Gay - The Enlightenmen v 1t: an interpretation. The rise of modern paganism

Books by P ETER G AY

A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America (1966)

The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (1964)

Voltaires Politics: The Poet as Realist (1959)

The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernsteins Challenge to Marx (1952)

Translations with Introductions:

Voltaires Candide (1963)

Voltaires Philosophical Dictionary, 2 vols. (1962)

Ernst Cassirers The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1954)

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

Published, October 1966
Third Printing, 1967

Copyright 1966 by Peter Gay

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Distributed by Random House, Inc. Published simultaneously in Toronto, Canada, by Random House of Canada Limited.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-10740

eISBN: 978-0-307-83137-8

Portions of the first appeared as an essay entitled The Family of Freedom in The Columbia University Forum, Winter 1966, Volume IX, Number 1.

v3.1

FOR RUTHIE

Boerhave utilior Hippocrate,

Newton tot antiquitate,

Tassus Homero;

sed gloria primis.

VOLTAIRE ,

Notebook entry, around 1750

Preface

T HIS ESSAY is the first of two related but independent volumes which together will offer a comprehensive interpretation of the Enlightenment. For the last half century or more, intellectual historians, students of literature, and political theorists have worked to restore the Enlightenment to its true stature, to rescue it from its admirers nearly as much as from its detractors. They have published authoritative editions of major texts, discovered new documents, and compiled exhaustive, accurate, often supremely revealing collections of the philosophes correspondence. And they have not rested content with this essential but technical labor; they have been angry. Ever since the fulminations of Burke and the denunciations of the German Romantics, the Enlightenment has been held responsible for the evils of the modern age, and much scorn has been directed at its supposed superficial rationalism, foolish optimism, and irresponsible Utopianism. Compared to these distortions, more superficial, foolish, and irresponsible than the failings they claim to castigate, the amiable caricature drawn by liberal and radical admirers of the Enlightenment has been innocuous: the navet of the Left has been far out-weighed by the malice of the Right. Still, like the conservative view, the liberal view of the Enlightenment remains unsatisfactory and calls for revision. And so scholars have turned to polemics. I have had my share in these polemics, especially against the Right, and I must confess that I have enjoyed them. But the time is ready and the demand urgent to move from polemics to synthesis.

Synthesis demands regard for complexity: the men of the Enlightenment were divided by doctrine, temperament, environment, and generations. And in fact the spectrum of their ideas, their sometimes acrimonious disputes, have tempted many historians to abandon the search for a single Enlightenment. What, after all, does Hume, who was a conservative, have in common with Condorcet, who was a democrat? Holbach, who ridiculed all religion, with Lessing, who practically tried to invent one? Diderot, who envied and despised antiquaries, with Gibbon, who admired and emulated them? Rousseau, who worshipped Plato, with Jefferson, who could not bring himself to finish the Republic? But I decided that to yield to the force of these questions would be to fall into a despairing nominalism, to reduce history to biography, and thus to sacrifice unity to variety. These questions have their uses, but mainly as a corrective: they keep historians from sacrificing variety to unity and help to free them from simplistic interpretations that have served them for so long and so badlyinterpretations that treat the Enlightenment as a compact body of doctrine, an Age of Reason, and then take the vitalism of Diderot, the passion of Rousseau, or the skepticism of Hume, as foreign bodies, as harbingers of Romanticism. This is definition by larceny; it is to strip the Enlightenment of its wealth and then complain about its poverty. I shall follow neither of these methods in these volumes. I shall respect the differences among the philosophes which, after all, supplied the Enlightenment with much of its vigor, generated much of its inner history. Yet, mindful that general names are not Platonic ideas but baskets collecting significant similarities, I shall speak throughout of the philosophes, and call the totality of their ideas, their strategies, and their careers, the Enlightenment, and I shall use these terms to refer to what I shall call a family, a family of intellectuals united by a single style of thinking.

While the Enlightenment was a family of philosophes, it was something more as well: it was a cultural climate, a world in which the philosophes acted, from which they noisily rebelled and quietly drew many of their ideas, and on which they attempted to impose their program. But the philosophes world, their eighteenth century, was at least in part an ideological construct; their passionate engagement with their time gave them access to some of its deepest currents, but it also closed their eyes to some inconvenient realities. I found it essential therefore to account not merely for the philosophes ideas and for the interplay of these ideas with their world but also to judge the adequacy or inadequacy of their perceptions. Is Jeffersons virtuous Roman Republic the Roman Republic of twentieth-century scholarship? Is Humes Cicero our Cicero? Is the philosophes revival of letters our Renaissance? It was questions like these that led me from intellectual to social history, to inquire whether and to what extent the Enlightenment which the philosophes constructed and experienced was the Enlightenment we now observe as a historical event.

Since I found myself primarily interested in the encounter of ideas with reality, I quite naturally made the experience of the philosophes the central concern and the organizing principle of my interpretation. The philosophes experience, I discovered, was a dialectical struggle for autonomy, an attempt to assimilate the two pasts they had inheritedChristian and paganto pit them against one another and thus to secure their independence. The Enlightenment may be summed up in two words: criticism and power. Voltaire once wrote in a private letter that he knew how to hate because he knew how to love, and the other philosophes too employed destructive criticism to clear the ground for construction, so that criticism itself achieved a creative role. The Enlightenment, as Ernst Cassirer felicitously expresses it, joined, to a degree scarcely ever achieved before, the critical with the productive function and converted the one directly into the other.