In his essay, Paul Rahe pushes back against Jonathan Clark’s contention that there was no “The Enlightenment” by highlighting the centrality of a common project begun in the seventeenth century by such men as Bacon, Newton, and Locke, among others, with Bacon taking pride of place. But what was that project? And was it the same on this side of the water?
If, to simplify a bit, one can say that the unifying slogan of the Enlightenment was “better living through reason,” there was still room for dispute about how much better we can make things. In America, particularly after his time in France, Jefferson leaned hardest into the notion of fundamental progress. In religion, for example, in Jefferson’s view there’s an arc of history that we can understand or even create, and it bends toward Unitarianism: “it is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, & one is three.” Or consider his famous or perhaps infamous comment on the Terror in Revolutionary France:
The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? [R]ather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.
Jefferson was exaggerating for clarity as he often did, the underlying sentiment is clear. Our goal is to transform the world radically.
Compared to Jefferson, John Adams believed nature was more robust. He referred to God as our “great Creator, who does nothing in vain,” an echo of Aristotle’s “nature does nothing in vain.” In other words, he read nature like a book, assuming the Divine Author put everything in nature intentionally, and, amid cultural changes, there were significant underlying constants. Man’s job was to work with that nature to serve God. Jefferson began from a radically more fluid view of human nature and the human condition, only allowing the tragic constants a place with great reluctance, and never incorporating such limits into a comprehensive philosophical reflection on man’s political nature. As a practical statesman he was more reasonable than he was as a theorist. And both men hated slavery and hoped to see it ended in America. In Massachusetts slavery was ended by the state constitution Adams drafted. Jefferson couldn’t end slavery in Virginia. But his work was fundamental in creating the Northwest Ordinance that ensured there would be no slavery in the old Northwest.
To give a brief taste of the argument between the two statesmen, and, hence, of the range of Enlightened opinion in America, consider the problems of natural aristocracy, science, and war. Their dispute over natural aristocracy is probably the best known, although we seldom give it the kind of close reading it deserves. Jefferson wrote Adams:
I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue & talents. formerly bodily powers gave place among the aristoi. but since the invention of gunpowder … bodily strength, like beauty, good humor, politeness, and other accomplishments, has become but an auxiliary ground of distinction. there is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth … the natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature, for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society. and indeed it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society.
Note Jefferson’s way of reasoning, backward from what the goodness of creation demands. Rather than begin with a study of what human beings have been like across history (as Adams did) and then wrestle with it, Jefferson’s focus is on what nature must be like for a good society (by his lights) to exist. Note also the historical dimension. Advances in technology have changed the markers of natural aristocracy. And how to ensure the real, as opposed to artificial aristocrats are in charge? Jefferson was a democratic optimist: “leave to the citizens the free election and … in general they will elect the real good and wise.” The task of the natural aristocracy was to use the tools Baconian science provides to help change the world, making it “better than it is now,” as he put it in his apologia for the terror.
Adams looked at it rather differently.
Fashion has introduced an indeterminate Use of the Word “Talents.” Education, Wealth, Strength, Beauty, Stature, Birth, Marriage, graceful Attitudes and motions, Gait, Air, Complexion, Physiognomy, are Talents, as well as Genius and Science and learning. Any one of these Talents, that in fact commands or influences two Votes in Society, gives to the Man who possesses it, the Character of an Aristocrat, in my Sense of the Word.
Adams’s method, in Baconian fashion, was ruthlessly empirical. He studied as much history as he could find and from that he abstracted what he regarded as the deep constants, or common tendencies of men and women that were discoverable beneath cultural change. In Federalist 10, Jefferson’s political partner Madison argued that given larger districts “it will be more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried,” an argument congruent with Jefferson’s belief that our voters will select truly worthy men. Adams was skeptical that larger districts would make more than a marginal difference. Hence the checks and balances that Madison described as merely “auxiliary” in Federalist 51 were primary for Adams. And for Adams, unlike Madison, those checks and balances, if well designed, would help moderate the souls of men in office. In time that might, Adams hoped, help produce a better elite, and, status competition being another inevitability, a better group beneath them chasing them.
The second area of disagreement has to do with knowledge. Adams applied Enlightened skepticism against itself. In 1820 Adams turned his discussion with Jefferson to fundamentals, declaring that “we know nothing of Essences.” All we know from the senses is, or might very well be, mere surface appearance. From that concluded that “I insist upon it that the Saint has as good a right to groan at the Philosopher for asserting that there is nothing but matter in the Universe—As the Philosopher has to laugh at the Saint for saying that there are both Matter and Spirit.”
Jefferson responded with a doctrinaire materialism, Adams’
croud of scepticisms kept me from sleep … to give rest to my mind, I was obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne, “I feel: therefore I exist” I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. this gives me motion … on the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.
Note the contrast. Jefferson grounded his hopes for progress on the certainties, or what he insisted were certainties, discoverable by the senses. To draw that into doubt, and to keep the limits of Baconian epistemology in mind, drew the whole project of radical progress into doubt.
The rubber really hit the road when it came to war. In an 1812 letter to Adams, Jefferson reflected upon the Napoleonic wars, “if science produces no better fruits than tyranny, murder, rapine, and destitution of national morality, I would rather wish our country to be ignorant, honest & estimable as our neighboring savages are.” Modern science was in the process of giving men previously unthinkable power. If we tended to behave in the future as we had in the past, wars would produce unspeakable horrors, so horrible that we would be better off living in the stone age, as Indians did. It is not a coincidence that Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein, or “The Modern Promethius” a few years after Jefferson penned those words. Adams credited Jefferson’s benevolent hopes, but he thought they were misguided. Man, as known in the pages of history was not abnormal. He wrote Benjamin Rush shortly after we declared war in 1812.
Wars are the natural and unavoidable effects of the constitution of human nature and the fabric of the globe it is destined to inhabit and rule. . . . As I believe this to be the constitution of God Almighty and the constant order of his Providence, I must esteem all the speculations of divines and philosophers about universal and perpetual peace as shortsighted, frivolous romances.
Adams, in short, had radical doubts about progress. And yet, he did believe in the American experiment. In the Preface of his Defence of the Constitutions (a work defending a constitution ratified by the people, with a bicameral legislature, an executive with a veto, and a separation of the three powers, legislative, executive, and judicial), Adams proclaimed, “The people in America have now the best opportunity and the greatest trust in their hands, that Providence ever committed to so small a number, since the transgression of the first pair.” To prove that the great mass of men capable of assuming the mantle of political responsibility would be no small achievement.
Although both Adams and Jefferson had their theoretical sides, for them, as founding statesmen, Enlightenment was a practical problem. That focus meant that their work seldom slipped the bounds of what progress might reasonably be possible among men. Like Jefferson, Americans have always chaffed against those very limitations, even as we, reluctantly, keep them in mind.
Richard Samuelson is Associate Professor of Government at Hillsdale College’s Washington, D.C., campus.
Photo by Rembrandt Peale – https://www.whitehousehistory.org/galleries/presidential-portraits, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20179140 and by Gilbert Stuart – National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., online collection, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=167696536