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

Rating:
Summary: A Chauvinist Enlightenment
Review: For centuries Anglo-American conservatives have contrasted the happy fate of their country under the empirical, conservative moderation of their best thinkers with the ruinous fate of France under the disastrous theories of the Enlightenment. Over the past few decades scholars have pointed out this is a rather simplistic version of events. Now Gertrude Himmelfarb, leading conservative historian and Distinguished Professor of History at New York University has come up with a volume that is almost exactly the same as the old conservative version. There is just one slight difference. The good Anglo-Americans are the followers of a Good Enlightenment, while France is the follower of a Bad Enlightenment. Actually a majority of the book discusses the Enlightenment in England. The term is appropriate, because although many of her subjects are actually Scots (Smith, Hume and the moral philosophers), Wales is ignored and Ireland only appears in a footnote. We get a chapter on those moral philosphers who saw an innate moral sense in people. We get discussions of Hume and Smith, while Burke gets a whole chapter, as a model of Enlightenment moderation and decency. The more radical group around Paine get a less appreciative chapter, while John Wesley and Methodism get a chapter that also gets them placed in the Enlightenment. Finally, there is a discussion of the glorious age of moderate philanthropy that followed the Enlightenment ideas. There is also a concluding chapter on the wisdom of the American Enlightenment. Notwithstanding the violent war that broke out between the two the two are basically in agreement on everything, with special emphasis placed on their high opinion of religion. By contrast, the French get everything wrong. They are dogmatically opposed to religion, contemptuous of the public, opposed to philanthropy, supportive to Enlightened Despotism while their emphasis on reason over all leads directly to the Terror of the French Revolution. The book concludes with a paean to compassionate conservatism.

This is a middlebrow history. Instead of serious analysis, we get quotations from Tocqueville. We have an admiring chapter on Burke that is as admiring and uncritical as dozens of other conservative tributes. We also have a surfeit of double standards. Himmelfarb mocks Price and Priestly's millenial speculations, while John Wesley's opposition to Copernicus and belief in witchcraft go unmentioned. Voltaire's anti-semitism is condemned, while Hume's racism goes unmentioned. (Himmelfarb also says that the philosophes hated Judaism more than Christianity, but provides nothing to support this.) The Anglo-American Enlightenment is viewed as pro-education largely because of Smith's plans for public education in The Wealth of Nations. They were not implemented in Britian for decades to come, yet she dismisses Condorcet's plans for public education because they were not implemented quickly either. One theme of Himmelfarb is that the Anglo-American Enlightenment was genuinely democratic while the philosophes were snottily elitist. But this is simply playing with words: Himmelfarb obviously knows that Hume was not a democrat, that Burke vociferiously opposed them, and that the intensely hierarchical and fiercely authoritarian Methodists did not care for universal suffrage. And if the French philosophes were so anti-democratic and anti-semitic, why did France become a democracy and French Jews full citizens before England? The discussion of philanthropy is completely uncritical. It is odd that one seeking to defend the Enlightenment Project would discuss prison reform as if Michel Foucault never existed. It is clearly unconscionable to discuss poverty without mentioning K.D.M. Snell and praise the anti-slavery as if David Brion Davis never existed.

Slavery, indeed, is a bit of a blind spot for Himmelfarb. The American dilemna over slavery and the treatment of Indians is treated with a good deal of sympathy by Himmelfarb (more certainly than she gives to the slaves and the Indians). By contrast, there is no sympathy for French revolutionary leaders who face severe financial crisis, an absolutist political culture, a haughty Catholic establishment, a treacherous King and foreign invasion. On slavery Himmelfarb lamely suggests that the writers of the constitution were somehow vaguely anti-slavery. The fact that Jefferson, Madison and others had careers beyond 1787 lasting for four or five decades is not examined. She ignores Jon Butler and Leonard Levy on religion in the American repubic. A whole host of scholarship on slavery and the American Revolution goes unmentioned, as does more critical scholarship on Indian-American relations. Her empahsis that everyone in the Anglo-American Enlightenment thought that religion was useful, blurs the fact that state Anglicanism argued that Christianity was true, that non-Anglicans should be deprived of crucial rights, and that non-Christians were damned. There is also no discussion of modern science, while critics of the whole Enlightenment Project will not be satisfied with her brief, superificial discussion of empire. One would not learn, as one would from Emma Rothschild's recent book on Smith and Condorcet, that far from being mutually appreciative of each other, Burke's Scots admirers denounced Smith's admirers as atheists, subversives and traitors. There are errors on Methodists and the American Revolution (Wesley ordered all his missionaries to leave the ungrateful rebels, and all but one of them complied), as well as the Methodist attitude towards education (Wesley's conservative successors opposed teaching Sunday School students how to write well into the 19th century). And finally, Himmelfarb is unforgiveably catty and snide towards Wolstonecraft and Condorcet. This is especially striking, since if Himmelfarb had to rely on Burke and Wesley to get women's rights she would not be the Distinguished Professor of anything.

Rating:
Summary: Authentic Endeavors
Review: 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.


Rating:
Summary: Misleading
Review: On a narrow basis of acknowledged fact, a great and rude superstructure of fable has been erected. - Edward Gibbon

This is a peculiar and confused book. Individuals considering reading and/or buying this book should look at Stephen Bronner's critical and perceptive review from the Washington Post posted above. Potential readers should look also at Amazon reader-reviewer pnotley's review, also posted on this site. Both Bronner and pnotley deliver a series of excellent criticisms of The Roads to Modernity.
In this book, Himmelfarb presents a typology of the Enlightenment by associating different national groups with different strands of Enlightenment thought. The British exhibit "virtue" (actually sympathy, which is something related but different), the French "reason", and the Americans "liberty." Himmelfarb would have us believe that these different national versions of the Enlightenment have something to do with the subsequent evolution of each nation. This is likely to be true but probably not in the ways she suggests. Himmelfarb has exagerrated the differences between national groups of Enlightenment intellectuals and obscured their common features. In the process, she presents a highly selective and often distorted view of the Enlightenment.

Lets start with "reason", which Himmelfarb identifies with the French, often to their disadvantage. To Himmelfarb, "reason" seems to be an effort to impose highly schematic and theoretical constructs on human realities, thus leading to the excesses of the French Revolution. In fact, "reason' was a preoccupation of all Enlightenment intellectuals. The ideal of reason, at base, was the notion that the unaided human intellect could discover crucial and universal, objective and regular features of the natural and social worlds and apply this knowledge to the advantage of humanity. This is the great lesson that the Enlightenment drew from Newton. David Hume believed, with considerable justice, that he was applying a Newtonian method to his studies of epistemology and moral psychology. James Madison, in the couple of years leading up to the Constitutional Convention, didn't reaffirm traditional institutions or pray for a revelation, he embarked on a systematic study of contemporary political theory (which led him to Hume, among others) and the history of other republics in an effort to develop a stable and novel polity embodying the ideals of the Founders. Its this kind of reliance on human capacity that sets the Enlightenment apart from individuals like Burke and John Wesley whom Himmelfarb would like to drag into the tent of the Enlightenment.

Himmelfarb is particularly unfair towards the French philosophes. She tends to present them as snobby ideologues uninterested in actually doing anything about the lot of most people and contrasts them with the "reformism" of the British Enlightenment. She is particularly disparaging of the great Encyclopedie, which she presents primarily as an ideological document. In fact, the Encyclopedie was intended as a summary of human knowledge up to that time, covering a huge array of fields and embodying the best practices of the arts, manufacturing, and the sciences. It was intended as an educational resource, making widely and publically available knowledge that could be used by anyone to improve many aspects of daily life. This is reformism with a vengeance. Diderot and D'Alembert spent a substantial fraction of their lives on this project. None of the British intellectuals discussed admiringly by Himmelfarb accomplished anything like the Encyclopedie. The example of the Encyclopedie is yet another example of Himmelfarb missing the forest for the trees. The driving idea of the Dncyclopedie, the idea of widely disseminated useful knowledge, was not just a French preoccupation but a common theme of the Enlightenment. Benjamin Franklin, scientist, inventor, and philanthropist, exemplifies an American attachment to the idea of useful knowledge. The great French chemists Lavoisier and Berthellot, who made fundamental contributions to science and helped improve French industry, are also good examples of this Enlightenment tendency. Probably the most consequential, though indirect, product of Hume's circle in Edinburgh was James Watt, inventor of the high pressure steam engine. Watt was a mentee of Hume's close friend (and personal physician), the noted chemist Joseph Black.

Himmelfarb's treatment of Enlightenment attitudes towards religion is odd. She would like to make the British and American Enlightenments hospitable to religion, while making the French Enlightenment hostile towards religion. This requires some peculiar intellectual gymnastics. It requires, for example, the dubious step of somehow transforming John Wesley into an Enlightenment figure. Its true that Wesleyanism did have a number of admirable features, and its true as well that Wesleyanism embodied an attack and/or effort to reform the existing religous and social establishment. These common features don't make Wesleyan evangelism identical to the Enlightenment. This would be like saying Barry Goldwater and the SDS were both members of the same movement because they attacked the prevailing establishment of their day. Now, its true, as Himmelfarb states, that Hume and Gibbon weren't dogmatic atheists. But friendly to religion? Hume's writings on religon are the most searching criticism of religous belief ever published. Gibbon's Decline and Fall contains a devastating critique of Christianity. With friends like these, who needs atheistic enemies. Himmelfarb is also inconsistent. While she attempts to make Hume and Gibbon into individuals well disposed towards religion, she is disparaging in her treatment of radicals like Richard Price and Joseph Priestly, many of whom were sincerely religous and whose views were allied to several of the early leaders of the American Revolution.

This is only one of numerous inconsistencies in Himmelfarb's presentation. She attacks the French intellectuals for preferring to work through social reform by monarchial power, condemning their elitism. She fails to mention, however, that Burke was the client and mouthpiece of prominent Whig Aristocrats. She attacks the French for being "subversive" when the only group of Enlightenment intellectuals to actually work towards the overthrow of a legitimate and established government were the Americans. She, like many others contrasts the "moderation" of the American Revolution with the excesses of the French Revolution. Its true that there was no American equivalent to the Terror (though there was in Britain, only it occurred during the 17th century) but the American Rvolution, like all revolutions, was partially a civil war and the Patriots committed numerous acts of violence against the Tories. It is true also that the magnitude of unjust acts committed during the French Revolution was considerably greater than those committed during the American Revolution. But, France was a much larger country than the British Colonies. RR Palmer pointed out approximately 50 years ago that the proportion of forced emigrants from France and what became the USA was approximately the same.

How did an accomplished historian like Himmelfarb write such a poor book? Part of the answer may be that she is not an 18th century specialist. This can't be whole answer because of the outstanding secondary literature on the Enlightenment. It could also be that she became enthralled with her national typology of the Enlightenment. Simple and apparently powerful ideas often possess a power out of proportion to their true validity. A large part of the answer comes at the end of the book when she starts to draw comparisons between the Enlightenment and contemporary political ideas. It is hard to escape the conclusion that this book was written partially to give contemporary conservatism a respectable historical pedigree. This is not very different from the actions of Marxist historians who cut and chop the past to make events fit into the Marxist model of historical progression. Himmelfarb should know better.

Rating:
Summary: A Slightly Different View
Review: 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.