Why We Should Defend the Enlightenment

Why We Should Defend the Enlightenment

By Scott L. Montgomery and Daniel Chirot

Published in History Today Volume 66 Issue 1 January 2016  

 

Enlightenment ideas have always faced resistance, but they continue to be relevant and are vital to our understanding of the modern world.

Delacroix's 'Liberty Leading the People'

Defining the Enlightenment, in time, space and substance, has proven challenging. Yet agreement does exist about certain ideas that originated or matured during this period, about political and economic freedom, social equality and the value of science, as was Outlined by Avi Lifschitz in the September 2013 issue of History Today. Such ideas have shaped history in many ways, as potent forces, making the Enlightenment not merely ‘a work in progress’ but a source for the modern world. 

 

Adam Smith laid out the foundations for modern economics and in so doing stressed the need to expand a freedom mostly lacking in his time. He demonstrated how individuals able to choose freely could create greater prosperity than under the rule of selfish, elite interests. Smith argued that industry, not agriculture, brought real wealth and that governments should provide education for their people, restrain the greed of the rich and build infrastructure to advance economic activity. Prosperity would wither if individuals were shackled to an autocratic system, ruled by a single church or encrusted traditions. 

 

That Smith sided with those who built the first modern democracy is no surprise. In turn, America’s founders had to invent a lot that was new and they used Enlightenment philosophy as a guide. Two exceptional thinkers, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, were responsible for visions of America that helped establish principles of democratic government, which have remained in conflict ever since. Jefferson favoured distrust of power, a weak central government, small military and ‘entangling alliances with none’. Hamilton embraced state power as a means to protect liberty and foster a modern, industrial nation, because ‘liberty without prosperity is merely a word’. 

 

In the immediate aftermath of the Enlightenment, Charles Darwin’s scientific ideas began to alter, indeed to form, modern concepts of life and its history, concepts that then expanded into nearly every conceivable domain of intellectual activity. Through his theory of evolution, which gave a deep, secular history to all life, Darwin redefined the organic universe and the place of human beings in it, while radically weakening the explanatory authority of religion, in doing so setting up a conflict that is now more ferocious than ever.

 

Enlightenment ideas faced resistance from the beginning. For a time, this was primarily religious and it remains the case among conservative Christians and Muslims, particularly over Darwinian evolution. Rejection of democracy originally came from hereditary aristocracies and monarchies, but later reaction took the form of extreme, populist nationalism that denied individual rights, free thought and markets in favour of charismatic autocracy (fascism). We must acknowledge that this type of reaction, too, has continued to the present, as is apparent in Putin’s Russia, modern China and a number of authoritarian regimes in Central Asia, Africa and elsewhere. Attacks upon liberalism as a system that produces only feeble, alienated societies are not hard to find in today’s world. 

 

But the Enlightenment was itself the source of fervid reaction. Partly this came from western hypocrisy, such as slavery in America, colonialism and its denial of rights to large parts of the globe or the extermination of indigenous societies by Europeans. The misuse of Darwin’s ideas to promote eugenics, appropriated by the Nazis to horrific effect, was another egregious example. We must recognise, therefore, the historical complexity and dark quarters of the Enlightenment’s legacy, even as we acknowledge its incalculable importance. 

 

Fortunately, the more positive side of this legacy has proven strong enough to survive and expand in a global sense. Yet it is also true that this side remains under attack at present from an array of forces, including radical jihadist movements, and the fearful rejection of migrants and an open society in many western nations. 

 

The Enlightenment must be viewed as far more than an academic subject. There are powerful reasons to teach and study its development and ideas, for they are necessary to any understanding of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. What matters most to the history of the Enlightenment today is not its definition but its survival.

 

Scott L. Montgomery and Daniel Chirot, of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, are the authors of The Shape of the New (Princeton UP, 2015).