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(This post has been sitting half-completed in my drafts folder for at least a month and a half. Thanks to @fuckduck9000 and @Hoffmeister25 for inspiring it.)
What is the Enlightenment? What is its essential nature, such that a thing can be said to be more or less like it, more or less of it, more or less descended from it? Which of its philosophical axioms are foundational, and which are peripheral? Which historical events are a result of its influence, and which are unrelated?
The question of the Enlightenment's central character seems like it ought to be easy to answer, given the ideology's prominence in our consensus origin myth. The Enlightenment is generally held to be the author of the modern world, the philosophy that ended millennia of benighted rule by superstition, ignorance and cruelty, the wellspring of humanistic ideals, of compassion and empathy, of the meteoric progress that has since transformed human civilization beyond recognition, shattered the fetters of hunger, sickness and want. Its hopeful brilliance is contrasted with the strangling dogmas of the dark age that followed the collapse of Rome. Indeed, I expect most of the community here probably holds that describing the nature of the Enlightenment is easy, almost too easy to be worth bothering with.
I disagree. I've tried to present this disagreement numerous times, but each time I've found an inferential gap that swamps whatever the original topic of the discussion might have been, and that required a level of effort that seemed prohibitive. This post is an attempt to approach that gap on its own terms, and at least somewhat methodically.
I think a good place to start is with a simpler question: Of the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, which hewed closer in practice to the essential spirit of Enlightenment ideology?
These two revolutions occured a mere 13 years apart. Both societies were heavily influenced by Enlightenment ideology, and conciously sought to recast their social structures according to the precepts of that ideology. On the other hand, the interpretations, implementations, and ultimate outcomes differed vastly between the two. Clearly the divergence was significant, and it seems reasonable to presume that one diverged further from the root ideology than the other. By describing our understanding of that divergence, we can give a clearer picture of what we see as the Enlightenment's core nature, while being kept honest by the historical record of its commonly-accepted champions.
The American Revolution:
The American Revolution emerged from an emphatically Christian society; that is to say, a society of serious individual and communal Christian faith welded together by the Protestant tradition. It was a society with a 70% and rapidly growing male literacy rate, thanks largely to Protestant commitments to the necessity of widespread literacy, the better to read the Bible.
Both Leadership and the public see themselves as explicitly Christian. A lot of the leadership really is devout, those who are not (Jefferson and Franklin most notably) at least pretend to be both in public actions and private deliberation. (It's possibly also worth noting that Jefferson and Franklin were notably sympathetic to France's revolutionaries).
The revolution's social goals are limited. No universal equality, no abolition of slavery, no overturning of the existing social order. It's not even really a change of government, as most of the revolutionaries and their support structures are already de-facto running things.
The Revolution consistantly aimed to limit the power of government, even popular government, even if turned to apparently noble ends, against the rights of individual citizens. In doing so, they expressed a deep skepticism for all human judgement, even their own.
The French Revolution:
The French Revolution emerged from a very different sort of Christian society. Faith appears to have been far less personal and far more communal in nature, with enforcement being top-down rather than bottom-up. I've been unable to find figures for literacy rates, but the references I've found indicate it was considerably lower than in America, perhaps in part due to the linguistic fragmentation of the French populace.
To my knowledge, the Revolution's leadership were uniformly militant atheists, or else hiding their faith very, very deep. Religious belief was considered obvious superstition. Numerous attempts were made to channel religious impulses into the deification of human reason.
The Revolution's social goals were extremely broad, perhaps unlimited. They aimed not merely to build a new country, but explicitly a better society, a rational society, a just, free, equitable society. Universal equality of all citizens was the standard. Slavery was abolished. The existing social order was demolished, the monarchy and nobility slaughtered or exiled, the Church brutally subjugated, religious observence suppressed. The revolutionaries believed that they had everything they needed to build, if not an outright utopia, at least the best society the world had ever seen, by far, and they intended to make it happen.
Given their faith in human reason and scientific insight, the Revolution felt no need to limit the power of government, especially popular government, in pursuit of noble ends, even if this meant trampling the rights of individual citizens. They believed they knew what the right thing to do was, their reason was sound, and checks and balances just got in the way, slowed them down in the fight against their enemies.
Which was closer to the true spirit of the Enlightenment?
My answer: The French Revolution, and by a wide margin. The French Revolution was built around the idea of Progress, of man's capacity to fundamentally reshape his conditions and himself, of his ability to cast off the shackles of the past and move on to a brighter future. It was built on a supreme confidence in human reason, a self-assurance based on what I consider to be the core thesis of the Enlightenment:
We know how to solve all our problems.
Over and over again, its leaders and the policies they implemented demonstrate an unrelenting, unreflective certainty; they were not experimenting, inching their way through possibility-space in search of an unknown solution, but rather executing a recipe with a firmly-expected outcome. They considered themselves pre-eminent scientists, not because they were actually engaging in science, but because they zealously and meticulously applied the label of "science" to their ad-hoc, utterly untested and (as it happens) completely unworkable social theories. Actual scientific results were mixed: the metric system seems to have been a tolerably good idea, metric time less so. Shutting down educational institutions over charges of inequality and guillotining Lavoisier were perhaps less than perfect contributions to the advancement of human knowledge. Though the lip-service to science, progress and reason never wavered, it is easy to see that ideological commitments to entirely unscientific and even irrational beliefs remained dispositive throughout.
In these features, the fundamental nature of the Enlightenment is revealed.
(The above was written off my best understanding of the two Revolutions, and a moderate amount of googling. Corrections and arguments over the description are welcome as well.)
This is a great question, and most of the disagreement youre getting is just insisting on the Enlightenments self-presentation with little argument. Sad.
That said, I dont think "We know how to solve all our problems." is a plausible candidate. First its a very simple idea, thats easy for lots of people to stumble upon in lots of situations. Secondly, confidence can grow quickly, and shrink quickly, too. So if that was what the enlightenment was about, it would not be a historical trend with a definite starting point, it would be something like "Cannibalism in crisis" or "Wars of succession" that pops up occasionally and peters out again.
I think that, at least as far as politics is concerned, a good summary of the Enlightenment is Cartesian dualism. It leads to things like the original position, our definition of authentic desire, people apparently appearing ex nihilo as fully formed adults, "What if you had been born an X", and most of the other driving arguments of "progress".
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THESIS: It's the Age of Enlightenment not the Enlightened Age. The correct framing of the Enlightenment is not final, We Know How to Solve Our Problems, it is procedural: the solutions to our problems are knowable and we can find processes that will be likely to produce those solutions. Contrast with both The American Revolution, and its results, are much more in line with the Enlightenment (in large part due to a more secure historical context) in that they created a procedure by which solutions could be found, rather than defining specific solutions to those problems. The French Revolution suffered from immediate concerns of war and national defense, which lead directly to violent insecurity, and while Franklin might have shaken his head, it was inevitable that long iterative processes of proposal and amendment did not appeal to a nation in imminent danger.
I'm amazed that you wrote this without reference to Kant's most famous essay: What is Enlightenment; written conveniently between the two revolutions you cite as examples. HIs opening is one of the most famous in philosophy:
Kant wanted the people, all of the people (which for him probably meant more like "the upper middle class in Germany, France, and a few other countries) to exercise their reason. No one, least of all Kant, expected every single person to agree on what was advisable, but he believed that by the combined effort of every individual exercising their reason and autonomy the best path would be found.
Adam Smith, as important a figure in the Enlightenment as anyone, tells us:
The Enlightenment wasn't about knowing the solution it was about creating the process by which solutions could be found.
Compare to antiquity:
-- Plutarch, Lycurgus
Lycurgus knew. He figured out the best way possible to run a country, and then he made absolutely certain that once the best ways were implemented that they would never ever change. Once Lycurgus had implemented his laws to perfection, his only goal was to ensure that no one would change them.
Contrast with the US Constitution:
-- Article V of the US Constitution
And US founding fathers:
-- Thomas Jefferson
The goal of the American revolution was never to set up one permanent and eternal law for all time, as soon as they had properly laid down the laws, they set about regulating the process by which better ideas could be implemented.
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As in our previous discussions, the antipode is missing. You condemn the enlightenment, but you ignore and refuse to defend the actual enemies it was up against : the ancien regime and its privileges, the absolutism of Louis XIV and Nicholas II. Let us grant that the french revolution was more ‘enlightened’ than the american revolution. Does that make the american revolution anti-enlightenment?
You adopt the perspective of a liberal english or american visitor in paris, initially supportive, then disgusted by the blood and radicalism. That’s understandable, but it’s not anti-enlightenment. It’s the noncommittal, comfortable position of a tourist. I too prefer my revolutions with as little blood and terror as possible. The only interesting dilemma here is, revolution with blood, or ancien regime.
In 1789, the french system of government was less enlightened than the anglos, but the intellectuals were up to date. So when the center broke, the pendulum swung considerably. What compromise could there be with those who did not recognize the people’s authority, and claimed divine right to rule over them? Only way to dispell the magic “We will cut off his head with the crown upon it.” The King’s trial by ordeal. That lesson, and others, centuries of progress, france had to speedrun, while at war .
Those rascals, one crazy idea after another. The sheer hubris to think they could solve this problem, a venerable institution vetted by our ancestors and the bible.
Not defending it, but he was executed for being a top tax farmer, viewed as a Crassus , not a Galileo.
Why do the features of the people the revolutions defeated matter? The revolutionaries won. They took absolute power. They built the societies they wanted, unconstrained by what came before. If they built abattoirs packed with human misery, how is that the fault of the people they overthrew?
No, it makes it a less central example of the Enlightenment, and it weakens claims that Enlightenment values are responsible for American outcomes. This is important to do, because there is a very clear ideological core of the Enlightenment from its inception to the current day, that core is what America largely passed on, and that core has an abysmal track-record elsewhere.
Ancien regime. How is this even a question? The Revolution killed a shitload of people, failed to solve the problems that propelled it to power, and collapsed into a military dictatorship that plunged Europe into a generation of brutal warfare before plopping the Bourbons briefly back on the throne, before continuing to modernize more or less alongside the rest of Europe. Why should we consider any of that remotely necessary? What possible silver lining are you seeing here?
They failed, though. The whole thing failed. They accomplished nothing but mutual fratricide and mass murder, and then were swept aside by a tyrant who got a considerable portion of their population killed attempting and failing to conquer the world. They didn't dispel any magic. they didn't build a legacy. They didn't speedrun shit, other than than the pointless atrocity counter.
It's another example of how the French Revolution was more Enlightened than the American. I wish the American revolution had abolished slavery as well, but the fact is they didn't, and had to solve the problem the hard way a century later. I think the French abolishing slavery was a great idea! ...But they also collapsed their whole society and got many millions of people killed through the secondary effects, and that happened precisely because of their hubris. So the hubris seems like kind of a problem!
Maybe if their ideology had been a little less bloodthirsty, it might have been a little better at actual science?
I’d think americans would have a problem being ruled by someone who does not require their consent. Where’s that alamo spirit? Do you tolerate insults to your will? I think it is the right, the duty and the pleasure of every man to cut down such rulers. Of course the king had to go, first. It’s not a silver lining, it’s the entire point.
You’re introducing a lot of confusion with your definitions because the anti-enlightenment position you’re trying to occupy already exists as a distinct set of ideas (then as absolutism, nowadays as neoreactionary). And they do not recognize this artificial split between good(american) and bad(fr**ch) enlightenment. So me and my enemies, we all agree, we reject your innovative definitions as unhelpful.
Seems like you’re trawling through a giant enlightenment box, arbitrarily picking stuff you dislike and putting that in your new smaller enlightenment box, while the rest is just relabeled as good common american god-fearing sense. In reality, what made it the enlightenment box is the giant anti-enlightenment box next to it, which you ignore.
They did not solve the problem of rule without consent, they just changed a relatively benign despot for an insanely paranoid and delusional pack of murderers, and then a competent but bloodthirsty tyrant that plunged the whole continent into war. They made everything worse, and got millions of people killed for zero benefit.
In any case, the idea that you make things better by killing the bad people is exactly the problem I'm pointing out here. Killing people should never be a terminal goal, which is yet another of the mistakes an entire branch of Enlightenment ideology repeatedly makes.
The confusion already exists. People claim that the Enlightenment is defined by a commitment to individual liberties, and then claim that the French Revolution was a central example of an Enlightenment project. These two claims are contradictory. My position is that you cannot claim A = !A. I feel like that's a pretty solid position.
Then you and your enemies are ignoring the evidence in front of you, because those two revolutions were very, very different in character from each other. You are being sloppy in your definitions, and I object to that. If we are going to claim that a category is important, that category should be rigorously defined. If that category is an ideological movement, we should be able to define what features determine whether an item is included or excluded from the set, and we should be weighing the historical results of that ideology more heavily than theorizing or public statements of intent. I am willing to accept whatever definition you prefer, provided that definition is then scrutinized properly and rigorously applied. If you want to define the Enlightenment as "only good things and never bad things", I'm fine with that, as long as you do so explicitly, so I can point out that such a definition is useless for analysis of the real world.
No. I'm asking you and everyone else to give your definition of what we all agree was a pivotal ideology, and then sort two very distinct historical examples according to that definition. This should not be hard to, and it is not unreasonable to insist that it should be done. This is what definitions are for.
Then make that your definition, and let's see where the evidence goes. If you want to claim that the Enlightenment is defined by opposition to traditional forms of religion, government and social structure, I'm fine with that. It still leaves America and Britain as distant outliers given that they kept their traditional religion and social structures and even much of their government, and it still leaves the basic problem that the more Enlightened a revolution was, the worse the results it delivered.
Or perhaps I'm not getting the definition right. Feel free to correct me in detail. Make your case!
Me and others have quoted the dictionary at you already. That definition is perfectly serviceable. But you try to create meaning for its own sake, untethered to the minds of other men. Your definition of the enlightenment clashes with
the dictionary
present supporters of the enlightenment
present opponents of the enlightenment
historical supporters and opponents of the enlightenment
american revolutionaries , and their opponents
everyone
I think you’re stretching the limits of acceptable word games, dude. If you want to keep arguing against this ‘bad enlightenment’ , you should call it something else, like ‘rousseauianism ‘, or ‘Cult of Reason’ , some less well-known expression that is not already imbued with a different meaning to the one you want to assign to it.
Plus you’re trying to define a mammal by comparing a cat to a dog, saying this one’s paws are more mammal-like than the other’s and so on. Futile exercise, you need a mollusk or a reptile.
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The Republic recognized the people's authority for all of what, two years? In 1793 they get the Committee of Public Safety and then two years after that it's the Directory and then Napoleon. Louis XVI wasn't a great king but I don't know what he did that would mark him out as such an unreasonable tyrant that no compromise at all was possible.
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I’ll more or less join the pro-@Soriek dogpile.
I’d say the root of the Enlightenment is epistemological. “What do I know, and why do I think I know it?” Descartes gets obvious credit, as do the many contributors to subsequent debates. Rationalists and Empiricists.
In a Church-dominated environment, the single source of truth is obvious. Stepping back from that to a more general theory of truth is the hallmark of the Enlightenment. It’s also materially useful, both for its influence on the scientific method, and for giving us the most practical developments in sociology. We don’t know how to solve all our problems, but we can insulate against the most obvious failures, and iterate towards a better solution.
Mistake not the implementors for the architects, though. I think you could write a flipped version of your narrative where it’s the Americans tearing down Chesterton’s fence while the French stick to high-minded Liberté, égalité, fraternité. It turns out violent Revolution selects for decisive ideologues. Dogmatism is adaptive. Just not as adaptive, in the mid to long run, as skepticism.
You phrase it as a question, but by the time the French Revolution arrives, they've very clearly arrived at answers, at single sources of truth, at dogma and crystalized belief-systems.
What contributions precisely are we thanking sociology for? How confident are you that those contributions are net-positive?
That's not the lesson Enlightenment ideologues drew, though, which is why the centuries from then till now have been defined by subsequent Enlightenment revolutions and their disastrous consequences. They continued to insist that they do know how to solve all our problems, and any remaining problems are the result of bad people who need to be removed, right down to the present day. I agree with you that insulating against obvious failures and iteration toward solutions is a much superior option! The Enlightenment observably argues otherwise, though.
I'm not sure I follow. How would this flipped narrative work? The results are still there, and it seems to me that they defy reinterpretation.
On that, at least, we agree.
I’m thanking Enlightenment sociology for developments in democracy, especially consent of the governed and the idea of social contracts. Those are more valuable than pretty much any social or political theory from the subsequent centuries.
I think the bloody revolutions are what you get when you combine Enlightenment thought with a giant selection effect for violence. Rationalism and skepticism are really good at generating and propagating ideas. They’re pretty bad at getting people to kill for one. Dogmatism is much better at that. So by the time you can call it Revolution, most followers will have crystallized on the idea, rather than abstractly reasoned into it.
The Enlightenment provides fuel, but it’s awfully tricky to make fire without heat.
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I have to agree with @Soriek, that "let each religious group live on its own" fits much more with my idea of the Enlightenment than "crush all religions." Also, free-market capitalism is way more of Enlightenment economics than the mish-mash of top down policies imposed during the French Revolution.
Also, was literacy really 70% over the whole continent? I was under the impression it was pretty high in Puritan and Quaker areas, and very low elsewhere.
Is your idea of the Enlightenment accurate, though? I'm aware that the term is loaded with positive affect. Should it be, given the historical record?
I have no idea. That's what the sources I could find claimed, but actual figures for America or France were frustratingly difficult to find.
What historical record are you referring to? If you mean the very question we're discussing, then that seems circular. Anyone can claim to be implementing some set of ideas, but that doesn't mean they actually are. Marx and the USSR claimed to be following "science" and "democracy"; does that mean science and democracy were the cause of those tens of millions of deaths?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment#Religion
There doesn't seem to be anything here about forcibly getting rid of all religion. E.g.
and
Maybe there are other Enlightenment thinkers with more hard-line stances, but when I read Locke the individual choice interpretation was definitely what I understood.
The French Revolution, and the whole downstream branch of purported Enlightenment thinking and subsequent revolutions which took the French Revolution as their model, which appears to me to be the predominant portion both in raw numbers and in intellectual influence throughout the modern era.
I'm asking people what they consider to be the core elements of the Enlightenment, given the actual historical record of the movement. If you want to claim that the core element is respect for individual liberties, I'm entirely happy with that definition, provided you then exclude the revolutions, revolutionaries and theorists who rejected and trampled on individual liberties or approved of others doing so from the Enlightenment set. What I'm objecting to is the paired claims that the Enlightenment is about individual liberties, and also the French Revolution is a central example of an Enlightenment project. It seems to me that you really do need to pick one or the other, and it also seems to me that a large portion of our current consensus is built around lying about that fact.
No, it doesn't, because what people claim is of far less evidentiary value than what they do. But the flipside of this is the people who claim that Communism is Utopia, and therefore the USSR wasn't really Communist since it didn't create a Utopia. That is what I perceive you and others to be doing with the Enlightenment; you seem to be claiming that good results are part of its definition, and therefore an instance that produces bad results can't have been part of it. I think we should understand ideologies by the methods they employ and the outcomes they produce, not the outcomes they claim to be pursuing. The claims are still helpful in understanding how their agents saw themselves, but those statements should be heavily outweighed by what those agents actually did and the results they actually achieved.
And yet, the French brutally suppressed religious practice, and that brutal suppression was approved of as good and necessary by their ideological descendants, who appear to me to be the majority by numbers and influence. Again, we can claim that religious toleration is a defining characteristic of the Enlightenment, provided we conclude that this excludes the French Revolution and its descendants from the Enlightenment set. What we can't do is say that the good thing is a defining characteristic, and then not apply that criteria to those who do the opposite.
Maybe this is just my Amero-centric bias speaking, but it seems to me like the American version is much more influential worldwide. Are there any countries that are currently trying to do what the French Revolution did as far as religion? I agree that the American Revolution is fairly unique among revolutions, but I think this more likely has to do with who was doing the rebelling and the circumstances of that rebellion than ideological influence. For example, the Americans were British colonists, rather than being natives of the country they inhabited, and so were not subject to the same sort of oppression (and technological and economic disadvantage) as, say, the Indians, Haitians, Mexicans, or Congolese.
(One could even argue that the real legacy of the Enlightenment is neither of those 2 big revolutions, but rather the peaceful granting of independence to countries like Canada and Australia much later, and these data points don't even come to mind because of how boring it is. That's fairly speculative on my part though).
Yes, the French Revolution was influenced by and incorporated aspects of the Enlightenment. I think it's a mistake to judge any intellectual movement by its worst "members" since some portion of any group of people will have bullies, narcissists, sociopaths, and people just hungry for power or violence, who are willing to join any movement and utilize it to their own ends, as well as extremists who truly believe but also use it to justify violence regardless of what those beliefs actually are. For example, what exemplifies the "core elements" of Christianity? Is it the Crusades? The forceful suppression of Native American culture and religion? The preservation of Greek and Roman learning through the Dark Ages? Maximillian Koble sacrificing himself at Aushwitz? All of these are some combination of what Christianity teaches and individual behavior by individual people. The French Revolution is the same.
(Communism rightfully gets dragged because all of its examples, at least above Dunbar's number, are horrific.)
I see what you're saying, and I agree that it's fallacious to just redefine a thing you like to be "good things" and a thing you don't like to be "bad things." However, in this case I really do believe that the individual liberty interpretation is much more in line with what Enlightenment thinkers like Locke actually proposed, and French Revolutionaries were largely taking out their anger with the Church, which was heavily entwined with the monarchy and had benefited from special privileges, rather than implementing an Enlightenment philosophical vision. Particularly when you have a mass movement with individual people from many walks of life... do you think that all of those people had read and digested all of the Enlightenment thinkers? Similarly I'm sure there were aspects of the American Revolution not perfectly in line with Enlightenment principles.
Both Canada and Australia were offshoots of one of the two Enlightenment outliers: Britain and America. Their peaceful transition is certainly important evidence. On the other hand, we have Marxism, which brutally subjugated half the world for between fifty and a hundred years, while support for its conquest and its ideology was endemic throughout the elites and intelligentsia of even the Enlightenment outlier societies. That support came because Marxism claimed to be the true descendent of the Enlightenment, and that claim was accepted at face value by the educated class even in liberal states. Resistance came primarily from the far less Enlightened common people and their social systems and structures, the very social structures that mark Britain and America as significant outliers for their failure to systematically destroy them in the name of Progress and Rationality, like the rest of the Enlightened states invariably did, and as Outlier elites frequently advocated.
Do you see the shape of the problem?
Doesn't it behoove the ideologues to account for such vagaries when designing their theories? If you're going to claim to know how to make a better society, shouldn't you account for the real-world conditions that will cause your system to fail?
When the ideology itself claims that the nature of the political problem is that there are good people and bad people and the solution is for the good people to kill the bad people, I don't think you get to blame the outcomes on bad actors. What the French Revolution did wasn't a fuckup or a distortion of a reasonable plan. The plan itself was bad, they failed to notice that going in, and their progeny failed to notice it coming out, which ensured that their failures propagated down the ideological line. My understanding is that Marx came away with the lesson that they hadn't been ruthless enough. Mark Twain argued that the ends justified the means. Neither of these are defensible positions, but large swathes of the world adopted them all the same, in the name of Truth and Reason.
It's a hard question! I'd say belief in Christ and the Bible is probably a start, but the actual history of Christian implementations must be accounted for, there's no denying it. We had our own revolution, in an explicit attempt to rectify what was seen as inconsistent definitions of what Christianity actually was. Whatever your core definition, though, it needs to actually apply to the historical examples. If you claim that Christianity is defined by membership in the Catholic Church, you're saying Protestants aren't Christians. If you say it depends on a belief in the divinity of Jesus, then you're saying Unitarians aren't Christians.
For Christianity, you gave examples spanning a thousand years and several continents. The French Revolution happened at one place over a handful of years, and was steered by a reasonably-coherent ideological core composed of a relatively small number of political actors. No two things are ever identical, but some things are a whole lot more diverse than other things. The Jacobins were coherent enough to coordinate seizure of power and dictatorial rule based on a shared ideology, and their ideological progeny recognized this fact without difficulty, and did not recognize their excesses as mistakes.
Then your argument would be that the French Revolution was not a central example of the Enlightenment, and that individual liberties are a defining characteristic? If so, what do you make of all the people arguing the opposite throughout history?
I don't understand your claims in this paragraph at all. Britain, its former colonies, and the other states that those places controlled or influenced, can't possibly be an "outlier" when they represent such an enormous amount of people, land, wealth, and influence. There were only so many major powers at the time or in the immediate aftermath.
And what does Marxism have to do with this? Marx's main works were published around 50 years after the end of what is generally considered the Enlightenment, and represents a very different intellectual tradition. Maybe Marx and some his followers thought they were the following in the Enlightenment tradition, but I don't see it at all, except to the extent that you could group literally all Western philosophy into one big tradition, but which is far too broad to ask a question like "Of the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, which hewed closer in practice to the essential spirit of Enlightenment ideology?" Each generation of thinkers presumably takes influences from their predecessors, while also rejecting some of what came before. While you can have fuzzy boundaries for sure, I feel very comfortable placing the late-1800s socialists, the early- to mid- 20th century socialist states, and their apologists in Western academia, outside the purview of "The Enlightenment."
I'm not really sure I follow, but it is impossible to anticipate all of the possible ways in which someone might misinterpret or misuse your ideas. Aside from the infinite range of human excuse-making and rationalization and stupidity, if someone can ignore what you write about individual liberty, they can also ignore what you write about not ignoring the part about individual liberty.
Ok, but did Enlightenment thinkers actually say that? Or did some people just hamfistedly glue their unrelated complaints to vague ideas about equality and distrust of authority and hierarchy?
It wouldn't be hard to give examples that are much closer in space and time. Just look at the reactions to Martin Luther's theses, for example, which split down the middle of countries or even families. Or the differences across the groups of Albion's Seed.
I think it's less central than the American Revolution, but also, the new system didn't even last that long. Napoleon took over, then the Bourbon monarchy was restored, then you had the revolution of 1830, then another in 1848, then Napoleon 3rd declared himself Emperor until 1870. While this initial event had something to do with the Enlightenment, it seems weird to me to over-index on this one fairly short event. Modern France's government is based on what happened many decades later, while America is still using the same Constitution we had in 1792. As I described above, I might just be biased as an American, but violent revolution against the existing powers is nothing new. For example, do any of the things you identify as negatives in the Enlightenment also seem to describe the Hussite wars of 400 years prior, and if so, why?
People also argue that the American Revolution is a central example of the Enlightenment, and your post is largely about the differences between the 2 revolutions. So do you argue the American Revolution is not a central example? Do you agree that 2 things can be wildly different while still being part of one big intellectual movement? Do you think that all of those people you mentioned are just confused?
You originally asked, "I think a good place to start is with a simpler question: Of the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, which hewed closer in practice to the essential spirit of Enlightenment ideology?"
In order for this question to be meaningful, there has to be an "essential spirit" which is not simply defined by the behavior of people in those revolutions, as the latter would be circular. It seems like your answer is to define this "essential spirit" as being closer to the French version mostly because that version was more... popular? Globally influential? Which is something you can do, I guess, but is mostly an empirical question and I'm far from sure that you're correct, and in any event seems fairly close to saying that Catholicism is closer to true Christianity simply because there are more Catholics than any other branch.
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Because I'm a nitpicking bitch, it's "hewed" not "hued". Otherwise, yes, good post and good points.
The text has been corrected, and my thanks are offered.
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It feels like you're focusing on one sort-of part of the enlightenment's legacy - technocratic administration (which is way older than the enlightenment) - and breezing by the part that's really relevant to people: individual rights. In this respect the American revolution and attendant liberal movements throughout the west were genuinely pretty radical.1
You seem to describe the French revolution as more authentically enlightenment-based for giving less respect to individual rights, but those rights were of course very much enlightenment ideas, in many respects the core foundation of a lot of its philosophy. There is little uniquely innovative or "enlightenment" about the fact that the Jacobins were despotic centralizers or that they persecuted religion - pre-revolutionary France was also a famously centralized despotic regime that did things like kicking out 100% of its Jews and having the government sieze their property cuz maybe they caused the black plague.
It's more than fair to say, as @IGI-111 does downthread, that it's debatable whether scientific government can be given credit for the industrial revolution. There is still, however, a strong argument that individual rights and liberalism can be given that credit. At least that's the Diedre McCloskey argument, that an ideology that promoted individuals having enshrined freedom of expressions and rights to participate in self-governance leads to a world where you have way more people innovating, way more publishing, vastly increased dissemination of knowledge, infinitely increased numbers of people pushing at the doors of scientific and industrial progress. I don't know if I fully buy the argument myself, but anyone arguing against the enlightenment needs to be able to fully extricate all of its credit for the industrial and commercial revolutions to challenge the strongest arguments in its favor.
The other approach, of course, is to bite the bullet and say the post-enlightenment world has brought prosperity, but it wasn't worth what we lost. That's gotta be argued on its own terms though.
1 By the way, the Americans founders were mostly Deists, a highly enlightenment-derived version of Christianity that Wikipedia describes as a:
If the French Revolution is indeed the more Enlightened of the two, then why should we presume that individual rights are, in fact, a core element of the Enlightenment's legacy?
From the post above:
How do we actually go about answering a question like that? It seems to me that we can start with four types of evidence, in ascending order of reliability:
If I claimed that deep Christian faith was a core element of Enlightenment ideology, you would laugh. If I pointed to Kant's profound faith in Christianity, you would continue to laugh, and you would be right to do so. Kant's Christian faith may have been the core of his personal philosophy, but it did manifestly failed to propagate into the ideology as a whole. What did propagate are the ideas we see in the French Revolution: absolute, unshakable confidence in the primacy and sufficiency of human reason and rationality, militant hostility to traditional religion, enthusiastic secularism and atheism, and honestly not a whole lot else. Individual liberties get a lot of lip-service, but their actual record is a whole lot worse than the ancein regime's, from what I've seen.
I wrote this post to highlight what I see as the fundamental dishonesty of the consensus discourse regarding the Enlightenment. When people talk about the Enlightenment's results, they talk about outcomes in America or Britain, the two distant outliers of the entire Enlightenment project. When they talk about Enlightenment values, they go straight to Revolutionary France. They ignore the fact that the best results came from the societies that maintained strong Christian social integration and placed absolutely minimal trust in the products of human reason, and the worst came from the countries that embraced Enlightenment principles whole and without restraint.
Several of the most prominent among them were indeed probably not too far in beliefs from Robespierre. And yet, the sum of their peers and society was such that they kept their opinions mostly to themselves, and often spoke even to each other of Divine Providence in contradiction to their own avowed beliefs. Meanwhile, in France...
The point of this comparison is not to argue that Christianity is awesome. It's to point out that Christianity is very clearly not part of the Enlightenment, and so the revolution that embraces the Christian faith of its populace is not a very Enlightened revolution.
Your point eludes me. The revolutionaries themselves, and their subsequent progeny, seemed to find both despotism and religious persecution both innovative and eminently desirable. Here's Mark Twain offering apologia for mass slaughter a century or so later:
The mendacity of that passage galls. Leave aside the absurdity of the cited numbers; grant them for the sake of argument. He minimizes the crimes of his favored ideology by comparing them to all harms and misfortunes, natural or manmade, for a thousand years previously. In doing so, he demonstrates both the founding principle of the Enlightenment, as well as its first corollary:
You can't claim that the pathological hubris and maniacal bloodlust were tangential to the spirit of the movement, when the movements' own champions consistently affirm that that they were necessary and justified.
And what sort of societies gave birth to such principles? Was it France, with its radical egalitarianism and staunch secularism and obsession with "scientific" progress? Or Britain and America, deeply Christian, cautious, skeptical of revolutionary change?
One would.
I don't think the Enlightenment has any claim to creating our prosperity at all. It did not end the religious wars; the religions and secular authorities did that jointly before its birth, and once it got rolling it caused some of the worst wars we've ever seen. It did not establish universal literacy; the Protestants did that, with the able assistance of Guttenburg. It arrived after science was already organizing itself, and so cannot claim credit for establishing it. It cannot claim credit for the subsequent industrial and scientific revolutions, because its focus was always social science and the theories it promoted were uniformly garbage, and because the nations that drove those revolutions the hardest were not very Enlightened. It cannot claim credit for individual rights and liberties, because it systematically trampled those rights and liberties wherever its ideology was allowed free action. What it did do, quite reliably, was produce vast, pitch-black concentrations of human misery, the historical record of which our current consensus steadfastly refuses to seriously grapple with.
Bro, you can't invent your own definition of the enlightenment, then say that everybody else's definition is wrong because it doesn't fit your own. You say that your assessment comes from reading the words of theorists and revolutionaries, by which I have to assume you mean literally the French revolutionaries themselves. This is a good way to learn about the French Revolution, but not about the ocean spanning movement of the Enlightenment, on which exists a massive corpus of work by theorists arguing for the importance of individual rights.
Imagine if I wrote a piece about how the point of communism was for capitalists to own the means of production, and that therefore Lenin's New Economic Policy was an example for why communism worked well. For evidence I show statements from contemporary communist apartchiks praising Lenin's plan as a glorious expression of the communist revolution. People push back and say that generations of philosophers, activists, and social movements have actually made it really clear that communism is supposed to take the means of production away from capitalists.
I respond: "If the New Economic Policy is the more communist of the regimes, then why should we presume that taking the means of production away from the capitalists is, in fact, a core element of Communism's legacy?"
I haven't argued this - I haven't even engaged with the corpus of thinkers or movements who define the enlightenment, I'm just creating my own circular definition based on a cherry picked situation and assuming everyone else is wrong if they don't match it.
Downthread I've seen @To_Mandalay make the same point and you seemed confused there too, and I'm not really sure how it can be made a lot clearer. If you want to argue that the enlightenment brought tyranny, centralization, and religious persecution, you need to grapple with the fact that all those things were happening before the enlightenment and that the broad European history of the enlightenment is less absolutism and greater religious tolerance. You can't just pick one country you don't like, ignore all the others, and act like their own history started in 1789.
Beyond this, your insistence that the success of the incredibly enlightenment oriented, rationalist-ruled, post revolutionary democracies of Britain and America add proof that the enlightenment is bad is just baffling. As @fuckduck9000 says, this is all part of the enlightenment box. These were most certainly not countries that were "cautious, skeptical of revolutionary change" - they literally had real revolutions. I generally respect and appreciate your posts a lot but this argument just doesn't make sense.
The past 200 years are far away the most prosperous in all of human history. It is insufficient to say "science existed before" (unless you think alchemy is equivalent to the combustion engine), you have to grapple with this graph.
I'm not saying that your definition of the Enlightenment is wrong because it contradicts mine. I'm asking you what your definition is based on, how it is derived. I'm pointing to a pair of purported Enlightenment revolutions, and observing that the features people generally ascribe to the Enlightenment don't actually cluster the way the standard narrative claims. One revolution is much more secularized and rationalist than the other, two values usually taken to be core elements of the Enlightenment.
If your definition holds that individual liberties are a core, definitional element of the Enlightenment, my argument isn't that you're wrong, it's that you should then conclude that the French Revolution isn't a central example of the Enlightenment, and neither are the succeeding generations who took the French Revolution as a positive example of how to make a better world. The problem then becomes that absolutely everyone else appears to be certain that the French Revolution is a central example of the Enlightenment, and we can both notice we are confused together.
My claim is that different types of evidence should carry different weight, and the order roughly goes: writings of theorists < theory as understood by revolutionaries < actions taken by revolutionaries/political actors < action as interpreted by the next generation of theorists/revolutionaries/political actors. Ideologies have a core, an identifiable set of central beliefs that define them. I'm arguing that the best way to identify that core is to look at which ideas make it into practice and then get propagated down through the generations and into subsequent revolutions and government reforms, versus those that do not. How could it be otherwise?
I do not think I am engaging in circular thinking. If the French Revolution is a central example of an Enlightenment project, than the values it trampled can't be definitional elements of the Enlightenment. If the values it trampled are definitional to the Enlightenment, then the French Revolution can't be a central example of an Enlightenment project. ...Otherwise, it seems to me that the definition of the Enlightenment is simply incoherent.
The French Revolution brought some of the worst tyranny, centralization of unaccountable power and religious persecution Europe had ever seen, and led to a military dictatorship that plunged Europe into one of the worst sequences of warfare it had suffered to date. Direct ideological descendants, Marx in particular, did significantly worse. They were worse than the status quo, and not by a small margin. I get that the American/British-style eventually spread and a lot of the European nations eventually settled down into peace and normalcy, and now they DO care a lot about individual liberties and other Enlightenment principles, and don't guillotine each other randomly. What I'm trying to do is to track the specifics of how that actually happened, compared to the recieved story of how it happened.
You and Mandalay seem to be arguing that the French Revolution's murderous nature was par for the course. It was not. France wasn't a slaughterhouse under the ancien regime. America pulled off a revolution with absolutely minimal bloodletting. People have argued that tyranny and massacres were the norm for French politics, but the whole point of a revolution is that you stop doing things the way they've been done, and start doing them exactly the way you think they should be done. And again, there'd be no point in arguing about it if everyone recognized that the FR was a monstrous mistake. They don't! It's been lauded as a victory for freedom and social progress for two hundred years!
I'm picking the first two (three, counting Britain) countries in the chain, and trying to make sense of the divide between them. The next step is to follow the branches of that split forward through the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. I'm not sure what to do with the argument that I can't act like the history starts in 1789, because 1789 is when this set of people secure absolute power and begin to use it. We can look at what came before them, or what opposed them, but neither seems to me to be of much help to the central problem; they won, they got to reshape their political world as they saw fit, and what they produced is what we have to judge them by. What am I missing?
Britian and America diverged very sharply from France. If they're the central examples of the Enlightenment, fine, the French Revolution and its descendent ideologies are non-central, and then we need to ask why no one else seems to understand this. If France is the central example, then the extreme political divergence means America and Britian are the non-central examples, and their excellent results can't be attributed to Enlightenment ideology. If all three are central examples, then we need to admit that "The Enlightenment" can mean pretty much anything, and is thus an incoherent term.
Further, the French did what they did for specific reasons, and those reasons clearly derive from elements of Enlightenment philosophy, specifically the axiomatic confidence in human reason. I believe it is easy to demonstrate how those ideas contributed directly to the disastrous consequences in France, and how they continued to propagate through the subsequent generations of thinkers and actors.
Science existed before the Enlightenment. The Scientific and Industrial revolutions are absolutely, obviously the reason for the graph you posted. The question is whether the Enlightenment is responsible for those revolutions, a question we can't answer without nailing down an understanding of what the ideology itself actually is and is not. I note that both revolutions were heavily driven by Britain and America, so the split mentioned above seems like it's pretty relevant.
The point isn't that science is fake, it's that the Enlightenment wasn't ever science, and especially not when it explicitly claimed to be. The educational revolution underpinning the birth of Science started with Gutenburg and Protestantism. The Enlightenment took shape because science already existed and was demonstrating its value. The Enlightenment itself was not a scientific movement, but a philosophical and political one. It frequently deployed fake science for political ends, using social hacks to bypass skepticism and verification because the lie was "too good to check"; Marxism and Freudianism being two of the more consequential examples, but the social sciences generally are rife with examples. Its ideological nature frequently undermined actual science, occasionally to disastrous effect.
Science and Industry, meanwhile, were obviously useful and experienced little to no ideological opposition from any quarter. No one who mattered was arguing that science sucked and should be stopped. What people were arguing against, and occasionally fighting, were Enlightenment social innovations. A fundamental part of the Ideology's strategy has always been to frame opposition to its schemes as opposition to Science. That's part of what makes it so pernicious.
Or at least, that's the reality as I understand it. If you think the Enlightenment was actually critical to the Scientific and Industrial revolutions, though, it'd be good to lay out exactly why, what, and when it did the things to get the ball rolling. I'm skeptical, but open to being proven wrong.
I apologize if my tone upthread has been rude and I'm trying to be more polite here, I just think I'm very confused by your argument because it seems to hinge on two things that I don’t think anyone really considers up for debate:
Individual rights are not relevant in the enlightenment, such that when we see less individual rights we should consider a country more enlightened.
The American and British revolutions are not manifestations of enlightenment political philosophy.
We have three countries that had revolutions led by rationalist, secularized Christians who lionized reason and rejected divine revelation, conducted in the name of replacing the monarchs with more democratic rule and establishing individual rights.
Two of these revolutions that most fulfilled these goals you seem to think did a pretty good job, maybe even contributed towards the industrial revolution. But you look at the third and conclude that the enlightenment:
This is a... downright strange argument. These are all the enlightenment. Not just France. If you think post-revolutionary Britain and America did a good job then you too are a supporter of the enlightenment.
Who systematically trampled on individual liberties more, Tudor England with its strict restrictions on publishing and the importation of books, or post revolutionary England with its freedom of press? Who systematically trampled on individual liberties more in the 1848 revolutions, the monarchies with their restrictions on freedom of press and speech and democratic participation, or the protestors who demanded more of these rights? Are we to conclude that the kings and queens or yore were more authentically enlightened than the liberal movements that fought their repression? Few would find this line of thinking convincing.
You've mentioned several times that you think France is the most central / most enlightened of the revolutions (based on their ultimate rejection of core enlightenment principles?) I understood that this is your position but until your last comment I never realized that you thought everyone else believed this too. To be clear, I have never heard anyone say that, not ever. It's completely natural to say that the revolution that retained the most of the old world's absolutism and intolerance was the least successful in implementing enlightenment norms. It would be like arguing that the Young Turks were the most enlightened revolution.
The reason you see a bunch of users referencing pre-revolutionary France is that you’re making some really strong claims about how the enlightenment brought novel things like tyranny and religious persecution without acknowledging that these things got better most places other than France, and in France in the longer run, and that they were extremely commonplace and generally worse before the enlightenment.
When you say the enlightenment "systematically trampled" individual rights you have to grapple with the fact that in most places these rights were only invented and enshrined in the enlightenment era; nearly all of Europe previously were monarchies with serious restrictions on speech, press, religion, and association.
When you say that the enlightenment brought absolutism and state repression you have to grapple with the fact that pre-revolutionary regimes did things like kill everybody in an entire village or city for defying them (France, Russia, England).
When you say that the enlightenment brought religious persecution you have to grapple with the fact that literally dozens of these countries ethnically cleansed their Jewish populations without a second thought.
When you say that the enlightenment brought unprecedented war you have to grapple with the fact that wars of the Middle Ages were staggeringly violent, with the French Wars of Religion killing some two to four million people, the Thirty Years War killing up to 50% of Germany, and Renaissance Italy having an average life expectancy of 18.
When you say that the enlightenment made all these things worse you have to confront the fact that in most of the West absolutism declined and religious tolerance increased with the advent of liberalism.
You’ve already said you think the post-revolutionary enlightenment nations of America and Britain contributed significantly to the industrial revolution so there isn’t much to argue that you don’t seem to already agree with.
But first, on an economics level, abolishing aristocratic monopoly privileges allows for competition, which lowers prices and encourages innovation and the adoption of technology to keep your competitive edge; abolishing feudalism allows people to own their own land and property which raises the self interest that drives work; abolishing guilds (the vastly more restrictive versions of unions of the day) and allowing free movement between jobs and regions allows people to shift into the most productive versions of the work they can do. You already seem to agree we see this in enlightened America and Britain, I’ll point out you even see this France as well - in Acemoglu’s “The Consequences of Radical Reform: Post Revolutionary France,” he and his co-authors measured that the areas occupied and reformed by Napoleon demonstrated significantly higher long run growth when compared with the areas that did not.
The cultural argument is that, beyond replacing faith and relevation with the more scientifically productive norm of reason, previously in western societies the ideal life (in yes, heavily protestant-work ethic Christian societies) was considered to be a gentleman who received passive income, whereas merchants were seen as base and materialist. Over time people came to value knowledge, innovation, and progress for its own sake and the ideal life was seen as one that contributed to society. If you want the long form argument the go-to is Joel Mokyr's “A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy” or “The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850,” that “the root of modernity is in ‘the emergence of a belief in the usefulness of progress’, and that ‘it was a turning point when intellectuals started to conceive of knowledge as cumulative’
This is also well argued by Diedre McCloskey’s six-part Bourgeois Era series. To quote myself from the first OP:
I find these arguments pretty convincing, most especially on the economic level. To the extent that I’m not convinced, the remaining plausible argument for the industrial revolution does come down to interventionist government - most of the countries that industrialized first did so during high tariffs and industrial policy.
Of course, the burden of proof hangs more on the skeptics. If our extremely novel social system coincides with unprecedented success then it’s kind of on you to present a serious alternative theory.
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While some of the best known ones were Deists, most of the people who signed the Declaration or attended the Philadelphia Convention were just Christians, albeit frequently very lukewarm ones. More Washington than Jefferson. The effects of the First Great Awakening were starting to peter out and religion was becoming more laid back again, as it would become in cycles throughout American history. John Adams, for example, was a Congregationalist by birth, some of the most committed Christians in the country, but died a Unitarian, some of the vaguest and least fundamentalist.
Yeah, but we should be concerned with people's political and ideological positions relative to the time they lived in. Someone who was a radical in one period might be a conservative in another.
"Unitarianism" was so called because it denied the Trinity and the deity of Christ. Most fundamentalists today would consider 19th century Unitarians hellbound heretics, let alone their contemporaries. They also tended to put a premium on human reason rather than revelation, and many denied miracles, the infallibility of scripture, etc. It was a very much an 'enlightened' flavor of Christianity, to the extent it was Christianity at all.
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No real disagreement here, but there remains a debate about whether or not Washington was a Deist (and he was certainly a freemason). The list of notable deists records almost all the most important founders save Hamilton, including Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Franklin, Paine (and Washington, though up for debate). Otherwise agreed with the general Christianity of the time.
That's ironic for Adams, my understanding had always been that he was one of the more religious founders, waking up early to read the Bible and so forth.
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Just going to push back a bit on the idea that individual rights come from the enlightenment. Brits had individual rights long before then (habeas corpus and the right to a trial by jury being the most well known) and depending on how you define them it would be rarer to have societies that didn’t have the concept of individual rights, albeit limited to certain persons and circumstances.
If you’re talking about unlimited rights like “free speech” or “liberty” then maybe, but those were not applied to slaves and America added at least some limits to them pretty quickly.
Sure, no strong disagreement here, and there were of course periods of higher liberty in the more distant past. I don't think though that it would be controversial to argue that the enlightenment spurred a pretty significant expansion of individual rights, or at least of movements trying to advance those rights against the oppression of their ruling regimes.
America's founding certainly didn't perfect egalitarianism, and enshrined slavery to our shame, but still offered a uniquely higher level of protected liberties than other societies at the time or for centuries prior. The later movements to abolish slavery and expand civil rights were done in the name of the ideology established in the Declaration and articulated by the Founding Fathers.
As a slave society, antebellum America offered a lower level of protected liberties than non-slave societies, of which several existed in 1776. You can argue that Jefferson was a hypocrite who believed that "all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights" while whipping niggers for fun and profit, and that America deserves the credit for his good intentions, but we know that most of the Southern elite from which Washington and Jefferson were drawn did in fact believe that some men were born with saddles on their backs and others with spurs to ride them, and were willing to say so explicitly. This is, of course, what the French revolutionaries and their enemies said they were fighting over (and I believe them), and what the Americans said they were fighting over in the 1860's (and I believe them too).
I have always assumed that one of the reasons America was spared the bloodshed of the French revolution and associated upheavals was that the Founding Fathers carefully fudged the question of whether all men really were created equal. As it turned out, the fudge only lasted 80 years and the bloodshed was postponed and not prevented.
In the UK, we put our fudge in place with the Restoration in 1660 and the Glorious Revolution in 1688, and somehow made it stick all the way to the present day when Charles III is crowned By Grace of God, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and his other Realms and Territories, Defender of the Faith and only spergs and left-idiotarians complain that this is incompatible with democracy. I assume part of the reason we were able to do this is that the English Civil War and the depradations of Cromwell's major-generals was a fair warning of what would happen if you actually tried to give a straight answer to the equality question.
Both Washington and Jefferson wrote that they believed slavery was evil even as they personally profitted from it, explicitly ended America's participation in the international slave trade, and seemed to expect its end in the near term future. None of this absolves them of their hypocrisy but I don't know what I could say here that I didn't say in the parent comment - America's Bill of Rights and founding principles represented a new high point in civil liberties for their citizens but failed to extent those liberties to the existing pre-revolutionary slave population.
I have no serious disagreement with the idea that the American Revolution was not singularly about advancing liberty, and that instead it helped solidify some heirarchical power structures - I'm even considering an effort post on it. But arguing that the American Revolution is not a central example of an enlightenment-based movement that expanded individual rights is silly.
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I believe it's more complicated that you're letting on, but you're touching on one of the major things that define the Enlightenment: Scientific Government.
The best example of this idea is found in Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. The incomplete novel describes a fictional utopian land where "generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendour, piety and public spirit" are the law of the land. A place ruled by an institution called "Salomon's House" that was explicitly the model for all future academies of science including the French Académie des Sciences and the English Royal Society.
At core, the Enlightement is a Platonist revolt against an Aristotelician order. A revolution of humanist philosophers against realist clergymen. And it is therefore no surprise that its essential direction is towards redesigning the world to fit the whims of those now philosopher kings. No surprise that it now culminates in technocracy and managerialism.
From this standpoint, it becomes easy to understand how Enlightenment led to the ascendency of physiocrats turned Liberals, and how it birthed both Communism and Fascism. All these are visions of the world based on technics ruled by would be elite technocrats that design society according to scientific principles.
But those paradoxes you point out I believe show how this isn't the whole story. How come the ideology of scientific government is so against science when it goes against the interests of the ruling class?
Well because like all ideologies it's a completely fictitious excuse to justify the rule of a particular elite, it's color is that of Science merely because the industrial revolution and its marvels gave it a lot of cachet. There was lots to buy with the name of Science for centuries. But if the ascendency of the liberal bourgeoisie didn't coincide with such discoveries, it is my firm belief that the Enlightement would have taken a completely different color.
The spirit of technics lives in Western civilization since these times, and it is useful to understand how its tribulations are justified and understood. But it is not useful in understanding how they are caused. As that still obeys the same pragmatic considerations of power it ever has.
In fact I believe, unlike I expect many here, that the future doesn't hold very much for this vision. I believe that this formula of rule by scientific experts is slowly coming to an end, crushed under the weight of its own contradictions. Unable to renew itself through new industrial marvels it is now only promising a virtuous ecological agony. And I see no way for this to inspire any ascendant elites.
Well, we’ve heard that story before, and it didn’t work out… what’s different about this time?
Maybe it is how it is supposed to be. Because there is a difference in Science and "science" and the pattern here is that Science has remained but "science" gets kicked out. We have gotten rid of concepts race biology for eugenics and phrenology because it is "science", but when we get rid of one other takes it place like "Gender Studies" and CRT and we are about to repeat that cycle by getting rid of it and replacing with some other junk.
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Tech stagnation, policy starvation, and accumulating evidence.
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...Well, shit. Just steal all my thunder, why dontcha!
Credit to all, I would say.
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This might come across as flippant, and or retreading old territory but I feel I should at least state my position for the record.
My position is that the Enlightenment was at it's core a rejection of the old notion of capital-M Mystery. IE the idea that there were things that man should not or could not know. To be fair this actually maps pretty well to your own characterization of the enlightenment as a belief that "We know how to solve all our problems."
I have, and I continue to maintain that "the Left" and "the Right" are best understood as a religious schism within the Enlightenment with disciples of Rousseau on one side and the disciples of Hobbes on the other. Both accepted Locke's theory of the social contract (or at least the broad strokes thereof) but each had vastly different ideas about the relationship of the individual to said contract. The American Revolution skewed one way, the French the other. I would say that the proof is in the pudding but then I also recognize that I am biased in favor of Hobbes.
Biased as I am I would say that the French revolutions mistake was in not allowing themselves to be bound by some higher power or principle. Reason, like fire, is a powerful tool and a frightful master.
If your publicly stated position is "by any means necessary" and "we don't care how much blood we shed" you can't then claim innocence when your followers start building mountains of skulls
On the one hand, I think this is a pretty good characterization and there's truth to this. On the other hand, arch-Enlightenment-thinker Kant's metaphysics revolved around the Ding an sich, the unknowable core of reality that lay beyond any possible experience, something (potentially) so radically foreign that even the categories of time, space, and causality cannot be applied to it. Pretty Mysterious if you ask me!
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You can't even claim innocence, I would say, when your followers start building mountains of the wrong skulls!
Reason cares not from whence the blood flows, only that it flows.
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I would question whether there's really a relevant distinction. The peasants in the Vendée who revolted against the republican government certainly seemed to have a very deep personal affection for their king and their Christ.
They were mostly not Christians, but they were also mostly not atheists. Robespierre was opposed to atheism. The 'cult of reason' never really had state sponsorship and died out pretty quick.
There were so many factions that referring to the goals of "the Revolution" is almost meaningless. People couldn't agree what "the Revolution" meant. It could span from people who just wanted a few constitutional guarantees from the king to people like Babeuf who were essentially proto-communists. But even the more radical Jacobins at the height of the Terror would probably sit on the conservative end of a European social democratic party today, by their political positions.
Rather than blaming the centralization of the Republic on its founders' faith in human reason, I would note that France had been centralizing her government and smashing competing power centers for centuries under the Bourbon kings. That's what absolutism was all about. The revolutionaries simply continued, and maybe expedited, a process that had been ongoing for a long time. IMO centralization of government is inevitable in an industrializing world.
I think you significantly underrate the extent to which the ideals of social equality and universal brotherhood are based on Christianity. Most of the stuff conservative Christians like, property, patriarchy, patriotism, tradition, family, virtue, sexual continence, aren't actually Christian. That's not to say they're anti-Christian (though I would argue some of them might be), but that none of those values owe anything to Christianity. They are identified with Christianity in the present day, because western society was Christian for so long, to the extent that a lot of leftists end up agreeing and saying, "and that's a bad thing!" and then wrongly lionizing pre-Christian pagan societies as bastions of tolerance and libertinism. But those values existed long before Christianity, and continued to exist in societies that never Christianized. On the other hand, the ideas that all men are brothers, or that everyone has something fundamental in them that makes them equal by virtue of being human, or that there is virtue in being the oppressed rather than the oppressor, are all Christian in origin. That's not to say that Christianity must have necessarily produced the enlightenment, but the enlightenment would certainly have never existed without Christianity. A reactionary Christian may say that Jesus didn't mean social equality, or he didn't mean we all have to be brothers this side of heaven, but the surest way for a reactionary to make certain the revolution never rears its ugly head again is to junk the cross. Otherwise it's always going to be just a matter of time before someone comes along and interprets--wrongly or otherwise--the sermon on the mount to mean "to each according to his need" all over again.
I've seen the argument made (though I don't recall where) that one of the central tensions when thinking about Christianity is that much of the writings about Jesus in the Gospels, and the immediate social movement around Jesus, were expecting an immediate end of the world and Apocalypse, and thus insist on a kind of intense radicalism that is wholly unsustainable in any kind of longer lived community. And then, even by the time of Paul, the fact that the imminent Apocalypse hasn't shown up yet starts being more and more disruptive to making a church with any kind of continuity, and so much of the work of Paul was to reformulate Christianity into a faith that could grow and maintain its own communities through time and space, which required dampening a lot of the especially radical Christian tendencies and shifting them from a material interpretation towards a more spiritual one.
At least by this kind of argument, this is why, when Christian sects show up insisting on returning to the roots of Christianity and ditching everything other than the actual words and actions of Christ, they generally end up burning out in a decade or two at best, or else they age past their radical phase and revert to more sustainable, less radical social forms.
But if you're sympathetic to this kind of radicalism, you end up having to say, for example, that the writings of Paul (which is to say, a large chunk of the New Testament) aren't really Christian. Which some people kind of implicitly do! But certainly for a lot of people, a definition of Christianity probably ought to include the writings of Paul and all the early church traditions.
And then someone else might very well argue that the tension between the unwavering apocalyptic, unsustainable idealism of Christ, and the "how do we live in the world and keep this ship afloat through time and space" concerns of Paul and the early church is itself, in fact, at the very core of Christianity. The pulls of both idealism and pragmatism / sustainability both serve extremely important functions in the world, with different people needing to steer towards one or the other at different times and places.
I think this is pretty unambiguously true, but it includes Paul, who apparently expected the end to come very shortly, and said things like:
He also suggested people not even get married, and only grudgingly sanctioned marriage as a necessary evil to prevent "burning with lust," hardly conducive to family formation.
He may or may not have mellowed out later, depending on whether you believe all of the letters attributed to him were written by him.
I do agree this is a fundamental problem at the heart of Christianity though. It is a faith that was never. meant to be a civilizational faith which has been jury-rigged into just that. All it really takes is for someone to look around at all the kings and princes, and then look at the New Testament, and say, "hey, wait a minute, this isn't what Jesus taught!"
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The relevant distinction is that they made the overthrow of the Church an explicit policy goal, and won on popular acclaim. Sure, the peasants in the Vendée didn't agree, but they weren't really part of the revolution, were they?
Clearly "Militant Atheists" is the wrong term.
via wikipedia:
...Did any of the Revolutionaries approve of a religion or a system of faith that they did not themselves personally invent, based on their revolutionary principles, purely as an expression of their understanding of human reason?
Meanwhile, none of this would have been within the Overton window of the American public. To my knowledge, the American revolution spawned zero novel state religions, reason-based or otherwise.
I disagree. We can look at which factions won, and we can look at which arguments were decisive. Sure, lots of Revolutionaries wanted different things. Only a few revolutionaries got what they wanted, and they won based on a narrow set of arguments. Therein lies the true nature of the revolution, I argue.
It was a Revolution, though. France might have been centralizing power for hundreds of years, but they had kings for hundreds of years too. The revolutionaries ditched the crown and ran away with the power-centralization, and doing so was an affirmative choice, made for ideological reasons. Faced with the task of rewriting their social structure from scratch, the French deliberately chose to centralize all power and remove every check on that power's exercise. They deliberately and consciously embraced the mob.
And yet, the Americans a mere 13 years earlier did the exact opposite, and restrained that tendency better than most other places in the world. Why?
property, patriotism, and depending on definitions patriarchy I'll grant you unequivocally. Those aren't Christian in any way. Tradition, Family, Virtue, and Sexual Continence aren't Christian in the sense that other cultures have had other expressions of these ideas without any influence from Christianity. They are Christian in the sense that the western world was decisively shaped by the Christian versions of these ideas.
This seems... unlikely to me. Doesn't Buddhism have analogues to all of those concepts, for example?
It's entirely possible that this is true, but to my mind the question is not whether the Enlightenment was possible without Christianity, but rather whether the Enlightenment necessarily rejects Christianity. I think it does, and I think that is another reason why the French Revolution was the true offspring of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, properly understood, is flatly incompatible with Christianity. Further, while you may be correct that Christianity is a perpetual source of leveling arguments, I disagree that it is a perpetual source of the Enlightenment specifically. Christianity ruled a lot of terrain for a very long time, and over that time there were many abortive leveling revolutions, just as there have been leveling revolutions in previous societies far back into antiquity. There has only been one Enlightenment, because the idea of leveling is not, at the end of the day, the core concept that makes it what it is. The core of the Enlightenment is not "things should be more equal". The core is "We know how to solve all our problems." that claim, and that claim made credible by a conflux of unique historical forces, is why the Enlightenment could succeed where previous movements failed.
The central message of Buddhism is not "every man for himself", as the quote goes, but neither is it "every man a brother
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If the premise is that industrialisation causes this trend, then a country with 1/10th the population spread out over a much wider area not being as far along the path as one of the most populous and industrialised countries in Europe is no contradiction.
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