Ritchie Robertson - The Enlightenment The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790

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First published by Allen Lane in 2020

Copyright Ritchie Robertson, 2020

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover: Detail from a portrait of the Comtesse de la Chtre, by Elisabeth Vige Le Brun, 1789, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Photograph The MetropolitanMuseum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence

ISBN: 978-0-241-00483-8

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To Katharine

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Historians often claim that the period they are studying or writing about is important for the present, but it is undeniable that the Enlightenment has a particularly urgent message for our time. Opponents of tyranny, injustice and superstition often appeal to the values of the Enlightenment. With the definite article, the Enlightenment refers to a historical period, which for the purposes of this book runs from about 1680 to about 1790. Within this, the Enlightenment stands for the endeavours of thinkers, writers and practical administrators in many countries to increase the well-being of humanity, and to do so by the process called (without the article) enlightenment. For them, to enlighten humanity is to clear away the false beliefs which have blinded people to their own interests; to oppose the power of institutions, especially the organized Churches, which have encouraged such blindness; to arrive at a true understanding of human nature, and of the political and economic societies in which people live; to increase peoples well-being and happiness; and to do so by close attention to empirical facts and the use of reason. The conviction animating these endeavours is that the world need not be a vale of tears; the earth is the destined home of humanity, and a place where happiness is attainable.

Recently, the case for the Enlightenment has been put with particular eloquence by the psychologist Steven Pinker and the philosopher Susan Neiman. The era, according to Pinker, was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism, and progress. By including reverence, perhaps surprisingly, Neiman means that the believers in a rational religion, who formed much of the Enlightenment mainstream, meant to substitute for the questionable God presented by the Churches a conception of divinity that measured up to humanitys moral intuitions.

There is, however, another view of the Enlightenment, which was acknowledged, even when being dismissed, by another defender of the Enlightenment, the late historian Eric Hobsbawm, in a lecture he delivered in 1992:

I believe that one of the few things that stands between us and an accelerated descent into darkness is the set of values inherited from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. This is not a fashionable view at this moment, when the Enlightenment can be dismissed as anything from superficial and intellectually nave to a conspiracy of dead white men in periwigs to provide the intellectual foundation for Western imperialism. It may or may not be all that, but it is also the only foundation for all the aspirations to build societies fit for all human beings to live in anywhere on this Earth, and for the assertion and defence of their human rights as persons.