The Enlightenment in Iberia and Ibero-America

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

The Enlightenment in Iberia and Ibero-America

Series Editors

Professor David George (Swansea University)

Professor Paul Garner (University of Leeds)

Editorial Board

David Frier (University of Leeds)

Lisa Shaw (University of Liverpool)

Gareth Walters (Swansea University)

Rob Stone (University of Birmingham)

David Gies (University of Virginia)

Catherine Davies (University of London)

Richard Cleminson (University of Leeds)

Duncan Wheeler (University of Leeds)

Jo Labanyi (New York University)

Roger Bartra (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)

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Pascale Baker

Teresa Margolles and the Aesthetics of Death

Julia Banwell

Galicia, A Sentimental Nation

Helena Miguelez-Carballeira

The Brazilian Road Movie

Sara Brandellero

The Spanish Civil War

Anindya Raychaudhuri

The Mexican Transition: Politics, Culture and Democracy in the Twenty-first Century

Roger Bartra

Adolfo Bioy Casares: Borges, Fiction and Art

Karl Posso

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

The Enlightenment in Iberia and Ibero-America

BRIAN HAMNETT

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

2017

© Brian Hamnett, 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

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Cover image: Lorenzo Quiros, ‘The entry into the city of Madrid of King Carlos III at Platerias ornamental street’ (1760); collection Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. Prisma Archivo/Alamy.

Contents

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Series Editors’ Foreword

List of Abbreviations

Preface

Introduction

Final Remarks

Notes

Sources and Bibliography

Series Editors’ Foreword

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Over recent decades the traditional ‘languages and literatures’ model in Spanish departments in universities in the United Kingdom has been superseded by a contextual, interdisciplinary and ‘area studies’ approach to the study of the culture, history, society and politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds – categories that extend far beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula, not only in Latin America but also to Spanish-speaking and Lusophone Africa.

In response to these dynamic trends in research priorities and curriculum development, this series is designed to present both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research within the general field of Iberian and Latin American Studies, particularly studies that explore all aspects of Cultural Production (inter alia literature, film, music, dance, sport) in Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, Galician and indigenous languages of Latin America. The series also aims to publish research in the History and Politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, at the level of both the region and the nation-state, as well as on Cultural Studies that explore the shifting terrains of gender, sexual, racial and postcolonial identities in those same regions.

List of Abbreviations

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Preface

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‘Enlightenment’ is not an ideology but a state of mind. The way from pre-enlightenment to a state of enlightenment is through experience: it passes from a condition of not knowing to one of knowledge. The difference is between not understanding what is going on and understanding it. In Wagner’s opera, Parsifal, the ignorant, innocent young man, who has just fired an arrow into a flying swan, witnesses the ceremony of the Knights of the Grail without understanding anything. Gürnemanz, the narrator, has tried to tell him the significance of what he witnessed but to no avail. It takes Parsifal two more Acts of the opera (and several more hours) to understand through experience the meaning of these events. Enlightenment, it appears, cannot be told: knowledge is gained through experience and suffering. Symbols and rituals then unravel their meaning. Enlightenment has been revealed as a process of spiritual purification.

We can see from this that Enlightenment has frequently been associated with religion – with awakening and regeneration – and, it should be said, not exclusively associated with Buddhism. In Christian terms, enlightenment may be the working of divine grace. The attribution of Enlightenment primarily to eighteenth-century philosophers and government ministers has caused the original meaning to be practically (though not entirely) lost. This is especially so, when latter-day protagonists of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment associate the term specifically with anti-religion. Few eighteenth-century philosophers did that. In the Iberian and Ibero-American Enlightenment, most ilustrados sought to bind together inherited religion with the new methods of thinking. They argued for reform in Church and State, in law and education, and in the practice of science and medicine. When ilustrados who were members of the clergy argued for reform of religious practice, they were calling for an intensification of belief and not for its abandonment. When imperial monarchy broke down at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the instruments of reform could no longer be kings and their ministers. When constitutional change became necessary for the survival of political society, attention turned to new forms of government and social organisation. Republicanism and federalism were among the offsprings. Most political figures saw the transformation in Christian terms.

An interviewer asked me what I thought still needed to be investigated concerning eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Iberian and Ibero-American history so that we could understand the Independence period more clearly. I answered that principally it should be the Enlightenment.¹ I said that we needed to distinguish between official expressions or appropriations of ideas and non-official and provincial; that we should see whether Enlightenment in Iberia and Ibero-America, or in the Hispanic and Lusitanian worlds, differed; whether the focus on the sciences, mathematics and medicine contributed to a change in mentalities and practices; and, finally, whether any linkage existed between Enlightenment and Revolution, and between eighteenth-century reformers and early nineteenth-century Liberal constitutionalists.

That affirmation arose from earlier participation in the University of Warwick’s Institute of Advanced Study Colloquium ‘Mexico and the Enlightenment’ held in Venice on 20 March 2008 and presided over by Dr Rebecca Earle and Dr Andrew Laird. The aim of the Colloquium was ‘to explore the intellectual, cultural and political climate of late eighteenth-century Mexico – principally in relation to conceptions of the European Enlightenment’. My topic was ‘The Mexican Enlightenment Between Church and State, 1750−1790’. This was the first time I had spoken in public on the subject of the Enlightenment, which, I confess, had never been uppermost in my mind. Even so, many of the issues had been broached in two courses in my final year as an undergraduate at Cambridge University in 1963−4. These were Betty Behrens’ course on Absolutism and Enlightenment, and, as my special subject, ‘Church and State in France, 1789−1814’, taught by C. W. Crawley. I suppose the deepest roots of this present book lie there. We studied this latter course largely from French printed primary sources and examined the various French historical schools. We delved into the historical conflicts over Church-State relations, de-Christianisation, popular opposition to the Revolution in the Vendée, the response of the Papacy and Catholic Church to revolutionary movements, and the development of Counter-Revolution. It was through John Street’s innovative lectures on Spanish Enlightened Absolutism, which stood out against the general absence of interest in Cambridge at that time in eighteenth-century Iberian and Ibero-American history, that I moved the focus of my interest from France to the Hispanic world. Accordingly, I began doctoral research in the Archive of the Indies in Seville.

The subject of the Enlightenment and early Romanticism once more came into the picture when I was preparing the groundwork for my previous book, which dealt with the European historical novel in the nineteenth century. My examples ranged from Scotland, France, Italy and the German territories to Spain and the Russian Empire.² The desire to push further into the problem of how the Enlightenment affected the Iberian world sprang from that experience. This became a principal motivation for the present book.

I remain indebted, as always, to the staff of the University of Cambridge Library, the British Library and the University of Essex Library and, equally, for this project, to those of the Biblioteca Nacional, the Archivo Histórico Nacional and the Archivo de Palacio in Madrid, the University of Valencia Library, the Archivo de Indias in Seville, and to those of the National Libraries in Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro and libraries of Recife. I am grateful to Professor Paul Garner for first pointing me in the direction of the University of Wales Press and supporting this project, for the helpful (anonymous) peer readership, and for the support of Sarah Lewis, the Commissioning Editor.

Notes

1 Manuel Chust (ed.), Las Independencias iberamericanas en su laberinto. Controversias, cuestiones, interpretaciones (Valencia, 2010), pp. 201–2.

2 Brian Hamnett, The Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Representations of Reality in History and Fiction (Oxford, 2011; pbk 2015).

Introduction

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This book responds to those who say that they had no idea there was any Enlightenment in Spain and Portugal and their American territories, and it aims to set discussion of it into the historical mainstream. Although Arthur Whitaker’s pioneering examination, published in 1942, still has value, few, beyond a handful of Latin-Americanists, are aware of it. Hispanists will be aware of Jean Sarrailh’s momentous work on the impact of the Enlightenment in Spain, which appeared in Paris in 1954, although it has not enjoyed wide dissemination in the English-speaking world. More familiar, perhaps, will be Richard Herr’s study of 1958, The Eighteenth Century Revolution in Spain, despite the ambiguous title.¹ A few further works appeared on Latin America, but interest in the subject of the Enlightenment appeared to evaporate.² The years from c.1954–c.1975 produced substantial studies and varying interpretations of the European Enlightenment; after that, there seemed to be a slackening of interest. In part, this may have resulted from a mistaken belief that everything had been said on the subject. The explanation lay perhaps in greater emphasis on social and economic history and, subsequently, on the almost unobserved shift away from Enlightenment to such sociological phenomena as the expansion of the ‘public sphere’, as developed from the theories of Jürgen Habermas.³ By the mid-1990s, the pendulum had begun to swing once more in the direction of an examination of Enlightenment as a distinct historical phenomenon. At that time, the issue arose of whether we could speak of one, single phenomenon described as the Enlightenment or many disparate enlightenments, accordingly to locality and time-span.⁴ The Iberian world once again became the focus of some attention.⁵ From the 1990s, the Post-Modernist, Post-Structuralist and Post-colonial assaults on the historical ideas of the Enlightenment followed this. Their attack focused on the universalism attributed to the Enlightenment, viewing it as a deleterious teleological and authorial superimposition upon particular pasts, which were intrinsically unknowable, at least in accordance with the general categories and rational suppositions put forward by enlightened thinkers. Most historians, especially those operating in the British empirical traditional, continued their researches and teaching regardless of these arguments over what they considered to be theory.⁶

The Iberian Enlightenment cannot be understood just in Iberian terms. It represented specific aspects of a generalised European shift in thinking, which recognised the necessity of implementing reforms in government practice, education and political economy, absorbing scientific knowledge and extending geographical knowledge. Spain and Portugal – and their overseas territories – certainly participated in the process, which extended from the Americas into the Russian Empire and beyond. There is much basis for comparison and contrast in future studies. This shift in thinking also raised questions of Church-State relations, the balance between ecclesiastical claims and civil jurisdiction, the nature and purpose of Church properties and revenues, the social utility of the contemplative life and the clerical role in education. In Catholic countries, the relationship of the Holy See – the papacy and the Roman Curia, the clerical bureaucracy that administered the Church – and the dynastic monarchies became an on-going central issue. Tension over this subject accompanied the parallel issue of how the Church should be reformed, a matter which focused on popular practices and inherited traditions. In many respects, clerics became as divided as laymen over these questions, and vituperative factions formed among them.⁷

The issue of reform in state, Church and society raised the far-reaching problem of its compatibility with the institutions of the ancien régime. The protagonists of reform in or around the ministries of absolute monarchs, whose claims to exercise authority were rooted in divine right, rarely sought consensus or, still less, public support, for the measures they took. Although dynastic monarchy formed an essential part of this structure, the needs of the state, within a context of intense competition for wealth and power among the European Powers, frequently pressed against the inherited privileges of a society juridically constituted on the basis of estates and corporations – the ständestaat. In this sense, the plenitude of power claimed by monarchs and the ministers acting on their behalf sometimes ran counter to the corporate rights of noblemen, clerics, cities and towns, subsumed kingdoms, provinces and localities, which they possessed by virtue of their status, not as individuals. Responses to this problem became a source of division among reformers. We can see the emergence of ideas of aristocratic constitutionalism as a response to absolute monarchy, and of the more radical ideas of representative government in the forms of liberal constitutionalism, democracy and republicanism. The unresolved relationship of reform and revolution exposed a major tension at the heart of the Enlightenment. This is why the concept of ‘crisis of the old régime’ is barely below the surface in contemporary studies of the Enlightenment.

Most reformers, however, saw in reform the means of preserving, rather than undermining the political status quo. The risks of moving too fast or going too far were obvious in societies that remained predominantly rural, subject to periodic subsistence crises, and with overcrowded and unsanitary cities. Even so, considerable advances were made in the Iberian world in medicine, the sciences and Natural Science. Although these were not necessarily put to any other political use than reaffirming and reasserting imperial unity, the new ways of viewing the world did provide fertile ground for new perspectives on the organisation of state and society.⁸

In this study, we are not dealing with just ideas but the fate of ministers. We are not dealing with an abstract flow of ideas, a kind of philosophical parallel to the political economists’ market forces, but with individuals, networks and linkages, groups or factions, advocating or opposing reforms perceived to be necessary within the state. Perceptions grow within the minds of men and women. They are shaped and reshaped, absorbed or rejected, diluted or exaggerated, moderated or radicalised, comprehended or misunderstood, depending upon contexts and circumstances. Many men and women fail to see the point or do not see the necessity of implementing changes. In short, there is as much prosopography as there is philosophy in any examination of the Enlightenment.

Periodisation, Context, Impact

From at least the time of Paul Hazard’s study of intellectual transformation, the periodisation and impact of Enlightenment have continued to be a matter of dispute among historians. Jonathan Israel, for instance, draws attention to ‘the crucially formative half-century, 1670–1720’, and views the decades before 1750 as ‘arguably the most decisively formative period of the Enlightenment’.⁹ Intricately linked to this question are the intellectual origins of the Enlightenment. It is essential to regard these roots or antecedents as significant in themselves rather than as subordinate factors explaining an Enlightenment specifically identified for the historical spotlight. The problem with prioritising the antecedents, however, is that the result could be to submerge the Enlightenment within a continuous process beginning with the Renaissance, passing through the scientific revolution, and merging into the intellectual perceptions of the nineteenth century. The opposite of this would be to elevate the Enlightenment into a moral category, against which its critics or opponents are either ignored or denigrated. Norman Hampson’s synthesis attempts a compromise position, even at the cost of regarding the preceding period as yet another age of ‘transition’:

it is, I think, helpful to regard the seventeenth century as an age which saw a transition from one intellectual climate to another. In order to understand whatever is implied by the Enlightenment, one must consequently first appreciate the assumptions, attitude and values against which it reacted.¹⁰

This is to set the Enlightenment within two distinct contexts – not only as a development from antecedents but also as a reaction to the conditions and perceptions prevailing at the time when Enlightenment might be identified as a distinct historical phenomenon. Before we hasten to dismiss enlightened thinkers and reformers as ineffective or frustrated in their endeavours, we need first to bear in mind the intensity, and even violence, of the reaction against them. In Spain, for example, opposition developed at least as early as the 1770s, intensified during the 1790s as part of widespread traditionalist hostility to the French Revolution of 1789 and after, and came to a brutal climax after 1814 at the time of the continental-European Restoration. For this reason, I have made the ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ the subject of the last chapter of this book.¹¹

There is consensus regarding the antecedents: Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543), Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), René Descartes (1596–1650), Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), William Harvey (1578–1657), Isaac Newton (1642–1727), John Locke (1632–1704) and Pierre Bayle (1647–1706). Even so, not every thinker identifying with the Enlightenment had a similar attitude to these predecessors or to one another. Although reaffirmed during the Renaissance and Reformation, Classical and Scriptural authority became the subject of growing criticism during the course of the seventeenth century and opened the way for a widespread undermining during the Enlightenment. The most decisive factor in the diffusion of criticism towards the rival forms of the Christian religion, however, was the impact of the Wars of Religion during the century from the 1540s to the 1640s – and particularly the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), which had a devastating impact across Central Europe. These conflicts exposed the violence and murderous civil strife that religious belief – and its exploitation – was capable of generating. A recent historical work has attributed the destruction of Christendom to this historical period.¹²

Even so, most thinkers still framed their findings within a Judaeo-Christian synthesis. Most Anglophone writers on the subject of the Enlightenment make a point of focusing on anti-theological elements in it and particularly on criticism of the Christian view of the universe. These, in fact, are readily identifiable among the French philosophes, who derived their position on this mainly from Bayle, and in David Hume (1711–76), but they are not all the picture, as we shall see in the case of the Iberian and Ibero-American proponents of the Enlightenment.¹³

It is by and large correct to argue that the Enlightenment had roots in the philosophical and scientific revolutions of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In an underrated work, Herbert Butterfield argued that the real revolution of the ‘Early-Modern’ period was the scientific revolution from Galileo to Newton, rather than either the Renaissance or the Reformation, both of which looked back to idealised pasts.¹⁴ Yet, the Enlightenment was also the product of the special conditions of the eighteenth century. It took its different shapes from the issues and events of that century as they developed. Although its origins have been traced back to the 1680s and 1690s, the greatest impact lay in the period from the 1740s and into the 1780s. An essential characteristic, running right through the Enlightenment and linking it to the nineteenth century, was the advances in applied science – medicine, pharmacy, chemistry – and the development of mathematics. These were accompanied by further rationalisation of geography, attention to critical history and the beginnings of anthropology and sociology.¹⁵

Dispute surrounds the issues of whether the Enlightenment could be portrayed essentially as a unity or whether internal divisions and mutual antagonisms were its characteristic feature. Israel dissents from Gay’s earlier view of the Enlightenment as essentially a unified body of thought:

from its first inception, the Enlightenment in the western Atlantic world was always a mutually antagonistic duality and why the ceaseless internal strife within it – between moderate mainstream and Radical Enlightenment – is much the most fundamental and important thing about it … conceptually, there were always two – and could never have been ‘only one Enlightenment’ – because of the basic and ubiquitous disagreement about whether reason alone reigns supreme in human life or whether philosophy’s scope must be limited and reason reconciled with faith and tradition.¹⁶

He sees Locke, Hume and the later Voltaire, along with Newton, Montesquieu, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke as leading exponents of a moderate and conservative Enlightenment, with which its English proponents were primarily associated. This strain, which was anti-democratic, he argues, became predominant in Europe from the 1740s. Instead, Israel’s position is that interpretation should move away from the Anglophone bias towards a more continental perspective – and, one might add, towards a more Latin-American perspective as well. Israel regards the background to a more democratic and egalitarian Enlightenment as lying in the continental context, especially after 1720 and mainly in France but also with important German, Dutch and Italian dimensions. This strain contested the moderate hegemony and ultimately won the intellectual battle. Israel’s objective is thence to determine how ideas influenced society and the historical process.¹⁷

Israel’s comprehensive and critical three-volume study is undoubtedly the most challenging interpretation of the Enlightenment of those recently developed. A ‘Radical Enlightenment’, founded in Spinoza and Bayle in the later seventeenth century, was expressed primarily by Diderot, d’Holbach, Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, Condorcet and Constantin-François Volney. A ‘Democratic Enlightenment’ burst into the open in the 1770s, 1780s and 1790s and called for individual liberties, racial and sexual equality, and freedom of expression. Strongly and cogently argued, Israel’s thesis takes us deeper and further into the ambiguities and complexities of this subject than we have been before. It rightly tackles perhaps the most outstanding problem in the historical interpretation of the Enlightenment, and one inadequately dealt with. This consists of its relationship to the revolutionary movements in Europe, North or South America over the period from the mid-1770s to the mid1820s. Israel’s division between the ‘moderate’ and the ‘radical’ Enlightenment is very helpful in this respect. He argues that the former upheld the existing status quo with regard to monarchy, nobility and the juridical structure of society into ‘orders’ or ‘estates’, along with revealed religion. The ‘radicals’, by contrast, provided a full-blown critique of the social and juridical systems, seeking the overthrow of the nobiliar and ecclesiastical superstructure, advocating republicanism, and opening the way to democratic forms of representative government. The two most important arguments that Israel puts forward in this respect are, first, to warn of the growing anti-Enlightenment, on the one hand, and, on the other, to argue that the ‘moderate’ Enlightenment had run out of steam by the 1780s, leaving the initiative to the ‘radicals’. We can conclude from this view that a full confrontation between radicals and anti-Enlightenment would follow from this, the ‘moderates’ squeezed in the middle. A particular nuance in the Israel thesis is to make a distinction between the disciples of the later Rousseau, such as Robespierre and the Jacobins of the Reign of Terror of 1793 and 1794 and, those, such as Condorcet and Paine, who did not reject reason and democratic republicanism.¹⁸

I am not proposing here to take Israel’s thesis as a model. His ideas need to be fully digested in relation to Iberian and Ibero-American historical conditions before we can do that. However, his view is hugely suggestive, and we can examine in preliminary fashion whether it might have some application for our interpretation of the Enlightenment in Spain and Spanish America, both of which gain mention in Israel’s general argument. Where, for instance, would we put the ‘moderates’ and where the ‘radicals’? In terms of the Court ilustrados, we can consider Campomanes, Floridablanca and Jovellanos among the ‘moderates’, making the distinction between absolutists such as the first two, and corporative constitutionalists like Jovellanos. Saavedra would also fall into the category, veering more towards Jovellanos than to Campomanes or Floridablanca. We might put Pablo de Olavide in the radical camp, perhaps, thereby helping to account for the ease with which other ilustrados were prepared to sacrifice him to the Inquisition. The Cádiz Liberals of 1810–14, however, only correspond to Israel’s description of the ‘radicals’ in certain aspects: they aimed to replace the juridical structure of estates and corporations with a liberal system of equality before the law and representation according to population. On the other hand, they were monarchists and they also retained the Catholic establishment, dispensing only with the Holy Office of the Inquisition – and as late as 1813. They were not democrats. As a result, we cannot identify Spanish Liberalism unequivocally with radicalism. Its descent is partly from the moderate Enlightenment and in part from radical rejection of corporatism. In effect, Cádiz Liberalism represents a stop-gap or barrier to fully-blown radicalism. In the early 1820s, it will divide into its own separate brands of moderate and radical Liberalism.¹⁹

The key factor distinguishing the Enlightenment must surely be the transference of scientific and philosophical ideas into the social and political spheres. The focus moved from natural phenomena to the position of man in the universe. While this did not necessarily lead to the abandonment of the centrality of God, as perceived in the Judaeo-Christian traditions, it did lead to the examination of the capacity and prospects of man in the universe and in this life. A common position held across the Enlightenment was an understanding that existing institutions and practices should be subjected to scrutiny, with the object of altering them in order to improve material conditions. Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Lois (1744) sought more than the basis for human laws in specific societies; he sought also to improve existing societies. The French political system, in his view, necessitated a counterbalance to royal power through the return of the nobility, as the prime estate of the realm, to the centre of political life. Similarly, the Enyclopédie, compiled by Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert and appearing between 1751 and 1772, aspired to change contemporaries’ ways of thinking. The Milanese jurist, Cesare Beccaria (1738–94), sought to unravel the contradictions of the existing judicial system by altering the basis of punishment, rendering it effective as a deterrent and viewing it as a means of moral improvement.²⁰

In that sense, tradition became subordinate to reason. This explains the centrality of education in enlightened thinking. Education, removed from clerical control, was seen to be the instrument of moral improvement and social amelioration. Much depended upon the use of political power to that effect. The linkages across the different European states between protagonists of Enlightenment and the wielders of power become clear.

The Enlightenment was not one homogeneous movement: it had many aspects and fulfilled different functions in different places, depending upon context and cultural inheritance. This diversity understandably complicates its interpretation. Even so, it would be incorrect to speak of it as representing simply a series of unconnected particularities. Certain common threads wove these together. Not the least of them was the personal contacts between individuals through their writings or membership of societies, or through meeting one another. This, understandably, stretched across province, state and even continent. Not all the threads, however, were identical. Much depended on political needs, economic conditions and cultural perceptions.²¹

Debate still ranges over the question of how far down the social scale enlightened ideas penetrated: were they confined primarily to noblemen, individual clerics and men of the professions; whether they represented a state-sponsored initiative in response to overriding problems; or whether enlightened circles existed beyond official supervision and independently of government policy? Discussion over the issue of whether the Enlightenment put forward radical ideas, anticipating a democratic or republican stance, or whether it amounted to little more than a mild reformism designed to reinforce the status quo rather than remove it, continues. A major question running through the interpretation of the Enlightenment still continues to be whether the new ideas and the projected reforms accompanying them had a social foundation. What social groups or social forces, for instance, pressed for them and sought to back them? Derek Beales argues for the existence of such a base:

in many parts of Europe, a growing ‘social force’ favouring Enlightened policies was visible, a movement towards rationality, secularisation, humanitarianism and sentimentality – a movement supported by, but wider than, such institutions as reading societies, Freemasons’ lodges. Among its sympathisers were Enlightened clergy, aristocrats and bourgeois, but it was opposed by many, probably most, members of the same classes.²²

Historical understanding of Enlightenment almost invariably links it to some form of rejection of the unquestioned dominance of received ideas. Immanuel Kant’s essay on the question of what the Enlightenment was, submitted in 1784, fixed on the term, ‘tutelage’. In a situation of tutelage, humanity was constrained from using reason. Kant saw ‘freedom’, another term used, as the prerequisite for ‘making public use of one’s reason at every point’. Such a view inevitably pointed towards ecclesiastical authority, whether through a Catholic priesthood or through Protestant reference to Scripture. Since most political systems in Europe and Ibero-America consisted of mutual reinforcement of State and Church, Kant’s conception of reason opened the possibility of criticism of the nature and expression of monarchical power in existing states. The potential dangers were obvious. He went on to suggest that respect for or obedience to such constituted authorities induced a ‘self-imposed tutelage’, a form of auto-repression necessary for survival in absolute monarchies reinforced by censorship and imprisonment. Kant hinted, though without developing the idea in his essay, that state practices such as those amounted to a ‘crime against human nature’ and a violation of the ‘rights of mankind’. He did not regard his present age as one of Enlightenment in view of the many obstacles still to be overcome, but he did think it was on the right road. Humanity’s escape to freedom remained a long way off. Only through ‘the propensity and vocation to free thinking’ could a people ‘then become capable of managing freedom’.²³

One of the most succinct commentators on the issues arising from Enlightenment was Ernst Cassirer, whose appraisal of the subject first appeared in Tübingen in 1932, just before the German Republic sank beneath renewed tyranny and unparalleled violence. Cassirer put the focus first on a changed understanding of ‘reason’ from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. In his view, the former century had perceived reason to be the place where the divine mind implanted knowledge of the basic truths held in common by God and men. The connection between the human faculty of reason and the divine plan for the universe remained, accordingly, intact. In the eighteenth century, however, the perception of reason altered. Reason ceased to be viewed as recipient and became, instead, an actor in its own right:

Reason is now looked upon rather as an acquisition than as a heritage. It is not the treasury of the mind in which the truth like a minted coin lies stored; it is rather the original intellectual force which guides the discovery and determination of truth.

Reason is seen as energy, though ‘fully comprehended only in its agency and effects’. This is the faculty that analyses, questions, searches for evidence and constructs.²⁴

Such a perception of reason points to a broad range of issues that could be subjected to analysis and criticism, not just the observation of the natural world but also the institutions and practices governing human society and regulating behaviour. The political dimension would soon come to the forefront of observation, as we shall see. Criticism of institutions and traditions looked towards improvement of social conditions, and, when accompanied by the spread of education through society, could ensure real human progress in the terrestrial sphere. The Enlightenment’s idea of progress should be understood in that way. Education, it was understood, would have to be emancipated from clerical control and be focused upon the practical sciences as well as traditional subjects such as law, theology or philosophy.

Emphasis on rationality and scientific approaches has led several commentators to conclude that the Enlightenment represented the beginning of ‘modernity’, although it should be noted that they are usually referring to Western Europe:

The Enlightenment – the era when modernity begins – gets its name, as Kant explained later in the eighteenth century, from the enterprise of spreading light into the dark corners of the human mind. From the 1690s onwards, science led the way. The philosophes grabbed learning out of the hands of the clergy and argued that all knowledge whether about morality or politics or history, could be scientific … If the Biblical account of history could be disproved, then history became an human and secular domain, an infinitude of time with no one in charge.²⁵

There is an element of wishful thinking in such as view, projecting attitudes prevailing at the time of writing into the different context of the eighteenth century. The notion of ‘modernity’, furthermore, is misleading, especially when it subsumes other ideas, rejection of revealed religion, for instance, as one of its necessary features. Rationality did not lead inevitably to free-thinking, and most proponents of Enlightenment remained Christian believers in one form or another. Very few indeed admitted to atheism, despite charges made against the Enlightenment as a whole by extreme proponents of traditionalism. The ideas of the Italian Enlightenment, for instance, were not unfavourably received during the pontificate of the Bologna-born, Pope Benedict XIV (1740–55), who founded Chairs of Mathematics, Chemistry and Surgery at the city’s university, which lay in the Papal States.²⁶ Unbelievers, such as Hume, formed a minority.

John Robertson’s more nuanced view of the Enlightenment, distinguishes between phases:

What characterised the Enlightenment from the 1740s onwards was a new focus on betterment in this world, without regard for the existence or non- existence of the next … Intellectual effort was now concentrated on understanding the means of progress in human society, not on demolishing belief in a divine counterpart.²⁷

The Enlightenment was not exclusively founded on reason and was not necessarily, or always, in conflict with revealed religion. Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) whose work formed part of the Neapolitan Enlightenment, set the Christian religion at the centre of his Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations, first published in 1725. This work was then revised in second edition in 1730 and again in third edition in 1744.²⁸

There is a case to argue for a Catholic or a Protestant Enlightenment, essential Christian doctrines reinforcing the humanitarian aspects of the new attitudes, as they did in the case of such an antislavery activist as William Wilberforce. In most European and American societies, religious orthodoxy and practice subsisted alongside the new ideas, often criticising and opposing them. This was true of Spain, Portugal, the Italian states and the Austrian Habsburg dominions, where Catholicism remained the prevailing religious form. An essential aspect of the Catholic Enlightenment involved reform within the Church, between the dynastic Churches and the Holy See, and between Church and State. Some of its protagonists argued for the need to bring the Church closer to the lives of ordinary people through a simplification of ritual and liturgy and by using Scriptures in the vernacular instead of Latin. Such reformers also strove to rein in what they considered to be exaggerated religiosity. Most of them sought to magnify the role of the diocesan bishops, lessen dependence on the Roman Curia and reduce the role of the religious orders. They were ready to cooperate with government ministers in order to achieve such objectives. Each objective however, was riddled with contradiction and open to contestation.²⁹ Protestant Scotland, where the Enlightenment would occupy a leading intellectual position from around 1750, was also a country where religious belief prevailed. In the age of Adam Smith (1723–90) and Hume, Presbyterianism and the Biblical tradition continued to be rooted in culture and in the Scottish mentality. Accordingly, the Scottish Enlightenment played down the extremes of rationalism found elsewhere in the Enlightenment by drawing attention to the emotions and passions.³⁰

While no overarching philosophy linked the different aspects of the Enlightenment, it did have a distinct historical identity and time span. Robertson, for example, sees it primarily as a movement of ideas, given coherence by the commitment to understanding and advancing human betterment in the world. With this goal in view, enlightened thinkers and their protagonists developed a moral philosophy founded more upon human behaviour, interpreted through time, than on divine authority interpreted from Scripture. The cases of Naples and Scotland, studied by Robertson, suggest that the focus on improvement led towards the direction of political economy.³¹ Todorov identifies three essential characteristics of the Enlightenment: ‘autonomy; the human end purpose of our acts; and universality’. The first of these develops Kant’s original insistence on individuals deciding for themselves rather than automatically accepting the rectitude of external authority, particularly religious. In this line of thinking, Todorov links autonomy to emancipation: ‘religion was the greatest target of Enlightenment criticism, the aim of which was to allow human beings to control their own destiny’. He provides the caution that Kant was directing his criticism at inherited tradition. Accordingly, his objective was not religious experience, transcendence or moral doctrines, regarded as separate matters from instinctive acquiescence. This is to say that criticism focused on structures and behavioural patterns rather than beliefs. Religious enforcement, Kant had argued, should not be the function of the state.³²

The Enlightenment generally envisaged the state in a beneficent role as principal agent of reform, even if it meant dismantling several state powers. In the writings of François Quesnay and the French Physiocrats, and in Adam Smith (1723–90), The Wealth of Nations (1776), this entailed the removal of state monopolies and modification of mercantilist policies. The peak of Physiocratic influence fell in the 1760s. The term derived from the idea of the rule of nature, thereby arguing that economics should follow the laws of nature and not be interfered with by politics. Governments should not attempt to regulate free trading by imposing regulations. The Physiocrats stressed the importance of the contribution of agriculture to the general economy.³³

Smith, who had been in France in 1766, agreed with the Physiocrats on the liberation of commerce, but not on the centrality of agriculture. He investigated the causes of economic growth and, in Book Four, argued for the freeing of commerce, regarding trade as the principal stimulus to the creation of wealth. For that reason his work investigated the workings of the market. This struck a major cord in the last decades of the eighteenth century, in view of the Great-Power rivalry between Britain, France and Spain in Europe, the Atlantic and the Americas. Political economy rose to the fore particularly in states struggling to reform backward economic systems and