ENLIGHTENED THOUGHT AND THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS What is the Enlightenment? wrote the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

His response was Dare to know! Have the courage to make use of your own understanding, as exciting a challenge today as in the eighteenth century. During that period of contagious intellectual energy and enthusiastic quest for knowledge, the philosophes, the thinkers and writers of the Enlightenment, espoused intellectual freedom and the use of reason in the search for progress. Unlike most scientists of the eighteenth century, they wanted their ideas to reach the general reading public. Education therefore loomed large in this view of their mission. Their approach to education was not limited to formal schooling, but instead took in the development of the individual and the continued application of critical inquiry throughout ones life. The Enlightenment began in Paris but extended to much of Western Europe; including the German states the Dutch Republic Great Britain and as North America The works of the philosophes reached Russia. Orthodox Christian intellectuals carried the Enlightenments celebration of and humanism into the Balkans. The philosophes writings helped French as the language of high culture in eighteenth-century European, it was reported from Potsdam that at the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia the language least spoken is German. But French was he only language of philosophic discourse: In Italy, those influenced by the new thinking used the ideas of the philosophes to attack clerical and particularly papal influence in political life. In Britain, the philosopher David Hume and economist Adam Smith, father of free-market liberalism, represented the thought of the Scottish Enlightenment. The Enlightenment can be roughly divided into three stages. The first covers the first half of the eighteenth century and most directly reflects the influence of the Scientific Revolution: the second, the high Enlightenment, begins with the publication of The Spirit of Laws 1 748 Charles-Louis de Montesquieu and ends in 1 778 with the death of Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: and the third. The late Enlightenment, influenced by Rousseaus work, marks a shift from an emphasis on human reason to a greater preoccupation with the emotions and passions of mankind. 1 his final stage also features new ideas relating the concept of freedom to the working of economies, best represented by the thought of Adam Smith. At this time, too, several monarchs applied the philosophies principle that rulers should work for the good of their subjects. But these experiments in enlightened absolutism were most noted for rulers organizing their states more effectively, further enhancing their authority. This third period saw popular diffusion of the lesser works of would-be philosophes seeking to capitalize on an expanding literary market. These works, too, were influential in undermining respect for the authority of the monarchy of France and thus indirectly contributed to the French Revolution. The philosophes espoused views of nature, mankind Society government, arid the intrinsic value of freedom that challenged some of the most fundamental tenets Europeans had held for centuries Slavery for example, violated their principle of human freedom The implications of Enlightenment thought were revolutionary, because the philosophes argued that progress had been constrained by social and political institutions that did not reflect humanitys natural goodness and capacity for material and moral improvement. Although many philosophes saw no or little incompatibility between science and religion, they were skeptical of received truths. Thus, they challenged the doctrinal authority of the established churches and launched a crusade for the secularization of political institutions. It is to the Enlightenment that we trace the origins of many of our most strongly held political beliefs: the idea that people should he ruled by law, not rulers: the belief that a separation of powers ought to exist within government in order to prevent the accumulation of too much power in a few hands; the concept of popular sovereignty (legal authority should be wholly or at least partly based in the people, reflecting their interests, if not their consent): and the assumption that it is the responsibility of rulers to look after the welfare of the people. The consequences of such modern views of sovereignty, political rights, and the organization of states would be seen in the French Revolution and the era of liberalism in the nineteenth century.

Intellectual Influences on Enlightened Thought Like all intellectual and cultural movements, the Enlightenment did not emerge spontaneously Creating what David Hume (17111776) called the science of man, the philosophes reflected the influence of the Scientific Revolution, whose proponents had espoused the scientific method in the study of nature and the universe. Sir Isaac Newton, the brilliant English scientist arid theoretician (see Chapters) emphasized that science-reason and experimentation....holds the key to understanding nature, and that mankind discovers knowledge not through religious teaching but through observation, analysis, and experiment. Two thinkers linked the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment thought: John Locke and Georges-Louis Buffon. Locke (I632-l7O4) claimed that philosophy was, as much as astronomy, a discipline subject to the rigors of the scientific method and critical inquiry. The son of a landowner and a member of the British Royal Society, Locke maintained a strong interest in medicine. After returning from Holland, where he had gone into self-imposed exile during the political crisis swirling around the throne of King James 11, Locke remained close to the government of King William and Queen Mary Locke believed that the scientific method could be applied to the study of society. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (169O), Locke postulated that each individual is a tabula rasa, or blank sIate at birth. Believing that all knowledge is sensory, Locke denied inherited abilities and rejected the idea that humanity is stained by original sin. He anticipated that the discovery of more laws of nature would be the basis of secular laws on which society should be based. He was confident- that in humanity might thereby be able to improve social conditions. Locke had asserted the dignity of the individual in contending that every person has the right to life, liberty, and property (though he excluded slaves in the Americas from such innate rights). He argued that monarchies were based on a social contract between rulers and the ruled. People had to relinquish some of their liberty in exchange for security. But, unlike Thomas Hobbes, Locke insisted that mankinds liberty and rights stemmed from the laws of nature. He became a leading proponent of educational reform, freedom of the press, religious toleration and the separation of political powers. Lockes interest in the relationship between nature and the social order led him to consider issues of gender. The assumption that the king ruled his nation as a husband and father ruled his wife and children had been prominent in early modern political theory, only briefly challenged by a handful of radicals during the English Civil War of the 1640s. John Locke argued against the contemporary vision of the state in which all power on earth is either derived from or usurped from the fatherly power. He denied the appropriateness of the analogy between the family and the state as patriarchal institutions. Rejecting the contemporary view that Adam held supremacy over Eve, he viewed marriage, like government, to be organized by social contract. However, Locke went no further than that, and his espousal of equality within marriage remained only an ideal. In everyday life, he believed that women should defer to men. But Lockes analysis of the family as an institution nonetheless helped stimulate intellectual interest in studying the social role of women. More than any of his contemporaries, Georges-Louis Buffon (17071788) linked the Scientific Revolution to the Enlightenment. Buffon, whose initial presentation to the French Royal Academy of Science was a study of probability theory applied to gambling on hopscotch, became the curator of the Royal Gardens. Surrounded by monkeys and badgers in his laboratory, he carried out many experiments, some of which worked, such as his study of the burning effect of the sun through glass, and some of which did not, including his study of the emotional life of birds. Buffons experiments with cooling metals led him to build a large forge near his home in Burgundy. The philosophes acknowledged their debt to the late-seventeenth-century proponents of the scientific method. Voltaire saluted Newton, whose funeral he attended in Londons Westminster Abbey, for having called on scientists and philosophers to examine, weigh, calculate, and measure, but never conjecture. Hume insisted that all knowledge came from reason and experiencethat is, from critical inquiry and scientific discoveryand that the ability to reason distinguished mankind from other animals. Many philosophes, reflecting the influence of the Scientific Revolution, considered religion, the origins of which they found not in reason but in faith and custom, to be a social phenomenon. Like any other to he studied scientifically. Hume blasted away at the idea of religious truths revealed through the

Bible, and Montesquieu asked, Is it possible for those who understand nature and have a reasonable idea of God to believe that matter and created things are only 6.000 years old? The very universality of their principles led some of the philosophes to suggest that a sense of moralityof what is right and wrongmight vary across cultures, because it emerged from the nature of mankind, but not from religious teaching. Denis Diderot, influenced by Locke, argued that sensory stimulationor in the case of people who are blind, deprivationshapes individual moral responses, and that moral principles for a blind man might be somewhat different from those for someone who could see. He described the so-called savages of distant Tahiti as forming a rational social order without the benefit of any ecclesiastical doctrine. Hume called for a science of morals to serve the interests of Christians. The Republic of ideas The philosophes calls for reform were sometimes subtle, sometimes boldly forceful. Yet they did not lead insurrections. Their pens and pencils were their only weapons as they sought to change the way people thought. They communicated their ideas in letters, unpublished manuscripts, books, pamphlets, brochures, and through writing novels, poetry, drama, literary and art criticism, and political philosophy. The philosophes glorified the collegiality and interdependence of writers within the republic of letters, what the men and women of the Enlightenment sometimes called the informal international community of philosophes. By the mid-eighteenth century, Voltaire could claim with some exaggeration that the professional writer stood at the top of the social summit. He, Montesquieu, and Diderot accepted election to the prestigious French Royal Academy, revealing their ambivalence toward the monarchy that they attacked however subtly, in their work. The most famous of the philosophies gained money as well as prestige, although Voltaire and Montesquieu were among the few who could support themselves by writing. The philosophes may have shared the fundamental ideas of the Enlightenment, but significant differences existed among them. They came from different social classes, generations, and nations. And they often disagreed, like people in any republic, arguing in person, by letter, and in their published work. They could not agree, for example, whether the ideal state was an enlightened, benevolent monarchy, a monarchy balanced by a parliamentary body representing the nobility, or a kind of direct democracy. Their views on religion also varied. Montesquieu. Voltaire and Rousseau were deists. Because scientific inquiry seemed to have demonstrated that the persistent intervention of God was unnecessary to keep the world in motion, they viewed God as a clockmaker who set the world in motion according to the laws of nature and then left knowledge and human progress to the discovery and action of mankind. In contrast, Diderot, one of the principal spokesmen of the Enlightenment, became an atheist. For all the variety and richness of the republic of letters, four philosophes dominated Enlightenment discourse with startling ideas about society, religion, and politics: Montesquieu, Voltaire. Diderot and Rousseau, each is well worth considering separately. Diderot Denis Diderots monumental Encyclopedia best reflected the collaborative nature of the Enlightenment, as well as its wide influence. Diderot (17131784), the son of an artisan, was something of a jack-of-all-trades, a man of letters who wrote plays, art criticism, history, theology, and philosophy. Educated by the Jesuits (like Voltaire), he flirted with the idea of becoming a priest, and for a time supported himself by writing sermons for bishops. Unlike Montesquieu and Voltaire, Diderot underwent a rugged apprenticeship in the republic of letters. He penned a pornographic novel to earn enough to indulge the fancies of his mistress. But he also questioned how, through centuries of male domination, women, despite their capacity for reproduction, had come to be considered inferior to men. Diderot claimed that laws ~that limited the rights of women were counter to nature. The Encyclopedia, on which Diderot worked for twenty-five years, stands as the greatest monuments of the Enlightenment. At the heart of the project lay the philosophes insistence that knowledge was rational and that it followed laws of nature. Social and political institutions should be

submitted to standards-of rationality. All things, as Diderot put it, are equally subject to criticism. By elevating mankind to the center of human inquiry, the authors of the Encyclopedia sought to achieve Diderots goal, to change the general way of thinking, as well as to bring glory to France. Voltaire had set a goal for the Enlightenment itself: to educate the literate and intellectually curious of the social elite, and perhaps people further down the social scale as well. The Encyclopedia at least partially fulfilled that goal. Published over a period of more than twenty years beginning in 1751, it consisted of 60.000 articles and 2.885 illustrations in twenty-eight volumes. Subtitled A Classified Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Trades, this first such compilation in the West was a hold attempt to organize and classify all knowledge gathered from over the face of the earth. Its authors insisted that by learning more about the universe, men and women could improve the world. This marked a departure from the assumption that mankinds ability to penetrate the secrets of the universe was limited. Montesquieu contributed sections on taste. Rousseau on music, Voltaire on horticulture, and Buffon on nature Diderot gave particular credit to the contributions of everyday artisans by describing how and why ingeniously simple tools and machines could make tasks easier. The Encyclopedia generated sufficient excitement that advance sales alone financed-its publication. It earned its publishers a handsome profit. After the first edition, subsequent editions with less expensive paper and fewer illustrations became available at about a sixth of the original price. Lawyers, officials, and rentiers (people living -from-property income) were more likely to own a copy than merchants or manufacturers, who could afford the- volumes but seemed less interested in what began as a luxury product ended up on the shelves of the middling sort. The philosophes wanted the Encyclopedia to carry the Enlightenment far beyond the borders of France. Although only about one in ten volumes traveled beyond the country, its pattern of distribution in the I 770s and 1780s reflected the success of the enterprise. To contemporaries, the Encyclopedia seemed to embody Kants bold challenge, Dare to know! Through Swiss, Dutch, and German booksellers, among others, the Encyclopedia reached readers in London, Brussels, Turin, Munich, and St. Petersburg, among other European capitals. The Encyclopedias prospectus and booksellers advertisements assured potential buyers that ownership would proclaim ones standing as a -person of knowledge, a philosophe. In northern Germany and Scandinavia, customers were described as sovereign princes and Swedish seigneurs. A few copies reached distant African settlements, including the Cape of Good Hope. Thomas Jefferson helped promote the Encyclopedia in America, finding several subscribers, among them Benjamin Franklin. King Louis XVI of France himself had a copy purchased for him. There was an Italian edition, despite the opposition of the Church, and a priest was among those taking orders for it. However, in Spain, Inquisition censorship frightened booksellers and buyers alike, and in Portugal only a few copies got by the police. The Encyclopedia did implicitly challenge monarchical authority. Jean-Jacques -Rousseau and Paul-Henri Holbach (17231789) wrote enthusiastically about representative government and even popular sovereignty, though only Rousseau came close to espousing a republic. After initially tolerating the project, French royal censors banned Volume 7 in 1757, after an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Louis XV. Diderot, whose first serious philosophical work had been burned by the public executioner, was briefly imprisoned before being released on a promise of good behavior. Although the philosophes left their skeptical challenge to the Church implicit, disguising the pope in one satire as a figure in Japanese robes, the POPE condemned the volumes 1 759. In the 1 770s, the French state again tolerated the Encyclopedia, which it now treated more as a commodity than as an ideological threat to monarchy or Church. The small skirmishes fought over the volumes had more -to do -with rivalries between publishers, between those privileged with official favor and those without. In this way, Diderots grand project symbolized the ongoing political struggles within the French monarchy itself. The Spread of Enlightened Ideas Salons, academies, and Masonic lodges helped spread Enlightenment thought. Salons, which brought together people of means, noble and bourgeois alike, in private homes for sociability and discussion, were concentrated in Paris, but they were also found in Berlin, London, and Vienna, as well

as in some smaller provincial towns. The English historian Edward Gibbon claimed that in two weeks in Paris he had heard more conversation worth remembering than I had done in two or three winters in London. The salons of Paris were organized and hosted mainly by women, who selected topics for discussion and presided over conversations. Women thus became mediators of changing culture. In Warsaw Princess Sophia Czartoryskas salon played an important role in conveying Western ideas to Polish elites. In London, women hosted similar gatherings, some composed exclusively of women. Sometimes the discussion focused on the place of women in society. The women of the republic of letters accustom us to discuss with charm and clarity the driest and thorniest of subject, commented Denis Diderot with admiration but also condescension. Madame Geoffrin in Paris hosted artists on Monday and men of letters on Wednesday. I well remember seeing all Europe standing three deep around her chair, recalled one of her visitors. Her husband sat silently at the other end of the table while his wife put the philosophes through their paces. One night, a regular guest noted that-the place where the silent man usually sat was empty and asked where he was. He was my husband, came the laconic reply, and hes dead. LEGACY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT The Enlightenment philosophes celebrated reason, while acknowledging the passions, and were suspicious of pure faith. Steeped in respect for science and reason and confident that humanity would discover the truths of nature, they were optimistic about human potential. The philosophes belief in progress, which Kant insisted was a sign of modernity, separated them sharply from the Catholic Church. Yet, they were not as naive, uncritical, or foolish as Voltaires Candide, who thought progress inevitable. The philosophes believed that the combination of thought, study, education, and action would lead the better future. States, they thought, were not ordained by God, but by mankind and; like other phenomena, should be subject to critical scrutiny. The philosophes belief in human dignity Ied them to oppose all forms of despotism. Most spoke out against religious intolerance, torture, and slavery (although an effective campaign against slavery, launched by the English abolitionists of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787, stood independent of the Enlightenment). Furthermore, some Enlightenment thinkers and writers recognized that contemporary assertions about the inequality of women contradicted their understanding of nature. Diderot, Montesquieu, and Voltaire favored divorce, but they opposed equal status for women. Some philosophes had strong reservations about the ability of individuals to develop equally. As for the rabble, Voltaire once said, I dont concern myself with it; they will always remain rabble. Those with power and influence first must be enlightened, they reasoned, so that eventually everyone could develop through education. The philosophes in their commitment to individual freedom influenced the subsequent history of the Wes tern world. Whereas most people in the eighteenth century still considered the monarchy to be the repository of the public good, the philosophes proclaimed that the public had rights of its own and that freedom was a good in itself. Enlightenment thought helped create a discourse of principled opposition to the foundations of absolutism. If the philosophes themselves were not revolutionaries, many of their ideas in the context of eighteenth-century Europe were revolutionary indeed. Source: Merriman, John. A History of Modern Europe: From the Renaissance to the Present. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. 2004.