Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  Some hoped, others feared, that the revolutionary blaze would leap the Channel. Jacobin doctrines were inflammatory enough, and the tinder of discontent everywhere: soaring inflation, agrarian riots (notably over enclosures) and unsettling industrialization. Insurrection was in the air, old paternalism was crumbling, and deference with it. Awarding ancestral vengefulness a new weapon, an anonymous versifier warned the Quality:

  On Swill and Grains you wish the poor to be fed

  And underneath the Gullintine we could wish to see your heads.

  while a notice nailed to a church door expressed new sentiments: ‘Downe with your Constitucion Arect a republick’:19 no longer ‘ours’, now the constitution was ‘yours’. This new ‘them and us’ mood was captured by Thomas Walker. The people had grown aware, noted the Manchester manufacturer, ‘how the few have permanently contrived to live in affluence and luxurious indulgence, while the many drag on an existence laborious and miserable, in ignorance and vice, in pain and poverty!’20

  Yet the old order was not decisively tested. Once France declared war, radicals at home found themselves in a cleft stick. The Terror alienated many erstwhile supporters;21 the propertied closed ranks, and patriotic support, spontaneous or staged, swelled in ‘Church and King’ demonstrations against foreign enemies and domestic ‘traitors’ like Priestley. The proclamation against ‘Seditious Writings’ (1792) made mention of Tom Paine dangerous, and he was hanged in effigy.22

  The Scottish trials of 1793–4, with radical leaders sentenced to transportation for attending an alternative parliament, served warning to militants elsewhere. In England, meanwhile, Pitt had set up spy networks, believing, or professing to believe, that the radical societies threatened a ‘whole system of insurrection… laid in the modern doctrine of the rights of man’.23 In April 1794 habeas corpus was suspended, and in the next month a high treason prosecution was launched against leading London radicals, including Horne Tooke, John Thelwall and Thomas Hardy.24 For the government, their acquittal later in the year proved a blessing in disguise, since their martyrdom would have lent credence to the charges that Pitt was bent on tyranny.25

  The radical surge subsided, and after 1794 it was economic misery that kept opposition alive. When in October 1795 – a year of skyrocketing wheat prices – stones were thrown at the King's coach, Pitt seized the opportunity to batten down the hatches still further by means of the ‘Two Acts’. The Seditious Meetings Act prohibited assemblies of more than fifty people without a JP's permission, while the Treasonable Practices Act extended the sedition laws. Charles James Fox, leader of the opposition Whig rump, retorted that all parliamentary reformers were, technically at least, now liable to transportation, while Samuel Taylor Coleridge, still in his radical phase, prophesied that ‘the cadaverous tranquillity of despotism will succeed the generous order… of freedom’.26 Opposition had been muzzled by 1795, and at crisis point public opinion fell into line behind the government, judging that Britain's priority was national salvation. Things were different in Ireland, however, where political discontent came to a boil in the revolutionary nineties, with an alliance between native Irish resistance and Jacobin ideology through the inspiration of Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen movement – defeated in the end by internal dissensions and ferocious repression.27

  If, however, the threat of revolution receded, commentators sensed that the old order was disappearing, too. English society was in turmoil, now no longer based on a rural order still to be found throughout most of the Continent. Labourers were leaving the land – or rather being turfed off it by enclosure and the other innovations brought by agrarian capitalism. ‘Two causes, and only two, will rouse a peasantry to rebellion,’ opined Robert Southey, a radical turned Tory: ‘intolerable oppression, or religious zeal.’ But that moderately comforting scenario no longer applied: ‘A manufacturing poor is more easily instigated to revolt: they have no local attachments… they know enough of what is passing in the political world to think themselves politicians.’28 England's rulers must pay heed: ‘If the manufacturing system continues to be extended, I believe that revolution inevitably must come, and in its most fearful shape.’29

  Friends of enlightenment became friends of the Revolution. The London Corresponding Society set about disseminating political knowledge, so as to effect ‘a Revolution in the Minds of [the] Nation… An enlightened nation immediately becomes free.’30 The chief oracle of enlightened philosophy was Thomas Paine.31

  Born a Quaker, Paine had had a chequered career as a staymaker, schoolmaster and excise officer before migrating to America and vindicating the rebellion in his book Common Sense (1776). Returning to Europe after the outbreak of the French Revolution, he fanned insurrectionary flames in Britain. The first part of his Rights of Man was published in March 1791 at 3s. – dear enough, the government hoped, to keep it out of the hands of the swinish multitude. Within a few weeks, however, aided by the London Constitutional Society, which distributed it, 50,000 copies had been sold.32 Upon appeals to Paine to make it available in cheaper format,33 the second part, appearing a year later, was issued in a 6d. edition, accompanied by a cheap reprint of the first.34 By 1793, a staggering 200,000 copies were allegedly in circulation – Burke's Reflections sold only a seventh of that number.35

  ‘When, in countries that are called civilized,’ declaimed Paine, painting a sombre picture of oppression, ‘we see age going to the workhouse and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong in the system of government.’ What was to blame? In Paine's view, privilege: ‘the idea of hereditary legislators is as… absurd as an hereditary author’.36 Power came from the people and must ever dwell in them: ‘The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.’37

  Paine jeered at the very words prince and peer which, depending as they did upon the nonsense of hereditariness, were insults to reason: ‘mankind are not now to be told they shall not think or they shall not read’. Arbitrary power that squandered millions on pensions, patronage and warfare, must end, and be replaced by government by ‘election and representation’: the only safeguard against the abuse of power lay in universal manhood suffrage.

  Paine was bold in his predictions – monarchy and aristocracy would not ‘continue seven years longer in any of the enlightened countries of Europe’ – but, true to his Quaker colours, he did not preach bloodshed. Nor did he envisage strict equality. ‘The floor of freedom is as level as water’, but that ‘that property will ever be unequal is certain’, on account of differentials in talents and industry.38

  Paine's quarrel with Burke concerned the stranglehold of history. Burke had contended that the Revolutionary Settlement bound posterity, thus denying the people's right to choose or cashier their own governors. But the parliament of 1688 had actually done precisely that, asserted Paine, and ‘every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it’. ‘Governing beyond the grave’ was arrant tyranny, and Burke's lament for the ‘age of chivalry’ quite absurd: he ‘pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird’.39

  The origin of the rights of man lay in the origin of man himself: the Creation. All histories, and particularly the Mosaic – ‘whether taken as divine authority or merely historical’ – agreed ‘in establishing one point, the unity of man, by which I mean that… all men are born equal, and with equal natural rights’.40 Upon these rights civil rights were grounded, which existed for the same Lockean reason as did civil society, because not all natural rights could be safeguarded by the individual alone. Some, such as freedom of religion, remained untouched in civil society; others, such as the right to judge and act in one's own case, were relinquished in exchange for justice. Legitimate government rested upon popular sovereignty.

  Part Two of the Rights of Man took as its departure point the American Revolution, since the New World had been ‘the only spot in the political world, where the principles of univers
al reformation could begin’. The diversity of its settlers with their myriad faiths had compelled a spirit of compromise, and tilling the wilderness required cooperation. Whereas the American regime promoted prosperity, Europe was awash with ‘hordes of miserable poor’, while ‘the greedy hand of government’ invaded ‘every corner and crevice of industry’.41

  There was a seeming contradiction in Paine's position which arose out of his populism. He embraced liberalism: man was born free, and the State, set up by contract, was ‘no farther necessary than to supply the few cases to which society and civilization are not conveniently competent’. In other words, ‘government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil’, a ‘badge of lost innocence’.42 Yet in the concluding chapters of Part Two, he painted a picture of an energetic State meeting the needs of the people: relief for a quarter of a million poor families, universal elementary education, family allowances for children under fourteen, old age pensions, maternity benefits, funeral allowances, workshops for youngsters and public works for London's poor. To pay for this Paine looked to military cuts and a graduated income tax. The civilized society was the one which could say: ‘my poor are happy’.43

  The Rights of Man became the radical bible. Its follow-up, The Age of Reason (1794–96), was no less an Enlightenment text, translating the élitist Deist critique of theologians and prelates into a populist idiom.44 Brimming with indignation against the Old Testament's cruel and arbitrary God, it ridiculed the ‘riddles’ of the Scriptures, and praised natural religion: ‘Every religion is good that teaches man to be good.’45 ‘I do not believe,’ ran Paine's anti-creed, ‘in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.’46 Established religion insulted reason, the Bible was packed with obscenities, bishops were the toadies of tyrants and churches were set up ‘to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit’. As soon as the destruction of priestcraft put an end to mystery-mongering, ‘the present age will hereafter merit to be called the Age of Reason’.47 Paine embraced enlightened cosmopolitanism – ‘My country,’ he insisted, ‘is the world’ – and he looked forward to when ‘the present generation will appear to the future as the Adam of a new world’.48 Hugely popular as the voice of hope, he was hymned in a profane anthem:

  GOD save great Thomas Paine,

  His ‘Rights of Man’ explain

  To every soul.

  He makes the blind to see

  What dupes and slaves they be,

  And points out liberty,

  From pole to pole.49

  To others, however, Paine was the Devil incarnate; his books were proscribed, and the booksellers who distributed them imprisoned.50

  Many political theories burst upon the scene at the end of the eighteenth century, embodying this or that strand of enlightened thinking, and often also drawing upon other traditions – Christian, utopian or populist. Philosophically, the most radical of these was Godwin's anarchism.51

  Born in 1756 the son of a Dissenting minister, William Godwin was schooled at that hotbed of criticism, Hoxton Nonconformist Academy, moving on to become minister to a Dissenting congregation at Ware in Hertfordshire. His Calvinist faith was shaken, first by his reading Rousseau, d'Holbach and Helvétius, and then by Joseph Priestley's teachings. Unlike Gunpowder Joe, he would not stop at Unitarianism; after five years he quit the ministry and soon turned atheist. Moving to London in 1783 at the age of twenty-seven, Godwin remained there for the rest of his long life, eking out a living in Grub Street while getting involved in radical politics – he was, in fact, present at Richard Price's 1789 sermon.

  Godwin conceived his great work in May 1791, just after The Rights of Man appeared – unlike Paine, however, he would transcend the rhetoric of representation and address the fundamentals. Appearing in February 1793, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Political Justice instantly made Godwin's name:52 it was ‘a book which… in effect directed the whole course of my life,’ recalled the radical Crabb Robinson, who was ‘willing even to become a martyr for it’.53

  The Enquiry blended Lockean empiricism and Hartleyan determinism, sensationalism and utilitarianism in a unique synthesis.54 Individual differences arose from education and external influences. Denying innate ideas and instincts, Godwin even doubted whether man could truly be said to have a mind as such, using the word only provisionally as a shorthand to signify the lattices of thought which produced the complex of personal identity. Reason prescribed to the individual a duty to work for the greatest happiness through unflinching exercise of intellect and unfettered private judgement. ‘Sound reasoning and truth, when adequately communicated, must always be victorious over error,’ he insisted: ‘truth is omnipotent… man is perfectible.’55 Truth would triumph, because evil was at bottom not wickedness but ignorance.

  Misery prevailed, however, and tyranny, high-life debauchery and rampant capitalism were to blame.56 Unlike Paine and most other radicals, Godwin sought not the reform of government but its abolition. Unnecessary and counterproductive, government created the evils it pretended to eradicate, just as free-market capitalism spawned the servitude of needless wants and the burdens of wasted labour. The answer lay in the euthanasia of government itself.

  Wrongs were at bottom the product of faulty education: ‘all vice is nothing more than error and mistake reduced into practice, and adopted as the principle of our conduct’.57 Such false values would disappear once people acquired a rational understanding of their duties. Subjective sentiments like honour, generosity, gratitude, filial affection, promises, gallantry or friendship had no place in a true moral philosophy or a just society. For example, in the case of a lethal fire, one ought to save the life of the great French writer Fénelon (expounded Godwin, in a parable which became notorious) rather than Fénelon's sister or one's mother; for by rescuing the moralist one would be doing right by mankind rather than pandering to subjective feelings.58

  Also to disappear in this expurgation of the irrational was the entire panoply of the law and punishment.59 The judicial system did not operate efficiently; punishment, old style and new style alike, was the infliction of pain to no avail, and the gallows were no argument.60 It made no sense, moreover, given Godwin's strict Priestleyan determinism. A man, like a knife, was set in motion from without – the weapon was moved by ‘material impulse’, the man by ‘inducement and persuasion’. Hence ‘the assassin cannot help the murder he commits any more than the dagger’.61 Hating a murderer was thus as irrational as hating his weapon. Disapproval might be in order, indeed, but ‘our disapprobation of vice will be of the same kind as our disapprobation of an infectious distemper’. In a necessitarian universe, dominated by a ‘chain of events’, it was folly (argued this lapsed Calvinist) to hold malefactors responsible for their crimes: society should be so reconstituted and people so re-educated that they had no motive for committing them.

  Infringements on individual judgement were ‘tyranny’ and must be minimized: Godwin thus frowned upon marriage, cohabitation, orchestras, concerts and stage plays because all stifled ‘individuality’.62 Government was ‘an evil’, and the most that was needed by way of popular control was a parish committee, in the Anglo-Saxon mould.63 Make private judgement paramount, and one might expect a future in which ‘there will be no war, no crimes, no administration of justice, as it is called, and no government’.64

  Indeed, not only all that, but there would also be ‘no disease, no anguish, no melancholy and no resentment. Each man will seek with ineffable ardour, the good of all.’65 Once people comported themselves truly rationally, ill-health and ageing would disappear and immortality succeed. This would not lead to overpopulation, since sexual appetites, being themselves irrational, would also wither away, and copulation cease. The consequence? ‘The whole will be a people of men, and not of children. Generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have�
� to recommence her career every thirty years’: a middle-aged bachelor's heaven, indeed.66

  Citing Franklin's supposition that ‘mind will one day become omnipotent over matter’, Godwin reflected: ‘if the power of intellect can be established over all other matter, are we not inevitably led to ask, why not over the matter of our own bodies?’67 Duty must supplant desire:

  Reasonable men now eat and drink not from the love of pleasure, but because eating and drinking are essential to our healthful existence. Reasonable men will then propagate their species, not because a certain sensible pleasure is annexed to this action, but because it is right the species should be propagated.68

  Godwin's mission was to grind beliefs and behaviour down to their atoms, for, after all, ‘individuality is of the very essence of intellectual excellence’.69 He extolled the very soul of enlightenment – ceaseless criticism, self-examination and perpetual vigilance – for the unexamined life was not worth living. ‘The wise man is satisfied with nothing… The wise man is not satisfied with his own attainments, or even with his principles and opinions. He is continually detecting errors in them; he suspects more; there is no end to his revisals and enquiries.’70 Godwin's faith was also vested in gradualism – ‘we shall have many reforms, but no revolutions’ – for violence was coercion, and all coercion was useless or worse.71 Improvement had to come from ‘the enlightened and the wise’, from within, and from the mind: ‘There is no effectual way of improving the institutions of any people but by enlightening their understandings.’72 ‘Reason,’ it followed, ‘is the only legislator.’73