Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  has also a high Degree of Honour and Esteem annexed to it, procures us many Advantages, and Returns of Kindness, both from the Person obliged and others; and is most closely connected with the Hope of Reward in a future State, and with the Pleasures of Religion, and of Self-approbation, or the Moral Sense… It is easy therefore to see, how such Associations may be formed in us, as to engage us to forego great Pleasure, or endure great Pain, for the sake of others.99

  Drawing on associationism as an explanatory principle, Hartley went beyond Locke and set it upon physical foundations, that is, the anatomy of the nervous system and the physiology of ‘motions excited in the brain’. For his scientific axioms he turned to Newton. In the ‘Queries’ to the Opticks, Newton had shown how light vibrated in a medium. Such vibrations impacted upon the retina, Hartley explained; having impinged upon the eye, these corpuscular motions then set off further undulating waves which passed along the nerves to the brain. The association of ideas was thus materialized in terms of reiterated vibrations in the white medullary matter of the brain and spinal cord, resulting in lasting traces which formed the physical substrate of complex ideas, memory and dispositions.

  Unlike La Mettrie and other French philosophes, Hartley framed his materialist psycho-physiology in terms of an overarching Christian theology: materialism could nowise be the road to atheism, precisely because it had been God who, in His wisdom, had endowed matter with all its powers. Furthermore, the necessitarianism entailed by such materialism was, to Hartley, the surest guarantee of the unbroken operation of cause and effect, of the uniformity of Nature, and hence of God's boundless empire. Determinism predicated a strict chain of causes both physical and moral, which led inexorably back to the First Great Cause. Indeed, the second volume of the Observations extended the system to account for man's prospects beyond the grave.

  Hartley's thinking proved critical to the late Enlightenment science of man. It gave learning theory and the moral sense firm naturalistic moorings, and, though he was himself devout, his unification of sensation, motion, association and volition within a mechanistic theory of consciousness and action pointed to the secularization of the concept of utility. His was a model which came to be prized as the fountainhead of psychological, biological and social truths, providing the stimulus for the associationist tradition in psychology and pedagogics. Hartley's conjectural physiology of the nervous system also offered prototypes for the sensory motor theories later influential in neurophysiology, comprising distant ancestors of Pavlovian notions of conditioned reflexes.

  Hartley's influence was widespread – an early enthusiasm for his work led Coleridge to name his first-born Hartley. In his 1775 edition of the Observations, retitled the Theory of the Human Mind, Joseph Priestley, though omitting the neurology, valued Hartleyan determinism since it put associationism at the service of a Unitarian philosophy of nature. Erasmus Darwin, by contrast, made Hartley's neurological mechanisms the basis for the scheme of medical classification advanced in his Zoonomia (1794) and for the evolutionism of his Temple of Nature (1803), and William Godwin's arguments in his Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793) for inevitable progress drew on Hartley's moral meliorism. Hartley, indeed, proved more influential than Hume in the late Enlightenment, since his vision of human perfectibility – a predetermined tendency to happiness, scientifically intelligible, under a benevolent Deity – was precisely the doctrine of human nature needed by progressives, marrying as it did science and piety and discounting the abhorrent selfishness of Hobbes or Mandeville. Its Achilles heel lay in its unsettling and, to many, offensive materialism. As so often, enlightened solutions proved jarring to tender sensibilities, and so provided perennial provocations of controversy.

  Sidestepping pulpit pontifications and formal metaphysics, enlightened thinkers thus put the study of human nature on a footing which was naturalistic, empirical and analytical. Of course, any natural science of man was open to the charge that it reduced the Christian pilgrim, created in God's image, to a beast, puppet or machine, driven by the gross laws of matter in motion: hence the sting of Swiftian satire. But the new scientific approach to human nature caught on, notably in the rooting and shooting of the human and social sciences.100 ‘In our universities, what a change has been gradually accomplished since the beginning of the eighteenth century!’ exclaimed Dugald Stewart at its close:

  The Studies of Ontology, of Pneumatology, and of Dialectics, have been supplanted by that of the Human Mind, conducted with more or less success, on the plan of Locke's Essay; and in a few seats of learning, by the studies of Bacon's Method of Inquiry of the Principles of Philosophical criticism, and of the Elements of Political Economy.101

  Beyond those seminaries, the transformation from Pilgrim to the man of sense was even greater.

  8

  THE SCIENCE OF POLITICS

  freedom is the first blessing of our nature

  GIBBON1

  By the time David Hume proposed in an essay of 1741 that politics should be reduced to a science, the idea was a cliché indeed, it had been the subject of a sardonic joke in Gulliver's Travels (1726), where the hero chided the Brobdingnagians for their ‘ignorance’ in ‘not having hitherto reduced Politicks into a Science, as the more acute Wits of Europe have done’.2 And, as we have seen, in 1728 Desaguliers had produced his The Newtonian System of the World: The Best Model of Government, which vindicated the social order through science and proclaimed that he had ‘considered Government as a phenomenon… most perfect’ when it ‘does most nearly resemble the natural government of our system, according to the laws settled by the all-wise and almighty architect of the universe’.3

  But if the State was thus construed as being open to scientific analysis, in practice politics itself remained a cockpit of rival rhetorics, and the central plank in enlightened platforms was freedom:

  Freedom from absolutism (the constitutional monarchy); freedom from arbitrary arrest, trial by jury, equality before the law, the freedom of the home from arbitrary entrance and search, some limited liberty of thought, of speech, and of conscience, the vicarious participation in liberty (or in its semblance) afforded by the right of parliamentary opposition and by elections and election tumults… as well as freedom to travel, trade, and sell one's own labour.4

  Small wonder freedom roused such passions, for, in the eyes of Whiggish modernizers, the Stuarts had been bent upon extinguishing it. Charles I had dispensed with Parliament; Charles II had played fast and loose with both that institution and the Anglican Church, while his stops of the Exchequer had undermined security of property and financial confidence; and then James II had subverted the sanctity of the law by arbitrary arrests and by tampering with urban corporations, university tenures and other forms of property. Moreover, both Charles and James, admiring Catholic absolutism overseas, had used the royal prerogative and dispensing powers recklessly. Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha (1680) had deemed monarchy divine, and Jacobitism would long retain its furtive following.5

  The most signal repudiation of such thinking came from John Locke, whose Two Treatises of Government, written during the Exclusion Crisis, was published in 1690.6 In the First Treatise, Locke rebutted passive obedience and discounted Filmer's notion of the Divine Right monarchs handed down from God via Adam: such patriarchalism forged ‘Chains for all Mankind’.7 He also repudiated the view that ‘all Government in the World is the product only of Force and Violence, and that Men live together by no other Rules but that of Beasts, where the strongest carries it’ – although Hobbes went unmentioned as the author of ‘might is right’.8 Defining political power as ‘a Right of making Laws… for the Publick Good’, Locke denied that its source lay either in Adam or in arms: political legitimacy could spring only from consent, as was explained in a just-so story of the transition from a state of nature.9

  Locke conjured up an original pre-government condition in which men went about their business bound by all the basic rights and duties of civil society (such a
s abstaining from theft and violence), precisely because ‘the state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone: and Reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions’. This law of Nature was binding because it was God's edict and men were His ‘property’.10

  Political society was then set up by the voluntary agreement of ‘all’, to protect those God-given rights and properties recognized by reason in the state of Nature: ‘the great and chief end of men's uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property’.11 Government was dutybound to uphold the contract agreed by the people, who retained an indefeasible residual authority over their rulers. In the state of Nature, in other words, the individual was autonomous, though bound by the law of Nature; in civil society action became subject to public judgement – private persons became public persons, and private acts were replaced by public ones, in a transformation designed to strengthen the protection of life, liberty and property.12 An ultimate right was retained to resist a government in breach of its contract – a right not to be activated individually but exercised by the ‘people’ (a notion left studiously vague): ‘the Community may be said in this respect to be always the Supreme Power’.13 So long as government functioned justly, this residual popular power was not to be used. But if the prince were to seek to ‘enslave, or destroy them’, the people were entitled to ‘appeal to Heaven’ – though precisely how, the judicious Locke left unstated. Moreover, he was quick to reassure nervous readers that this right did not ‘lay a perpetual foundation for disorder’, since it would not be used until ‘the Inconvenience is so great, that the Majority feel it, and are weary of it’. The nation would thus be slow to rebel:14 even ‘Great mistakes in the ruling part… will be born by the People without muting or murmur’, and recourse would be had to resistance only after ‘a long train of Abuses, Prevarications, and Artifices’.15 Locke was walking his perennial tightrope: anarchy was no answer to tyranny.

  Locke's defence of liberty rested on his theory of property. Confronting Filmer's claim that ‘God gave the World to Adam and his Posterity’,16 he cited the Scripture text stating that God had ‘given the Earth to the Children of Men, given it to Mankind in common’.17 In the state of Nature, a man lawfully made his own the land upon which he laboured:

  Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.18

  Work thereby debarred others from the products of one's labour.19 The basic ‘value added’ principle – by adding something to the land over and above ‘Nature’, labour created an inviolable title – solved for Locke the problem of how ‘the Property of labour should be able to over-ballance the Community of Land’ – a solution doubtless attractive to propertied readers enjoying the highly unequal fruits of agrarian capitalism at a time when enclosure was gathering momentum.20 Since property thus preceded government, it could not be meddled with by the prince.

  A further and crucial modification of the state of Nature arose from the consensual ‘Invention of Money’,21 which led to lawful consent to ‘larger Possessions, and a Right to them’, and thereby sanctioned all the changes industry brought. ‘The desire to having more than Men needed altered the intrinsick value of things’,22 and added what would later be called exchange value to use value.

  Needs, explained Locke, had initially been met through barter. By the exchange of ‘Plumbs that would have rotted in a Week, for Nuts that would last good for his eating a whole Year’ no injury was done by natural man to the conservation of Creation, for ‘he wasted not the common Stock’.23 Barter thus squared with the law of Nature, since no ‘waste’ resulted: what would contravene it was not the ‘largeness of his Possession’, but rather the ‘perishing of any thing uselessly in it’.24 Next followed the invention of money, drawing on ‘some lasting thing that Men might keep without spoiling’, such as gold.25 Some (Locke presumed) being more industrious than others, the advent of a money economy inevitably brought a ‘disproportionate and unequal Possession of the Earth’,26 thereby sanctioning differential wealth and encouraging accumulation and saving. Crudely put, capitalism enjoyed the blessing of God's laws, while absolutism did not.

  Though Locke sought to allay fears – the right of rebellion was a last resort – the radical potential of his politics could hardly be gainsaid. Indeed, looking back from the 1780s, the pragmatic Josiah Tucker bemoaned the unsettling tendencies of Lockean theory as hijacked by the contemporary ‘new-light’ men, that is, Dissenters like Richard Price. With its postulates of a state of Nature and an original compact, contractarianism was rooted, Tucker growled, not in realities but in precisely those metaphysical will-o'-the-wisps the enlightened scorned. That was what made it so serviceable in the 1770s to the American rebels and then in the 1790s to Painites back home.27

  In his own lifetime, however, Locke's political formulations proved somewhat beside the point. The Two Treatises had initially been penned to justify the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury's exclusionist policies.28 Published, however, in 1690 in the afterglow of the Glorious Revolution, his oppositional theory of an original contract was virtually redundant – indeed, even a potential irritation for triumphant Whigs by then seeking not to legitimize resistance to tyranny but to vindicate the new Williamite order. After 1688, it has been observed, the key question was not whether ‘a ruler might be resisted for misconduct, but whether a regime founded on patronage, public debt, and professionalization of the armed forces did not corrupt both governors and governed’.29

  Not surprisingly, then, alternative discourses of freedom moved centre stage. Prominent among them was one which drew upon the analysis of the rise and fall of states developed by Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy's history of Rome, and which had been trimmed to British circumstances by James Harrington's Oceana (1656).30 Followers of Harrington explained the flourishing (or failure) of liberty in political societies in terms of their socio-political health (or pathology). Initially developed by anti-Stuart Whigs, the theory was subsequently levelled by dissident (‘Country’ or ‘True’) Whigs against post-1688 administrations (‘Court Whigs’) before, thanks to the twists of politics, being exploited by opposition Tories, notably Viscount Bolingbroke, for their own ends. Posing as a public-spirited, non-party censor of political morality, Bolingbroke's paper, The Craftsman, sermonized on maladministration and corruption, targeting in particular the great oligarch Robert Walpole – a classic case of stealing one's enemy's ideological clothes.31

  This ‘civic tradition’, a body of ideas owing much to Polybius and other Graeco-Roman thinkers, addressed the historical and institutional realities of the body politic.32 The essentials of a sound state lay in a regular constitution which involved elected assemblies and a division of powers amongst the various legislative, executive and judicial functions; and in a military force recruiting the citizenry in public defence. The polity's make-up was broadly speaking republican, and political liberty hinged on participation both in arms and in senates. The converse of the virtuous and free body politic was despotism – an irregular, unconstitutional state which depended for its defence on standing armies and mercenaries, and consigned the populace to political slavery.33

  A constitution and a citizen army were not, however, sufficient to guarantee permanent freedom. The people themselves had to possess true public spirit (virtù) and moral fibre: only thereby could political liberty be sustained. Such esprit in turn depended on the right foundations: economically, a citizen had to be ‘independent’ – that is, free from needing to engage dir
ectly in productive or commercial activity. In Aristotelian terms, a clear demarcation was to be drawn between property-owners on the one hand and on the other those whose lot it was to sustain them – tradesmen, artisans, women and the plebs.

  If, however, citizens ended up sordidly setting private interests above public virtue, then, according to this civic tradition, the community would sink in sleaze, a malignancy threatening the very soul of the commonwealth. Greed and apathy would speed the decay of institutions and the consequent loss of political virtù and liberty.

  Pamphleteers and coffee house pundits voiced fears of the ruin allegedly being wrought by commercial society, in particular by the nouveaux riches, by their paper money, stocks, shares and banks, the National Debt and other new and shady forms of financial dealing, all suspected to be spawning deception, double-dealing and dependence. The gentry and freeholders, England's backbone, were supposedly growing enfeebled, while the new City plutocrats lorded it in conspicuous luxury.

  A prominent instance of this neo-Roman discourse of political freedom was John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon's Cato's Letters (1720–23). A Whig MP, Trenchard had co-written with Walter Moyle the definitive ‘Commonwealth’ attack on William III's standing army. Although he had initially penned pamphlets for Walpole, he grew disillusioned, and, with Lord Molesworth, led the parliamentary attack in 1720 on the minister's handling of the South Sea Bubble.34 Collaborating with Gordon, he then produced ‘Cato's’ letters in the anti-Walpole weekly the London Journal. For three years, ‘Cato’ slammed the ‘Robinocracy’ (Walpole's regime) and the money-mongering to blame for the Bubble, vilifying mere ‘money’ in the name of landed independence and exposing the ‘Murtherers of our Credit’ who had imperilled the sacred ‘Security of Property’.35