, 145, 149, 167, 174 Athens, 32, 40, 56 Aufkldrung, 106, 108, n o , 112-14, 118, 120-1, 123,126 Augustinians, 129 Babeuf, G., 52 Bacon, F., 41 Bahrdt, K.F., 108 Bailie, P., 59 Barbeyrac, J., 78 Barelli, E., 93

Barnabites, 99 Barnave, A., 52 Bartram, J., 205 Barueth, 67 Basedow,J.B., 100, i n , 116 Basnage,J., 56,57 Bavaria, 123, 126 Bayle, P., 4, 54, 56, 57, 60, 78, 79, 82, 106, 168-9 Beattie, J., 20, 37 Beccaria, C , 91, 96-9, 101, 103, 105, 121, 160, 182-4 Bellegarde, G. (Dupac), 120, 122 Benedict XIV, 104, 129 Benedictines, 119 benevolence, human, 198 Bentham, J., 2, 7, 9, 98, Book of Fallacies, 14 Bergman, T., 170, 174 Berkeley, Bishop G., 29 Berlin, 108, n o , 116 Berlin Academy, 108 Berlinische Monatsschrift, 107

Bernini, D.S., 91 Bertrand, E., 88 Bicker, J., 50 Biffi, G., 96, 99 BirchfeldJ.F., 184 Blackstone, W., 187, 190 Blair, H., 20, 32, 34, 36 Blake, W., 16 Blanc, F.A., 134 Bocage, Mme du, 9, 11 Bochkarev, V.N., 187 Bodmer, J.J., 72, 76, 82 Boerhaave, H., 29, 68, 85 Bohac [Bohadsch], J.K. [J.T.], 150-2 Bolingbroke, Lord H. St J., 2, 93, 168 Bondt, N., 66 Bonnet, C., 72, 84, 85-7 Born, I., 139, 151-2, 161 botany, 170 bourgeoisie, 125, 162, 217

268

Index Breitinger,JJ., 72, 76 Brissot, J.P., 50, 82 Brockes, B.H., 115 Buffon, G.L., 101, 160, 207 bureaucracy, m , 116, 179 Burlamaqui, J.J., 78, 194, 203 Burmau, P., 66 Burke, E., 6, 15, 17, 45-6, 52 Burns, R., 20 Butler, Bishop J., 9

Collins, A., 2,56, 168 Cologne, 120, 122, 124 Condillac, E.B., 86, 101; Essaie sur Vorigine des connaissances humaines, 64

Cqffi, il, 96 Cambridge Platonists, 93 cameralism, 113, 179-80 Campe, J.H., 109 Camusat, D.F., 64 Canning, W., 17 capital punishment, 97ff. capitalism, 9, 36, 39, 106, 144, 146, 148, 153, 163, 216-17 'Caps', 173 Caraccioli, D., 99 Carlile, R., 16 Carlyle, A., 32, 34, 38 Carlyle, T., 17 Carmichael, G., 29 Cartesianism, 73, 77, 78, 80; see also Descartes Catherine (the Great), 57, 176, 181-91 Cato, M.P., 178 Cavalier, J., 60 Cazales, J., 51 Celsius, A., 170-1 censorship, 60, 136, 139, 143, 165, 168, 169, 189 Chambers, Ephraim, Encyclopaedia, 3 Charlemagne, 178-9 Charles IV, 155 Charles VI, 143, 158 Charles XII (of Sweden), 169 Charles (King of Naples), 92 Charriere, Mme de, 83 Chastellux, Marquis de, 207 Chechulin, N.D., 184 chemistry, 165, 170, 172 Chesnaye des Bois, M. de la, Lettres hollandaises, 58 Chesterfield, Lord, 8 Chubb, T., 168 Chydenius, A., 173 Cicero, 29 citizenship, 73-4, 75-6 civic morality, 22, 27, 28, 29, 30, 35-6, 38, 40 Clarke, S., 93, 176 Clement XIV, 129 clubs and learned societies, 15, 27, 31, 38; learned societies, 69, 192, 200 coffee houses, 5, 27, 36 Coleridge, S.T., 7

Condorcet, Marquis de, 7, 49 Constant, B., 82 Corsica and the Enlightenment, 99ff. Counter-Reformation, 119, 128, 145, 156 Cousin, V., 20 Coyer, Abbe, 62 Cromartie, Earl of, 25 Cromwell, O., 178-9 crypto-Protestantism, 143 Cudworth, R., 93 Cumberland, R., 194 Dalin, O., 166, 171 Dalrymple, Sir J., 32, 35, 38 Darwin, E., 7, 15 Defoe, D . , Robinson Crusoe, 3, 4

Degola, E., 103 Deism, 66, 73, 78, 79, 80, 83, 86, 87, 89, i n , 133, 168 Deken, A., 70 Derzhavin, G.R., 186 Descartes, R., 56, 57, 59, 79, 93; see also Cartesianism Desnitsky, S.E., 190 despotism, 100, 137-9; enlightened, 174, 216 Dessau, 109 Diderot, D., 1, 2, 3, 44, 45, 48, 57, 59, 68, 87, 93> 99> 104-5, ri 5> X77> ^ 4 , 194; Bijoux indiscrets, 4 4 ; La Religieuse 4 4 ; Peniees Philosophiques, 6 1 ; Rive de d'Alembert, 4 4 ; Voyage de Hollande, 5 8 ; see also Encyclopedie

Dobner, G., 153-4 Dobrovsky, J., 155, 156, 157, 161 Dollond,J., 170 Dominicans, 129 Dostoevsky, F.M., 170 Dresden, n o , 116 Diilmen, Richard van, 119, 123 Dupac: see Bellegarde Du Tillot, G.L. (Felino), 101 economics (discipline), 93-4, 103 economy, 128, 144-5, 152, 165, 179 Edinburgh, 19-40 passim, 116 education, 78, 90, 100-1, 107, i n , 116, 119, 121, 129, 140, 157-8, 165, 170, 185, 204, 217; elementary (primary), 95, 122, 131-2, 135, 157, 159; higher, 91, 103, 119; industrial, 157-60, 163; religious, 113, 130, 132; secondary, 119, 122, 159; social, 113 Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, 182 empiricism, 4, 73, 74, 77, 78, 80 Ems, Congress of, 124

269

INDEX encyclopaedia, 3; Yverdon encyclopedia, 82 Encyclopedie, 3, 84, 87, 206

Episcopalianism, 119-20, 122 estates, i n , 134, 141, 145, 164, 181 ethics, 93, 100, 156 Eugene (of Savoy), 2, 151 Eybenschiitz, J., 155 Fabricius, J., 115, Facchinei, F., 98-9 famine, 92, 146 Farquharson, H., 180 Febronius, see Hontheim, J.N. von Feder, T.G.H., 121 Feith, Rheinvis, 70 Felbiger, J.I., 131, 159-60 Felice, F.B. de, 87 Ferdinand II, 141 Ferguson, A., 19, 20, 32, 34, 36-7, 38, 40, 194, 209 feudalism, 92, 94-5, 147-8, 153-4, 163, 217 F e z e r J J . , 138 Fichte,J.G., 52 Filangieri, G., 93-5, 101, 105 Firmian, K.J., 97, 104 Fitzroy, A.H., see Grafton Fletcher, A. of Saltoun, 22-5, 34 Fonvizin, D., 177, 179, 190 Forsskal, P., 169, 173 Francis II, 148 Francis (of Lotharingia), 150 Francke, A.H., 111 Franklin, B., 56, 95, 199, 205, 206 Frederick II (the Great), 61, 104, 107-8, 134, 166 free market economy, 11, 36 Freemasonry, 95, 99, 106, i n , 123, 125, 138-9, 161, 199 freethinkers, 4, 85 Freiburg im Breisgau, 121 French Revolution, 5if., 108, 123-4, 126, 140, i75> 190 Frisi, P., 99 Fulda, 120 Fiirstenberg, K.E., 152 Galanti, J.M., 93 Galiani, F., 91, 93, 103, 104-5 Galileo, G., 91-2, 96 Gall,J.A., 132-3 Genovesi, A., 91-4, 100-5 Giannone, P., 2, 97-103 Gibbon, E., 75, 77, 78, 91, 94, 102, 178 Godunov, B., 178, 181 Goethe, J.W. von, 41, 46, 157 Goeze,J.M., i n , 114 Goldoni, E., 102

Goldsmith, O., 15 Golitsyn, V.V., 180 Gordon, P., 180 Gottingen, n o , 113 Grafton, 176 Gravesande, W. 's, 66 Great Chain of Being, 196 Great Northern War, 114 Grimaldi, D., 94-5 Grimaldi, F., 93-4 Grimm, F.M., 188 Griselini, F., 102 Grosley, P.J., 55 Grotius, H., 29, 94, 176, 179 Grove, H., 168 Guardi, F., 102 guilds, 135, 143 Gustav III, 173-5 Hajek, V. (of Libocany), 153-4 Halle, 113 Haller, A. von, 72, 77, 82, 84-7 Hamburg, n o , 111, 114-16 Hamilton, A., 213 Hammerstein, N., 121 Hanover, n o happiness, 30, 32, 33, 35, 38, 39, 58, 213 harmony, 194, 198 Hartig, F., 147-9, 157 Hartley, D., 15 Hastings, W., 178 'Hats', 164 Haydn, J., 10, 133 Heinke, F.J., 130, 134 Helvetius, C.A., 41, 45, 97-8, 173 De VEsprit, 45, 47, 64; De VHomme, 58 Henry IV, 135 Herbert, Earl of Cherbury, 169 Herder, J.G., 113 heresy, 128, 131, 143, 167-8 Hermes Trismegistus, 172 historiography, 91, 102, 119, 153, 171 Hobbes, T., 10, 85, 94, 169, 187; Leviathan, 210 Hoffman, C.G., 109 Hofstede, P., 67 Hohendorf, Georg Wilhelm, Baron of, 2 Holbach, Baron d', 6, 48, 82; Systeme de la nature, 48

Holberg, Ludvig, 166 homosexuality, witch-hunts in Holland, 67 Hontheim, J.N. von [Febronius] 119, 122 Hopken, Anders Johan von, 173 Hornigk [Hornick, Hoernigk], Ph. W. von, H9-5O Huguenots, 59, 73 humanity, 138, 147, 216 Hume, D., 4, 19, 20, 26, 29-31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 270

Index 37, 38, 40, 41, 48, 82, 94, 164, 168, 178, 213; History of England, 30; The Treatise of Human Nature, 30; Of a Perfect Commonwealth, 31

Hus, J., 145, 154-6 Hussites, 143, 148, 154, 156 Hutcheson, F., 29-30, 37, 40, 98, 168, 194, 209 Hydrology, 170 Ihre,J., 168 Illiteracy, 92, 110 Illuminism, 94, 100, 121, 123-5, J38—9, J 88 Immigrant labour, 59 inclusiveness, n , 13, 30, 31 industrialization, 106, 149 industry, 94, 99, 103, 143, 150, 157, 159, 163, 165,216 Inquisition, 92, 95 intelligentsia, 125, 156, 186, 188, 191 Intieri, B., 103 Italian unification, 94 Ivan (the Great), 178, 181 Ivan (the Terrible), 181 Jacobins, 95 J a n i g o n , F., Etat Present de la Republique des Provinces- Unies, 58

Jansenism, 102-3, I20 > I29> I 3 0 ' X 4 2 Jefferson, T., 192, 196, 200-14 passim; Notes on Virginia, 207

Jeffrey, F., 26 Jesuits, 104, 112, 119-20, 128-30, 151, 156, i59? 185 Jews, 106, 155, 186 Johnson, Dr Samuel, 7, 13, 15, 47 Joseph II, 96, 99-100, 127, 129-31, 136-7, 139, 144, 154, 156, 160, 162 Journals and magazines, 57, 65; Algemeen Magazijn van Wetenschap, Kunst en Smaak, 6 9 ; De Borger, 6 5 ; De Denker, 6 6 ; De Grijsaard, 70; De Politieke Opmerker, 70; De Spectator der Studenten, 70; De Vaderlander, 70; Dublin Journal, 29; Edinburgh Review, 20, 26; The Federalist, 210; Gazette de Berne, 8 2 ; Lounger, The, 20, 26; Mercure Suisse, 8 2 ; Mirror, The, 20, 26; Nederlandsche Spectator, 6 5 ; Nieuw Algemeen Vaderlandsch Magazijn, 6 9 ; Spectator, The, 26, 27; Tatler, The, 26, 27

Jurieu, P., 60 jurisprudence, see law jury system, 97 Justi,J.H.G., 184 Kames, Lord, 20, 26, 35, 38 Kant, I., 23, 107, 108, 118, 124, 160, Karamazin, N., 178-9, 190 Karl Theodor (Bavarian Elector), 123 Kassel, 110

Kaunitz, W.A., 99, 129, 144 Kellgren,J.H., 174-5 Kindermann, F., 159-60 Kinsky [y], F.J., 151-2, 161 Kinsky [y], Count J., 158 Klingenstierna, S., 166, 168, 170 Knos, A., 167, 168 Kozel'sky, la. P., 190 Kratter, F., 137 Lafayette, G., 207 La Mettrie, J.O. de, 168; VHomme machine, 61,85 language, 157, 163 Lavoisier, A.J., 49 law(s),92,94-5,97, 109, 122, 135, 148, 178-9, 182, 190; natural, 120 Leche,J., 172 Leibniz, G.W., 86-7, 128 Leipzig, 110, 116 Leland,J., 168 Lenin, N.I., 180 Lepeletier, F., 50-1 Less, G., 112 Lessing, G.E., 106, 114, 117, 127, 134, 160 Levesque, P., 178 Liberte et egalite, 111

liberty, 56-7, 70, 71, 148, 194, 195, 200, 201; intellectual freedom, 54, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 81 libraries, 75, 77, 199 Linnaeus, C., 150, 160, 169-72, 174, 205 Lippe, 116 Locke, J., 2, 4, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 29, 41, 56, 86, ^7, 92, 95, 102, 160, 164, 166, 174, 185, 194, 196, 197, 198, 203 Lombardy, Enlightenment in, 90 Lomonosov, M.V., 182 Longano, F., 94 Louis XI, 178-9 Louis XIV, 135 Louis XV, 129 Lovisa Ulrika, 166 Lutheranism, 112-13 Luzac, E. 61, 71 Mably, G., Entretiens de Phocion, 64

Macartney, G., 176-7, 179 Mclntyre, A., 4 Mackenzie, H., 20, 26, 35 Macpherson, J., 33 Madison, J., 210 Magnanima, L., 100, 101 Mainz, 119, 120, 123-5 Malebranche, N., 93 Malesherbes, G., 45 Malthus, T.R., 17, 102

271

INDEX Napoleon, 102 Mandeville, B. de, 82 Naryshkin, Prince, 58 manufacture, 143-4, 149-50, 153, 158-9, Nash, B., 12 164-5 natural history, 131, 150-1, 154 Marat, J.P., 51 natural law, 71, 193, 196, 208 Maria Theresa, 96, 129, 131, 134, 135, 144, natural man, 207 150—1, 158, 160, 162 natural order, 201 Marmontel, J.F., Belisaire, 67 natural philosophy, 193 Martens, W., 109 Nature, 41, 42, 196 Martini, K. A., 134 Naumann, H.F., 113 Marx, K., 105 Necker, J., 49, 52; Mme Necker, 83 materialism, 73, 84, 85, 88, 89, 111, 145, 190 Nepomucky, J., 154 mathematics, 91, 149, 172 newspapers, 200 Maupertuis, P.L.M., 170 Matveev, A.S., 180 Newton, I., 2, 3, 4, 10, 29, 41, 48, 63, 74, 84-9 May, H.F., 6, 14; The Enlightenment in America, passim, 93, 127, 160, 170, 180, 195, 196, 198 Newtonian cosmic order, 195, 196 192, 198, 208,211 Nicolai, F., i n , 114 mechanics, 149-50 Nieuwentyt, B., 64, 66 medicine, 109, 150 Nostitzs (Nostic), 155-6 Mendelssohn, M., 107-8 Novikov, N.I., 190 mercantilism, 56, 62, 94, 143, 149, 164, 179-80 numismatics, 154 Mercier, L., 50-1, 53; Van 2440, 51 Mest, N., 135 Meyer, J.H., 111 oaths in court, 97 Milan, Enlightenment in, 96ff. obscurantism, 91, 100, 103 Miliukov, P.N., 182, 185, 189 Ogier, C , 58 Millar, J., 19, 35 Oppenheimer, D., 155 Mirabeau, J., 56, 71, 82; Doutes sur la liberte de optimism, 10, 206, 211, 214 VEscaut, 71 order, 195, 198 Ordin-Nashchokin, A.L., 180 modernity, 100, 124, 179-80, 215 Orsini (Cardinal), 104 Monasteries, 92, 112, 124, 161; Augustinian, Ortes, G., 102 119; Benedictine, 119 Ossian, 34, 36 Monboddo, Lord, 32 Owenism, 17 Montagu, Lady M.W., 8 Montesquieu, C.L. de S., 42, 43-7, 57, 59, 80, 82, 93, 95, 100-1, 160, 182-8, 194; De Pagano, F.M., 95 VEsprit des lois, 44, 47, 80; Lettres persanes, 4 3 - Paine, T., 16, 51-3, 208; Rights of Man, 51-2 4; Voyage en Hollande, 62, 63 Paley, W.,9, 13 moral benevolism, 2, 12, 21 pantheism, 133, 145 moral philosophy, 193 Paoli, P., 99, 100 morals, 22-30, 156, 158, 183 Parnassus Boicus, 119 More, H., 17 Patent of the Abolition of Serfdom, 147, 163 Morgan, G.C., 168 paternalism, 12 Morgan, Thomas, 168 Patriotic Societies, i n , 114-16 Moritz, Pastor K., 8, 12 patriotism, 100, 115, 153-4, 160-1, 185 Mozart, W.A., 139 Pauli,J.U., 115 Muhlenberg, Rev. D., 205 peasants, 100, 131, 143, 148, 162, 165; Munich, 119, 123 taxation, 134, 146-7; risings, 145-6, 186 Munich Academy, 123 Pelel [Pelcel, Pelzel], F.M., 155-6, 25m Muralt, B. de, 77, 81; Lettres sur les Anglois et les Perfectibility of Man, 13, 214 Pergen,J.A., 139 Frangois et sur les voiages, 81 Pestel, P., 68 Muratori, L.A., 90, 102, 119, 128, 160 music, 159-160 Peter (the Great), 178, 180-4, l87> I 9 I Muslims, 186 Peter III, 183 Musschenbroek, P. van, 66 Peter Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 103 mysticism, 95, 172, 174, 175 Petrasch,J., 151 philanthropy (-ic), 126 Namier, L., 4 philology, 157 272

Index Philosophes, 54-6, 64, 67, 88, 97, 118-19, 121 172, 174, 177, 180-2, 184, 187-90 philosophy, 27f., 90, 93, 95, 108, 124, 157, 166-7, ^ 9 - 7 0 , 172, 175, 191 phrenology, 17 physics, 150, 165, 172 physiocracy, 46-7, 105, 185, 217 Pietists, i n , 122, 153-5 Pilati, C , 103, 118 Pius VI, 136 Place, F., 16 Platonists, 93 Plutarch, 178 political economy, 33-37, 92, 99, 100 politics, 157, 165 Polizeiwissenschaft, 134, 181, 184, 188 poor relief, 109 Pope, A., 1, 2, 9, 48; Essay on Man, 87, 180, 198,213 Popes, and the Enlightenment, 9 population statistics, 170 Potsdam, 110 pragmatism, 8, 19 press: freedom, 95, 138, 169, 173-5; journals, n o , 126; pamphlets, 136, 138; periodical, n o , 123, 134; newspapers, 123 Prevost, A.F., 8, 12 Priestley, J., 7, 9, 10, 13 progress, 214 proportion, 195 propriety, 35, 195 providence, 42 public administration, 134 publishing, 60-1, 63, 77, 78, 82, 84 Pufendorf, S., 69, 176, 179 Pugachev, E.I., 186, 191 Raeb, H., 120 Radishchev, A.N., 189-190 Ramsay, A., 19, 27, 32 rationality (-ism), 3, 13, 30, 55, 70, 73, 74, 79, 80, 81, 85, 86, 138, 147, 174, 193, 216 Rautenstrauch, S., 130 Raynal, 7, 62, 64, 82, 161 reading, 158-9 reading societies (clubs), 111, i23ff. Reason, 11, 206, 211, 212, 213 refinement, 14 reform (s): agrarian, 116, 134; ecclesiastical, 134, 136; educational, 109, i n , 122-3, I 3°5 legal, 99; penal, 90-1, 95; social, 111 reform movement: Catholic, 102-3, 120-1, 123-4, 128-35; Protestant, 112, 117 Reformation, i n , 121, 175, 215 refugees, 59 Reid, T., 5, 20, 37, 38, 194, 209; Enquiry into the Human Mind, 37

Reimarus, H.S., 111-12 religion, 47-8, 95, 103, 109, 115, 130, 136, 137, 143, 157, 159; Calvinism, 10, 60, 78, 79, 211, 212; Catholicism, 79, 83, 87; Catholic minorities in Holland, 60, 66; Deists, 131, 145; Dutch Evangelism, 67, 68, 71; Evangelism, 17; Liberal Protestantism, 78-81, 86, 87, 88; Natural, i n , 133, 167, 189; Protestantism, 72, 77-84, 86, 87-8, 193, 194; Puritan preachers, 198; Old Believers, 186; Quakers, 80, 207; religiosity, 66, 67, 84; religious toleration, 1, 60, 66, 79, 83, 86, 199, 207, 211; Unitarians, 212; universalism, 212; Visionaries, 145 Renaissance, 215 Restoration, 95 Rey, M.M., 57, 61 Reynolds, Sir, J., 15 Ricci, L., 102 Ricci, S., 103 Richardson, S., 3, 70 Richey, M., 115 Riegger, P.J., 129 Risorgimento, 94 Rittenhouse, D., 205 Robertson, W., 19, 32, 35, 38, 94, 178 Robespierre, M., 49-53 robota system, see serfdom Rochambeau, A.L., 207 Roland, Mme, 11 Romanticism, 42, 67, 106, 164, 175 Rome, 46, 49 Rosenstein, N., 175 Rousseau, J.J., 2, 42, 44, 46, 48-52, 56, 57, 70, 72, 76, 78, 80, 82, 83, 97, 100, 160-1, 164, 169, 173, 177, 182-4, 189, 191; Du Contrat social, 48-50, 61; Emile, 48-50; Nouvelle Hilo'ise, 44 Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences, 148, 150, r 2 5 -3> !55> 162-3 Royal Society (London), 149 Royal Society of Arts (London), 115 Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 165, 170, 171, 172, 175 Rudbeck, O., 171 Ruef, K., 138 Rush, B., 202, 208, 209, 211; Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools, 204 Saint-Just, 50-1 salons, 43-4, 57 Salzburg, 120, 121 Salzmann, Ch. G., 107, 109 Sambuca, 99 Sanfedists, 95 Sanifatin, 99 Saussure, C. de, 12, 82

273

INDEX scepticism, 20, 31, 37, 38, 39, 55, 73, 85, 206, 213 Scheele, C.W., 170, 174 Scheurleer, D., 61 Schloezer, A.L., 113, 160 scholasticism, 119 Scholder, K., 112 schools, see education science, 2, 48, 66, 73, 77, 81, 84-7, 88, 90, 119, I49-5O» !52-4> i57» l65> 169-70, 172, 174, 178, 182, 205, 207-8, 217 Science of Man, 20, 21, 22 Scotland, Act of Union (1707), 19, 22, 26 Scotland, Church of, 28-9 Scotland, militia controversy, 33-4, 35 Scott, Sir W., 20, 40 secularism, 6, 17, 20, 29, 73, 112 Seibt, C.H., 156, 159 Selden,J., 94 Seminara, Calchia, 94 Semler, J.S., 112 serfdom, 145-8, 191, 216 sermons, 113 Seton, W., 25 Seven Years' War, 1, 70, 176 Shaftesbury, third Earl of, 2, 4, 5, 15, 29, 56, 194 Shcherbatov, M.M., 190 Shipley, W., 115 Sieveking, G.H., 111 Sievers,J., 187 Simond, Louis, 8, 12 slaves, 178, 201, 202, 206, Smith, Adam, 10, 49, 19, 20, 32, 33, 35-6, 37, 38, 40, 173, 185, 207, 209; The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 3 5 ; Wealth of Nations, 36

Smollett, T., 8, 12, 19, 20, 35 sociability, 15 social conflict, 106 social contract, 97 social welfare, 122 Socialismo, 99 Societas eruditorum incognitorum in terris austriacis

(Society of Unkown Scholars) (Olomouc), 151 Socinianism, 80, 86, 130 Sonnenfels, J., 134-5, 138 sovereignty, 75-6, 210, 211 Spangenberg, W., 122 Sparta, 46, 49, 51 Spectator, The, 27, 115

Spendou,J., 132 Spener, Ph. J., m - 1 2 Spinola, G., 58 Spinoza, B., 4, 111, 169 Sporck, F.A., 142-3, 157 Stael, Mme de, 82

Steele, R., 2, 5, 26, 27 Stepling, J., 151, 156 Sternberg, J., 162 Sternbergs [Sternbergs (Sternberk)], 155-6 Sterne, L., 6 Stevenson, J., 29 Stewart, D., 5, 19, 20, 37-9 Stijl, S., Opkomst en Bloei der Verenigde Nederlanden, 71 Sturm und Drang, 106

superstition, 95, 100, 103, 130, 137 Swammerdam, J., 66 Swedenborg, E., 174-5 Swieten, G. van, 133, 135 Swift, J., 16, 82 Symonds,J., 100 Tacitus, 178 Tamburim, P., 103 Tanucci, B., 92-3, 96, 100-1, 104 Taranovsky, F.V., 184 technology, 152 Teller, A., 112-13 theology, 93-4, 112, 130—1, 149, 167, 186 Third Estate, i n , 190-1 Thirty Years'War, 116, 141-2, 179 Thorild, T., 175 Tiepolo, G.B., 91, 102 tiers etat, see Third Estate Tillotson, J., 93, 176 Tindal, M., 2 Tittmann, C.C., 112 Toland, J., 2, 4, 167-8 toleration (-ance), 136-8; religious, 122, 144, 155, 161, 186 Toleration Patent, 144, 154, 163 Tollner,J.G., 112 Torre, B. della, 95 torture, 95, 97, 135 trade, 99, 148, 163, 179, 216; free, 105 Tret'iakov, I.A., 190 Trier, 119, 120, 122, 124 translation, 82 Tramp, C., 66 Turgot, A., 49, 207 universities, 68-9, 77-9, 84, 88, 92, 112-13, 120-4, 158, 165, 169, 172; Aberdeen, 19, 37; Bologna, 91; Edinburgh, 19, 20, 28, 37; Franeker, 67; Geneva, 77; Glasgow, 28, 29, 32, 35; Gottingen, 169; Halle, 128; Leipzig, 128; Leyden, 128; Mainz, 119; Naples, 91, 103; Padua, 91; Pavia, 91, 97; Pisa, 91, 100; Prague, 151—5, 156; Salzburg, 120-1; Trier, 119; Uppsala, 166, 169-70, 175; Vienna, 129, 185; Wiirzburg, 119; Zurich, 77 utilitarianism, 4, 90, 109, 165, 170, 216 Uytwerff, M., 63

274

Index van de Meersch, A., 66, 69 van der Marek, 68 van der Pot, W., 57, 62 van Effen, J., 64, 65 van Mephschen, R., 67 van Zuylen, B., 65 Venturi, F., 2 Verri Brothers (P. and A.), 96, 101-2, 104-5 Vico, G., 91, 94, 96 Villaume, P., 109 Voigt, M.A., 154 Volta, A., 91 Voltaire, F.M., 45, 47-8, 50, 72, 76, 80, 81, 82, 83, 93, 98, 100, 104, 119, 148, 160-1, 164, 106, 108-9, ll$-$i X77> ^ 5 ' l9l> J 99; Lettres philosophiques ou Lettres anglaises, 1, 2, 4, 14, 8 1 ; Histoire de VEmpire de Russie, 54, 57, 58, 62, 6 3 , 65, 7 1 ; Abrege de Vhistoire universelle, 6 3 ; dig, 48

Wagenaer, J., 56 Wallerius, J.G., 166, 170, 172 Wallerius, N., 168-9 Walpole, Sir R., 9 Wargentin, P.W., 170, 172, 174

Wars of the Austrian Succession, 146 War of the Spanish Succession, 129 Watson, Bishop R., 7 Weerth, 116 Weimar, 114 Weishaupt, A., 138 Wenceslas IV, 155 Wesley, J., 16 Wieland, Ch. M., 109, 127 Wilkes, J., 7, 16 William V, Stadholder, 68, 70 Wolff, B., Sara Burgerhart, 70; Cornelis Wildschut, 70; Willem Leevend, 70

Wolff, Ch., 118, 122, 128, 160, 166-7 Wollaston, W., 2 Woolston, T., 168 Wordsworth, C , 91 writing, 158-9 Wiirzburg, 119, 120, 124 Yankovich, F.L, (de Mirievo), 185 Zeger-Bernard van Espen, 129 Zoellner, J.F., 107-8

275