9780141997704

The End of Enlightenment

EMPIRE, COMMERCE, CRISIS

RUTH SCURR

Richard Whatmore

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE END OF ENLIGHTENMENT

‘Powerful and meticulously argued . . . Whatmore approaches the Enlightenment on its own terms . . . There is buried treasure in his account of how figures from different intellectual backgrounds negotiated the Enlightenment crisis . . . Whatmore is to be applauded’ Joseph Hone, History Today

‘An exhaustive and fascinating read on how the Enlightenment came to a grizzly end’ Reader’s Digest

‘A brilliant and revelatory book about the history of ideas’

David Runciman

‘In this lucid and beautifully written book, Richard Whatmore evokes the darkening vision of the eighteenth-century thinkers forced to confront the failure of Enlightenment. Instead of achieving perpetual peace and progress, they saw Europe fragment into a collection of warmongering states teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and global turmoil. Whatmore carefully reconstructs the historical context for the failure of Enlightenment and presents it as a powerful echo chamber for our own troubled times. This is a fascinating and important book’ Ruth Scurr

‘The Enlightenment had seemed to promise a limitless bounty of peace, prosperity, rational inquiry and mutual tolerance to a Europe long ravaged by religious fanaticism and war. Why did it come to end in the extreme violence and continental bloodshed of the French Revolution, and how could another such disaster be avoided? Richard Whatmore charts the response to these concerns of many of the greatest thinkers of the eighteenth century, from Smith and Burke to Wollstonecraft. His book is panoramic in scope, always fresh and deep in its analysis, but with a polemical edge for today’s readers fearful again for our global future’ Jesse Norman

‘A brilliant work of intellectual interpretation by our foremost historian of Enlightenment ideas. Whatmore rescues the Enlightenment from today’s circular debates and places it where it belongs: in the pulsing, chaotic era of its genesis and demise’ Christopher de Bellaigue

‘As the eighteenth century progressed, it was increasingly apparent that the Enlightenment was failing. If religious bigotry was in retreat, new evils advanced: revolution, terror and greed, fuelling war, exploitation and imperial expansion. Richard Whatmore shows how thinkers from David Hume to Mary Wollstonecraft strove to find solutions to such challenges. This intellectually exhilarating book is particularly relevant today, when liberal democracy is facing new dangers, which threaten to drag us back into the darkness once more’ Adam Sisman

‘An accomplished exercise in intellectual history’

Alexander Faludy, Catholic Herald

‘Excellent . . . suggests that the Enlightenment ended up devouring those who most believed in it, providing the context for the emergence of Napoleon’

Katherine Bayford, Engelsberg Ideas

‘One of my favourite books on the British Enlightenment . . . the author captures the tenor of eighteenth century British debates about liberty very well . . . Whatmore writes as if he is actually trying to explain things to you! If you read a lot of history books, you will know that this is oddly rare’ Tyler Cowen

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Whatmore is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Co-Director of the Institute of Intellectual History. He is the author of several acclaimed contributions to intellectual history and eighteenth-century scholarship, including  The History of Political Thought, Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans and Against War and Empire.

Richard Whatmore The End of Enlightenment

Empire, Commerce, Crisis

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First published by Allen Lane 2023

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A dark

Illimitable ocean, without bound, Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height, And time, and place, are lost; where eldest Night And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise Of endless wars, and by confusion stand.

John Milton, Paradise Lost, II , 891– 94

Men could not recognise the common good. They knew no binding customs, used no laws. Every man, wise in staying strong, surviving, Kept for himself the spoils that fortune o ered.

Lucretius, De rerum natura, trans., Anthony M. Esolen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 5, 958–61

LIVONIA

Sarajevo Stockholm Constantinople

LITHUANIA

KINGDOM

Moscow

RUSSIA

After the wars of religion: Europe in 1648, when most of the religious con icts between states had ceased. Although wars were ongoing between the major powers, gures such as Edward Gibbon and Edmund Burke praised the diverse cultures and politics. Europe became a patchwork of di erent political and religious communities.

CRIMEANKHANATE

EMPIRE

0

0

Holy Roman Empire

Imperial Cities

CIRCASSIANS GREECE

The two cities in Westphalia where the treaties were signed

500 miles

800 km

Notec

Lipawa (Liepaja)

Tauroggen (Taurage)

Königsberg (Kaliningrad)

Olsztyn (Allenstein) Chelmno (Kulm) Torun (Thorn) Gdansk (Danzig)

Gniezno (Gnesen)

Mitawa (Jelgava)

EAST PRUSSIA NEW EAST PRUSSIA WARMIA

Kowno (Kaunas)

Wilno (Vilnius)

Grodno

Dzialdowo (Soldau) Bialystok

Wolkowysk (Volkovysk)

Dyneburg (Daugavpils)

Polock (Polotsk)

Minsk

Bobrujsk

Witebsk (Vitebsk)

Mscislaw (Mstislavl)

Mahilyow (Mogilyov)

MAZOVIA

Lodz Plock (Plotsk) Wielun Poznan (Posen)

SOUTH PRUSSIA

Drohiczyn Warsaw Rawa (Rava)

WEST GALICIA

Pinsk

First Partition, 1772

Lands annexed by: Austria Prussia Russia

Czestochowa (Tschenstochau) Maciejowice

Krakow

Tarnow

Lublin

Brzesc Litewshi (Brest)

Kowel (Kovel)

Zamosc (Zamostyle)

KINGDOM OF GALICIA

Przemysl

Pripet Marshes

Korosten (Korostyshiv)

Luck (Lutsk)

Zytomierz (Zhytomyr)

Lwow (Lviv)

Tarnopol (Ternopil)

CARPATHIANS

Second Partition, 1793

Lands annexed by: Prussia Russia

Third Partition, 1795

Lands annexed by: Austria Prussia Russia

Winnica (Vinnytsya)

Balta

Homel (Gomel)

Kiev

States ceased to exist across Europe before and after the French Revolution. The best illustration is the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the largest states, which gradually disappeared because of the partitions between Russia, Prussia and Austria, which commenced in 1772 and continued in 1793 and 1795. Smaller and weaker powers across the continent felt increasingly endangered.

Other German Principalities

Milan

RUSSIA

While the surviving republics of Europe were seen to be in decline in the eighteenth century, everything changed with the French Revolution.

The First French Republic established client republics across Switzerland, Italy and the Netherlands, but also turned itself into an empire, eating up the old republics in the process.

AUSTRIAN POSSESSIONS

ALASKYA (RU)

BRITISH NORTH AMERICA

NEW SPAIN (SP)

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

GREENLAND (DK)

ICELAND (DK) FAROE ISLANDS (DK)

UNITED KINGDOM (of Great Britain and Ireland) UNITED KINGDOM (of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves)

NEWFOUNDLAND COLONY (BR)

AZORES (UKPBA)

NETHERLANDS

MADERIA (UKPBA)

FRANCE

SPAIN

CAP. GENERAL OF CUBA (SP)

CAP. GENERAL FLORIDA (SP)

BRITISH GUIANA

BAHAMAS (BR)

HAITI

JAMAICA (BR)

MOSQUITO COAST (BR)

CAP. GENERAL SANTO DOMINIGO

CAP. GENERAL PUERTO RICO (SP)

ANTILLES (ND)

ARUBA (ND)

ANTIGUA & BARBUDA (BR)

DANISH WEST INDIES GUADELOUPE (FR)

MARTINIQUE (FR)

DOMINICA (BR)

ST. LUCIA (BR)

GRENADA (BR)

TRINIDAD & TOBAGO (BR)

BARBADOS (BR)

ST. VINCENT & THE GRENADINES (BR)

NEW GRENADA (SP)

PERU (SP) CHILE (SP)

CANARY ISLANDS (SP)

SURINAM (DUTCH GUIANA)

BRAZIL (UKPBA)

SIERRA LEONE (BR) SAVOY (PIEDMONT SARDINIA)

FRENCH GUIANA GOLD COAST (BR)

CAPE VERDE (UKPBA)

S ÃO TOM É (UKPBA)

The age of mercantile and Napoleonic wars, Britain survival and military victory.

UNITED KINGDOM (of Sweden and Norway)

SAVOY (PIEDMONT SARDINIA)

GOLD COAST (BR)

DENMARK

AUSTRIAN EMPIRE GERMAN CONFEDERATION STATES

OTTOMAN EMPIRE

BIOKO (SP)

PRINCE’S ISLAND (UKPBA)

É

EMPIRE

QING EMPIRE

COMPANY RAJ (BR)

CEYLON (BR)

ANGOLA (UKBPA)

CAPE COLONY (BR)

MOZAMBIQUE (UKBPA)

DUTCH EAST INDIES

NEW SOUTH WALES (BR)

mercantile systems ( c . 1815). Having survived the turmoil of the French Britain showed that mercantile empire facilitated national victory. Other European states followed.

Introduction I

On 8 August 1776 the political economist Adam Smith visited his great friend David Hume at his home in Edinburgh. For the past two years Hume had been declining. Although physicians were divided about the nature of the disease, it was evident from the severe pain he felt and the acute loss of weight he had experienced that he was dying. An ill-advised trip to Bath to take the waters in the summer of 1776 further weakened him. On 4 July, just as the American Declaration of Independence was being signed in Philadelphia, Hume returned to Scotland to dine with his closest friends, and to make nal alterations to his works and will. There had been some speculation that the famous sceptic might embrace the Christian faith before he died, but this had been rmly put aside weeks before: in a conversation about his soul with the lawyer James Boswell, Hume playfully maintained that ‘when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal, though he had known some instances of very good men being religious.’1

In Smith’s company, Hume was much more candid.2 Together they discussed the prognosis, and Hume assured his friend that a contented end was near. As they conversed, he informed Smith that he had been reading Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead and imagining the excuses he might give to Charon for not entering into his boat ferrying the dead across the river Styx to the Underworld. The rst excuse was that Hume was very busy ‘correcting my works for a new edition’, to which the imaginary Charon would patiently reply, ‘When you have seen the e ect of these, you will be for making other alterations. There will be no end of such excuses; so, honest friend, please step into the boat.’ The second excuse was a little

Introduction

grander: ‘I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of the public. If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition.’ Charon’s reply was signi cant –  through it, Hume admitted that the ‘systems of superstition’ remained powerful and were unlikely to soon be broken: ‘But Charon would then lose all temper and decency. “You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years. Do you fancy I will grant you a lease for so long a term? Get into the boat this instant, you lazy loitering rogue.” ’3

For much of his life, Hume had held that the great achievement of eighteenth-century Britain was that its religious institutions –  those ‘systems of superstition’ – resembled ‘little more but in Name their Predecessors, who ourished during the civil Wars; & who were the Authors of such Disorder’.4 Zeal and bigotry, he believed, had been replaced by more tolerant and calmer instances of Christian commitment. Hume was attacked for downplaying the link between Protestantism and the civil liberties enjoyed by modern Britons living in their professedly free state.5 He was violently criticized for playing down the role of the Reformation in contemporary national life, portraying contemporary Protestants as being lesser vessels of the Word of God than their forebears.6 Hume shrugged o such predictable animosity. What mattered most to Hume during this time was that Europe had nally escaped the bloody sectarian con icts of the past two hundred years and found itself instead experiencing an enlightenment composed of peace, toleration and moderation.7 During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the splitting of the church saw the rise of rival attempts to achieve the ecclesiastical and political dominance over populations that in turn heralded religious persecution and wars both within and between states. Attempts to contain this religiously fuelled violence gave rise to various political and constitutional settlements, but ordinary Europeans still faced sustained periods during which fanatics justi ed actions and laws condoning and encouraging civil and international bloodshed. These movements often justi ed themselves and generated zealous followers by

Introduction

de ning their mission along explicitly war-like terms against those with an alternative faith. The results were often the collapse of paci c modes of behaviour and crisis among communities suddenly overrun by men and women with extreme and uncompromising beliefs. This was one reason why, in the British context, John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments or ‘Book of Martyrs’ continued to be so popular from 1563, with its images of the persecuted being burned alive.8 Europe- wide fears were epitomized by Jacques Callot’s prints, published as Miseries and Misfortunes of War in 1633, including an unforgettable image of the numerous dead hanging by the neck from tree branches while nearby clerics absolved the murderous soldiers in sacred ceremony.9

II

Identifying threats that might transform superstition into fanaticism was, Hume argued, a central duty of the philosopher. As a younger man, he had responded to accusations that he was an atheist who sought the destruction of religion and morality with a refutation founded on the assumption that he was living ‘in a Country of Freedom, where Informers and Inquisitors are so deservedly held in universal Detestation, where Liberty, at least of Philosophy, is so highly valued and esteemed’.10 He portrayed himself then as an advocate of this enlightened attitude, a hard-won spirit of the age that ought to be maintained. He believed he was a defender of the relative harmony he perceived around him, that he was honing tools for society that would help it understand the consequences of its violent past and make clear the measures that could be taken to avoid the return of those dark days.

But, over time, Hume’s position changed. And as he approached death, as he rehearsed his excuses for Charon, he had concluded that new forms of superstition had forged new fanaticisms of unparalleled power. Hume believed that this superstition stemmed not from the religious realm, but from that of secular belief. He feared

Introduction

the consequences of ministers and merchants promoting a form of mercantile empire fuelled by spiralling national debts that funded war.11 He worried especially about one consequence of the pursuit of empire, namely an addiction to the idea of liberty among the populace and politicians.12 And although he had defended the pursuit of luxury during his life, towards its end he was concerned that the sel shness accompanying the pursuit of material gain had corroded national mores.13 With these three forces in mind, Hume soon came to the conclusion that the times of the Reformation had been returned to. As they had done then, individuals would pursue extreme ends, but now in the name of liberty, commerce, pro t and empire, ensuring that the future looked bleak: once again peace and toleration were being replaced by division, accusation and violence. When such action became social norm, the Enlightenment –  de ned, in Hume’s view, by its aim to prevent superstition-fuelled con ict –  had failed. Such threats were real, Hume warned even as he prepared to sail the river Styx.

The fundamental change in the world that Hume became most concerned about as he aged had rst been identi ed in a series of essays that he wrote in the 1730s, and that made him famous by the early 1740s. The young Hume argued that the established rules of international politics had been turned upside down. Hume dated this development to the nal decades of the seventeenth century, when states had rst started to compete with one another for the control of trade. States had, of course, always sought riches and commerce. In building empires, they had incorporated polities and regions into national domains, always with an eye for spoil. 14 International commerce was traceable to ancient times and numerous seaborne empires had been erected upon such a foundation, as the Dutch had done in the seventeenth century. 15 Merchant empires had risen and fallen since the Renaissance, and since then scal- military states had emerged which taxed their populations heavily in order to ght long wars.16 Britain was such a state. 17 But Hume argued that when the overriding goal of national policy became the expansion of national

Introduction markets by war or by economic imperialism –  through the controlling of the commerce of fellow states and communities by applying political or military pressure, even as they remained notionally independent – then politics was fundamentally altered.

Hume soon too perceived there was no alternative to this new national strategy of commerce increased by whatever means necessary, be it competition, invasion, extortion or threat. The reason, he held, was the link between commerce and a burgeoning military revolution. States had to invest in the latest military technology –  canon shooting explosive shells, mortar ring hot-shot, intlock muskets, polygonal forti cations –  to defend themselves against rival powers, as well as often having to deploy vast eets and huge armies, the latter being frequently ten times larger than they had been in the 1550s.18 Paying for this relied upon generating revenues through commerce – and the capacity of states to do this was transformed when, from the late seventeenth century, immediate revenue generation through public credit became possible.19

This was a moment of historic importance. If they maintained the trust of the nancial markets that had loaned them funds at interest, states could now defer capital repayments to a distant point in time. The Dutch Republic had proven to be innovative in generating and servicing debt in this way, with trading in shares of the Dutch East India Company in Amsterdam beginning in the seventeenth century.20 Britain had followed suit: the Bank of England was founded in 1694, followed by the new East India Company in 1698.21 By the 1690s equity or risk capital was being issued on the London exchange; the purposes of such exchanges were not solely to nance state or private enterprise, but also entailed trading in stocks, commodities, foreign currencies and insurance. A state like Britain could in very little time generate enormous debts to fund its wars. Yet paying national debts over long periods depended in turn on extended economic success; any long-term downturn would leave a state at the mercy of its creditors –  as well as those countries who continued to be able to a ord their military expenditure. This was why the British and the French in particular became so worried about

national bankruptcy.22 The need to pay interest upon the national debt in turn focused governments’ minds on furthering the reach of their trade, which meant more markets and revenues for the state and a greater level of trust among creditors.23 Such forces contributed to an ever-greater lust for empire, practically realizable both because of the growing gulf in power between commercial and non-commercial states and the pressure upon states to expand their markets.

As Hume and his friends recognized, one consequence of the turn to commercial empire was that few states in Europe were safe. It was clear by the middle of the eighteenth century that a whole host of traditional powers had declined, from Sweden, Spain and the Dutch Republic to Venice, Genoa and Poland-Lithuania.24 More were losing their liberty, becoming states ruled by absolute monarchs, the predominant form of government.25 Smaller states and especially the republics entered a prolonged period of crisis.26 Traditional survival strategies for such states, from economic specialization to alliances and confederation and, above all else, an emphasis on national patriotism or ‘manliness’, were no longer sufcient, such was the gulf in strength traceable to commercial dividends. Many states simply ceased to exist. Others found their domestic politics perpetually interfered with by larger commercial powers, who suddenly had an interest in the markets of their neighbours, whether they were traditional allies or enemies. A commonplace assertion in the eighteenth century was that for every state except the global superpowers of Britain, France and a handful of vast longstanding empires such as Russia, China, Japan, the Ottomans and the Habsburg dominions, sovereignty had become a myth.27 A new form of empire was developing, entailing the economic exploitation of a territory by political control rather than direct acquisition or military invasion. Rome became less relevant –  modern Carthages were on the rise.28

If the consequence for Europe was a reduction of the number of states that could be considered independent, in other parts of the globe e ects were more parlous still. The European capacity to

Introduction

employ military technology to defeat less advanced states, tribes and communities was ruthlessly deployed in the creation of empires intended to generate pro ts for their national epicentres. The growth of the Atlantic slave trade was one result, with the Portuguese, British, French, Dutch, Danes, Swedes and Spanish battling for control of the supply of enslaved peoples from West Africa to labour in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and in the mining and farming of South America. In the British case, the plantation economy in the American colonies produced highly pro table cash crops for European consumption, such as sugar, rice, tobacco, indigo and co ee. In addition, raw materials such as gold, ivory and dyewoods were extracted from Africa to support manufactures in the European states. Another instance was the exploitation of India and the Americas, also through chartered companies; signi cantly, the European power which had yet to establish such a company, Portugal, did so in 1755. Smith accused the Portuguese of making pro ts only for trading pirates, their actions resulting, as his friend the Abbé Raynal wrote, in the enslavement of all of the northern part of Brazil.29 For Smith, ‘The government of an exclusive company of merchants, is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatsoever.’30 Merchant companies made their own interests sovereign, he argued, to the detriment of indigenous peoples who became only a source of pro t, and to domestic governments, who became their fools.31

The price of such developments was ceaseless war between the larger states for commercial dominion both by arms and by political and economic strategies of control. In addition to the risk of being annexed, smaller states found their own domestic politics to be far more complicated and turbulent, being dependent on the views of the ambassadors from the major powers. New forms of xenophobia developed in which foreigners and rival countries were blamed for the economic health of your own state. In free states, where the people had a voice, it was discovered that elections were much more easily won if voters could be persuaded to blame foreigners rather than national politicians for decline.

Introduction

War for trade generated enormous pro ts for particular groups in society. Fears expressed early in the century about ‘the monied interest’, those whose wealth derived from investment in government stocks or who were able to exploit the commercially dependent elements of empire for vast personal gain, continued to grow. A major worry of contemporaries concerning their own nation’s economies centred on this new monied class –  and especially the liquidity of their wealth. Rather than relying on the immoveable wealth of land, this group could, it was suggested, move their assets across borders, ruining a state’s economy in the process. More dangerous still was the idea that the monied interest could easily establish what Hume’s close friend Smith in his Wealth of Nations (1776) famously called a ‘mercantile system’: a corrupt nexus of merchants and bankers, who moved capital for trade, and the politicians they bribed, who made legislation for their own pro t rather than the good of society. Smith notoriously put it that ‘it is the industry which is carried on for the bene t of the rich and the powerful, that is principally encouraged by our mercantile system. That which is carried on for the bene t of the poor and the indigent, is too often, either neglected, or oppressed.’32 Traditionally, Smith’s mercantile system has been associated with an economic doctrine termed mercantilism, entailing bullionism, the pursuit of gold for your own state, and reason-of-state, the policy of pursuing your own economic interests at the expense of others, beggaring your neighbour wherever possible.33 Smith is regularly described as the arch-enemy of such a system because he made plain the bene ts of free trade in making nations wealthier.34 This is a mistake. Smith thought all policy prescriptions, including free trade, had positive and negative e ects depending on the circumstances in which they operated. This was why he supported Britain’s restrictive Navigation Acts, which he called ‘the wisest of all the commercial regulations of England’ –  an example of his preference for discussing speci c cases in particular contexts.35 He found himself writing a book for the ages amid civil war, domestic crisis and likely international war. Accordingly, he defended expansive global trade while

Introduction

depicting various more realistic scenarios, accurately depicting the parlous condition of contemporary states battling for markets.36

When he discussed the mercantile system, Smith was mostly concerned about the British Empire: he believed it was likely to collapse because it had turned into a mercantile system addicted to war and empire-building. Smith’s Wealth of Nations was one of the very last books that Hume read before he died; he was full of praise for it.37 Hume felt it supported his view, and that of so many of his friends and contemporaries, that Britain would collapse, like past mercantile states had tended to, and just as the Dutch and the Spanish empires had declined in living memory. Smith was cautious by character and tended to hedge his bets about the future. But he could not have been more explicit about the ills he perceived around him. The subject on which ‘the public prejudices of Europe’ needed ‘to be set right’ was ‘the real futility of distant dominions’.38 Empire was for Smith a policy of madness: ‘under the present system of management’, he argued, Britain ‘derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she assumes over her colonies’.39

When states had previously pursued commerce and empire, wealth had come only to the adventurers who travelled and the courts or aristocrats who patronized them. The British were di erent –  politicians from across the political spectrum, in an ocial capacity or not, owned shares in the East India Company, in related imperial ventures or in national bonds.40 British politics was increasingly in uenced by a coterie of gures who each had a personal interest in the expansion of the existing mercantile empire; waging war brought pro t to them at the same time as it damaged indigenous peoples, increased taxes for the British people and reduced wealth for all. Figures such as Robert Clive, who made a fortune in the East as he rose from a simple clerk to major general, were depicted as dangerous ‘nabobs’, a term derived from the leading o cials of the Mughal Empire, who were known as nawabs , with in uence su cient to maintain Britain’s mercantile path. 41 As Bengal experienced a famine that killed a third of the population from 1769, the more grotesque e ects of the system

Introduction were manifested.42 Smith’s nightmare was that all of Europe was following British policy because of its success in war before the American Revolution. Smith believed that this resulted in an ‘unnatural and retrograde’ economic development reliant upon the pursuit of war and empire and at odds with the true interests of humanity. Ultimately, he argued, it could not be sustained.43 For many observers, chattel slavery was the most apparent example of the kind of commerce that resulted from the unnatural order of modern European trade.44

However unnatural they considered contemporary economic and political relations to be, Hume and Smith, after the experience of the Seven Years’ War, fought across several continents between France and Britain and their respective allies from 1756–63, could not deny that Britain was far better at waging war than any commercial state in history. Britain described itself as a free state whose populace enjoyed far greater liberties and rights than those of other European nations. But this free state amounted to a war machine that used individual liberty as a rationale for the destruction of other states and the subjugation of their peoples. Rather than true liberty, the kind that fostered tolerance and peace, Hume believed that liberty itself was becoming fanatic, that it was morphing into a cynical, xenophobic tool of politicians. Images of John Bull and abstract notions of national glory had begun to be deployed to justify the taxes that sustained the wars that expanded the empire that, nally, generated pro ts for the monied interest.45 Traditional strategies for maintaining enlightenment ranged from establishing mutual respect between previously hostile communities to creating separate spheres of in uence to laws embodying toleration. Especially in the Protestant German states, an enlightenment/ Aufklärung was emerging entailing a rationalization of religion through the spread of a philosophy that would allow peoples and societies to govern themselves through reason alone. But whatever the nature of the enlightenment strategy, they failed in an era of global wars fought for trade and empire and in which indigenous peoples became embroiled –  the Seven Years’ War saw con ict

Introduction

across North America, Europe and the Indian subcontinent, with consequences for all of Asia and South America.46 As we will see, thinkers during this period spent a great deal of time devising schemes to abolish war and empire in perpetuity, using peaceful forms of commerce as a contributing tool, in an attempt to avert what they considered to be the end of enlightenment. Britain, they began to argue, might emerge smaller and weaker and less in uential as a result, but more free, tolerant and peaceful.

III

According to its advocates, the Enlightenment ended. Strategies for enlightenment had largely vanquished religious fanaticism from public life. But in the nal decades of the eighteenth century, they believed that they ultimately failed in the maintenance of toleration and peace among nations. They braced themselves for an era of civil or international war, the growth of intolerance and the fall of existing constitutions and governments. For many, including Hume, Smith, Gibbon and Burke, the most signi cant failure was in suppressing ideological zealots whose forebears were deemed to have been responsible for the religious wars that devastated Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were right: these conicts broke out again at the end of the eighteenth century, this time in secular guise – but with equally violent results.

Some have argued that fears for the future were a commonplace response to the French Revolution. Enlightenment thinkers had much earlier identi ed the problems likely to cause the age’s end. The French Revolution was, in fact, more of a response to the anticipations of imminent crisis; it was their e ect rather than their cause. The view became widespread in the 1760s that new forms of fanaticism were abroad. As societies across Europe became polarized, frightening forms of superstition and enthusiasm were being translated from religion into politics. These terms –  superstition, enthusiasm and fanaticism –  were employed by contemporaries to

Introduction

signify a person for whom reason was being overwhelmed by passion, delusion or ignorance, and they are of fundamental importance in understanding the eighteenth century. They were employed again and again by a wide variety of thinkers, just as they had been across Reformation Europe, to identify those who had begun to justify civil violence against others, those who argued for war and empirebuilding and those who promoted forms of sel shness and luxury that were said to corrupt human nature and lead to unnatural forms of living. As a result of such diagnoses of contemporary ills, catastrophic futures were prophesied by numerous philosophers who looked on in anxiety as secular prophets promised their followers incredible social transformation and improvement.

In order to understand the Enlightenment era and its demise it is vital to distinguish between Hume’s optimism about what can be termed the enlightenment in his early life and a conversion after the Seven Years’ War to the view that enlightenment had failed. Hume’s view was that for a variety of reasons existing societies were in crisis, being likely to collapse or be consumed in violence, and the only certainty was that the politics and society that surrounded him could not be expected to survive into the future. This was a view shared by many. As a result, speculation was rife about alternative futures, often highly practical in nature, focusing not just on the desired end but also the means of getting there, the transition mechanism that would successfully move humanity from a state of violence or corruption to harmony –  or at least stability.47 Many of these anticipated futures could be described as enthusiastic, being overly optimistic and impractical, but easily attracting adherents in consequence of promises being made to potential believers and because of the attractiveness of a general message of hope. The rhetorically gifted projector who sold such moonshine was derided but also feared as the ‘man of system’, Smith’s term from The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1755).48 The man of system might be a popular prophet and demagogue who manipulated the people, seeing himself to have special access to truth, or a philosopher advocating rigid laws and policies promising utopia, refusing to adapt to circumstances.49

Introduction

Such men existed in the realms of religion, politics and scholarship. The sort of enthusiasm these schemers might conjure was recognized as being a step on the road to fanaticism, hence Hume’s acute concern about the likelihood of civil and international war and all the kinds of intolerance and savagery that would accompany it.50

This book tells the story of the strategies to maintain enlightenment that Hume believed in when he was young and his ultimate conversion when older to the view that all of them were failing. It recaptures the views of the many contemporaries who came to share Hume’s belief that the Enlightenment had ended and that the world could expect upheavals even greater than those experienced during the Reformation. Hume’s world was one where people were expected to adhere to a faith because religion guaranteed promises and oaths, the very foundation of social interaction.51 Atheism was beyond the pale, and atheists social outcasts.52 Yet there was ongoing debate about what form of Christian belief was best suited to a tolerant and peaceful society and the least likely to turn fanatic or foment disorder. The legacy of the violence produced during the Reformation ran deep in national memories.53 The most straightforward employment of terms such as fanaticism, superstition and enthusiasm continued to be in negatively describing forms of Christianity a believer rejected, especially those found in foreign lands.54

In Britain the debate was especially acute because it was one of the few remaining free states, albeit a free state with a singularly turbulent history. Free states were associated with civil faction and division, raising the question of whether enlightenment toleration could be sustained only in autocratic states that had entrenched by diktat the rule of law. In the British case, worries about the relationship between liberty and enlightenment a ected in turn debates about the dominion of the Church of England or the Church of Scotland, as well as the rights of Dissenting and Catholic minorities. Those who believed that free states could be sustained and remain enlightened are the subjects of this book, those men and women struggling to defend their convictions in circumstances of great

Introduction

upheaval. Some prominent gures –  Catharine Macaulay, JacquesPierre Brissot, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine –  were convinced at rst that liberty, revolution and republicanism might be su cient to restore enlightenment. Others, such as William Petty, the 2nd Earl of Shelburne, Edward Gibbon and Edmund Burke thought that a Britain turned away from empire, war and commercial excess might become a beacon of moderation and toleration. These groups accused each other of being destructive fanatics and battled to restore their own version of peace and toleration. As their strategies failed, each accepted Hume’s grim prospect: ceaseless global turmoil beckoned as political and economic systems became fundamentally dependent on the practice of war.

The Meaning of Enlightenment

IThe general and accepted meaning of the Enlightenment today is that it was a great leap forward in the capacity of humans to control nature, generate wealth and direct their own destinies. It was, so the story goes, a crowning feat of progress and rationality, associated with some of the greatest philosophers such as Spinoza and Kant. Liberal values expanded, revolutions replaced tyrannical governments and the rst shoots of democracy, human rights and constitutionalism began to establish themselves, gradually spreading rst across Europe, then North America and then, ultimately, across the rest of the Earth. The assumption is that optimism was the dominant Enlightenment register, not because contemporaries were uncritical, but because they were sure that so much could be solved by the exercise of reason that a future could be forged embodying progress. Such a picture of the eighteenth century has become so rooted in educated minds that almost all scholars embrace this framework when studying the era. It is equally the point of departure for those who reject the Enlightenment for being overly imperialist, colonialist, racist or capitalist. Sometimes the present prevents us from understanding the past. Precisely this has happened in the case of the Enlightenment. Its story remains the inspiration for many actors in public life, and in politics it is regularly called on to validate stances taken today. The Enlightenment is widely described as the positive origin of our world, a shared Western heritage, emulated in progressive societies and required globally if the human race is to solve some of the

The End of Enlightenment enormous problems it presently faces.1 The mission of defending Enlightenment values against barbarians at the gates continues to inspire politicians and their followers. Countless historians have traced the origins of modernity –  our world –  back to the Enlightenment.2 There are continuities, of course, but in doing so they tend to confuse the crucial context of that historical moment. In order to understand contemporary predicaments, it is indeed vital to ask Michel Foucault’s question, ‘What, then, is this event that is called the Enlightenment, that has determined, at least in part, what we are, what we think, and what we do today?’3

If attacks upon the Enlightenment have tended to share the claim that it represents the origin of the modern world, they often then go on to blame eighteenth-century ideas for leading to or for justifying twentieth-century tragedies and crimes. Criticisms of the Enlightenment were initially focused upon a perceived gap between enlightenment values and religious commitment or social order. Religion and order were seen to be the basis of progress or peace, often in accordance with God’s providential plan for humanity.4 Such arguments, that the Enlightenment created a secular world and therefore social and intellectual chaos, persist into modern philosophy.5 In the 1950s, the Enlightenment was blamed for the rise of tyrannical communist societies –  the ineluctable search for perfectibility at any cost was often traced back to the eighteenth century.6 Liberal philosophers, such as Isaiah Berlin, were convinced that the supposedly monist rationalism of enlightenment philosophy led to the evils of Bolshevism.7 Conservatives such as Michael Oakeshott worried too about the e ects of the enlightenment aspiration to create harmonious societies based on universal laws.8 The contemporary philosopher John Gray has argued that ‘all schools of contemporary political thought are variations on the Enlightenment project.’ For Gray this project is ‘self-undermining’ and ‘exhausted’, being responsible in part for an ‘assault on cultural difference’. The Enlightenment should, in Gray’s opinion, be described as the embodiment of ‘Western cultural imperialism as the project of a universal civilization’ and the source of a ‘humanist conception

The Meaning of Enlightenment of humankind’s relations with the natural world’.9 Gray has also blamed the Enlightenment for the evils of global capitalism.10

Related arguments can be found in Jean-François Lyotard, the prominent French post-structuralist, who called the Enlightenment an ‘essentialist’ and ‘totalising’ metanarrative, another failed grand theory incompatible with human diversity.11 Far more in uential today is Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, originally composed during the Second World War, which stated that the ‘instrumental reason’ that has held sway since the Enlightenment ought to be blamed for totalitarianism and the evils of the twentieth century.12 It is worth restating again what has been frequently recognized, that Horkheimer and Adorno de ned the Enlightenment along rather particular lines: they began with Homer’s Odyssey, and had very little to say about eighteenth-century philosophy beyond a ‘Second Excursus’ linking Kant and the Marquis de Sade.13

Probably the most revered critique of the Enlightenment has been Michel Foucault’s association of the Enlightenment with the modern surveillance state epitomized by Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon.14 More recently, but in a similar vein, scholars have condemned the Enlightenment for human oppression through justi cations of social hierarchy, manifesting itself especially in historic colonialism, sexism and racism.15 Louis Sala-Molins has argued that Rousseau ought to be admonished for being silent about slavery; abolitionists such as Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, merit reappraisal too because they did not call for the immediate renunciation of the practice.16 Some authors go so far as to causally link the Enlightenment with fascism and the Holocaust.17

Even if the last examples are extreme, criticism is increasingly directed towards the historians and students of the past who have

The End of Enlightenment played down the levels of injustice that existed within pre-industrial societies, and especially the forms of oppression that arose within the Enlightenment-era European empires as they violated the resources and ravaged the cultures of countless native peoples.18 Historical actors can be condemned because of their dreadful exercise of power, or their existence within networks of coercion directed for the bene t of the rich and the strong against the poor and the weak. It is often stated that such critiques of the European past are new, a shared and urgent activity by thoroughly modern people motivated by moral conscience. In fact, none of the attacks are original. Indeed, both the positive evaluation of the Enlightenment as the source of civilized modernity and its critique as having justi ed barbarism can be traced to the nineteenth century. Those who justi ed the Enlightenment as the embodiment of reason and progress were Whigs or Liberals. Those who rejected the Enlightenment were socialists or Marxists, often inheritors of religious or republican traditions that advocated for social unions or uni ed cultural communities.19 And those old schools of thought continue to govern our perspective today.

When the dominant Whig/Liberal ideology in the nineteenth century established itself as a framework for understanding the present, con dent histories began to be written of a presumed past, narrating the triumph of representative government, liberty and free markets built on the foundations of progress laid down during the Enlightenment.20 At the same time, socialists and Marxists indicted industrial society, looking back to the eighteenth century as the time when the rot began, charting the explosion of propertydefending laws, the loss of the popular right to the use of common land, and the increasing power of the urban bourgeoisie as they refused to abide by the traditional notions of a moral economy.21 Liberal and Marxist histories are still being written, whether their exponents realize this or not.

In such histories the Enlightenment becomes a eld of battle. For Liberals, toleration, democracy and rights emerge from an ever-growing web of relationships forged through a revolution in

The

Meaning of Enlightenment

human communication. What is deemed most just, global and liberal wins out because it is the most rational –  with the caveat that full equality manifested in rights so obvious to us today had yet to be fully realized then.22 The work of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has bolstered such Liberal interpretations of the Enlightenment. He argued that the eighteenth century saw an expanding bourgeois public sphere, facilitating far greater communication through press and print than ever before, as well as the consequent emergence of a new category in politics: public opinion. 23 The Enlightenment that emerged could be de ned as secular and cosmopolitan.24 Against the Liberals, those who see the Enlightenment as an arena for oppression and exploitation reiterate Marxist tropes about the grisly injustices of early commercial modernity and the grotesque abuses of humanity that resulted. Such arguments frequently refer to the imposition in England –  purportedly a free state –  of the ‘Bloody Code’ commencing with the Black Act of 1723, which made poaching a capital crime.25 Between the 1770s and the 1830s the number of o ences punishable by death skyrocketed, with many of the new laws focused on the rights of property owners. Smith himself was critical of these sorts of laws.26 The many thousands who met public execution as a result of some minor theft is evidence, according to the Marxist formulation, of an ‘enlightened’ middle-class brutally entrenching their assets.27 Other examples included the eviction of tenants across the Highlands and the Western Isles in a series of clearances from the 1750s, all in the name of agricultural improvement, the Europe-wide enclosure movement and the battle to control the price of grain by populations worried at the prospect of famine. As Marx himself asserted, ‘when Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie.’28 Liberal and Marxist ways of seeing the Enlightenment are mistaken. It is wrong, with the Liberals, to see that world straightforwardly as the origin of our own. They incorrectly assume that the same sorts of questions were being asked about rights, liberty or

The End of Enlightenment

democracy by signi cant writers throughout history, a questioning culminating in the age of revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. In fact, eighteenth-century actors had distinctive responses to their problems. Presumptions of Liberal continuity mask what is alien and signi cant about ideas at that time –  making the intellectual history of the century dull and predictable, simply the passing of a progressive baton from one generation to the next. Liberals forget that assertions of rights can lead to division and fanaticism, the creation of self-proclaimed democracies to further violence and war.29 It cannot be denied, with the Marxists, that worries about political liberty, poverty and economic globalization are traceable to the eighteenth century. Yet the Marxist attack upon the Enlightenment for ideas which led to later catastrophe has negative consequences. It caricatures what happened in the eighteenth century as a few inkstained thinkers and rapacious nabobs forming and defending this thing called the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment did exist in the form of genuine strategies for peace and toleration.30 When these strategies were overwhelmed by new kinds of fanaticism, enlightenment was seen to have ended. But the battle was reconceived and recommenced.

If the Enlightenment is solely perceived as the source of a problematic modernity, the function of historical investigation becomes limited to detecting the errors of the past alone while ignoring the deeper and more complex currents that were in play then and may still be in play today. We cannot learn from the eighteenth century if we associate studying the Enlightenment with just the identi cation of the presumed mistakes of philosophers working at that time. Finding continuities from the eighteenth century is not wrong. Recognizing that, at the end of the eighteenth century, many observers believed that their own enlightenment dedicated to preventing religious and imperialist wars was collapsing or had disintegrated is the part that has been forgotten; it needs to be restored because it provided singularly clear-eyed evaluations of the prospects for sovereign states in a world which looks much like our own, perspectives now lost.

The Meaning of Enlightenment

That the Enlightenment exists today mainly in the form of a caricature, a product of a more general turn against history in public life, has been asserted many times since the turn of the century. James Schmidt has done more than anyone else to ridicule ahistorical perceptions of eighteenth-century thought.31 In particular he rejects those Whiggish accounts in which the Enlightenment becomes synonymous with the progress of reason in the form of human rights or declarations of the rights of man.32 Criticism of these standard approaches raises the inevitable question of whether it makes sense to generalize about enlightenment ideas at all.33 If enlightenment as a whole amounts to a series of strategies intended to put an end to civil turbulence and religion-inspired international turmoil, it becomes possible to talk of a plurality of enlightenments that might be Cartesian, Arminian or Newtonian in origin and Neapolitan, Scottish, English or Parisian in expression.34 Within such enlightenments, the contribution of theology to each strategy for peace and toleration can facilitate a more precise de nition. A ‘civil enlightenment’ derived from eclectic philosophy and seeking a state that separated religion from politics can be distinguished from a ‘metaphysical enlightenment’ based on rationalist forms of Christianity seeking a public theological culture that ensured politics and religion together maintained civil peace. Defenders of the rst approach included Samuel Pufendorf and Christian Thomasius, while the second included Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Kant.35 That the latter won out at the end of the eighteenth century forms a German version of the end of enlightenment – this is what the Kantian revolution in political philosophy meant –  and it was perceived to be dangerously theological by some of Kant’s many critics.36

I do not reject the notion of a plurality of enlightenments but assert that all of the strategies advanced to maintain civil peace were seen to be failing by major and minor philosophers, politicians and commentators in the nal decades of the eighteenth century. If

The End of Enlightenment

we reconstitute this sense of failure and plot the responses to it, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas begin to look very di erent.37 The eighteenth century was characterized by uncertainty about the future, so turbulent were the times through which people were living across Europe and the Atlantic world, and in the substantial areas of the globe controlled by the European powers. Problems were especially acute in the self-proclaimed free states, raising the issue of whether it was easier to maintain enlightenment in absolute monarchies or whether liberty and enlightenment were indeed mutually sustaining. IV

People living in the eighteenth century tended to see themselves as postwar generations. Their parents and grandparents would have had rst- or second-hand experience of worldly turbulence traceable to the Reformation. Religious warfare, often bound up with long-burning dynastic con icts, had devastated Europe from at least the 1520s. Indeed, when, in 1494, Charles VIII of France invaded Italy, initiating a general con ict with the Holy Roman Empire, Spain and numerous local polities, Europeans saw their continent as a constant battleground, a seat of Mars.38 Those who looked at Europe from other parts of the world came to the same unavoidable conclusion.39 From the Kingdom of Norway in the north to Portugal and Spain in the west, Muscovy in the east to Sicily in the south, European life became de ned by war. Nations were forever invading each other’s territories and questioning the right of fellow states to exist as sovereign entities. Shakespeare reveals a great deal about the early modern European experience when he classes the soldier as one of the seven ages of man.40

From the end of the fteenth century a central cause of this ongoing military con ict was the battle between France and Habsburg rulers, with the latter at di erent times encircling the French in territories ranging from Burgundy, Italy, the Low Countries, Spain,

The Meaning of Enlightenment

the Holy Roman Empire and even brie y England during the reign of Mary I and her husband Philip II . War occurred across Italy from the 1490s to the 1550s, across the Low Countries from the 1550s to the 1640s, across Germany and Scandinavia from the 1610s to the 1640s and across Europe as a whole during the Nine Years’ War (1688–97) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). Those Europeans in disputed territory faced perpetual danger and hardship. Raids by brigands and pirates were a constant threat. Armies on the march caused carnage by living o the land, often pillaging what wasn’t given up. Landowners could insist that men serve them militarily, leaving soil untilled and families dispossessed. Everyone su ered. Joachim von Sandrart, a German painter, wrote of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) that ‘Queen Germania saw her palaces and churches, decorated with magni cent pictures, go up in ames time and again.’ In such times, artists experienced only ‘poverty and contempt’41 – it is no surprise that Michelangelo earned his living for a time as a military engineer in Florence. Great cities were sacked and often nearly destroyed, as in the infamous case of Rome by the unpaid troops of Emperor Charles V in 1527, who remained in the city for seven months, raping and killing the populace, pictured like frenzied ants in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous panorama.42

In addition to intra-European con ict, the continued rise of the Ottoman Empire in the south and east, ranging from Algiers and Budapest to Baku, presented a great external threat to Europe, especially to those states on its frontier.43 Sultan Mehmed II had captured Constantinople in 1453, and the Empire had threatened to go further, annexing much of Hungary at the battle of Mohács in 1526 during the reign of Süleyman the Magni cent, and launching invasions that reached the gates of Vienna in 1529 and again in 1683. Wars between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans occurred from 1593–1606 and 1683–99. The latter con ict was marked by the creation of a Holy League on the grounds that the Ottomans posed as much a threat to Christianity as a whole as they did to individual territorial states. The Holy League comprised the Republic of Venice, Russia, the Holy Roman

The End of Enlightenment

Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – they ultimately put an end to Ottoman control of Hungary via the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699. Fear of the Grand Turk, Barbary pirates and the possibility of Muslim jihad was maintained in the eighteenth century despite the eventual decline of Ottoman military power. They became ‘useful enemies’ to the states of Europe, identi ed as Oriental despots and used as a warning to Western peoples that they were fortunate to live in polities where the whim of the ruler could not mean life or death for ordinary subjects.44 Yet during the Reformation, exactly this power was exercised across Europe towards purportedly heretical people and communities.

When traditional dynastic international rivalries were su used with religious division between Christians, the likelihood of war, especially civil war, intensi ed. Martin Luther himself stated that war was normal, as necessary as eating or drinking.45 Luther initiated the Protestant Reformation by posting his 95 Theses attacking the Catholic Church on the door of the All Saints’ Church at Wittenberg on the Elbe in Saxony in 1517. Rebellion against Catholicism was sparked and soon raged across northern Europe through the 1520s. By the 1530s martyrdom had become a commonplace. So had the judicial and private execution of individuals for confessing a particular view of Christ. The murder of fellow humans began to be justi ed as part of a journey of personal salvation, a journey that could encompass the souls of enemies and neighbours alike –  necessary victims by virtue of their di erent perspective upon Christianity. Europe was quickly divided along Catholic, Anabaptist, Lutheran and Calvinist lines. Even if the religious divisions did not always neatly align with dynastic and political rivalries, the resultant instability continually fuelled con ict: from the German Peasants’ War and Dalecarlian Rebellion in Sweden in the 1520s to the Schmalkaldic War across the Holy Roman Empire in the 1540s, and from the French Wars of Religion (1562–98), to the Thirty Years’ War encompassing Bohemia, Germany, Russia, Denmark, Sweden and France.46 Between the sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries Europe rarely saw a year of peace.

The Meaning of Enlightenment

The Enlightenment began when these religious wars ceased. To its defenders, the Enlightenment meant the project of preventing wars of religion from breaking out once more and destroying communities and states. The message of Thomas Hobbes’s Behemoth, or The Long Parliament (1681), an analysis of the causes of the civil conicts that brought about carnage across England, Scotland and Ireland in a war of the three kingdoms between 1639 and 1653, was that theological disputation translated into politics had led to civil and international war.47 Hobbes explained that when the conviction became generalized among particular communities that they were following the will of God in battling those with alternative beliefs, laws preventing violence ceased to be adhered to. In the worst cases, religious-inspired politics became fanatic, justifying extreme measures such as the assassination and massacre of those perceived to be ungodly. Cultures which de ned themselves by war against their unbelieving and heterodox enemies then sprang up. Severe penalties were handed down to those within these communities who failed to adhere to the laws of whatever sect was considered legitimate. This was why Voltaire later wrote that intolerance at this time was ubiquitous across Europe: Protestants, he argued, after freeing themselves from the yoke of Catholicism, turned their societies into monasteries, grim and austere with laws determining every facet of behaviour.48

For all parties, fanatical religious wars constituted an antiEnlightenment. Enlightened strategies for bringing about peace at a local level ranged from challenging community justi cations of violence, seeking means of habitualizing paci c behaviour, to the enacting of a series of broadminded, inclusive laws and schemes of education.49 Equally popular was the embrace of an ethic of toleration known by many at the time as ‘right reason’, consisting of maxims of behaviour and policy that enshrined moderation.50 Peace at the international level was even more important. Schemes for peace within and between states included the principle ‘cuius regio, eius religio’ (‘whose realm, his religion’) coined by the canon lawyer Joachim Stephani to describe the policy of estates choosing between

The End of Enlightenment

Protestantism or Catholicism for their particular lands, enunciated at the Peace of Augsburg (1555).51 Hobbes’s own union of civil and ecclesiastical authority was another enlightenment strategy, giving the sovereign authority to overawe religious communities and prevent them from ghting, a vision pictorially presented in the famous frontispiece to Leviathan in 1651.52 Published blueprints for the establishment of perpetual peace abounded, all of which dealt with religious con ict as much as they did with civil war, from Émeric de Crucé’s The New Cyneas (Le nouveau Cynée, 1623), Maximilien de Béthune, duc de Sully’s The Grand Design of Henry IV (Le Grand Dessein d’Henri IV, 1638), William Penn’s Essay Towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe (1693) and Charles-Irénée Castel, abbé de SaintPierre’s Project for Perpetual Peace (Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe, 1713).53

Forti cation was another widespread policy enacted to protect populations from war and division, with vast sums spent in early modern Europe to de ne a community as an impregnable haven through interconnected walls, gates, ditches and ramparts. Starshaped bastion forts including redoubts, ravelins, hornworks and lunettes, slopes and en lades made life miserable for those besieging defended walls, following the Italian cities that had replaced ring formations with polygonal structures intended to prevent concentrated canon re from bringing down walls.54 But for countless observers it was the act of making peace through legal agreement alone that could restore international accord and relative civil harmony. The Westphalian Treaties (1648), the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) and those signed at Utrecht (1713–14) were all envisaged in part as means to enlightenment.55 Each of these agreements detailed forms of toleration and attempted to de nitively establish national borders with the broad goal of preventing the outbreak of wars in general and wars of religion in particular. Advocating enlightenment entailed the development of strategies, treaties, laws, policies and beliefs that could be implemented whenever war and fanaticism arose. For some, the vexed question of religion and dynasticism was ultimately about power; for them, the only enduring solution

The Meaning of Enlightenment would be to forge a new Roman empire, creating a universal monarchy in Europe so militarily powerful as to make civil war or religious-inspired rebellion futile.56 V

Yet plans and projects for civil and religious peace and toleration were threatened by new commercial forces that were reshaping national politics, pulling people from the countryside into the everlarger towns and rapidly altering physical, social and ideological landscapes.57 A longstanding theme of religious apology had it that the secular lust for commerce could easily develop a fanatical edge. The kinds of passions that were prevalent in commercial society –  the desire for individual wealth and the jealous consumption of luxury goods –  could, it was believed, quickly look like the sort of fervour that had been unleashed during the Reformation.58 When such passions became prevalent in the life of the individual, it was commonly held that immorality, libertinism and the abandonment of societal duty would soon follow.59 In this respect, choosing a life dedicated solely to the pursuit of wealth and selfinterest was akin to the kind of dramatic personal change associated with religious conversion. Consumer society boomed in the eighteenth century: goods once deemed luxuries, from books and watches, to lace, porcelain and silks, were now widely enjoyed. For the richest, varieties of Indian textiles and Chinese vases fuelled fashion trends that only they could a ord.60 When whole communities and societies became addicted to luxury consumption, sustained by the new sorts of wealth generated by trade, it was considered by many critics to be a step into the unknown, potentially leading to disorder –  the bonds of traditional society had been loosened, they held, and might snap.

Critical contemporaries drew on ancient moral arguments associating luxury with corruption, ultimately holding that the Roman Empire had fallen because its citizens became addicted to the

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consumption of luxuries originating in Asia.61 A lust for commerce was making people sel sh, changing their mores and preventing them from supporting their communities in adhering to social duties in accordance with the good of all. For many, whether it led to war and empire or not, such a development threatened the stability of European states because of the corruption of popular and elite manners. Luxury, it was commonly held, preceded greater vice and e eminacy as men put self-interest before public duty, a process altering social behaviour and risking military defeat as manliness declined. John Brown, the ultimate contemporary doomsayer, held that the lust for gold was the handmaid of e eminacy, guaranteeing the national collapse of Britain, as it had that of ancient Rome.62

Writing in his popular journal the Spectator of 20 October 1711, Joseph Addison, the poet and playwright, made the parallel clear between change in religious and recent societal developments caused by commerce. Addison warned that ‘the two great errors into which a mistaken devotion may betray us are enthusiasm and superstition.’63 He went on to employ the terms to indict, respectively, Protestant Dissent and Catholicism, in contrast with the moderate nature of contemporary Anglicanism.64 Another source of fanaticism was identi ed in the societal division between the landed and the monied interest, the latter considered by Addison to be nouveau-riche products of commercial society, to encompass the desire of individuals to enrich themselves no matter the consequences for others. In this regard, Addison was especially concerned by the conditions created by the vast army and navy employed during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14).65 During this period, he believed that the costs of the war had induced rampant speculation in government bonds, especially among those who had already pro ted from the war and desired nothing else than to maximize their already substantial fortunes. Addison worried that opposition between the traditional rulers of Britain, the landed interest, and this new social group dedicated to commerce would lead to social and political unrest –  and had already, he believed, made civil war suddenly likely in British politics once again:

The Meaning of Enlightenment

It gives me a serious Concern to see such a spirit of dissension in the country; not only as it destroys virtue and common sense, and renders us in a manner barbarians towards one another, but as it perpetuates our animosities, widens our breaches, and transmits our present passions and prejudices to our posterity. For my own part, I am sometimes afraid that I discover the seeds of a civil war in these our divisions; and therefore cannot but bewail, as in their rst principles, the miseries and calamities of our children.66

Addison’s observation was taken up by many who were convinced that Britain was on the wrong track in politics and economics in the rst decades of the new century. The writers John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in their popular Cato’s Letters, in the issue of 6 April 1723, went on to distinguish between two kinds of enthusiast, like Addison drawing a parallel between the wars of religion of the past and the e ects of commerce in the present.67 The rst enthusiasts were harmless, being madmen convinced they were directed and inspired by God in all of their actions. The second were deadly, termed in Cato’s Letters as the ‘holy enthusiast’ or ‘mischievous madman’. Such men became violent and fanatic ‘out of a pure zeal for God’. They might, for example, kill, maim, cause plagues and destroy communities in the service of a purported higher good identical with God’s true wishes and plan for the world.68 Trenchard and Gordon’s brilliant twist was to redescribe the monied interest explicitly in these religious terms – they could just as easily be potential holy enthusiasts or mischievous madmen. Such a redescription made the threat to contemporaries meaningful, used as they were to the consequences of religious division. The economic events that were most often described as being akin to these outpourings of religious mania are now known as the South Sea Bubble and the Mississippi Bubble, both of which came to a head in 1720. In the early 1700s, the worry was widespread that politicians, having run up huge state debts through William III ’s wars, would turn into ‘projectors’ who promised easy money alongside economic transformation, while in reality maintaining a

The End of Enlightenment standing army corrosive of liberty.69 Daniel Defoe, the indefatigable pamphleteer, wrote in 1697 that theirs was ‘The Projecting Age’ because improvements in every walk of life had become vital in light of the ‘the losses and depredations which this war brought with it’.70 A singular project in this regard was initiated with the chartering of the South Sea Company in 1711 to supply, for the next thirty years, 4,800 slaves per annum to Spain’s South American plantations.71 When the British acquired monopoly rights over this trade at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the South Sea Company purchased the rights in return for paying o a large portion of the British national debt. Anticipating huge pro ts on the basis of new South American markets, shares in the Company, issued in order to purchase the national debt, proved wildly popular. This led the Company to cover more of the debt in return for further commercial rights in 1718, resulting in a frenzy of rising share prices: an economic bubble.72 When pro ts inevitably proved meagre, the share price and the Company collapsed, leaving large numbers of investors impoverished.

France su ered from a related scheme. In 1716, John Law, a Scottish speculator and professional gambler, promised to pay o the French national debt, commercialize their economy and generate enormous revenues for the state through the development of lands in Louisiana. Law was one of the gures who took advantage of newly developed nancial instruments, having as early as 1705 had the idea of stimulating the Scottish economy through the creation of a land bank.73 Law came to the notice of the French government, mired in debt in the aftermath of the War of the Spanish Succession, and he soon convinced Philippe Charles, the duc d’Orléans, then regent of France, that access to credit would restore French power while reducing the national debt. First, Law established the Banque Générale as a company issuing paper money. Then, in August 1717, he created the Compagnie d’Occident with rights to the enormous Louisiana Territory. Law’s idea was to pay o the French national debt by selling it for shares in the land of what was everywhere termed the Mississippi Company.