The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (82 page)

 
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A tradition in political thought imported to revolutionary America particularly by
Franklin
,
Jefferson
, and
Paine
. Jefferson drew on both the
French
and the
Scottish Enlightenment
; Paine especially on French Enlightenment and revolutionary thought. However, they did more than simply import Enlightenment ideas and views to America; they modified and applied them. In the Declaration of Independence, which is based on a draft by Jefferson , in the Constitution, drawn up under Franklin's chairmanship, and in the Bill of Rights, which was due among others to Jefferson (who had promulgated the Virginia Declaration of Religious Freedom on which the
First Amendment
was modelled) and
Madison
, American Enlightenment thought went beyond its teachers to produce documents that survive to this day. Jefferson also had a role in reimporting the Enlightenment to France. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789, still incorporated in the modern French constitution ( see also
constitution
), is in part an American statement of rights and in part a Rousseauvian statement of citizenship.
In the early-nineteenth-century United States there was a reaction against the secular tone of Enlightenment thought. Jefferson had been a religious agnostic, although one with a very high opinion of Jesus as an ethical teacher, and Paine an antichristian deist. In the religious reaction that followed, Paine died in poverty and obscurity and Jefferson in his last years retreated to ‘the consolations of a sound philosophy, equally indifferent to hope and fear’.

 
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Name given to the French version of the most important movement of ideas during the eighteenth century. Other versions appeared mainly in England, Scotland, and the United States, and there were individual thinkers who were accepted as members from all over Europe. Although there were some differences between them, the Enlightenment was a self-consciously international, and more particularly European, movement. Europe was often seen as a single country divided into various provinces, but with a common way of thinking, a common set of values, and a common language, French, which had the same role as Latin in the Middle Ages. Belief in progress was universal among the thinkers of the Enlightenment, but it was not something that would appear by itself: they knew that they had to work for it. The word ‘civilization’, with its modern signification and values, was probably first used by Mirabeau (father of the French revolutionary figure) in 1757. Attempts to provide exact dates for the beginning or the end are little more than an imposed neatness. The origins of all Enlightenment thought can be found in the works of seventeenth-century thinkers such as
Hobbes
, Descartes ,
Locke
, and Newton , who were far more original than their later followers, and provided them with basic assumptions and methods in epistemology, psychology, natural science, and the study of society.
After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which provided a new model for political change, the thought of its liberal supporters became the starting point for discussion in Europe in the early part of the eighteenth century. In the middle of the century came an explosion of ideas with
Montesquieu's
Esprit des lois
(1748), the first volumes of the
Encyclopédie
(1751), Voltaire's
Le Siècle de Louis XIV
(1751), the start of Buffon's
Histoire naturelle
(1749) and, even if they belonged to a different style of thought,
Rousseau's
two
Discourses
(1750 and 1754).
Thinkers of the French Enlightenment were by no means agreed in many areas but they all rejected authority as the basis for knowledge. Instead they accepted the rationalism developed in the previous century, whether in its deductive or empirical form. This did not automatically imply a rejection of religion, and various positions were held including atheism, deism, various forms of Protestantism, and even Catholicism. In practice, however, it meant rejecting the Church as the source of knowledge and therefore of the rules by which anyone should live. These could only be reached by the individual exercising his reason. The best example of this attitude was the
Encyclopédie
, edited by Diderot and d'Alembert, which claimed to present all existing knowledge in an easily assimilable and usable form. This approach was applied to every subject, and included not only human nature, religion, and politics but also natural sciences, law, and the arts, as well as strictly practical subjects. Philosophy in a strict sense, especially ontology, suffered a decline.
Given this common starting point, the French Enlightenment was politically divided between those such as
Voltaire
who favoured strengthening the absolute monarchy as the most efficient way to achieve reform, and those such as
Montesquieu
who favoured restricting the monarchy to re-establish liberty. Various other positions existed, such as those of
Helvétius
and
Holbach
. Neither side proposed extreme change although their thought has often been seen as a factor leading to the
French Revolution
. This was certainly not intended or foreseen, and the adherence of various absolute monarchs and other rulers in Europe, such as Frederick II of Prussia, Joseph II of Austria, and Catherine II of Russia, demonstrates the point. Rousseau is sometimes seen as a member of the French Enlightenment—he was for a time accepted by some of its other members and contributed to the
Encyclopédie
—but his pessimism and the fact that his most significant political proposals seem to have concerned only what could be done in a city-state make this doubtful.
CS 

 
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The period from about 1730 to about 1800 was one of the brightest in the history of the Scottish universities (and one of the dimmest in the history of the English ones). Why this was so has never been established; it may perhaps be attributed to an influx of wealth and self-confidence following the Treaty of Union in 1707, coupled with lack of clerical control over the universities. The main figures of the Scottish Enlightenment were Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), David
Hume
, Adam
Smith
, and Dugald Stewart (1753–1828). It is difficult to generalize about the thought of a loosely connected group of people, but the Scottish Enlightenment tried to construct first principles of politics and society free from the religious underpinnings that had previously been thought essential even by liberals such as
Locke
. Hume and Smith developed classical economics.
The Scottish Enlightenment had reciprocal links with France and America. Hume spent several years in France, where he wrote his
Treatise of Human Nature
. Smith and
Turgot
admired each other's work.
Jefferson
owed much to a Scottish teacher at William and Mary College, and much of mainstream liberal thought may have reached America through such routes. Although the Declaration of Independence sounds very Lockean, it reflects Locke inherited through the Scottish Enlightenment (and thus secularized) rather than directly.

 
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