Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  Hume disparaged Locke's state of nature as a futile fiction. Justice and morality had come about pragmatically, over time, by trial and error, in line with human wants:

  After men have found by experience, that their selfishness and confin'd generosity, acting at their liberty, totally incapacitate them for society; and at the same time have observ'd, that society is necessary to the satisfaction of those very passions, they are naturally induc'd to lay themselves under the restraint of such rules, as may render their commerce more safe and commodious… Thus self-interest is the original motive to the establishment of justice: but a sympathy with public interest is the source of the moral approbation, which attends that virtue.79

  War had first inured men to leaders. They, in time, would tend to assume responsibility for justice once possessions accrued. Recognition would follow that it was in everybody's true interests to set the administration of justice, along with defence, in the hands of officeholders whose repute would lie in the competent performance of those functions. Government was thus not, as for Locke, a necessary evil but rather the source and sign of social progress. Out of the need for, and utility of, government stemmed the duty of allegiance to it.80

  Hume then proceeded to address the implications of economic improvement. The neo-Harringtonians had got it wrong: luxury was a good thing, ensuring motives for obedience to government and creating a desirable environment for social life. Flying in the face of ancient wisdom, Hume held that Rome's decline had not stemmed from the import of ‘Asiatic’ luxury: excessive conquests and the ineptitude of imperial government had been to blame.81 The truth was that progress in the arts was favourable to liberty, for it fostered a stable social order. In ‘rude unpolished nations’, landowners and their underlings were hopelessly at odds, provoking social strife. Under the early tyrannies the populace were slaves, who did not ‘enjoy the necessaries of life in plenty or security’:82 neither learning nor trade could have developed in such conditions. It was only with the rooting of law in ‘free governments’ that improvement could begin. Aspiring to liberty, the citizens of early republics sought to curb power by instituting the rule of law. This in turn fostered and channelled productive energies, and so such republics became seedbeds for the encouragement of knowledge, skills and arts. The foreign contacts of the early Greeks, with all their ‘neighbouring and independent states, inconnected together by commerce and policy’, also boosted the rise of civilization. The rivalries of small eastern Mediterranean polities prevented the stifling uniformity characteristic of monolithic empires. Thus, Hume concluded, laws and institutions, stability and order – the preconditions of commerce and culture alike – were originally ‘the sole growth of republics’.83

  Hume's trump card, however, was his claim that modern monarchies were closer, in essentials, to republics than to their nominal forebears: ‘It may now be affirm'd of civiliz'd Monarchies, what was formerly said in Praise of Republics alone, that they are a Government of Laws, not of men.’84 Slavery had been the ruin of ancient despotisms – since slaves were not allowed family life, slave populations had had to be restocked by war. Early city states had not proved more viable, however, headed as they were by citizen élites holding women, foreigners and slaves in subjection. The open assemblies typical of early democracies were unwieldy, and rotation of office had foundered on the reefs of faction and feuds. Political chaos ensued and ancient polities had been torn apart by coups d'état, ostracism and vendettas, creating turmoil and driving cities into interminable wars for booty and honour. Consequent depopulation hindered economic development, while the glamour of politics and warfare meant that productive labour was despised. The slave labour and incessant warfare of early regimes, in short, did not favour economic growth. Nevertheless, despite all the turmoil, at least the seeds of civilization had been sown. Cultivation of the arts, manual and liberal, stimulated the mind and softened cruel passions:

  The more those refined arts advance, the more sociable men become; nor is it possible, that, when enriched with science, and possessed of a fund of conversation, [men] should be contented to remain in solitude, or live with their fellow-citizens in that distant manner, which is peculiar to ignorant and barbarous nations… Thus industry, knowledge, and humanity are linked together by an indissoluble chain, and are found… to be peculiar to the more polished, and… the more luxurious ages.85

  Enlightened optimism blazons here in Hume's confidence in the civilizing power of the passions. Government and freedom were not at odds: no authority, no liberty.

  Thus, in Hume's vision, the advance of civilization required neither saints nor heroes; impersonal forces drove men to accomplish collectively what none had individually willed: ‘The spirit of the age affects all the arts; and the minds of men, being roused from their lethargy, and put into a fermentation, turn themselves on all sides, and carry improvement into every art and science.’86 It was in this context that his Addisonian entreaties were entered against the reckless political partisanship tearing England apart.

  So how were virtue and happiness to be realized in Hume's modern commercial world, despite its courtiers, fops and speculators? He took up Addison's answer: the good life was to be practised, not in the great world of affairs – on the battlefield or the Senate House floor – but amongst family and friends, in a sociable setting where the buffetings of fortune could be avoided and self-esteem secured. It was a private milieu which had to be constructed and cherished – people had to learn to cultivate the art, as Adam Smith was shortly to explain, of seeing themselves as others saw them. The past had belonged to might; civilization must now look to mind, as swords were beaten into teaspoons. Private spaces had to be carved out in which people felt relaxed enough to tolerate each other's opinions and value respect above righteousness. Confidence, conciliation and conversation would abrade idiosyncrasy, affectation and prejudice. The Spectatorial values adopted by Hume held that beliefs and actions should be tempered by self-criticism, detachment and a desire to cultivate domestic affection and friendship: only thus could social approval be secured. Here, finally, lies the contribution of Adam Smith.

  Addison and Steele were no academics, and Hume never got a chair. Yet in a fascinating turnabout, their teachings were to acquire a more formal expression, when the Glasgow professor Adam Smith became the philosopher of Mr Spectator.87 Based on a course of lectures delivered to his students, Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) spelt out the principles of morals and social living appropriate for self-improving middling sorts immersed in a modern, commercial society, a few rungs down the social scale from the habitués of Mr Spectator's club. Lecturing to young Scots, Smith elevated the ego of commercial man above the civic virtues of the classical republican, dwelling particularly on the wealth, freedom and political wisdom needed to sustain a commercial polity.

  While anxious, like other Scottish philosophers, to introduce the methods of the natural into the moral sciences, Smith had ethical aims which were primarily practical: to instruct his students in their roles as citizens (as is clear from his discussion of the significantly titled ‘impartial spectator’).88 Addressing the psychological fact that ‘we desire both to be respectable and to be respected’, he proposed that ‘happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved’. Virtue, as Locke had taught, was a learnt behaviour; the desire to be praiseworthy was acquired, not innate;89 and the ‘impartial spectator’ was the device Smith proposed to help people cope and achieve respect in complex social situations posing conflicting choices.

  The ‘impartial spectator’ was many things for Smith. It could be the identity of a real person (‘the attentive spectator’) in concrete situations, whose approval was valued. On a higher plane, the ‘impartial spectator’ lay more within the imagination than in the world – he was the ‘supposed spectator of our conduct’. At the most sophisticated level, the figure was thoroughly internalized as ‘the abstract and ideal spectator’, or, in other words, conscience. This internal tribun
al – ‘the demi-god within the breast’ – was thus a monitor, an alter ego, conjured up to negotiate social intricacies. ‘When I endeavour to examine my own conduct,’ Smith meditated:

  when I endeavour to pass sentence upon it, and either to approve or condemn it, it is evident that, in all such cases, I divide myself, as it were, into two persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent in a different character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of.90

  Overall, the impartial spectator was a ‘looking-glass by which we can in some measure, with the eyes of other people, scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct’.91

  Smith's theory of interpersonal adjustment deriving from sympathy – putting ourselves in others’ shoes – should be read in the context of the practical morality already advanced by Addison and Steele and Hume, with their recognition that society was complex and required subtle skills in taxing social situations to help people lead useful, happy and virtuous lives and avail themselves of expanding opportunities. It was absurd for moderns to imagine escaping from the swirl of prejudice, fashion and fantasy by retreating into Catonic severity: contemporaries could live virtuously only by cultivating social sites such as the home, the coffee house, tavern and salon, where those from different walks of life would converse as friends and peers and learn tolerance, moderation and mutual respect.92

  Prizing relationships between independently minded individuals, Smith aimed to show how they could acquire a sense of justice, public responsibilities and personal identity. Distrusting monolithic politico-economic institutions, he valued face to face relationships and voluntary groupings – reflecting Hume's aperçu that the club might serve as a model for the moral history of society itself.93 By considering how others would appear to us, and by looking into society's mirror, noted Smith, we ‘suppose ourselves the spectators of our own behaviour’.94 As the inimitable Robert Burns put it,

  O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us

  Tae see oursels as ithers see us!95

  In some ways, Smith's philosophy reflected Mandeville's egoism, but whereas the Fable's author believed that people conformed because they were bent on praise, Smith deemed they also wanted to be praiseworthy: his was an internalized view of moral motives, appropriate to a dawning age of sentiment.96

  Enlightened political discourse vindicated commercial society by planting it in the soil of British liberties. Addison and Steele undertook the popularizing mission, Hume and Smith provided the theory. Ploughing his own furrow, and challenging, if more urbanely than Mandeville, the self-images of the age, Hume set the agenda for later twists in enlightened political discourse, ones concerned to vindicate commercial society and establish its conduciveness – indeed, indispensability – to peace, prosperity and sociability. How far economic development would square with liberal politics will be further examined in chapter 17.

  Initially at least, Hume's scientific analysis of politics and apology for the status quo had little cause to clash with Whig defences of freedom. Even Joseph Priestley, eventually a firebrand, could sound rather Humean early in his career, demoting ‘civil liberty’ below ‘personal freedom’. ‘Happiness is in truth the only object of legislation of intrinsic value,’ he maintained, ‘and what is called political liberty is only one of the means of obtaining this end. With the advantage of good laws, a people though not possessed of political power may yet enjoy a great degree of happiness.’97 In due course, however, this early accommodation would become problematic.

  9

  SECULARIZING

  The Augustan journalists and critics were the first intellectuals on record to express an entirely secular awareness of social and economic changes going on in their society.

  J. G. A. POCOCK1

  The long eighteenth century brought an inexorable, albeit uneven, quickening of secularization, as the all-pervasive religiosity typical of pre-Reformation Catholicism gave way to an order in which the sacred was purified and demarcated over and against a temporal realm dominating everyday life. In towns at least, churches were ceasing to be the main assemblies and clerics the chief authorities, and the daily round and the ritual year were becoming detached from the liturgy and the Christian calendar. Already characteristic of Protestant and commercial society, such changes were furthered by enlightened imperatives.2

  In the new climate of criticism and with the tempo of life accelerating, old ways were challenged, and no longer did hallowed custom or ‘God's will’ automatically provide answers to life's questions. With material culture burgeoning, ‘business’ (in both senses of the term) counting and the national pulse quickening, practical calculations meant more. Time – the transient and temporal rather than the eternal – became money, indeed became property: Samuel Pepys was pleased as Punch to acquire his first timepiece. ‘There are now a great many large Clocks in London,’ commented the French traveller Henri Misson fifty years later; ‘almost every Body has a Watch.’3

  With time growing precious to a commercial people, the English became noted as a nation on the move. They ‘walk very fast’, recorded the French traveller Grosley, ‘their thoughts being entirely engrossed by business, they are very punctual to their appointments’.4 Ever strapped for time, Londoners even came to rely on the fast-food takeaway. ‘I happened to go into a pastrycook's shop one morning,’ wrote Robert Southey, donning his Spanish persona:

  and inquired of the mistress why she kept her window open during this severe weather – which I observed most of the trade did. She told me, that were she to close it, her receipts would be lessened forty or fifty shillings a day – so many were the persons who took up buns or biscuits as they passed by and threw their pence in, not allowing themselves time to enter. Was there ever so indefatigable a people!5

  Time discipline was stressed as task orientation yielded to time orientation. Factory hours even became punctuated by clocking-on, with John Whitehurst designing special timepieces for use in his friend Josiah Wedgwood's Etruria works.6 ‘Above all things,’ advised Sir John Barnard, ‘learn to put a due value on Time.’7 Even aristocrats got the message. ‘There is nothing which I more wish that you should know and which fewer people do know than the true use and value of Time,’ Lord Chesterfield cautioned his son:

  I knew a gentleman, who was so good a manager of his time, that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary house, but gradually went through all the Latin poets in those moments. He bought, for example, a common edition of Horace, of which he tore off gradually a couple of pages, carried them with him to that necessary place, read them first and then sent them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina; that was so much time fairly gained, and I recommend you to follow his example… it will make any book which you shall read in that manner very present in your mind.8

  Prayers and pieties continued, but in the ubiquitous worldly atmosphere devout habits of trusting to Providence were challenged by a new eagerness to practise self-help and take charge where possible – indeed, to be ‘provident’. In respect of illness, for instance, there was a tide of hospital foundations. Medieval hospitals had been ‘hospices’, holy places of ‘hospitality’ for the needy, setting the good death and salvation above surgery; and most of those had been destroyed by the Reformation. The new foundations were, however, centres of care and treatment for the sick poor (the rich were still nursed at home). Five great new London hospitals were founded through bequests and private philanthropy: the Westminster (1720), Guy's (1724), St George's (1733), the London (1740) and the Middlesex (1745). Provincial and Scottish infirmaries followed and specialist institutions, such as the Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury for abandoned babies, lying-in hospitals, ‘lock’ hospitals for venereal diseases and ‘Magdalene’ institutions for prostitutes, were also set up, while new dispensaries provided drugs for outpatients.9 The evocatively named Humane Society, founded in London in 1774, publicized rescue techniques, especially for cases of drown
ing. Based on a Dutch precursor, it supplied equipment, awarded prizes and distributed pamphlets which instructed in mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, tobacco enemas and electrical stimulation. Promoted by eminent physicians like John Coakley Lettsom and supported by the Quality, it publicized its views in periodicals such as the Gentleman's Magazine, while newspapers explained first aid techniques.10 Human intervention was now meant to snatch victims from their fate.

  Various occurrences hitherto explained supernaturally, such as madness and suicide, were also secularized as part of this ‘disenchantment of the world’.11 Infanticide ceased to be viewed as the product of bewitchment, being reinterpreted in the civil context of child murder.12 In due course the Revd Thomas Robert Malthus, despite – or perhaps because of – being an Anglican clergyman, could claim to demonstrate in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) that incontestable ‘acts of God’ like war and famine had, after all, nothing to do with the Devil or the Horsemen of the Apocalypse but followed automatically from the numerical imbalance of man's appetites for food and sex.13

  Tabulation of statistics, publicly in bills of mortality, helped turn accidents into regularities in a growing culture of quantification.14 Falling sick had traditionally flagged the arbitrariness of existence, or rather had pointed to the essentially providential meaning of things. When mortal affliction had struck, heads had turned upwards. But now physicians strove to extend their control by plotting bio-medical regularities. The physiological operations of the body were weighed, measured and numbered, and there followed actuarial computations such as differential life expectations, essential for insurance, annuities and so on – it is no accident that those late Enlightenment luminaries Richard Price and William Frend were both prominent actuaries. Mortality crises became objects of investigation by army, navy and civilian doctors, especially after 1750, in expectation that once periodicities in smallpox and other epidemics were established, such infections might be predicted, and thence controlled.15 It is significant that it was the ardent Newtonian, secretary of the Royal Society and prominent physician James Jurin who clinched the statistical case for smallpox inoculation.16