Abstract
Modern Western and other democratic societies’, including Europe’s and America’s, fundamental values and institutions are, first and foremost, the creations and legacies of the Enlightenment. Their ideals and social structures of liberty, equality, justice, democracy, inclusion, individualism, social progress, secularism, pluralism, scientific and technological rationalism, economic prosperity and freedom, free markets, the pursuit of happiness and well being, dignified humane life, optimism and hope, universalism, and humanism are primarily rooted in, advocated, and advanced by the Enlightenment. The latter is understood as a sort of cultural revolution, starting as an intellectual or philosophical and sociological movement in Western Europe, especially, though not solely, in France, with subsequent partial ramifications and derivations in America and other non-European or non-Western settings during the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth century.
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- 1.
Artz (1998:35) observes that “so successful were [the Enlightenment’s ideals] they that at bottom we are still the spiritual children of the eighteenth century.”
- 2.
For example, some US neoconservatives accused liberal opponents and measures, such as the 2009 Congress economic stimulus bill, for the “Europeanization of America” in the apparent belief that American values and institutions are different from and even opposite to those of Western and all Europe. Ironically, this is the virtually same expression that Max Weber used when visiting America in 1904, “Europeanization of the American national character.” Hence, at least from Weber’s standpoint, there are hardly any values and institutions in America that are not of direct or indirect European origins, as epitomized by the twin religious-economic complex of Calvinism cum Puritanism and modern capitalism both, as even patriotic Parsons would admit, transplanted from the “old world” to the “new nation.” On this account, the conservative accusation of “Europeanization of America” is what Weber calls, in the related reference to the “appeal to national [American or other] character,” a “mere confession of ignorance” and thus “entirely untenable.” Such ethnocentric accusations also confirm Cooley’s classic definition of ethnocentrism as the “matter of lack of knowledge” or simply the product of ignorance and (so) arrogance, and eventually aggressive nationalism and militarism, in mutual relation and reinforcement.
- 3.
Artz (1998:35) suggests that “we still believe [in the Enlightenment ideals] that man and his institutions can be changed, that social and political problems can be improved rather than endured, that the goal of human life is maximum self-realization here below, and that the future is a challenge and an opportunity.”
- 4.
Caplan and Cowen (2004:404) that the “rise of [post] medieval society and the Renaissance was, in large part, a process of re-globalization [reviving antiquity], as the West established significant contact with the Chinese and Islamic worlds.”
- 5.
Some may add the Protestant Reformation to these pre-Enlightenment conceptions of freedom. However, the Reformation at best advocated only or mainly theological or religious freedom of conscience rather or more than secular freedoms, and even then it, especially its Calvinist “Second” phase, did not always practice what it had preached, as Weber and other sociologists suggest. At worst, it proved as antagonistic and destructive via, especially Calvinist-Puritan theocracies, to human liberty, including civil and political liberties as medievalist Catholicism and the Vatican Church. After all, the Reformation was, at least in part, an adverse religious cum evangelical reaction to the manifest or latent artistic and other secular freedoms and humanism of what Parsons calls the “humanistic Renaissance,” just as to hegemonic Catholicism as the prime and explicit theological target. For example, Parsons implies that the “men of the humanistic Renaissance” and early Puritans diverged on the matter of artistic and other secular freedom and humanism by agreeing on only on “few points” such as the “negative valuation of ritual.” Furthermore, Pareto observes that in northern Europe the Renaissance was, and thus its secular artistic and other liberties and humanistic values, “halted too soon” by the Reformation as a religious revival seeking and succeeding to supplant what he calls the “Roman [Catholic] theocracy” by a new Protestant version.
- 6.
Eisenstadt (1998:213) adds that for the Enlightenment the “possibility of extending an individual’s mastery over his own destiny, or of gaining his emancipation, implied not just the task of understanding society, but of reconstructing it.”
- 7.
US conservative sociologist Nisbet (1966:9) registers that British “utilitarian liberalism – from Bentham to Spencer – held to a view of church, state, family, moral tradition that did not differ from earlier views of the Enlightenment [i.e.] individual emancipation” in France as well as Great Britain (Hume, Ferguson, etc.).
- 8.
Juergensmeyer (2003:212) remarks that the “idea of a nation based on [‘Christian law and order,’ a ‘Christian Republic’] is on the minds of Christian religious activists [with] the Protestant governments of the early American colonies [grounding] their constitutions in biblical law [as a model] or precedent for a ‘new kind of Christian government.’” He also observes that US fundamentalism “admires the attempts of Muslims in Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan to create regimes grounded in Islamic law” (Juergensmeyer 2003:212).
- 9.
In passing, in the Enlightenment, liberal universalism in the sense of universal liberty on one hand and cultural relativism and pluralism, just as and individualism, on the other are complementary rather than mutually exclusive principles, simply complements or correlates, and not substitutes or opposites, as epitomized by Kant (Habermas 2001).
- 10.
Byrne (1997:16) comments that “this awareness of the customs and beliefs of other cultures raised crucial issues for Christian theology and the dominant role of the Christian church. If civilizations had existed for thousands of years without hearing of Christ then was revelation insufficient? Christian religion and culture [became] one among many and not as the one, single true religion given by the one and only God.”
- 11.
Parsons states that “probably the primary source of this individualistic cast of European thought lies in Christianity [viz.] the immediacy of the individual soul to God, inherent in [Protestantism],” thus curiously overlooking the Enlightenment and its sociological or secular individualism. To imply, as he does, that Christianity, specifically Protestant theological individualism, was the “primary source of this individualistic cast” of the Enlightenment overlooks that the latter was originally and essentially a non- or post-Christian, though not fully anti- Christian or atheistic, cultural revolution (Artz 1998), notably in France (Voltaire, Diderot) and in part Britain (Hume).
- 12.
Evoking Parsons, Ruggles (2007:969) suggests that “increasing individualism and a growing taste for privacy [is regarded] as a logical outcome of cultural changes set in motion by the Reformation and the Enlightenment,” implicitly conflating the theological individualism and transcendental “privacy,” namely what Weber calls “unprecedented inner loneliness,” in the former with the sociological individualism and societal privacy in the latter.
- 13.
Denying what the US Federal government officially in some obscure documents proclaims as the “existence of divinity” remains a crime of blasphemy. While not punished with death as by New England Puritanism, such a “crime” remains a certain open or tacit disqualification or at least disadvantage and not so “great expectation” for political office in much of America, especially the “Bible Belt” ruled, as Mencken (1982) noted a century ago, by “godly” fundamentalist powers that enforce with what Hume called Puritan-style “wild fanaticism” related proclamations and consequently make “unbelievers need not apply” in politics up to the early twenty-first century, despite such discriminatory practices on the basis of religion being judged unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the 1960s.
- 14.
Mises explicitly and systematically links “Collectivism” with “Socialism” and only implicitly or sporadically with “reactionary Conservatism,” just as “Individualism” with “Liberalism.” A minimalist interpretation is that if “Individualism” is paradigmatically linked with “Liberalism,” then “Collectivism” is with “Conservatism” as its original and perennial antagonist, and not, as he often seems to contend, only or mainly with “Socialism” as the identified major antiliberal, more precisely, anticapitalist, force.
- 15.
Byrne (1997:24) comments that “whether it was Rousseau’s rather vague idea that somehow power should emanate from the ‘general will’ of the people or the new American ideal of everybody’s right to the pursuit of happiness, it is to the Enlightenment that we owe the Western political principle that everyone in society should have a share in society’s benefits and opportunities.”
- 16.
According to Artz (1998:33), the Enlightenment was the first to posit that “the ability to use their reason makes men equal, laws should accord with popular wishes and should preserve men’s rights, and with the use of reason, progress is sure to come.”
- 17.
Brink (2000:13) adds that this egalitarian and liberal “assumption is based on a post-Enlightenment belief in the reasonableness of human beings [resting] on their capacity to act autonomously,” the term “post-Enlightenment” apparently signifying neo- rather than counter-Enlightenment.
- 18.
Cross (2000:245) comments that “both the cultural Right and Left shared the Enlightenment idea that adults must protect children from the adult world of limitless choice in order to prepare them to enter it with self-restraint.”
- 19.
Byrne (1997:24) proposes that the Enlightenment’s “Western political principle that everyone in society should have a share in society’s benefits and opportunities” probably had its extant and implicit roots in the early “Christian belief in the equality of all in the sight of God,” or as Lucas (2000) puts it, “equally valued by God.”
- 20.
Generally, Weber distinguishes Catholicism or original Christianity as “church” from Protestantism as a “sect” or the polar opposite; also, he somewhat imprecisely describes early Calvinism, including Puritanism, as the “Church militant” in the apparent or logical meaning of sectarian militancy.
- 21.
Protestantism, including Calvinism and even Puritanism, describes itself as a “reformed” and even claims to be the only “true” and “pure church” within Christianity, but strictly speaking is “sect” in Weber’s ideal-typical framework. This is what, after all, his expression “Protestant sectarianism,” adopted by Weberian (Munch 2001) as well as US conservative sociologists (Lipset 1996), indicates. In passing, Weber makes a distinction between Calvinism as “church” or “hierocratic institution” and Puritanism as “sect” to distinguish the former from the latter as its derivative. Still, for Weber Calvinism and even Protestantism as a whole substantively remains a “sect” vs. Catholicism as “church” within the framework of Christianity, as indicated by his detection and emphasis of Calvinist underlying “sectarian” tendencies, generating or culminating into Puritan sects (also, Munch 1981).
- 22.
In a typical misconstruction of the Enlightenment and liberalism (Berry 1997), in so doing Hayek overlooks or denies that Burke’s and any feudal-rooted or protoconservative antiliberalism is either by assumption or in reality anti-individualism, as precisely witnessed in pre-liberal traditionalism or antiliberal conservatism, from medieval despotism to fascism to “born” again fundamentalism and neo-fascism. Thus, it is anything but liberal “individualism” or Mannheim’s “individualistic liberalism.”
- 23.
Friedland (2002:125) observes that “we today confront the apparently premodern specter of religious nationalism.” Also, casting doubt on the prevalent view that nationalism is a “modern phenomenon,” Gorski (2000) identifies, in such Western societies as the Calvinist Netherlands and Puritan England, “medieval roots” in their “nationalist discourses” as “no less nationalistic” than those of the French Revolution.
- 24.
Angel (1994:347) observes that the Enlightenment is the “epoch in which the third line of progress in history, the dismantling of indiscriminate chiefdom [and theocratic] consciousness (i.e.) the damage that chiefdom consciousness has perpetrated in rippling through our social institutions and entrenching ego-consciousness.”
- 25.
In contrast to Weber, Mises states that the Enlightenment “doctrine of human progress was an adaptation of the Christian philosophy of salvation,” by implication to society, by modifying the latter “in order to make it agree with its scientific outlook.” This is a somewhat surprising statement, because Mises, like Weber, typically contrasts and even opposes the Enlightenment to the Christian and other religion, as did and do most representatives of both.
- 26.
Somewhat atypical for most economists, Phelps (2007:555) adopts the “classical theory of what the good life is, a theory that originated in Europe: Aristotle declared that people everywhere wanted to expand their horizons and ‘discover their talents.’ The Renaissance figure Benvenuto Cellini described the joys of creativity and making it in his autobiography. In Baroque times Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare dramatize the individual’s quest – a moral view call[ed] vitalism [also] reflected to a degree by Thomas Jefferson and Voltaire among other Enlightenment figures.” Phelps (2007:555) registers that, in contrast to classical civilization, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, “for John Calvin (1536), the good life consisted of hard work and wealth accumulation,” though he and his Calvinist disciples would add (and Weber implied) that the latter was only the means of (attaining knowledge of) salvation (“election”) or religious grace as the ultimate, transcendental definition of the “good life” and human “happiness.”
- 27.
According to Garrard (2003:9), Rousseau’s Calvinist pessimism was “among the most uncompromising in the history of modern thought [vs.] atheism and materialism in France after 1750.” This is indicated by Rousseau’s “pessimistic view of history” “savage,” “barbaric,” “civilized” stages as degeneration and that the “main culprit in the tendency of societies to degenerate into a Hobbesian war of all against all is amour-propre,” asking, for instance, “if Sparta and Rome perished, what State can hope to endure forever?” (Garrard 2003:110–2). As a predictable Calvinist solution, Rousseau suggested that his fellow Genevans (and all societies) should, as they did, “follow the example of the authoritarian Spartans rather than the democratic Athenians [and their] “dangerous innovations” (Garrard 2003:113). In a bizarre or frivolous twist Rousseau’s “pessimistic conservatism” was manifested in arguing “against the introduction of modern theater in Geneva,” apparently a place where Shakespeare “needed not apply” like in Puritan-ruled England. For illustration, “while there, he watched and was impressed by the French plays that Voltaire had been staging.” Rousseau was outraged; he feared that the theater would debase the morals of his innocent compatriots and that Voltaire “would cause a revolution there, and I would find again in my fatherland the tone, the appearance, the morals that were driving me from Paris” (Garrard 2003:113–4). Then, “in a letter to Voltaire in 1760, Rousseau accused him of ‘ruining’ his beloved Geneva – the ‘anti-Paris’ – incontrovertible proof of which came shortly afterward when his native city banned and burned both The Social Contract and Emile. As a consequence of these events, Rousseau renounced his Genevan citizenship ‘forever’ [second time]” (Garrard 2003:114). If anything, the bizarre, if not insane, case of Rousseau was a paradigmatic proof that the Enlightenment and liberalism overall and Calvinism and all ascetic Protestantism were as mutually exclusive and opposites as literally “heaven and earth,” despite some attempts at reconciliation (Sorkin 2005), specifically that his “die hard” Calvinist views literally poisoned or disfigured his actual or potential Enlightenment and liberal-democratic ideas.
- 28.
- 29.
In this connection, Calvinist Rousseau was an exception that really proved the rule, namely the pattern the Enlightenment as paradigmatic optimism or hope and of Calvinism as exemplary pessimism or “gloom and doom.”
- 30.
Artz (1998:35–6) adds that “the traditional Christian view of man as tainted by original sin, enduring this vale of tears, and hoping for salvation was no longer acceptable (but) the reasonable course for man (was) to forget about sin in the old sense, and to concentrate on his self-development here and now.”
- 31.
Garrard (2003:104) comments that “not only were human beings not tainted with an indelible corruption that always limits progress but, given the empiricism of the French Enlightenment, they were also seen as malleable, and therefore improvable (e.g., Condorcet).”
- 32.
In passing, Weber and Parsons et al. do not consider the Calvinist dogma of divine predestination, unlike the Islamic one of predetermination, fatalism on the grounds of its “elective affinity” with capitalist activity or wealth accumulation as the “proof,” though not the means, of God’s grace, but this is a dubious view, a sort of “deprived mental gymnastics” (Samuelson 1983). Simply, if humans are predestined by the God of Calvinism either to salvation (a few) or damnation (most) absolutely beyond their control, then this is absolute fatalism from their stance, though with respect to what Weber calls the “world beyond,” as distinguished from “this world.” He limits “fatalism” to the latter by relating the Islamic and other doctrines of predetermination to “this world” in contrast to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination related to the “world beyond,” but this distinction is also dubious or fluid. Conceivably, if humans are predestined beyond their control to “heaven” or “hell,” they will likely experience this as fatalistic as being predetermined in “this world,” simply, as “nothing to do about it” as their fate. For most humans the Islamic doctrine of societal predetermination and the Calvinist dogma of “heavenly” predestination, while formally or theologically distinct, eventually have substantively identical social effects of fatalistic resignation or helplessness in relation to suprahuman entities and their self-designed agents as theocrats with “divine rights,” contrary to Weber and Parsons et al. As Fourcade and Healy (2007:296) imply, the “protocapitalist Calvinists” were resigned to or inflicted by the “salvational anxiety their harsh religious doctrines tended to produce,” notably Calvin’s inhumane and antiuniversalistic doctrine of predestination.
- 33.
For instance, during the “war on terror” in the 2000s the Pentagon reportedly included a “Bible quote on the cover page of daily intelligence briefings” for the neoconservative administration, such as “quotes from the books of Psalms and Ephesians and the epistles of Peter.” (“Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him. To deliver their soul from death. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand”).
- 34.
Referring to the neoconservative war cum “crusade” on terrorism (Heymann 2003:164) comments that the US president “is free, as far as our own courts are concerned, to ignore customary international law, but that has its price; so, too, does an unwillingness to take part in a regime of treaties, or to subject ourselves to new institutions designed to enforce international law.”
- 35.
Angel (1994:346) elaborates that such Enlightenment optimism or pacifism suggests compelling evidence that “people can live out their lives without manifesting the potential for the irrational collective aggressions of large scale wars [i.e.] both in small scale societies and in large scale technologically advanced collectivities there is no overwhelming need for wars [vs.] any neat sociobiological or psychological argument for pessimism.” This leads to the following hypothetical question and answer: “Isn’t it perhaps enough to point to the holocaust [plus ethnic cleansing] to prove the bankruptcy of [the Enlightenment] hopes that collective irrationalist barbarities can be overcome? But it is shortsightedness to think that genocidal irrationalism is an invention of the twentieth century, as though designed by an antirationalist puppeteer to prove the hopelessness of rationalistic human prospects. From the earliest days (there are) records of genocidal intentions and campaigns” (Angel 1994:341). For example, arguably “if the Hebrew Bible can take for granted the acceptability of genocidal campaigns and the pursuit of justice, then our collective horror at the Holocaust shows the degree of moral progress (during) the last several thousand years” (Angel 1994:342).
- 36.
Artz (1998:33) states that the French Enlightenment philosophers “were eminently practical and utilitarian, and aimed to promote happiness and well-being among all classes. [For them] the only justification for the State is for the promotion of the good life for its citizens, men [are] rational, they can conceive the good, can discover means of obtaining it, and should be allowed, if they used reason, to direct their own lives by their knowledge, reason, and experience.”
- 37.
Einolf (2007:109) comments that the critics of the “traditional account of the abolition of torture” claim that the latter “was not abolished due to the spread of Enlightenment ideas, but due to a change in the standards of proof required for a conviction.”
- 38.
Sorokin (1970:426) observes that “at the end of fifth century (420–380 bc) there is a great flaring of the ethics of happiness. It becomes dominant [but] with the beginning of [the Christian] era, it begins to decline, and after fourth century ad it goes underground.” And, in his account the Christian “period from fifth century ad to the end of fifteenth century [is] monolithic again, entirely dominated by the ethics of principles.”
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Zafirovski, M. (2011). Modern Democratic Society and the Enlightenment. In: The Enlightenment and Its Effects on Modern Society. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7387-0_2
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