Reading “Scott McLemee’s review”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/books/review/24MCLEMEE.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all&position= of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s “The Roads to Modernity”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=henryfarrell-20&path=tg%2Fdetail%2F-%2F1400042364%2Fqid%3D1098573377%2Fsr%3D1-1%2Fref%3Dsr_1_1%3Fv%3Dglance%26s%3Dbooks (as “discussed by Henry”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002732.html yesterday), I’m struck by the inadequacy of her contrast between the “French” and the “British”. Take two of the alleged dimensions of difference:
bq. She finds in some English and Scottish thinkers of the 18th century (Adam Smith, the Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, for example) something like the first effort to create a sociology of virtue. The French savants exalted a bloodless notion of Reason to bloody effect. The British philosophers emphasized the moral sentiments, the spontaneous capacity to recognize another person’s suffering and to feel it as one’s own.
and
bq. Nor was this Enlightenment necessarily at war with religion, as such. Himmelfarb quotes the jibes of Edward Gibbon (no orthodox religious believer by any stretch) against those French thinkers who ”preached the tenets of atheism with the bigotry of dogmatists.”
Anyone who knows anything about the “French” enlightenment knows that at least that one of its non-French participants, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, differed from the likes of Voltaire on points such as these. Somehow, I doubt that this Jean-Jacques’ virtues on these points (if virtues they are) get highlighted by Himmelfarb since doing so would muck-up her division of the world into sheep and goats.
{ 7 comments }
oneangryslav 10.25.04 at 9:56 am
…division of the world into sheep and goats
Sounds like a David Brooks op-ed in the NY Times. Now, the only question is which do you find in ‘red’ states, and which in blue ones?
Rob 10.25.04 at 1:19 pm
Nothing like hanging your hat with that great religous thinker David Hume…
WeSaferThemHealthier 10.25.04 at 2:07 pm
“Nothing like hanging your hat with that great religous thinker David Hume…”
And Bentham!
“Nor was this Enlightenment necessarily at war with religion, as such.”
And Ataturk had nothing against Islam, *as such* ( just everything else that went with it ).
des von bladet 10.25.04 at 3:52 pm
Did we all read the recent account of the Scottish Uplichting (“Englightenment”)? (Briefly: the Scots were nice persons who liked each other and empiricisme and were kind to bishops and animals, hoorah!, while the Frenchy-French were a bunch of querulous malcontents given to bishop-baiting on a frankly Dawkinsian scale.)
(It is certainly the case, however, that the publication of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion was, no doubt fearlessly, postponed to post-Hume-ousness.)
Personally I think it’s all just a Murkan plot to edge the Frenchy-French out of history.
Jacob T. Levy 10.25.04 at 4:44 pm
Egads– aren’t we done with this distinction *yet*?
It’s always been bizarre to let the Enclyclopaedists to stand in for the whole French Enlightenment, excluding such minor figures as Rousseau, Montesquieu, and later Constant; weird to assimilate the Scottish Enlightenment into something that’s generically “British,” and omitting e.g. Bentham; etc etc. Fans of the philosophes (Peter Gay) and enemies of the philosophes (Hayek) have joined together in leaving us a really distorted lens for understanding the 18th-century…
[to Rob, though– it’s *not* bizarre to note that Hume had a crucially different view of the social consequences of religiosity than did, e.g., Voltaire.]
Brad DeLong 10.25.04 at 5:25 pm
It is always dangerous to take reviewers’ summaries as accurate representations of the positions taken in a book, but it is laughable to assign Hume and Smith to a team “not necessarily at war with religion.”
And when I think of what Himmelfarb is calling the “English” school, its two most important members seem to have names like “Montesquieu” and “Tocqueville”.
Not to mention the implicit misreading of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, one important piece of which is concerned with the *weakness* of the sense of sympathy…
mcm 10.25.04 at 5:51 pm
Shorter Himmelfarb can be found here.
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