Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World
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This rejection of traditional civic humanism and its Rousseauvian variant in favour of a ‘natural system of liberty’ squared with Smith's own proclivity to trust the individual, as it also did with Benthamite utilitarianism. Smith and Bentham together provided the intellectual underpinnings for the emergent body of laissez-faire political economy.91 Such views bred optimism, and, as so often, enlightenment proved patriotic.
The Enlightenment piloted a transition from homo civilis to homo economicus, which involved the rationalization of selfishness and self-interest as enlightened ideology, the privatization of virtue and the de-moralization of luxury, pride, selfishness and avarice. Corporatism yielded to individualism. ‘To provide for us in our necessities,’ commented Edmund Burke, elsewhere the defender of paternalism, ‘is not in the power of Government’; regulation ‘against free trade in provisions’ was ‘senseless, barbarous and, in fact, wicked’. The great danger, he concluded, ‘is in Governments intermeddling too much’.92 That is what enabled Hazlitt to aside that ‘the science of Political Economy means the divine right of landlords’.93 With laissez-faire in the saddle, economic activity, divorced from traditional values, assumed a morality of its own – the rectitude of making your own way in the world as homo faber, an independent rational actor beholden to none.
Capitalist consumer society was thus legitimized in terms of Nature, desire and individual freedom. Superseding traditional moral disapproval, the new ideology taught how self-enrichment could be personally enhancing and socially cohesive. Political economy fused burgeoning capitalism and social order into a single enlightened discourse. Individualism, however, was not always so readily accommodated.
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REFORM
Correspondent to discovery and improvement in the natural world, is reformation in the moral.
JEREMY BENTHAM1
The Enlightenment which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.
MICHEL FOUCAULT2
[A]ll knowledge will be subdivided and extended; and knowledge, as Lord Bacon observes, being power, the human powers will, in fact, be increased; nature, including both its materials, and its laws, will be more at our command; men will make their situation in this world abundantly more easy and comfortable; they will probably prolong their existence in it, and will grow daily more happy, each in himself, and more able (and, I believe, more disposed) to communicate happiness to others. Thus, whatever was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and paradisiacal, beyond what our imaginations can now conceive.
JOSEPH PRIESTLEY3
The late Enlightenment continued to chant the old war-cries of law, liberty, free thought, toleration, but increasingly it was elements of the post-1688 order which formed their target. Initially the enlightened vanguard had been made up of landed gentlemen protesting against popes and priests, kings and courtiers; scions of the senatorial ranks, they comprised a highly superior elite, landed, wealthy and cultivated.4 As time went on, however, and print capitalism did its work, protest was taken up by those hailing from the middling ranks and below, and by further segments of the traditionally excluded such as women and minority groups such as Dissenters,5 hitting home against all those ‘haves’ bedded down in the status quo, that is, the ‘moderate Enlightenment’ Whig state as sanctified by the constitution, the Glorious Revolution, Rule Britania and so forth. Thus, having emphasized that liberal intellectuals flourished ‘in the Whig and Erastian political order that dominated eighteenth-century England’, Margaret Jacob rightly adds that ‘late in the century and only within select circles, the English promoters of scientific improvement turned their zeal against the established social and political order’.6 The Mancunian Dissenting physician John Aikin hit the nail on the head: ‘your natural connections,’ he cautioned his son in a public letter of 1790, ‘are not with kings and nobles. You belong to the most virtuous, the most enlightened, the most independent part of the community, the middle class.’7 Aikin's sister, the children's writer Anna Barbauld, equally congratulated her co-religionists for belonging to ‘that middle rank of life where industry and virtue most abound’: ‘we have no favours to blind us, no golden padlock to our tongues’;8 while Mary Wollstonecraft, pleased to have been spared the ‘pestiferous purple’, likewise held that ‘the middle rank contains most virtue and abilities’ – there it was that ‘talents thrive best’.9
‘I bless God,’ Joseph Priestley assured his Birmingham buddies, ‘that I was born a Dissenter, not manacled by the chains of so debasing a system as that of the Church of England, and that I was not educated at Oxford or Cambridge.’10 As is evident, there was a new pride in being at odds with ‘the world' – with all those mighty men, from magistrates and moneybags up to the House of Lords: ‘What is a peer of the realm,’ demanded Holcroft, ‘but man educated in vice, nurtured in prejudice from his earliest childhood, and daily breathing the same infectious air he first respired!’11 Meanwhile, these rising voices of righteous anger took it upon themselves to speak for life's victims – they might even shed a tear, like Burns, for a wee timorous mouse. Their creed has thus been paraphrased: ‘Society – cultivated society – is always wrong. The individual who has courage to act against it is always right.’12 Post-1688 Britain had been supported by progressives as just and free, but the spirit of criticism now charged new generations of activists with a fresh rectitude and more radical energies.
Above all, the late Enlightenment mounted an attack on ‘Old Corruption’, that nexus of aristocratic capitalism, landed and commercial power, title and wealth, backed by the monster oligarchic state which William Cobbett was soon to dub ‘the Thing’13 Forget official ideology: the constitution was not in truth, critics now claimed, the palladium of freedom. Rather, argued those aiming to apply the knife to the tumours of the State, the apparatus of government and the social hierarchy remained repressive, if often in covert ways. ‘The public character of England… was gone,’ bemoaned the radical anarchist William Godwin, reprising earlier ‘civic humanist’ rhetoric: ‘I perceived that we were grown a commercial and arithmetical nation… Contractors, directors, and upstarts, – men fattened on the vitals of their fellow-citizens – have taken the place which was once filled by the Wentworths, the Seldens, and the Pyms.’14 That such a remark might just as easily have been uttered by the Burke who excoriated ‘calculators’ shows how late Enlightenment radicals could be no less hostile to commercialism than any paternalist reactionary: if they had little else in common, Burke, Wilberforce and Godwin all detested high-life vice.15
In a swelling chorus, those audibly distancing themselves from the Establishment power machine commended independence. In the preface to his Dictionary, the Midlander and self-made man Samuel Johnson boasted of completing his magnum opus ‘without any patronage of the great’, dismissing the idea of an academy for English because he could ‘never wish to see dependence multiplied’.16 David Hume's ‘Disdain of all Dependence’ rings out from his very first surviving letter (to Michael Ramsey, on 4 July 1727): a man who was ‘entirely master of his own disposition’ was fortunate, indeed.17 For Adam Smith, too, the desideratum was ‘the highest degree of self-command’: ‘nothing,’ he taught his students, ‘tends so much to corrupt and enervate and debase the mind as dependency’;18 while his protégé John Millar also prized ‘the independence of the inquiring mind’.19 ‘Oh misery of Dependence!’ cries a character in Fanny Burney's play The Witlings (1779).20 Rebutting the French Revolution, the erstwhile radical Archdeacon Paley might laud ‘the divine spirit of dependence and subordination’,21 but that was a red rag to an enlightened bull: ‘The first lesson of enlightened reason’, proclaims a character in Mary Hays's radical feminist novel The Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), ‘the principle by which alone man can become what man is capable of being, is independence’.22
In the last third of the eighteenth century criticism crescendo'd against the political oppressiveness, social corruption and moral licentiousness of blue blood
. In a secularization of the Protestant right of private judgement and priesthood of all believers, middle-class pundits applauded honesty and sincerity.23 A new moral earnestness urged strict and strenuous self-examination. For some, truth now lay within the breast, a sincere heart being the steadfast sentinel against temptation;24 for others, it was a clear head and self-control which must serve as the guardians of uprightness. Whichever, the David of integrity would fell the Goliath of pride.
Novels provided prime vehicles for the critique of corruption. With plots centring on family conflict and generational feuds, the angry sentimental fictions of the 1780s and 1790s scorned aristocratic privilege and presumption, melodramatized the heartrending oppression of labourers, servants, daughters and tenants, and, especially in women's writings, assailed the double standard. Virtue was a child of the cottage, while vice festered at Court. Elizabeth Inchbald's Nature and Art (1796) told a tale of two cousins: one, spoilt by rich parents, went to the dogs, while the other was providentially cast away upon a tropical island and reared by noble savages. With her motifs of the honest native as a foil to the corrupt grandee, and the homespun country girl seduced by the vicious squire, Inchbald pointed up a popular moral: integrity was the supreme virtue, degeneracy the most heinous vice.25 Like many, she sentimentalized cosy bourgeois domesticity.
Thomas Holcroft, author of The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1794) and many other biting tales, was another engagé novelist in this didactic mould. A shoemaker's son radicalized by successive experiences as a stable boy, shoemaker, stocking-weaver, stroller, teacher, playwright and translator, he had the common touch, and tirelessly popularized the new philosophy in a deluge of plays, novels, essays, reviews, biographies, histories, travels and translations. His detestation of the cruel and the corrupt was tempered by an enlightened environmentalism: ‘men are rendered selfish and corrupt by the baneful influence of the system under which they live… They are not in love with baseness, it is forced upon them.’26
Remembered by his friend William Hutton as ‘barely a Christian’, Robert Bage, a Midlands paper manufacturer on the margins of the Lunar Society, produced a string of benignly ironic novels bristling with similar late Enlightenment messages. His stock plot involved a moral trial: the hero and heroine must prove themselves worthy of each other, not, as in romantic narratives, by transcendental passion but by more rational tests of probity, selflessness and social merit.27 In Hermsprong: Or Man as He is Not (1796), a young man of German origin, a supporter of the French Revolution and a reader of Paine, fetches up in a Cornish village and saves the life of the daughter of Lord Gronsdale – a stock Bage villain who is a depraved tyrant in his various incarnations as borough-monger, landlord and father. Falling in love with her, Hermsprong nevertheless feels, inspired as he is by impeccable political correctness, dutybound to lecture her on her shortcomings. She for her part plays the dutiful daughter, and he refuses to marry her while she remains enslaved to custom and prejudice.28 Tested by heart and head alike, the status quo was thus found wanting by the taxing standards of late Enlightenment moralism.
A new political radicalism also emerged, triggered by the ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ agitation in the 1760s against the abuses of executive power,29 and taken up by the Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights (1769), whose leading figures included the London alderman, John Sawbridge (father of Catharine Macaulay), and the Revd John Horne, later known as Horne Tooke.30 The society put forward an II-point programme to be imposed upon parliamentary candidates, including anti-bribery laws, ‘full and equal representation of the people in parliament’, annual elections, redress of grievances before granting supplies, bans on pensions and places, attention to the Irish problem and restoration to America of the ‘essential right of taxation’ – demands which became the backbone of the radical agenda.31
The Declaration of Independence (1776) and the American war proved crucial to British radicalization, for ‘enlightened’ England became cast in the new and unaccustomed role of old regime oppressor, while enlightened aspirations were realized in the New Republic. America had long had its allure: ‘in the beginning all the World was America,’ judged Locke,32 while George Berkeley declared,
Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The first four acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day;
Time's noblest offspring is the last.33
America came to be identified with the future – the French-born author J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur tellingly dubbed the American the ‘new man’.34 Richard Price's Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776), which sold a stunning 60,000 copies, supported the colonists' right to self-government and portrayed their country as the new nation whose citizens would truly enjoy the personal and civil freedoms only dreamed of in the old. ‘With heart-felt satisfaction,’ he proclaimed, ‘I see the revolution in favour of universal liberty which has taken place in America; – a revolution which opens a new prospect in human affairs, and begins a new aera in the history of mankind.’35 For his part, Jeremy Bentham came to admire ‘that newly created nation, one of the most enlightened, if not the most enlightened, at this day on the globe’;36 while in Blake's epic poem America: A Prophecy (1793), Orc, the spirit of revolution, arises from the ocean to proclaim an end to empire: ‘The King of England looking westward trembles at the vision.’37
Meanwhile, the Society for Promoting Constitutional Information had been founded in 1780 to pump out propaganda for political reform, its activists including Rational Dissenters and such prominent reformers as John Jebb, the ubiquitous Thomas Day and Major John Cartwright. Four years earlier, in his Take Your Choice, Cartwright had drafted the radical programme of annual parliaments, universal male suffrage, the ballot, equal representation and payment of members; for half a century, in speeches and pamphlets, he then tirelessly campaigned for reform, helping to found the Friends of the People in 1792 and the Hampden Club in 1812. Growing steadily, by 1782 the SPCI endorsed the Radical programme of parliamentary reform favoured by yet another Radical caucus, the Westminster Association, whose members included Sir William Jones and Horne Tooke, both philologists. The radical Whig the Duke of Richmond graced its dinner in 1782, drinking toasts to ‘Magna Carta’, ‘The Majesty of the People’ and ‘America in our arms, Despotism at our feet’. Too radical to command widespread support, it faltered, however, after the failure of Pitt's Parliamentary Reform Bill in 1785, but the French Revolution revitalized its efforts to enlighten the rising generation.38
The archetypal enlightened radical of this era was James Burgh, a Scot who settled in London in the 1740s and began a long career of reformist idealism.39 Urging a thorough reformation of ‘sentiments and manners’, he looked in his early writings to a grand national association of upright aristocrats, proceeding to spend the early 1760s instructing the young George III as to how to cleanse the Augean stables of Westminster and unify the people. The ‘moralist in Babylon’ became politicized, proposing, in the more populist atmosphere of the 1770s, a ‘Grand National Association for Restoring the Constitution’. Written ‘in the spirit of a true independent Whig’, his Political Disquisitions (1774–5) resurrected the canonical commonwealth authors in support of public liberty, targeting the peerage, lamenting national degeneracy and urging constitutional checks on tyranny and corruption. His early critiques of the enervating effects of luxury turned into portents of national disaster: ‘Ten millions of people are not to sit still and see a villainous junta overthrow their liberties.’40
Burgh's rhetoric derived from the Bible.41 ‘Assert thy supreme dominion over those who impiously pretend to be thy vicegerents upon earth,’ he charged the Lord of Hosts: ‘Arise… Let thy light-nings enlighten the world.’42 His politics, however, increasingly expressed the values and idiom of the new liberalism. Just as Smith damned monopolies and aristocratic prodigality, and Priestley sought ‘free scope to abilities’, so Burgh began to demand for all ‘an equal chanc
e to rise to honours’. Fairness and equal opportunities became the swelling refrain among such circles. ‘All men should start from equal situations and with equal advantages, as horses do on the turf,’ declared the Dissenting minister David Williams, an admirer of Priestley and Franklin: ‘afterwards everything is to depend on ability and merit.’43 Godwin likewise looked to a meritocratic race of life: ‘let us start fair, render all the advantages and honours of social institutions accessible to every man in proportion to his talents and exertions’.44 Liberalism was a child of the late Enlightenment.
Political reformers made common cause with those pressing for the enlargement of religious liberties. While the trend among Presbyterian Dissenters was towards Socinianism or Unitarianism,45 Anglican rationalists expressed growing hostility to the tyranny of the Thirty-nine Articles. Their inspiration was Edmund Law, master of Peterhouse and presiding genius of the liberal turn in Cambridge divinity. His pupil Francis Blackburne, rector of Richmond in Yorkshire, allegedly owed his convictions to a ‘worthy old lay genteman’ who told him: ‘Young man, let the first book thou readest at Cambridge be “Locke upon Government”.’46 A stalwart liberal in politics and religion alike, Blackburne held in The Confessional (1766) that since the Bible, and the Bible alone, was the religion of Protestants, no church had the right to demand subscription beyond an avowal of the Scriptures as the word of God. In any case, the Articles were theologically suspect, and compulsory subscription bred spiritual dishonesty.