Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  19 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, treatise 2, ch. 5, sect. 27, pp. 287–8.

  20 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, treatise 2, ch. 5, sect. 35, p. 292.

  21 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, treatise 2, ch. 5, sect. 36, p. 293.

  22 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, treatise 2, ch. 5, sect. 37, p. 294.

  23 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, treatise 2, ch. 5, sect. 46, p. 300.

  24 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, treatise 2, ch. 5, sect. 46, p. 300.

  25 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, treatise 2, ch. 5, sect. 47, p. 300.

  26 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, treatise 2, ch. 5, sect. 50, p. 302.

  27 Joseph Tucker, A Treatise concerning Civil Government (1781), p. 33; W. George Shelton, Dean Tucker and Eighteenth-century Economic and Political Thought (1981); J. G. A. Pocock, Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price’ (1985). Similar criticisms were made by Hume, by Blackstone and by Burke. ‘The only true and natural foundations of society,’ wrote Blackstone, ‘are the wants and the fears of individuals’: Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism (1990), pp. 73f.; J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty 1660–1832 (1994), ch. 3.

  28 Laslett, ‘The English Revolution and Locke's Two Treatises of Government’; Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government.

  29 J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (1985), p. 48.

  30 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (1975), pp. 406f., and Virtue, Commerce and History, pp. 75f. In his Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), James Harrington (1611–77) offered an ideal constitution for England. Property, especially landed property, determined the distribution of power within a state. To prevent executive powers from remaining with the same individuals, he proposed a limited tenure of office. His ideas shaped the development of the ‘country’ ideology, with its stress on opposition to centralized power and suspicion of corruption.

  31 Henry St John, first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751), a Tory politician, was Secretary at War from 1704 to 1708, allying with Robert Harley. Supporting a Stuart restoration, after Queen Anne's death he fled to France, and was briefly the Pretender's secretary of state. Pardoned in 1723 but refused his Lords seat, he unleashed a literary onslaught on Walpole in the Craftsman, lambasting the corrupt ‘Robinocracy’, demanding frequent elections and limits on placemen and standing armies: H. T. Dickinson, Bolingbroke (1970); Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle (1968); Simon Varey (ed.), Lord Bolingbroke: Contributions to the Craftsman (1982); John B. Stewart, Opinion and Reform in Hume's Political Philosophy (1992), p. 63.

  32 Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-century Commonwealthmen (1968); Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (1993); John Robertson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition’ (1983).

  33 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies’ (1972), and ‘Civic Humanism and its Role in Anglo-American Thought’ (1972).

  34 Robbins, The Eighteenth-century Commonwealthmen; Shelley Burtt, Virtue Transformed (1992); Malcolm Jack, Corruption and Progress (1989); Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p. 467; David L. Jacobson and Ronald Hamowy (eds.), The English Libertarian Heritage (1994).

  35 The pair then turned out another highly successful weekly in the early 1720s, the Independent Whig, promoting anti-clericalism and free-thinking (see chapter 5). It says something about the ‘pen for hire’ ethos of the day that on Trenchard's death in 1723, Gordon's radicalism came to an end. He became Walpole's press adviser, accepted a position as the First Commissioner of Wine Licenses, and in time became a leading court writer, a pillar of the ‘corruption’ against which he had railed: Marie P. McMahon, The Radical Whigs, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (1990).

  36 Jacobson (ed.), The English Libertarian Heritage (1965), letters 59–68, p. xxxix.

  37 Jacobson (ed.), The English Libertarian Heritage, letter 62, p. xxxvi.

  38 Jacobson (ed.), The English Libertarian Heritage, letter 45, p. xxxvii.

  39 Jacobson (ed.), The English Libertarian Heritage, letter 60, p. xxxviii.

  40 Jacobson (ed.), The English Libertarian Heritage, letter 60, p. xxxix, p. 47.

  41 For the constitution, see J. A. W. Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property (1983); and Ernest Neville Williams, The Eighteenth Century Constitution, 1688–1815 (1960).

  42 James Thomson, Liberty (1735), p. 45, ll. 814–16. Thomson and other ‘patriots’ had a political agenda of their own, using ‘patriotism’ to support the Prince of Wales against George II.

  43 Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, A Picture of England (1791), quoted in Harry Ballam and Roy Lewis (eds.), The Visitors' Book (1950), p. 79; Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (1998), p. 274.

  44 Quoted in C. Y. Ferdinand, Benjamin Collins and the Provincial Newspaper Trade in the Eighteenth Century (1997), p. 155. For the limits of press freedom on the Continent, see Ulrich Im Hof, The Enlightenment (1994), p. 150.

  45 Geoffrey Alan Cranfield, The Development of the Provincial Newspaper 1700–1760 (1962), p. 273; Marilyn Butler (ed.), Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (1984), p. 6. On the press as guardian of English liberties, recall Henry Tilney's quizzing of the suspicious Catherine Morland:

  What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you – Does your education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open?

  Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1975 [1818]), p. 172.

  46 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1979 [1765–9]), quoted in Butler, Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, p. 6; James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (1963), p. 19; H. T. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-century Britain (1995), p. 169; Eckhart Hellmuth, ‘ “The Palladium of All Other English Liberties” ’ (1990).

  47 Quoted in Butler, Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, p. 6.

  48 J. Almon, Memoirs of a Late Eminent Bookseller (sn, 1790), pp. 148f. The Berlin Wednesday Club was arguing, in 1783, in favour of censorship – not surprisingly, as many of its members were civil servants: Eckhart Hellmuth, ‘Enlightenment and the Freedom of the Press’ (1998).

  49 Quoted in Stewart, Opinion and Reform in Hume's Political Philosophy, p. 306.

  50 Pat Rogers, Hacks and Dunces (1980), pp. 8–9.

  51 Alan P. F. Sell, John Locke and the Eighteenth-century Divines (1997), p. 2. All ideologues looked back to 1688 as securing English law and liberties (Bill of Rights, the Toleration Act, the Act of Settlement, the Union with Scotland, Defoe's lure Divino (1704)).

  52 Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1999 [1711]), vol. i, p. 60.

  53 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, vol. i, p. 39.

  54 Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, ‘Idea of the Patriot King’ (1738), in The Works of Lord Bolingbroke (1969 [1754–98]), vol. iii, p. 123: ‘The landed men are the true owners of our political vessel; the moneyed men, as such, are but passengers in it’, quoted in Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1962 [1876]), vol. ii, p. 178. There was of course endless social satire targeted against the vulgarity of mere money: Colin Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance (1994).

  55 James Harris, Hermes (1751), in The Works of James Harris, Esq. (1801), vol. i, ch. 5, p. 438.

  56 For the consolidation of the State, see John Brewer, The Sinews of Power (1989); P.
Corrigan and D. Sayer, The Great Arch (1985); John Cannon (ed.), The Whig Ascendancy (1981); J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675–1725 (1967); Jeremy Black, The Politics of Britain, 1688–1800 (1993).

  57 For accusations of a ‘sham’, see D. Hay, ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’ (1975); Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged (1991).

  58 John Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757), pp. 29, 35–6: Brown believed Britain was ‘gliding down to Ruin’, just like ‘degenerate and declining Rome’: he eventually committed suicide. See Jack, Corruption and Progress; D. Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-century Britain (1990), p. 214; Howard D. Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in ‘Augustan’ England (1978).

  59 See the discussions above in chapters 1 and 4. For the political thinking of Addison and Steele, see Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Politics and Politeness in the Reigns of Anne and the Early Hanoverians’ (1993), pp. 211–45.

  60 Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectactor (1965), vol. i, no. 124, p. 507 (Monday, 23 July 1711); see the discussion in Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode (1977), p. 208.

  61 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Tatler (1987), vol. i, p. 8, dedication. Steele said, ‘it is no small discouragement to me, to see how slow a progress I make in the reformation of the world’: Bond, The Tatler (1987), vol. ii, no. 139, pp. 297–301 ( Tuesday, 28 February 1710). Note that eighty years later the leading Spanish literary journal, the Espíritu de los majores diarios, had but 765 subscribers.

  62 John Gay, The Present State of Wit (sn, 1711), p. 20.

  63 Addison and Steele, The Spectator (1965), vol. i, no. 10, p. 44 (Monday, 12 March 1711).

  64 Addison and Steele, The Spectator, vol. i, no. 10, pp. 44–7 (Monday, 12 March 1711).

  65 Addison and Steele, The Spectator, vol. ii, no. 219, pp. 351–4 (Saturday, 10 November 1711), and vol. ii, no. 275, pp. 570–73 (Tuesday, 15 January 1712). See Edward A. Bloom, Lilian D. Bloom and Edmund Leites, Educating the Audience (1984); Scott Black, ‘Social and Literary Form in the Spectator’ (1999); Peter Burke, The Art of Conversation (1993); Stephen Copley, ‘Commerce, Conversation and Politeness in the Early Eighteenth-century Periodical’ (1995); Michael Ketcham, Transparent Designs (1985); David Castronovo, The English Gentleman (1987); George C. Brauer, The Education of a Gentleman (1959). For the tag, Totus mundus agit histrionem, see Addison and Steele, The Spectator, vol. iii, no. 370, p. 393 (Monday, 5 May 1712).

  66 Addison and Steele, The Spectator, vol. i, no. 125, pp. 509–10 (Tuesday, 24 July 1711).

  67 Addison and Steele, The Spectator, vol. ii, no. 262, p. 517 (Monday, 31 December 1711). He was as good as his word, although for his pains he then incurred Pope's derisive portrait as ‘Atticus’ (‘Willing to wound, yet afraid to strike/Just hint a fault and hesitate dislike’): Alexander Pope, An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1735), in John Butt (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope (1965), p. 604, ll. 203–4.

  68 Addison and Steele, The Spectator, vol. ii, no. 262, p. 519 (Monday, 31 December 1711). Compare Swift's professed aim in A Tale of a Tub.

  69 Addison and Steele, The Spectator, vol. i, no. 81, pp. 346–9 (Saturday, 2 June 1711).

  70 Addison and Steele, The Spectator, vol. ii, no. 169, pp. 164–7 (Thursday, 13 September 1711).

  71 Scott Paul Gordon, ‘Voyeuristic Dreams’ (1995). ‘Mr Spectator’ went ‘masked’: Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization (1986); Lee Davison, Tim Hitchcock, Tim Keirn and Robert B. Shoemaker (eds), Stilling the Grumbling Hive (1992).

  72 George S. Marr, The Periodical Essayists of the Eighteenth Century (1971), p. 57.

  73 Ernest Cassara, The Enlightenment in America (1988), p. 43. ‘Addison,’ wrote Macaulay, ‘reconciled wit with virtue, after a long and disastrous separation, during which wit had been led astray by profligacy and virtue by fanaticism’: quoted in Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (1984), p. 4.

  74 See the analyses in Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Luxury (1994), pp. 147f.; Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart (1986); John Sekora, Luxury (1977); James Raven, Judging New Wealth (1992).

  75 Hume, ‘Of the Protestant Succession’ (1741–2), in Selected Essays (1993), p. 297; see also David Hume, The History of England under the House of Tudor (1754–62), vol. iii, ch. 23, p. 296, and Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-century Britain, p. 309. Broadly on Hume's politics, see Duncan Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics (1975), and ‘Sceptical Whiggism, Commerce and Liberty’ (1975); John B. Stewart, The Moral and Political Philosophy of David Hume (1963), and Opinion and Reform in Hume's Political Philosophy; Nicholas Phillipson, Hume (1989).

  76 Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’ (1741–2), in Selected Essays, p. 52. For these ideas, see Phillipson, ‘Politics and Politeness in the Reigns of Anne and the Early Hanoverians’.

  77 Robertson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition’, pp. 152–3.

  78 Hume, ‘On the Origin of Government’ (1741–2), in Selected Essays, pp. 28–32, A Treatise of Human Nature (1978 [1740]), bk III, pt 2, ch. 1, and ‘Of Justice’, in David Hume, Enquiries concerning the Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals (1966 [1777]), pp. 183–204; Jonathan Harrison, Hume's Theory of Justice (1981); Christopher J. Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (1997), chs. 2–3.

  79 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, bk III, pt 2, sect. 2, pp. 498–500. Such views anticipate Smith's.

  80 Robertson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition’, p. 152.

  81 Hume, ‘Of Luxury’ (1741–2), in Selected Essays, pp. 167–77. From 1760 this essay was retitled ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’. Gibbon agreed: the fall of Rome had been due not to luxury but to despotism: see Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 148. For the Rome debate, see Howard Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature (1983); Philip Ayres, Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-century England (1997); Sekora, Luxury, p. 110.

  82 Hume, ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’ (1741–2), in Selected Essays, pp. 56–77.

  83 See the discussion in Robertson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition’, p. 163.

  84 Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’, in Selected Essays, p. 54. Gibbon too denied that modern monarchies were tyrannies:

  The abuses of tyranny are restrained by the mutual influence of fear and shame; republics have acquired order and stability; monarchies have imbibed the principles of freedom, or, at least, of moderation; and some sense of honour and justice is introduced into the most defective constitutions by the general manners of the times.

  Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1994 [1781]), vol. ii, ch. 38, p. 514.

  85 David Hume, The Philosophical Works of David Hume (1882 [1741–2]), vol. iii, pp. 301–2, quoted in Hiram Caton, The Politics of Progress (1988), p. 329.

  86 Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’ (1741–2), in Selected Essays, p. 168.

  87 While a student at the University of Glasgow from 1737 to 1740 Smith attended the lectures of Francis Hutcheson. He lectured on rhetoric, belles lettres, and, finally, jurisprudence in Edinburgh from 1748 to 1751, when he was appointed professor of logic at Glasgow, moving soon after to Hutcheson's old chair of moral philosophy, which he held until 1763. At Glasgow, he lectured on literature as well as on law, government and ethics, and in 1759 he published The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Adam Smith's Discourse (1994); Forbes, ‘Sceptical Whiggism, Commerce and Liberty’; Donald Winch, Adam Smith's Politics (1978).

  88 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1976 [1759]), pt III, ch. 3, para. 20, quoted in Phillipson, ‘Adam Smith as Civic Moralist’, p. 185.

  89 A man might pursue his desires to the full extent of his powers, so long as moral limits were accepted: ‘In the race for wealth, and honours, and preferments, he may run as hard as he can, and strain every nerve and every muscle, in order to outstrip
all his competitors. But if he should justle, or throw down any of them, the indulgence of the spectators is entirely at an end’: Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 83.

  90 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 113.

  91 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 112, quoted in Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Adam Smith as Civic Moralist’, p. 189.

  92 Phillipson, ‘Adam Smith as Civic Moralist’, pp. 189–92.

  93 David Hume: ‘But why, in the greater society or confederation of mankind, should not the case be the same as in particular clubs and companies’: Hume, Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, p. 281.

  94 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 112. By the second edition (1761), it has been argued, Smith was withdrawing from an ethics overwhelmingly based upon a moderate and informed public opinion towards a moral code which underlined the pre-eminence of the individual and internal conscience. Smith there made public the concept of a ‘tribunal within the breast’, ‘the abstract man’, the ‘representative of mankind’, which acted as the ‘supreme judge’ of men's sentiments: John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse (1987), p. 141.