The Enlightenment and Society

The question was how to create new world without God?  What would be the basis of this new life?  Spirituality was replaced with technology; religious laws were replaced by rational virtues, ethics, and morality.  “Bon sens”, extolled by René Descartes, could be determined by logical deduction, based upon observation of human psychology and conduct.  The Enlightenment sought empirical and pragmatic foundations for society for the material era.  The expectation was that peace and harmony would come into being through the minimum use of laws, instead of the heavy-handed tyranny of kings. In the past, the law was the will of the sovereign, in an Age of Reason, law was based upon the will of he people who voluntarily came together under the light hand of the state. The Enlightenment was characterized by this strong sense of humanity and by a belief that all humans are basically good and are deserving of basic rights and freedoms.  Humans could come together and rule themselves according to rational principles that all can come to know and live by.

The challenges to the authority of religion as a form of governance were directly related to the rise of nationhood. As early as 1534, Henry VII broke the power of the Catholic Church in England by the Act of Supremacy and made himself the head of the Church of England.  Without refuting religion, the King asserted the primacy of a nation in its own affairs.  The rising tide of the Protestant Reformation allowed European princes to likewise breakaway from the interference of the Vatican.  The Protestant idea that each person has a direct line to God and therefore could worship as s/he pleased led to not only a split between the Catholics and the Protestants but also among the Protestants themselves.  The result was the Thirty Years’ War, which ended in 1648.  After three decades of conflict, it was clear that religious ideology could never be allowed to disrupt the order of society and the power of religion as a dominant force was at an end. It is perhaps no coincidence that René Descartes who died in 1650 decided that the only point of certainty was the self: “I think, therefore I am.”  But Descartes was concerned as to the ground of his thinking—how did he know he wasn’t hallucinating or deluded?   He reverted to his faith in God, that God would be the guarantor of the validity of his thinking.  In his appeal to God, Decartes would be the last of his kind.  Indeed, one hundred years later, Diderot would assert that “…the philosopher teaches the priest what the gods are.”

The philosophers substituted “natural religion,” called Deism, a kind of watered-down theism and reconstructed religion in line with modern science for the mysticism of traditional “superstition.”  The abolition of God was also the abolition of hierarchies and the social theory of the Enlightenment stressed the discussion of social problems from the standpoint of the individual–the “true person,” not from the perspective of the state, which was only an artificial machine. The philosophes were the intellectual (and spiritual) leaders of Europe.  Natural Law was at the center of Enlightenment thinking and would be the instrument that severed morality from religion and would establish new bases for morality and ethics. If God was to be found anywhere, it was in “natural law.” Philosophers thought deductively about the origins of human society.  In Two Treatises on Government, 1680-90, John Locke projected his mind back in time and imagined a race of humans who were free and equal, their “natural” state” or State of Nature.”  The question that bothered Locke was why people had given up their freedom to come together into society, which so clearly curtailed their natural freedoms. He reasoned that the state was the entity that gave surety to these rights and used the words “social compact” or agreement that people made with their government to come together under “natural law.”  What made Locke so attractive to the budding American revolutionaries was his stress on the individual making a free decision to live within a state that, in turn, had the obligation to protect “natural rights.”

In his book, The Social Contract, 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau also went back to nature and considered the question of why humans would give up their natural freedoms.  His philosophical deductions led him to also consider the consequences of their decision to create a “Social Contract.”  Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind, 1754, asserted that the original human equality had ended due to the creation of private property.  The first person, who asserted “this is mine” ended the natural paradise of equality, according to Rousseau.  This idea that private property was to the root of the Fall of Humanity would be taken up by Friedrich Engels in 1884, and, indeed, Rousseau made a suggestion that the problem of inequality of wealth could be remedied by redistribution.  But beyond equalizing wealth, there is a general will of the people, which ultimately overrules private interests. Equality is natural law and natural law is based upon reason.  Rousseau understood the state as a function of the will of the people who look to the state to preserve and respect their “inalienable rights.” Even as Rousseau was writing, Adam Smith was rethinking the role of government, recasting the activities of society, not in terms of “natural rights,” but in terms of the new economic realities of mercantile society.

In 1776, Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, proposed that the sole purpose of a state was not to protect the rights of citizens but to safeguard the protect economic activities and property.   Like Locke and Rousseau, Smith was being perfectly rational.  Starting with a founding assumption that wealth was served the greater good, he gave priority to commerce, assuming that the wealthier the population, the wealthier the nation.  In separating the state from the economy and giving the economy free rein so that the “invisible hand” could enrich everyone, Smith also released the state from its moral obligation to protect people and gave voice to a new kind of political economy based upon the interest of capitalism.  Smith’s ideas are eminently reasonable and rational but they also give pride of place to impersonal forces—science, technology, and industry—that will change the face of Western society and reorder how people would interact with one another.  Smith himself was sympathetic to the plight of the poor and concerned over how the factory system dehumanized people but the logic of the “invisible hand” of capitalism gave rise to a ruthless exploitation of human capital in the name of economic prosperity of the nation.

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