Some ideas are too successful for their own good. They take flight from their original context and are capacious to a dangerous degree. The Enlightenment, Richard Whatmore contends in this book, is just such an idea. Well yes, since it appears to describe a state of mind rather than, say, a single, big thought (like “free trade”). We might think of another state-of-mind idea that also entails a very contested set of beliefs — “woke”.
No wonder, then, that the Enlightenment comes in for its own particular battering, depending on your politics. For many on the Right, its focus on liberty, equality, progress, and toleration make it the ancestor of a particular kind of smug liberalism. The kind that got slapped in the face by the twin shocks of Brexit and Donald Trump in 2016. On the Left, the Enlightenment is seen, in the words of John Gray, a regular contributor to the New Statesman, as the embodiment of “Western cultural imperialism as the project of universal civilization”.
Both these caricatures are wrong, argues Whatmore, right. The original project, if it can be called that, was to drain superstition and fanaticism from Europe, and turn its nations and people to peace, prosperity and happiness. In the first part, the Enlightenment largely succeeded. But, as Whatmore argues they saw it, only by trading the frying pan for the fire — and on the second hope, they failed.
Whatmore profiles eight thinkers who drove the 18th-century Enlightenment and who (in different ways) watched it go up in flames. In this telling, they weren’t smug, they were despairing.
Britain was about to collapse, everybody agreed. David Hume wrote to a friend: “I can foresee nothing but certain and speedy Ruin either to the Nation or to the public Creditors.” Tom Paine was “sure that Britain would ultimately implode through economic crisis or political chaos”.
Even prophets in those confused days got it wrong
If it wasn’t Britain collapsing, its great rival France was. The French Revolution came and turned the country — and the world — on its head. Some of Whatmore’s thinkers welcomed it at first. The historian Catherine Macaulay wrote to George Washington in 1790 to say that France “has undergone the fiery trial of temptation and come out purified”. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote that one had to have faith in what happened in France “because here was an opportunity to attain ‘more virtue and happiness than has hitherto blessed our globe’.”
Macaulay did not live long enough to see the bloody nightmare of the Terror, but Wollstonecraft did. It changed her view. Revolution was too fast a mechanism, she wrote — gradual progress was better. Others had made the right call at the time, most famously Edmund Burke. He foresaw the violence and was praised as a prophet.
Yet even prophets in those confused days got it wrong. Burke also predicted French decline after the horrors of their revolution. Instead, militarily, they flourished and accepted truths went out the window. In this maelstrom of death, destruction and debt, it wasn’t only the rivers of blood that appeared to herald the end of Enlightenment. It was hoped trade might unify people, countries and colonies, in the mode of Adam Smith. Another of Whatmore’s subjects, the politician William Petty, Earl Shelburne, believed of America that “once all parties accepted that the purpose of Britain’s colonies was trade benefits for all, rather than an extension of national power for one country, then hostile relations could be repaired”. Things didn’t quite work out like that. Hopes for toleration and trade were crushed under the realities of exploitative empires and their mercantile warmongering.
Nor did the Enlightenment thinkers lead happy lives. Edmund Burke died thinking himself a failure. Six people came to Tom Paine’s funeral. Mary Wollstonecraft’s reputation was ruined in Britain shortly after she died. Her husband William Godwin wrote a book containing the shocking revelation that she enjoyed sex.
This book shows brilliantly how an idea, though it may travel across the centuries, can still be historically located, just like the people who invented it. Seen in context (such a drab word for this dense but invigorating work), the Enlightenment in Whatmore’s telling is not a staid, steady procession of pompous ideas, but a vital intellectual exercise in making the best of a bad hand. And that’s a lesson for the 21st century too.
The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis, Allen Lane, £25
