Unenlightened England

Historians of the Enlightenment are recovering their nerve. Until recently, it seemed that most of them had lost it in the face of the postmodern critique of the "Enlightenment project." The critique itself had little to do with history, being loosely based on the disillusionment of the Frankfurt School and a general retreat from the celebration of supposedly "universal," but really western, male values. But it was enough to disconcert historians, especially in the English-speaking world. Scholarship continued, but with a disinclination to speak of "the Enlightenment." Instead of one Enlight-enment, historians talked of many, and played down their significance in the creation of modernity. The gradual recovery of nerve since the mid-1990s owes a good deal to the return of political optimism on the left, and to the newly-fashionable status of the 18th century.

Roy Porter's Enlightenment reflects this revival of confidence. Written with gusto, it challenges the view that the Enlightenment was a French monopoly, and rebuts Perry Anderson's 30-year-old verdict (in the New Left Review) that 18th-century England knew no "ferment of ideas." England's claims to Enlightenment were at least as good as those of anyone else. Porter's challenge was first expressed 25 years ago in a Cambridge lecture series; it was published as the lead essay in a volume on The Enlightenment in National Context in 1981. Over the next two decades the cause of an English Enlightenment gained distinguished adherents among intellectual historians, notably John Pocock, and it was well placed to exploit the researches of literary and other scholars into the vitality of 18th- century London's teeming "print culture." Above all, it was over the same period that the existence of the Scottish Enlightenment received general scholarly endorsement; if the Scots were enlightened, it surely followed that the English must have been at least equally so. Porter's new volume may thus be seen as the crowning achievement of a quarter of a century's campaigning on behalf of the English Enlightenment.

The book is an attractive product whose marketing has been an Enlightenment act in itself. The Institute of Historical Research has played host to lectures sponsored by Penguin Press; so Porter has been able to distil selected portions of the book for a live audience. Review editors have been galvanised: the TLS secured the services of the most distinguished Enlightenment scholar of the previous generation, Peter Gay-and had him in print the instant the book was published. There is nothing cynical here: Porter is reliving the experience of Enlightenment men (and occasionally women) of letters, and earning his independence by going out into the market to sell his books.



But what do readers get when they actually read this handsome commodity? The short answer is everything, and not very much. They get almost every British thinker with a claim to be enlightened, from Locke to Hazlitt, and every manifestation of Enlightenment which Porter's roving historical eye can detect, from theatre to sex to suicide. London is, as we would expect from a historian of the metropolis, at the centre of his attention: Porter relishes the variety of its culture, the spirit of its literary citizens. But the net is cast wide: acknowledging the notable studies which have been devoted to the Scots, Porter is happy to splice them into the story at frequent intervals. There is no reason to treat the Scots apart-after all, he remarks, the "clear lesson" of the enlightened science of man was that Scotland should Anglicise itself as swiftly as possible.

The approach is broad-brush and Panglossian. A few exceptions (Swift, Blake) apart, all Porter's thinkers are going in the same direction: towards knowledge of a better, happier life in the here and now-what he calls "the enlightened pleasure quest." He has less interest in the origins of ideas, and rarely traces the course of their development with any precision. What Porter really values is the range of the Enlightenment's interests.

But on the book's central thesis the reader is offered surprisingly little. The principal argument is that Britain was the first modern nation; hence it must have enjoyed Enlightenment. Or as Porter puts it in his last chapter: because British thinkers were "prominent, indeed precocious" in the creation of modern mentalities, it would be nonsense not to speak of Enlightenment in Britain. Implicit in this formula is a secondary, reinforcing claim: that because English ideas and achievements were so widely admired elsewhere in Europe, England must not only have been enlightened, but should count also as the first Enlightenment nation. Both of these arguments seem obvious, and several reviewers (headed by Peter Gay) have been persuaded. In each case, however, the sequiturs bear closer examination.

The esteem in which English thinkers and achievements were held across Europe is undeniable. Voltaire praised Newton to the skies; Montesquieu regarded the English constitution as a model of balance and liberty. But what distinguished the Enlightenment as a movement of intellectual enquiry was the original use it made of this inspiration. Newton's achievement in natural philosophy was to be extended to the study of man and society. Existing fields of study, such as history and morals, were to be transformed, and new ones, such as political economy and the progress of society, opened up.

It is certainly true that early reference points for this enquiry were provided by Locke's analysis of human understanding and by Shaftesbury's argument that man was naturally sociable and benevolent. In turn, Shaftesbury was answered by Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees notoriously argued that it was men's "private vices" which produced "public benefits," an argument which Hume then made philosophically respectable. But to recount this debate as if it were a purely British story, as Porter does, is misleading. The arguments of Mandeville and Hume cannot be understood without reference to the late 17th-century French Augustinian moralists. Porter stresses that all of the British participants in the debate rejected the pessimistic doctrine of the fall, to which the Augustinians subscribed. But this did not prevent Mandeville and Hume from appreciating the force of the Augustinians' emphasis on man's sinful passions. Their insight, which was to be crucial to the Enlightenment's understanding of society, was that self-interested, naturally unsociable men and women may nevertheless live in tolerable harmony, either with a little help from the legislator, or simply because the unintended outcome of the conflict of their interests is the betterment of the majority. In his own time and country, however, Mandeville was simply denounced as immoral; it was outside of England, in Scotland and France, Germany and Italy, that his work was to have intellectual repercussions.

If continental thinkers also admired English success in commerce and politics, they did not imagine that all their own countries needed to do was to follow England. As Montesquieu realised, an absolute monarchy such as France could not adopt English commercial practices, English luxury and English liberty without destabilising its social order. Europe's ancien r?gime states needed to catch up, certainly; but they needed to do so in ways which were appropriate to their circumstances. It was the task of philosophers to investigate how societies at different levels of development and with diverse forms of government could be expected to change and progress. Their own countries' need to match England's achievements lent urgency to their enquiries. Precisely because England was ahead, English thinkers lacked that incentive, and did not show the same intellectual ambition.

For most of the 18th century the Scots were in a condition akin to that of the continental Europ-eans. Formally united with England in 1707, they had to wait until the last quarter of the 18th century to gain the economic benefits of union, while old aristocratic patterns of authority within Scotland proved hard to shift. They too, therefore, felt the need to catch up, and Scottish thinkers set themselves to understand how it was done. Hume's response to the challenge of Mandeville had no parallel in England, and led him from moral philosophy to politics, political economy and, finally, to a rewriting of the history of England itself. The effort to conceptualise the progress of society was carried on, with no less ambition, by Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson and John Millar, until the end of the century. Nor were the Scots simply in awe of England's achievement, as Porter's remark about "Anglicisation" would imply. Removed from London's political and literary skirmishes, the Scottish philosophers reflected critically on English history and on contemporary English society and government, doing their best to cure south Britons of the misconception that their constitution and liberty were uniquely ancient.

Paris was more important to the Scots than London. Hume enjoyed the conversation of the Parisian salons far more than that of Samuel Johnson; he was better appreciated by the philosophes than by the curmudgeonly English critic, whose passion for literature left no room for philosophy. Another who found the company of the philosophes more congenial than that of Johnson was Edward Gibbon, who was English, and around whom John Pocock has constructed an argument for the existence of Enlightenment in England. But Gibbon is the exception who proved the rule: expelled from Oxford, his formation was European, and he looked to Edinburgh for the acclaim which, as Hume warned, "the clamour of bigots" would deny him in England.

Few of Gibbon's fellow-countrymen shared his esteem for the Scots. In general, the English were disinclined to accept the lessons which the Scots were so keen to offer. This diffidence is understandable. Porter is right to argue that England was in important respects already "modern"-free of the hierarchies, reverence for privilege, religious intolerance and restrictions on press freedom which were characteristic of ancien r?gimes. For all its value as a provocation, Jonathan Clark's account of 18th-century England as an ancien r?gime society flies in the face of too much evidence. But it was because England was already a modern society that it did not participate in the Enlightenment. Precocious modernity pre-empted Enlightenment.

Did the absence of Enlightenment in England matter much? If it is agreed that 18th-century England had embraced modernity, whether or not it was also enlightened can be seen as a matter of nomenclature. Perhaps Enlightenment simply means something different in England (a relativist position Porter himself sometimes toys with). But the absence of the Enlightenment from England did matter: despite the modernity of many aspects of English society and politics, there is a gap in its intellectual development. What is missing is that concentrated effort to understand how modern, commercial societies have come into being, how they work, and what their prospects may be, which was at the core of Enlightenment enquiry elsewhere. Missing, too, was the emergence of a group of philosophers claiming public recognition on the grounds of the importance of their ideas for the conduct of government, economy and society. Together, their absence meant that systematic social enquiry (excepting political economy) would be at a discount in English intellectual life.

In the final chapter, Porter attempts to elevate the status of his English thinkers to that of an "intelligentsia." Those who wrote for and took supper with the radical London publisher Joseph Johnson, he suggests, have as good a claim to be regarded as a nascent intelligentsia as do the French philosophes of the mid-18th century or the Italian avant-garde in the age of the Carbonari. Applied to the radicals in the 1780s and early 1790s, the term "intelligentsia" may have some force: Bentham, Priestley, Wollstonecraft and Godwin did share common interests and goals with the late Enlightenment on the continent. But if, as it seems, Porter means to apply this 19th-century term to the world of 18th-century English letters at large, he strains plausibility. As the Scots realised, London literary culture did not put a high value on systematic thought.

Soon, it is true, the radicals and their heirs would regroup on the basis of their family and religious (often dissenting) connections, to form what Noel Annan called the "intellectual aristocracy" of Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Within this new grouping, Scots would at last be assimilated through intermarriage and academic mobility: the 19th-century intellectual aristocracy was British. But it was an aristocracy mindful of its specific place in British society, and generally-there were exceptions-shy of engaging in the kind of wide-ranging social-philosophical enquiry initiated by the Enlightenment.

Perry Anderson was wrong to say there was no "ferment of ideas" in 18th-century England; but he was right to suggest that something crucial was missing from its intellectual life, with far-reaching consequences for the status of social enquiry, and of intellectuals, in British public life. What was missing was the Enlightenment.