The Enlightenment: An Idea and its History, J.C.D. Clark, Oxford University Press, 2024. pp. xix, 561. $45.00.
Jonathan Clark is the bad boy of English history, and he is splendid company. When he spies a sacred cow, he reaches for his gun. Sometimes, he bags the beast. On other occasions, he leaves even sympathetic readers exasperated. This volume is, alas, in the latter category.
The book’s title is promising. Had Clark chosen to explore the use and abuse of the term “Enlightenment,” he might well have done a great service. For he is surely right in suggesting that in our time the word is frequently deployed in support of a “civil religion” of sorts. But, instead of trying to define with precision what the Enlightenment was, he simply denies that there ever was such a beast. The ground for this disclaimer is that, in the eighteenth century, no one referred to the Enlightenment as such. As he puts it repeatedly, “‘enlightenment’ was everywhere but ‘the Enlightenment’ was nowhere.” And, in support of the conclusion he draws from this fact, Clark, who is a product of the Cambridge school, quotes Quentin Skinner, who once observed, “[A]s soon as we see that there is no determinate idea to which various writers contributed, but only a variety of statements made by a variety of different agents with a variety of different intentions, what we are seeing is that there is no history of the idea to be written.” So much for the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Technological Revolution, and, yes, the Enlightenment. So much for any attempt to characterize a loosely-organized movement in the past that was not a political party operating in lockstep fully aware of its aims. This is, as David Wootton puts it, the Cambridge fallacy.
Clark errs grievously in one particular. He restricts his purview to the 1690s and the eighteenth century. Had he followed the lead suggested by Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, co-editor of the Encyclopédie, who supplied a genealogy in his Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, he would have reached a different conclusion. The revolution underway was due in part, d’Alembert contended, to the efforts of four individuals. “While adversaries, poorly instructed or malign in intention, openly made war on philosophy, it sought refuge, so to speak, in the works of a few great men—who, without having the dangerous ambition of tearing the blindfolds from the eyes of their contemporaries, prepared from afar, in the shadows and silence the light [lumière] from which, they supposed, the world would little by little, by insensible degrees secure illumination.”
These four men were Bacon, Descartes, Newton, and Locke. Regarding the second in their number, d’Alembert added that he could justly be regarded as “a leader of conspirators, who was the first to rise up against a despotic and arbitrary power and who, in preparing a brilliant revolution, laid the foundations for a government more just and more happy than any which he was able to see established himself.” Later, he would add, “The middle of the century, in which we live, appears destined to form an aera, not only in the history of the human mind, by the revolution which seems to be preparing itself in our opinions, but also in the history of states and empires, by the extraordinary events of which we have successively been witnesses.” There can be little doubt that d’Alembert thought of himself as the leader of a long-existent party and that Diderot who wrote something very similar thought in like terms.
Although d’Alembert conferred great praise on Descartes, it was to Bacon that he gave pride of place. The English did the same. Abraham Cowley was commissioned to write an ode “To the Royal Society” in 1663. For three or four thousand years, prior to Bacon’s time, he wrote, philosophy was “left in Nonage.” Thanks to Bacon, philosophy’s day of emancipation had finally come:
Some few exalted Spirits this latter Age has shown,
That labour’d to assert the Liberty
(From Guardians, who were now Usurpers grown)
Of this Old minor still, captiv’d Philosophy;
But ‘twas Rebellion call’d to fight
For such long-oppressed Right.
Bacon at last, a mighty Man, arose
Whom a wise King and Nature chose
Lord-Chancellour of both their Laws,
And boldly undertook the injur’d Pupils caus.
Bacon was, he intimated, the Moses of the new science.
What all of this suggests is that the efforts of Diderot, d’Alembert, and their associates were part of a larger project that had its origins in the publication of Sir Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning in 1603 and that those in a later age who termed this project the Enlightenment made an appropriate choice. Bacon was interested in promoting a new science that had as its purpose the relief of man’s estate. To this end, he favored dispensing with metaphysics and focusing science on the improvement of the mechanical arts—i.e., on the application of reason (lógos) to the work of artisans (téchnē). That was precisely the focus of the Encyclopédie. Bacon’s aim and that of Diderot and d’Alembert was to sideline religion, to liberate philosophy from tutelage, to promote the mechanical arts, and to encourage commerce. It is no accident that Bacon was the great English defender of the patent.
Clark also errs when he dismisses as politically unimportant the anticlericalism of the philosophes. In eighteenth century England, this might not have mattered. In France, the clergy were not only influential, they were powerful—and the monarchical regime was based on a divine-right claim. Sideline the clergy. Deprive them of office. Mock divine-right theology—you will very likely produce a revolution, and Diderot and d’Alembert knew it.
Once one attends to the fact that Bacon’s scientific project was at the heart of the Enlightenment, one can easily see why that Enlightenment played a role in the American Revolution. It is no accident that there is a patent clause in the American Constitution, that its inclusion caused no comment whatsoever at the American Constitutional Convention, and that it was never challenged during the ratification debates.
How Locke fits in deserves attention. Clark, following an account published fifty-seven years ago at Cambridge by John Dunn, claims that “[f]or Locke, Scripture was trumps.” He seems unaware of the discovery in 2021 of a manuscript confirming what most scholars had long suspected: that the young Locke was obsessed with Hobbes’ Leviathan, and he attributes to the author of The Two Treatises of Government a host of contradictions. He is right that they exist. Locke insists that the state of nature is not a state of war, then concedes that it is and acknowledges that it could not be otherwise. He insists that man is the workmanship of God, then asserts that he is the sole owner of himself. He quotes 1 Timothy to the effect that God has given us all things “richly to enjoy,” then argues that what we have received from God’s gift is essentially worthless. In each case, he makes a claim apt to be reassuring to his readers. Then, without fanfare, he silently withdraws it—and in the end he traces property to human ingenuity and effort in a thoroughly Baconian manner. It is, he asserts, “Invention and Arts” that have vastly “improved the conveniencies of Life.”
“Whatever Bread is worth more than Acorns, wine than Water, and Cloth or Silk than Leaves, Skins, or Moss,” he writes, “that is wholly owing to labour and industry.” It would be difficult, he tells us, to describe all the various forms of agricultural and industrial labor that went into making a single loaf of bread:
For ’tis not barely the Plough-man’s Pains, the Reaper’s and Thresher’s Toil, and the Bakers Sweat, is to be counted into the Bread we eat; the Labour of those who broke the Oxen, who digged and wrought the Iron and Stones, who felled and framed the Timber imployed about the Plough, Mill, Oven, or any other Utensils, which are a vast Number, requisite to this Corn, from its being seed to be sown to its being made Bread, must all be charged on the account of Labour, and received as an effect of that.
To make a simple “Catalogue of things, that Industry provided and made use of, about every Loaf of Bread” would be “almost impossible, at least too long, to reckon up.” It was this chapter that Locke later singled out for special praise. It was his position, as it had been that of Bacon and would be that of Benjamin Franklin, that man is by nature a tool-making animal. That is the conviction at the heart of the Enlightenment.
Paul Rahe is Professor of History at Hillsdale College.
Photo by Paul van Somer I / Formerly attributed to Frans Pourbus the Younger – pl.pinterest.com, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19958108