The Roads to Modernity: The British French and American Enlightenment
by Gertrude Himmelfarb
New York, Knopf 2004,
304pp, $25
ISBN 1400042364

‘This is a book about the intellectual and religious history of the moral sentiments that informed the British, French, and American Enlightenments of the 18th century. It concludes with a discussion of how these sentiments shaped the ‘politics of liberty’ enshrined in the United States Constitution. ‘Moral sentiments’ in Ms Himmelfarb’s hands is a term more or less interchangeable with what Alexis de Tocqueville spoke of as the moeurs, or ‘habits of the mind and heart’, that make up ‘the whole moral and intellectual state of a people’. In that broad sense, she is concerned with the moral outlook underlying the tendencies and priorities of national conduct, both socially and politically, during the Enlightenment. For Britain, she emphasises the growth of an age of ‘benevolence’ and contrasts it with France’s age of ‘reason’. In comparing the working out of the enlightenment in Britain and America she says:

In Britain, the social virtues were in the forefront of philosophical speculation and social policy, the primary conditions of the public good. In America, they were in the background, the necessary but not sufficient condition. What was in the forefront was liberty (p.191).
The interactions between moral and political philosophising, political and religious movements, and the nature of the social virtues, become the leitmotif of Himmelfarb’s study.

The book has been criticised by some reviewers as narrow and partisan. Its narrowness consisting, supposedly, in foregrounding the central role of moral sentiments (and their religious and anti-religious determinants) in those Enlightenments, whilst ignoring the scientific vigour and political ferment of the period and giving relatively short shrift to the French Enlightenment. It is partisan, allegedly, in agreeing with the ‘reactionaries’, such as Edmund Burke, who condemned some directions of the new movements.
It seems hardly fair, however, to criticise an author for having deliberately chosen a particular focus to illuminate some aspects of such a tumultuous and many-faceted period in human history as the 18th century Enlightenment. The moral sentiments to be observed in great social and cultural movements, and their connections with major political and social developments, is not a trivial subject. Nor is it unreasonable for the author to take a defensible, conservative position in judging some of its causes and outcomes—the Terror following the French Revolution, for example, and the intellectual reflections of some French Enlightenment figures that would justify that Terror.

From the perspective of her previous historical-cultural studies of 19th century Britain and 20th century America, this new book extends Ms Himmelfarb’s inquiries into the origins of the moral character of the Anglo-American nations by going back to the 18th century. Its scholarship, as we have come to expect, is impressive, and the writing lucid and graceful.

Revival of interest in the Enlightenment

One purpose of the book is to challenge the French monopoly of the Enlightenment. In this, she joins the recent revival of interest in the British contributions to Enlightenment thinking and achievement to be found in Arthur Herman’s excellent The Scottish Enlightenment (2003), and Roy Porter’s wide-ranging Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (2000).
To charge this wave of re-assessment with chauvinism would be misplaced. It is not difficult, if one’s interest is in the Enlightenment thinking and achievements that have had the more lasting influence in advancing political liberty and economic progress, to award more honour to the British than the French Enlightenment. To say this is not to dismiss Montesquieu and Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot, Holbach and Helvetius, or Condorcet and d’Alembert as inconsequential. Indeed, as Himmelfarb points out, Montesquieu, for example, had very considerable influence upon the American constitutional founders in framing clauses to ensure the division and balance of powers—one of the bedrocks of the United States Constitution. But she also points out that Montesquieu himself was led to his conclusions by a study of the English Constitution.

It is also to be stressed that Scottish and English thinking were widely admired in France during the 18th century. Voltaire, of course, is known for his Anglophilia, and he, along with Rousseau and other figures of the French Enlightenment, was greatly impressed by David Hume who wrote his masterpiece during a long stay in France. Rousseau, hosted by Hume, wrote his Confessions as a refugee in England under the protection of George III, who offered him a pension (on Hume’s urging) that was refused. Rousseau and Hume, however, had a great falling out later on that did Rousseau little credit. There was, in short, a lively two-way traffic and mutual interest by leading intellectuals of the two countries at that time, as Himmelfarb notes.
A fair overall judgement on the British and French Enlightenments from present perspectives could surely claim that Adam Smith and David Hume, for example, had more important things to say about economics, politics, law and the rule of law, tradition, the moral sentiments, and the institutional conditions of liberty, than any of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment.
An encouraging thing about this revival of interest is the movement away from the ‘provincialism of the present’ in returning to the classic statements of some of the best thinkers of the Enlightenment. To recapture an important tradition of criticism and reflection is to access a repository of help in overcoming the slippages and errors of the present. Adam Smith may still instruct us on economics, Burke on the dangers of ‘metaphysical liberty’ (that is, rationalism), and Hume on rescuing ourselves from backsliding from the rule of law and secure property rights.

The ‘social virtues’, civil society, and religion

Himmelfarb finds, in the moral empiricism of the British Enlightenment, in its religious toleration, and in the widespread belief that a good, stable society demands human sympathy and benevolence, a central point of departure for the different courses taken by the British and French Enlightenments. The moral philosophy of Adam Smith and Francis Hutcheson, building upon the settlement of 1688, provided the basis for an age of ‘benevolence’, religion-led good works, the emergence of a host of voluntary associations, and the invigoration of civil society. In a century of revolutionary possibilities, these developments in England, along with growing prosperity and a high degree of individual freedom, mitigated poverty and possible sources of discontent.

By contrast, in France, with its widespread poverty, authoritarianism and political stagnation, intellectual energies veered towards abstract, rationalistic theorising and a penchant for recommending benevolent despotism, or ‘the general will’, as the agents of reform and sources of authority. To this was added a fierce anti-clericalism by intellectuals bent on destroying a church seen to be the handmaiden of monarchical oppression and medievalism. Himmelfarb quotes Edmund Burke as presciently observing: ‘The same engines which were employed for the destruction of religion might be employed with equal success for the subversion of government’. Some years later this came to pass during the Revolution.
To a surprising degree, explicit religious belief and doctrinal commitments were muted in British moral philosophising. Religious toleration, sometimes religious indifference, and an implicit acceptance of Christian principles were in the background, while in the foreground was speculation about innate human ‘sympathy’ and a ‘moral sense’ as the foundations of moral conduct. Both Adam Smith, in The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, and David Hume found some common ground here. As Himmelfarb notes, Hume, notorious in Edinburgh as a religious sceptic, nevertheless recognised the reality of a universal human tendency towards benevolence divorced from personal relations and affections. Francis Hutcheson argued more strongly for benevolence as an innate disposition.

Among the philosophers, therefore, religion played a secondary role in this moral speculation, with the sources of morality and benevolence to be found not in religion but in natural human ‘tendencies’ or innateness. Intellectually, this movement was not intolerant of religion, took it for granted, and regarded it benignly as generally cooperative with and supportive of human sympathy and benevolence. Even Hume, the serious and explicit sceptic, eschewed dogmatism and regarded religion, in Himmelfarb’s words, ‘as a natural ally of the morality inherent in man’.
Thus, in pursuit of her thesis about the distinctive place of ‘moral reformation’, philanthropy, and the social virtues generally in the British Enlightenment, Himmelfarb strays from conventional approaches by devoting a chapter to John Wesley and Methodism. She gives him an important role not merely in creating a powerful and democratic religious movement that gave a significant push to the growth of civil society voluntarism, but in also helping, thereby, to forestall revolutionary tendencies in Britain. Methodism’s emphasis upon salvation by good works was accompanied, she shows, by ‘an organisational structure in which hierarchy and egalitarianism were combined’…’ Also: ‘By providing the working classes with a means of emotional release as well as a sense of power and purpose, [Wesley] helped make Methodism a social force for good works’.

Under the influence of the Scottish and English moral philosophers, the insights of Smith’s economics, the broad religious and social movement of Methodism, and the sober realism of the political and legal philosophy of such thinkers as Hume and Edmund Burke, the Enlightenment in Britain was marked by an age of ‘benevolence’ and moderation. Its fruits were reform and humanitarian initiatives, the rapid creation of hospitals and asylums, penal innovation, movement towards the abolition of the slave trade, a plethora of charitable and other voluntary associations, and the emergence of a lively ‘civil society’ unique in Europe.
‘This’, says Himmelfarb, ‘ was the distinctive characteristic of the British Enlightenment, especially by comparison with the French. Benevolence was a more modest virtue than Reason, but perhaps a more humane one’.

The Enlightenment in America
The leading figures of 18th century America were men and women steeped in British and Continental culture and learning. It was a colony already boasting a rich history of struggle and enterprise, with vigorous institutions of scholarship and learning, a lively press, and a civic and religious spirit of its own making. These had shaped ‘the habits of the minds and hearts’ of its people in unique ways—ways so marvellously analysed 40 years after the American Revolution by Tocqueville.

The defining event was, of course, the War of Independence and separation from Britain. So Himmelfarb sees the American Enlightenment through the lens of independence and the framing of a republican Constitution. She points out: ‘As it was liberty that was the driving force of the American Enlightenment, so it was political theory that inspired the Constitution designed to sustain the new republic’.

The experience of self-government was not new to them—distance from the governing power of Britain, a tradition of local government ‘town meetings’ and regular deliberation on public affairs meant that, as John Adams put it: ‘The Revolution was effected before the war commenced’. Political institutions at state level and sentiments of liberty and self-government were already well entrenched.

Himmelfarb goes on to describe the background of debate and publication, especially in The Federalist papers, that revealed a population and leadership absorbed in forging, and in command of the arguments for, a liberty-supporting Constitution. But not merely liberty; there was also the problem of sustaining virtue. Himmelfarb sees concern to protect ‘virtue’ as the principal concern of the anti-federalists, and corruption their principal worry. John Adams was to say: ‘We must not, then, depend upon the love of liberty in the soul of man for its preservation. Some political institutions must be prepared to assist this love against its enemies’. This fear of corruption, and the corruption of concentrated power, was to lead, among other reasons, to the separation of power and a system of checks and balances. As the Federalist epigram put it: ‘If men were angels, no government would be necessary’.

In all of these debates, ‘Religion’, says Himmelfarb, ‘was not seen as a threat to liberty’—or to enlightenment. One might see in this the thread of British toleration and religious pluralism and the religious settlement that had removed religion from the centre of politics (but not from social life)—even in a nation as religious as the Americans were then, and continue to be today.
America, Himmelfarb concludes, ‘has, in effect, superimposed on the politics of liberty something like a sociology of virtue’, and that: ‘What had been a religious virtue was transmuted into a secular one, and a private duty became a public responsibility’. She is talking here of public welfare, but notes, in the recent debates about ‘compassionate conservatism’, ‘workfare’ and ‘mutual obligation’, a recrudescence in the public sphere of demands for a return to a moral tradition, to ‘habits of the mind and heart’ of personal responsibility, and the transference, as far as possible, of charitable impulse and action into the voluntary sphere.

As suggested earlier, given the restricted ambit that Ms Himmelfarb has placed upon herself, readers who want a broader view of the Enlightenment must go elsewhere to fill out the picture. The 18th century’s transformative developments in science, engineering, agriculture, architecture, literature, industry and commerce, warfare, exploration and empire-building, are inextricably involved with the political, intellectual, religious, and social events of the age, with all of them interacting with each other.

This, then, is a book with a fresh perspective on some important aspects of the Western heritage from the 18th century, and developed with admirable consistency and scholarly example within Himmelfarb’s chosen theme. It is, however, a book that is best understood as filling a gap in existing histories of the Enlightenment by explicating the way in which the moral life and the social virtues become habits of mind and heart that seek expression and affirmation in both formal politics and the character of civil society. Such things are at the centre of what used to be understood as the ‘common culture’. Perhaps that culture is nowadays more pluralistic. Nevertheless, they exist and, for the most part, they are tacit. These habits of thought, feeling, and conduct lie dormant until some private or public event brings them to the fore in private or public opinion and action. When we are forced to form an opinion or take action, we come to realise what we believe and value. We cannot fully understand ourselves or our society, or the source and character of social and political movements, unless they are taken to account. The core of Ms Himmelfarb’s achievement lies in revealing the historical roots of such an understanding.