Common Sense Nation. Robert Curry

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      SORTING OUT THE ENLIGHTENMENTS

      If we set out to get clear about the various Enlightenments, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments ought to provide us with the answers we are looking for—and, in many ways, it does. Where the book is good, it is very good indeed. Unfortunately, although the author accomplishes the task brilliantly in two magnificent chapters, she also creates confusion in a third chapter.

      The two outstanding chapters are the ones on the French and the American Enlightenments. They are models of brevity, clarity, and scholarly command of the subject. The French and the American Enlightenments are brought into sharp focus, and their profound differences are made clear.

      Professor Himmelfarb brilliantly contrasts the French Enlightenment, which she terms “the Ideology of Reason,” and the American Enlightenment, termed by her as “the Politics of Liberty”:

      “The idea of liberty . . . did not elicit anything like the passion or commitment [from the French] that reason did. Nor did it inspire the philosophes to engage in a systematic analysis of the political and social institutions that would promote and protect liberty.”

      The French philosophes and the American Founders were working in very different directions on very different projects. These differences help explain the sharply contrasting outcomes of the American and the French Revolutions.

      Because the study of the Enlightenment has traditionally focused on France, these two chapters provide the interested reader with an opportunity to make a great leap forward not just in understanding the Enlightenments, but also in understanding America. Himmelfarb’s thoughtful analysis makes a powerful case for the significance and the uniqueness of the American Enlightenment.

      Himmelfarb also ably demonstrates that the philosophes’ concept of reason explains their disdain for the common people. Voltaire, for example, never concealed that disdain, habitually referring to the people as “la canaille” (the rabble), and Diderot wrote that “the common people are incredibly stupid.” The philosophes’ statements about mankind are very different from Jefferson’s comparison of a ploughman and a professor quoted above or his ringing declaration that “all men are created equal . . . endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . .”

      What explains this difference? Himmelfarb correctly assigns the difference to the role of two conceptions that were elevated to great prominence during the Enlightenment, the moral sense and common sense. Moral sense and common sense doctrines were central to the American Enlightenment:

      “The moral sense and common sense . . . gave to all people, including the common people, a common humanity and a common fund of moral and social obligations. The French idea of reason was not available to the common people and had no such moral or social component.”

      Much ink has been spilled on the question of why the French and the American Revolutions had such different outcomes. Here you have a key difference, stated with brilliant clarity. The difference between the philosophes and the Founders is this: the primacy of unassisted reason versus the primacy of the moral sense and common sense.

      However, always pairing the moral sense and common sense, as Himmelfarb very correctly does, raises a problem. The moral sense and common sense together practically define Scottish Enlightenment philosophy. This is so well established that the heading for a chapter on the Scottish Enlightenment virtually writes itself: “The Moral Sense and Common Sense.” Yet there is no chapter on the Scottish Enlightenment. Instead, there is a single chapter combining the English and the Scottish Enlightenments under the single label of the British Enlightenment. Combining these two very different Enlightenments obscures an important part of the story.

      The Enlightenment certainly began in England. It began with the publication of Newton’s Principia in 1687, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the publication of the first of Locke’s Letters on Toleration in 1689. But the Scots soon achieved prominence in the Enlightenment project, especially in science and in philosophy.

      In philosophy, Locke’s theory of the mind quickly got the Scots’ attention. As you may remember from school, according to Locke the mind is like a sheet of blank paper. Experience writes on that blank sheet by means of sensations of pain and pleasure.

      It is important for us to understand that Locke was not himself a skeptic; he believed that there are things that people know and he believed that there really is right and wrong. However, David Hume and others showed that Locke’s account of the mind left the door wide open for skeptical challenges. So Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid set out to provide what was missing.

      Francis Hutcheson set himself the task of finding a philosophical foundation for moral judgments. In doing so, he put Scottish Enlightenment philosophy in motion, and at the same time, put moral philosophy at the center of Scottish thought. He argued for the existence of the moral sense, relying on the analogy of our external senses, just as Jefferson, himself relying on Hutcheson, did in the earlier quote:

      “Man was destined for society . . . He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong merely relative to this. This sense is as much a part of his nature as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality.”

      Hutcheson believed that Locke’s account, based as it was only on pleasure and pain, left convention as the only possible foundation of morality.