The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments

by Gertrude Himmelfarb

Book Overview

A bold and brilliant reclamation of the Enlightenment from scholars who have given the movement pre-eminence in France over concurrent movements in England and America. This is a contrast of the Enlightenment in three different countries and tries to show how the abstracted idealisation of Man characterised by the French has wrongly been given primacy. Exceptionally well written and clever.' - The Washington Post Book World 'Supported with great passion...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400077222
• ISBN13: 9781400077229
• Release Date: August 2005
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

The Enlightenment under the Spotlight

In this well-argued work Himmelfarb compares the British (Scottish-English), French and American Enlightenments. The bulk of the book deals with the British Enlightenment with reference to amongst others, Adam Smith, Godwin, Hume, Hobbes, Locke, Newton and Lord Shaftesbury plus, unusually, John Wesley and Edmund Burke. She assigns a significant role to the social movement of Methodism. Thomas Paine and the Founding Fathers represent the American, whilst Diderot and Voltaire are considered the main characters in the French Enlightenment. In every case there were exceptions, e.g. Locke and Newton had more in common with the revolutionary French whilst Montesquieu was closer to the evolutionary British. Roads to Modernity's history of the Western political tradition explains the enduring chasm between the Right and Left. From the start they embraced different philosophical assumptions and disparate notions of the human condition. It's plain to see why one yielded stability and growth while the other spawned genocidal secular salvationist movements or at best, stagnation. The British "moral philosophers" differed from the French "philosophes'. What made them moral philosophers was their belief in a moral sense of empathy/compassion thought to be so deeply entrenched in the human soul as to have the same compelling power as innate ideas. The author views Lord Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit as the spark of the British Enlightenment. Shaftesbury credited humanity with this innate moral sense. Adam Smith's laissez-faire economics and belief in natural equality expressed in On The Wealth Of Nations mirrors Shaftesbury's concept of social affection. Smith believed that sympathy and benevolence were virtues inherent to the human condition. Although formidable figures, Locke, Hobbes and Newton had little lasting influence on the issues that defined the British Enlightenment. According to Locke things could be judged good or evil only by reference to pleasure or pain, which themselves resulted from sensation. Shaftesbury disagreed - virtue did not derive from reason, religion, sensation or self-interest. These were methods for promoting or suppressing it but the moral sense was the real source of virtue. This moral conscience is the guide to distinguishing right from wrong. Shaftesbury did not shy away from discussing the baleful passions that torment mankind. He even warned of excessive virtue, since an immoderate degree of e.g. altruism could destroy the "effect of love," whilst excessive pity rendered a man incapable of remedial action. For Shaftesbury, the sense of compassion was rooted in nature and instinct, preceding instruction and reason that serve to determine the best way of promoting the good. Thus the innate impulse to the good was the basis of the social ethic that informed British philosophical and moral discourse throughout the eighteenth century. Subsequent philosophers that followed Shaftesbury agreed on the moral co

Stimulating comparisons

This superb, lucid and perhaps somewhat partisan book is primarily concerned with the British Enlightenment and with the differences between it and the Enlightenment in France and in America. The author points out that the mainstream of the British Enlightenment did not give absolute priority to Reason, which can easily lead people astray, but to innate moral sentiments and feelings of compassion and benevolence, which Reason and self-interest may support but can also pervert. Where the mainstream French Enlightenment aimed to regenerate mankind, the British wanted to improve it. Where the French were revolutionary, the British were evolutionary. Where the French were militantly anti-clerical, the British, even if they were Theists or Deists, had no intention to attack the Church as such - indeed men like Thomas Woolston, Conyers Middleton and Matthew Tindal were actually in Holy Orders. And the French philosophes generally had little sentiment to spare for the despised canaille, to whom they allowed `neither a moral sense nor a common sense that might approximate reason'. Education, important as it was in the writings of Helvétius and Holbach, would simply be wasted on them. They wanted enlightened reform, of course; but for the most part they pinned their hopes for this on the very unBritish notion of Enlightened Despotism, unreliable as their experience of actual Enlightened Despots turned out to be. I have used the word `mainstream', which Himmelfarb does not use. She does of course recognize that there were two distinct varieties of the British Enlightenment - that associated with Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Adam Smith and which she seems to regard as `mainstream'; and that associated with Radicals like Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Tom Paine and William Godwin. These had more in common with mainstream French philosophy. In so far as evolutionary thought and practice has played a bigger role in British history than has revolution, the implication that the Shaftesbury-Smith tradition was in the British mainstream appears to be justified. Similarly, there are some Enlightenment thinkers in France - she discusses Montesquieu and Rousseau - who do not fit into the French mainstream as Himmelfarb has described it. She challenges some ideas which, until fairly recently, were widely taught and accepted: that Adam Smith's fame rests on his work as an economist (The Wealth of Nations, 1776), whereas it had been established as a moral philosopher (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759) and that, moreover, the latter book had the same moral foundation as the former. I cannot personally agree with this argument. She does make a case for the latter also being based on moral principles (freedom, the fundamental equality of human beings, and self-interest); but I don't think they include the basic notion in the former that morality flows from innate benevolence. Himmelfarb includes Edmund Burke among the figures of the British Enli

The American Concept as an Excpetional Ideal

Leveraging the concept of "American Exceptionalism" coined by de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, Lipset noted that exceptional in this sense is to be interpreted as qualitatively different from all other countries. The concept of American Exceptionalism as expressed by Lipset has broad academic acceptance and credibility. While there are those who might challenge this concept, it is fair to say that Americans continue to see themselves as different or unique from the rest of the world. This is not to say that America is better than the rest of the world, but that America is what it is because of its unique balance of public and private interests governed by constitutional ideals that are focused on personal and economic freedom. It is through the lens of American Exceptionalism that we can best comprehend what Himmelfarb has put forward in The Roads to Modernity. Her comparison of the French, British and American Enlightenments yields some interesting differences providing greater context to the concept of American Exceptionalism. Himmelfarb completes this comparison with alacrity and evenhandedness. She does not end up being an apologist for the neo-conservative movement even though her eye is on present-day politics nor is this book a paean to Libertarians. On some level it is fair to criticize her for lightly brushing aside the Scottish Enlightenment and all but ignoring the Italian Renaissance as well as great Enlightenment thinkers outside of France, Britain and America. However, her point about the uniqueness of the American Enlightenment might have been lost if the comparison went to far a field intellectually. Her main point is that the American Enlightenment's influence is alive and vibrant in American political discourse even today while the influence of the French and British Enlightenments are all but footnotes to the current political discourse of those nations. She opens herself to criticism from the political left because she espouses the centrality of religion to the success and endurance of American civic and political institutions, is unwilling to de-moralize political economy, and recognizes the importance of the individual and the social virtues. Many today forget that religion was viewed as key to the triumph of our democratic experiment by our Founding Fathers. Those who seemingly forget or conveniently brush over this fact only mention the two of the Founding Fathers who were deists (Franklin and Jefferson). I am in full agreement with Himmelfarb that America was exceptional at its founding and remains so even today. Himmelfarb deftly succeeds in defining these qualitative differences. America today is a paradox to Europeans and many on the American left who can not seem to come to terms with the American focus and reliance on individuality, capitalism, and religion.

A Slightly Different View

There are periods in time when the situation in the world, or at least in some countries appear to be right for fundamental changes in thinking to occur. One such period was the Renaissance in Italy that ended the dark ages. Another happened in the 18th century. This period is called the Period of Enlightenment. It began in the early to mid 1700's and ended with the revolutions in America and France at the end of the century. This was the period of time that gave us much of the philosophical underpenning of our time: Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations; John Wesley and Methodism; Jefferson, Adams, John Licke and Edmund Burke. Dr. Himmelfarb writes this book on this period of time to discuss the Enlightenment as it happened in England, France and America. Her view is that while the Enlightenment has been considered as primarily a French happening, the American and particuarily the British contributions were probably more significant. After all, the French revolution was a disaster that led the guillotine, to Napoleon and a war that covered the western world.

Authentic Endeavors

I had mixed feelings about this book. Himmelfarb cannot be discarded as merely an undistinguished poorly reasoned historian (as some critics seem to want to suggest). On the contrary she's a redactionist of importance in the area of historical movements and measures. And this work proves it again. What Himmelfarb tries to do is reclaim the Enlightenment from what she sees as misguided French thinkers. It's difficult not to see her connections between a decline of religion, and the cultural outflowing resulting from aspects of the French Enlightenment. In contrast she presents the British Enlightenment as connected with social affections, based on a more solid moral foundation than that of the French with it's naked "ideology of reason" - a term I wish she would have explained in further detail. With that said, I found her claims regarding the French Enlightenment to be over-simplified. She claims, a preoccupation with reason as the primary fault of the French Enlightenment. However, I don't find this convincing in that the English movement was also very much focused on rationality, logic, and reason. My guess is her reaction here is too strong and too generalized. Furthermore, does she miss the need for societies to be built on the ideal of rigorous intellectualism? On the whole, her work is both sophisticated and easy to get at, and certainly makes credible contributions to this field with her more conservative approach. Any honest evaluator cannot write this book off as a docile and unenthusiastic romanticizing of the events. - rather, it's a worthy read, worthy of evaluation.