There is an irony in the fact that the Enlightenment is an integral part of our inheritance in America and the West. After all, as we usually describe it, the Enlightenment is said to have offered the prospect of a liberation from the burdens of inheritance.
Some of its foremost champions understood it this way. “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage,” wrote Immanuel Kant. “It is idle to expect any great advancement in science from the superinducing and engrafting of new things upon old,” Francis Bacon argued. “We must begin anew from the very foundations.” Such language is at the root of the most enthusiastic arguments for the promise of the Enlightenment.
Some of its self-described critics understood the Enlightenment in these terms, too. For Edmund Burke, for instance, enlightenment was generally a term of derision. “The whole clan of the enlightened among us,” he argued in the Reflections on the Revolution in France, “have no respect for the wisdom of others, but they pay it off by a very full measure of confidence in their own.” Of the prudent forefathers of the English political tradition who were his heroes, Burke wrote that, “Not being illuminated with the light of which the gentlemen of France tell us they have got so abundant a share, they acted under a strong impression of the ignorance and fallibility of mankind.”
And yet, in Burke’s very critique we can find a reason to see value in one key portion of the legacy of the Enlightenment. Burke articulates his view of the nature of social change and the character of the liberal society in response to a dangerous extremism he sees cropping up around him. That extremism is novel, and for that reason Burke’s argument is novel too. But Burke’s argument is also exceedingly valuable, because it offers a case for free and liberal institutions that is not rooted in radicalism but in traditionalism.
Indeed, the entire corpus of Anglo-American conservatism—which is distinct from and superior to continental European conservatism because it is committed to the equal dignity and natural rights of all—owes its existence as a set of arguments and a mode of coherent political thought and action to the Enlightenment radicalism that made it necessary. And without that conservative body of thought, the greatest achievements of the West would be unable to endure or to advance in the modern era.
Seeing this is essential to grasping the character of our political tradition. In Britain and America, the politics of the past two and a half centuries has been largely organized around a profound disagreement about the nature of what we now would describe as the liberal society—a society defined by the rule of law, rights of property and conscience, the presence and power of some representative institutions, and a degree of individual liberty. Britain and its American colonies were already living in more or less this way by the end of the eighteenth century. And the questions that were coming to define their politics were, roughly, where did this liberal society come from, and therefore where does it point? What does it require and demand of its citizens?
One side of that divide, which we have come to call the left side, argued that the liberal society was the result of a discovery of radical new political principles in the Enlightenment—principles that pointed toward new ideals and institutions, and toward an ideal society. Liberalism, in this view, is the pursuit of that ideal society. And it represents a decisive break with (and rejection of) the pre-modern inheritance of the West.
The other side of that divide, which we have come to call the right side, believed that the liberal society was the product of countless generations of gradual political and cultural evolution in the West, which by the time of Enlightenment, and especially in Britain, had begun to arrive at political forms that pointed toward some timeless principles in which our common life should be grounded, and that allowed for a workable balance among freedom, justice, and effective government given the constraints of human nature. Liberalism, in this view, involves the preservation and gradual improvement of those forms in light of those principles. It is an extension and culmination of Western civilization, not a break from all that came before itself.
One view therefore understands liberalism as a revolutionary discovery that points beyond the existing arrangements of society while the other sees it as a gradual accomplishment to be preserved and enhanced. The first is thus progressive while the second is conservative. They are very much in tension, even though both take themselves to be describing and justifying the liberal society.
That tension sometimes presents itself as a disagreement about the importance of the Enlightenment. Burke, as we have seen, sought to dismiss the language and logic of enlightenment as just self-serving boasting by the radicals. Alexis de Tocqueville was perhaps more dismissive still: In his introduction to Democracy in America, he offered a thousand-year history of liberalism that doesn’t even pause to notice the Enlightenment.
But both of these arguments, like a great deal of what we might now call conservative intellectual history, owe far more to the Enlightenment than their authors are inclined to acknowledge. The debate in which they take a side, a debate about the character of the free society, only really came to happen because of the ideas unleashed by Enlightenment thought. The traditions of the West do run far deeper, but they were articulated as a conservative case for the liberal society because of the provocation of Enlightenment radicalism.
The radicals in essence claimed to have invented liberal England, and the conservatives arose to demonstrate that it had actually been there long before, and that if anything the radicals were threatening its future. It would have been better had the radicalism of the Enlightenment not arisen, but given that it did, the conservative response was utterly essential. And to mount its defense, it required arguments for commitments that had generally been left implicit.
Burke well understood this peculiar point, and its complexity. “It has been the misfortune (not, as these gentlemen think it, the glory) of this age that everything is to be discussed,” he wrote in the Reflections, “as if the constitution of our country were to be always a subject rather of altercation than enjoyment.” And yet, regrettable though they may have found the need for doing it, Burke and his many successors set about offering a case for the inheritances of the West.
More fully articulating that case has made it possible to defend the traditions of the West from within the liberal society—and indeed to see those traditions as essential pillars of that society, which is then rightly understood as the greatest political achievement in the history of humanity. The response to Enlightenment radicalism thus made possible something like an Enlightenment conservatism. And this self-conception, this argument for what the West has achieved and why it is worth sustaining, defending, and improving, is what we should want to preserve of our Enlightenment heritage.
We should preserve it in part because it is true, and critical for understanding the achievement of the West and our good fortune as its benefactors. To see only the radical case for free societies is to fall into the misimpression that liberalism is a break from the intertwined classical and Christian paths of the West when in truth it is a culmination and extension of those paths. If we fail to see that, if we accept only the description of the modern West offered by its most ungrateful children, we would risk abandoning our civilization’s highest achievements.
But we must also preserve this facet of our heritage because that achievement will continue to find itself under attack by those ungrateful children. Champions of a nihilistic and anti-traditional conception of the modern West will continue to aggressively advance their agenda in every generation. Attempts to oppose them by uprooting the achievement of the West—that is, by insisting that our patrimony can only be preserved by restoring its pre-modern forms, and that those were morally better than modern free societies—may be well intentioned, but in practice they would be catastrophically self-destructive. They would accept their opponents’ description of the history of the West, and so would throw out the advances in human dignity and flourishing made possible by the very traditions they proclaim themselves to be defending. Such efforts may speak in the language of a muscular restoration of our heritage, but they actually offer a path only to weakness, fatalism, and ruinous self-defeat.
The persistent post-modern case for nihilism must instead be answered by the other side of the case for the liberal society—the traditionalist case that was forced into articulate form in response to Enlightenment radicalism, and which tells the fuller, more complicated, and more accurate story of the modern, liberal West. That truer story is rooted in the fact (not sufficiently appreciated by the West’s pre-modern political forms) that we are all created equal in the image of our creator.
That self-conception, and the politics it implies, offers a genuine living connection to the classical and Christian sources of our civilization, and therefore a way forward for us all. It is the part of the Enlightenment inheritance that America and the West need especially to build upon in the next generation.
Yuval Levin is the founding and current editor of National Affairs. He is also the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. He is a senior editor of The New Atlantis and a contributing editor to National Review.
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