The Enlightenment: Rationalism

and Counter-Enlightenment
 Montesquieu
• Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède
et de Montesquieu
• Generally known as Montesquieu
• Born at La Brède, France
 Works
• Lettres persanes (Persian Letters) - satire on
French life, customs and political institutions
in the form of letters supposedly written by
two bemused Persian travellers
• Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur et
de la décadence des romains (The Causes of
the Greatness and Decline of the Romans)
• De l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws,
1748)
 The Spirit of the Laws, 1748
• very long, and it exhibits a notorious lack of form
and coherence
Montesquieu wrote obscurely partly to:
• (1) shield the susceptibilities of plain folk from
the possibly unsettling effects of his doctrines
• (2) partly to set his readers the challenge of
unravelling his meanings for themselves
• (3) evade censorship - partly to evade censorship
(of which he seems to have been inordinately
fearful: all three of his major works were at first
published abroad and anonymously)
 Ideas
• The universe - exhibits as part of its nature the kind of regularities
that we call laws
• Laws - are ‘necessary relationships deriving from the very nature of
things’
• Example – God is bound by the ‘laws’ (the necessary conditions) -
that make creative activity possible.
• Those parts of the law of the universe that pertain to human
behaviour are, predictably enough, called ‘natural laws’.
• Natural laws – relate to the achievement of basic imperatives of
human existence such as (1) protection and (2) reproduction. But
not instincts.
• Prescribe what we should do. Discoverable by human reason
 Human sociability
• By nature - men are solitary and fearful, their reason
is developed only to a very rudimentary (basic) degree
• To activate and refine reason you need pressure or
stimulus (sociability)
• Sociability develops as they begin to discover the
pleasures and advantages of life with others of their
own kind
• Consequences - the development of sociability is
immediately productive of strife, as men begin to
exhibit their natural tendency to exploit one another
 State of Nature
• Like Hobbes – for Montesquieu the primitive
or ungoverned condition of mankind – the
‘State of Nature’ – would be a state of misery
and terror
• Under the impulse of this terror that man’s
reason teaches him to devise and enforce
positive laws to achieve peace and security.
• This is how government emerges (a basic
explanation)
 Government
• is created by common humanity and its needs, but the
particular ways in which government manifests itself
are diverse
• Diversity arises from the fact that human needs,
though universal, will be expressed and met in
different ways by different peoples, according to their
different circumstances
• Form taken by the government – will depend on the
‘general spirit of each nation’
• This spirit is determined by a number of variables: (1)
climate, (2) soil, (3) occupation, (4) history, (5)
geographical location, (6) religion, etc.
 Government
• Montesquieu identifies three main types of
government: despotisms, republics and monarchies.
• these types will be modified by environmental
influences
• Each kind of government has what he calls a ‘nature’
and a ‘principle’
• nature’ is defined by where sovereign power is located
in it
• ‘principle’, in the absence of which it will not work
successfully, is a suitable disposition or condition of
mind – a ‘modification of soul’ – on the part of those
subject to it
 Despotic government
• is in its ‘nature’ arbitrary and capricious
government by one person
• an unnatural form of government from which
law is absent
• Characteristic – large empires and hot
climates
• Principle - fear or servility of those under it
 Republican government
• Republican government is a blend of aristocracy
and democracy
• requiring of its citizens a strong sense of civic
virtue or public spirit, which will motivate them
to subordinate private interests to public or
patriotic ones
• He admires republics but the standards of
selflessness and public service that they demand
are often achieved at the cost of
institutionalising a rigid morality that stultifies
the individualism of their citizen
 Monarchy
• government by one man tempered by the
countervailing influence of ‘intermediate
powers’ such as the parlements, chartered
towns, nobility and clergy
• A monarchy is what Montesquieu thinks
France should be; a despotic regime is what
he thinks it has become under the
centralising tendencies of Richelieu and Louis
XIV
 Question
• What form of constitution, then, is most
compatible with liberty: that is, what
constitutional arrangements will best enable
individuals to live their lives without
interference and enjoy their property in
peace?
• Answer: monarchy of the kind observable in
England.
 Book XI of De l’esprit des lois
• Old-fashioned feudal monarchies derived their
stability from the uneasily balanced distribution of
power between king, nobles and clergy
• Contemporary England - a formal ‘separation of
powers’
• Legislative, judicial and executive functions are in
different hands, and the various mechanisms through
which these functions are expressed operate as
‘checks and balances’ upon one another
• Power cannot therefore achieve unwholesome
concentrations, despotism cannot arise, and the
liberty of all is guaranteed.
 Book XI of De l’esprit des lois
Commerce in England – civilizing influence.
• Quite apart from the material benefits of prosperity,
commerce broadens outlooks
• overcome destructive religious and national
differences
• desire to engage in peaceful trade cures human beings
of their addiction to military exploits
• inculcates the virtues of thrift, diligence, moderation,
prudence and order
Montesquieu believes that the political ills of France,
where the executive, legislative and judicial powers are
concentrated in the king’s hands (Louis XIV)
David Hume
 David Hume
• a Scottish philosopher, who was highly regarded
for his systems of philosophical empiricism,
skepticism and naturalism
• human beings are primarily creatures not of
reason, but of passion or feeling
• Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the
passions, and can never pretend to any other
office than to serve and obey them. (Treatise of
Human Nature 2:3:3)
• challenges the supposition that our moral beliefs
are grounded in, and demonstrable by, reason
 Political and Moral Thought
• Moral belief - is a species of feeling.
• But we do not have the feelings that we do because
we have reasoned in a certain way
• we reason as we do because we have the particular
kind of feelings that we have
• Moral convictions are positions chosen because one
feels as one does, not logical conclusions that one has
thought one’s way to
• as government institutionalises moral beliefs, it is a
creation not of reason directly, but of reason in so far
as reason is the ‘slave’ of a certain kind of feeling
 Implication for politics
• Government and political obligation - are to be understood as
originating not in some such abstraction as a social contract or law
of nature, but in the practical responses of human beings to felt
needs and desires
• Sociability of men - sociable as they are drawn to live with others
for their own kind.
• Benevolence/goodwill towards others is limited - they think first of
themselves and their own families and only then of other people
• Scarcity of material resources - it is inevitable that disputes will
occur wherever human beings come together
• Answer: ‘Rules of justice’ to keep disputes to a minimum
• Rules of justice - intended to maintain the security of possessions
and the honouring of contracts
 Rules of justice
• We cannot point to a legislator who formulated
these rules first, nor is there any need to try to
do so.
• arisen more or less spontaneously in the course
of human transactions
• They are not ‘natural laws’ discovered by
abstract reason; they are merely conventional,
and have no intrinsic merit
• Production of practical reason responding to the
sentiments to which the possibility of conflict
may arise
 Rules of justice
• Degree of Uniformity - Because human beings
are all more or less the same in how they feel
and think
• Rules of justice is prior to government –
government materializes because of human
nature. we cannot live by the ‘rules of justice’
unless we have over us some agency with
coercive power
• Needs to be enforced - we are short sighted; we
value short-term goals at the expense of our
long-term interests.
 Against social-contract arguments
• ‘Of the Original Contract’ - an essay that every
admirer of Locke should read
• Locke had appealed to ‘tacit’ consent. The mere
fact that individuals do not leave the community
in which they live is, he had argued, evidence
that they are consenting to the arrangements by
which it is governed.
• According to the social contractarians - all
authority is constituted by, and only by, the
individual’s consent to it; but that consent, says
Locke, does not have to be explicit
 Against social-contract arguments
• Hume’s example: consider the press-ganged
seaman who wakes up and finds himself on a ship
in the middle of the ocean
• (1) He can throw himself to the side (which is not
an eligible possibility)
• (2) He can remain where he is (tacit consent),
thus accepting the captain’s authority.
• What about the ‘poor peasant or artisan’ who
hates the government? But has no means of
removing himself from its jurisdiction.
 Immanuel Kant
• Works: Critique of Pure Reason (1781),
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
(1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788),
Critique of Judgment (1790)
 Ideas
• Was shocked at the skeptical philosophy of David Hume, which
seemed to undermine the very foundations of science and
question its claim to certainty.
• Hume’s argument: process of cause and effect cannot be observed
and that in consequence all the causal laws of science have no solid
empirical foundation
• Defending the scientific view of the world: the world is the way it
is because our minds shape it that way
• The world we experience is characterised by cause and effect,
time and space, and so forth, because these are built into our
minds to generate a view of the world that we can comprehend
• What the world is really like if it is independent of human
experience? ‘the thing in itself’ – we cannot possibly know
• He identified this unknowable world with the world of ‘noumena’ -
the world of spirituality and freedom beyond the senses
 Ideas
• The world of senses/’phenomena’ - governed
by causal laws and this includes the
behaviour of animals and human beings.
• Pursuing our self-interest is a causal one –
relationship between our desires and what we
do to satisfy them is causal.
• Use of reason - It just gives us an extra
instrument that animals lack
 Ideas
• Human beings can escape the world of
phenomena, and partake of the world of
noumena, by acting morally
• How? - Acting according to one’s moral duty
against one’s self-interest
• Fulfilling one’s moral duty is – a way that the
human being can be fully free and fully human
• What moral choices should an individual make?
Kant is firmly an individualist
 Moral Choices
• Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
• Argument: it is up to each individual to decide
his or her own moral rules by means of what he
calls the ‘categorical imperative’
• An abstract principle - we act in ways that we
would want others to act in the same
circumstances
• The moral imperative to do what is right is, for
Kant, categorical or absolute, whatever the
circumstance
 Moral Choices
• How we should act to achieve some end,
however desirable, is only a ‘hypothetical
imperative’, which for Kant is not moral at all
• More on categorical imperative – in practice
we should treat people as we would have
them treat us
• It also means that treating people as ends and
never as means
 What kind of government is
appropriate to a society of such
human beings?
• Critique of Pure Reason, p. 312
• ‘republican’ government
• a constitutional government, but one based
upon the principle that all are entitled to
maximum freedom that is compatible with
the freedom of others
• such a government was necessary for all
rational beings and that we have a moral
duty to strive for a government of this kind
 Republican government
• range of civil liberties, a constitutional monarchy and
a legislative assembly elected on a wide but not
universal franchise (exclusions include women,
tradesmen and servants, since they were dependent
upon others for their livelihood and could not be
expected to vote independently)
• it will drastically reduce wars, crime and other horrors
of the human condition
• Republican governments will eliminate war. War is
the enemy of that is good.
• What will ensure perpetual peace? Republican
governments
 Perpetual Peace
– Republican = representative government
– Republican government – a state based on the consent of
people and the rule of law, i.e., liberal democratic states in
the 21st century
– non-republican states are likely to wage war
– Consent from the citizenry. They are the ones that suffer
the most in case of wars. They (the citizenry) are the ones
that fight and pay for them, thus reluctant to agree to an
armed conflict.
– Rulers in non-republican states may declare war as they
please without having to worry about popular opinion
 Human progress
• humanity was moving towards an ideal future
because of the spread of rationality and
education
• Human progress was guaranteed by nature
• Idea for a Universal History with a
Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784) – ‘hidden plan’
of nature to lead man towards the perfect
constitution – all natural capacities of
humanity can be developed
 How do we arrive at this perfect
constitution?
• ‘unsocial sociability’ - Human beings are
naturally social beings, while at the same time
their behaviour displays a strong bias towards the
anti social: they are ambitious, egocentric and
aggressive
• Antisocial behavior - lead to conflict, crime,
tyranny and war, they also ultimately lead to
their opposites
• Antisocial behavior lead to opposites - horrors of
crime and civil strife force people to create
orderly societies with laws and institutions.
Edmund Burke
 Ideas
• Founder of modern conservatism
• Keynote of his thought - is a mistrust of
‘rationalism’ in politics: the belief that politics
can be conducted according to a priori principles
not rooted in previous experience and practice
• What human arrangements do work? – Those
that are based on long trial and experience
• Human arrangements in society emerged during
the slow processes by which men have
accommodated themselves to changing
circumstances
 Society
• There is no point for the origins of society in a
social contract
• Society is not a contractual or voluntary
association that any one generation has created
• Society is a vast and seamless historical
partnership between those who are living, those
who are dead, and those who are yet to be born
• Society is complex – it cannot be understood by
any one individual or group, or during any single
generation
 Human Beings
• are not atoms or isolated essences.
• Products of a long and intricate history
• Created by the culture of which we are part
• Manners, customs, and laws – the general way
of doing things that Burke Calls ‘prejudice’ are
parts of that culture
 Revolution and Reforms
• Revolutionary change - a destructive affront to
nature: a leap away from the known into the
perilous unknown
• How reform should be undertaken - about in a
gradual and ad hoc fashion (solutions required for
a specific problem or task)
• in response not to the stipulations of an abstract
doctrine, but to changing needs and conditions
as they arise.
• Directed towards a specific problem.
 Revolution and Reforms
• Reforms should preserve the existing
harmonies - there should always be a
presumption in favour of leaving things alone
• Burke is in favour of religious toleration, as
well as an established Church.
• He is convinced that a landed aristocracy – an
aristocracy of wealth, leisure and sensibility –
is essential to the preservation of the
complex fabric of society
 Burke’s conservatism
• Burke’s conservatism in essence: (1) that the
present state of things is the sum total of all
past developments;
• (2) that it is too complex to understand;
• (3) that meddling with it is therefore
dangerous; and
• (4) that arrangements that work well enough
are best left alone
 Burke’s conservatism
• Burke does not, as so many conservatives do,
seek to ground his political prescriptions on a
mythical ideal constitution or a Golden Age
that it should be the purpose of politics to
commemorate or restore
• He understands that the historical origins of
things are unrecoverable
Thomas Paine
 Works
• As an excise officer - Campaigning for better pay
and conditions (his first publication was a
pamphlet called The Case of the Officers of
Excise) cost him his position
• contributed several articles to the Pennsylvania
Magazine, including one calling for the abolition
of slavery
• the anti-monarchical pamphlet Common Sense
(1776), vigorously advocated independence
 Works
• The Rights of Man (1791) - defend the French
Revolutionaries against the strictures of
Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution
in France; but he also attacked hereditary
government and argued for equal political
rights
• The Age of Reason – attack on organized
religion. Against Christianity
 Political thought
• Radical-liberal ideology – Paine is informed
throughout by European Enlightenment
ideas.
• Past – is the story of tyranny and ignorance
• It is characterized by superstition and
uncritical acceptance of the existing order
• Critical against kingship – hereditary
monarchy is unnatural and irrational
 Against hereditary monarchy
• Against kingship - creates a distinction between
kings and subjects that has no basis beyond the
willingness of the credulous to accept it.
• It places men in positions of power regardless of
ability and moral character
• Produces and sustains conditions of inequality
and injustice
• Kings are parasites - supported in luxury out of
public taxes while thousands of their subjects
live in misery
 Against hereditary monarchy
• They wage wars for their own glory, which
their subjects have to fight in and pay for
• What is needed for Paine? - a rational
reconstruction of society and the installation
of the correct form of government to
administer it
 Government
• Is a necessary evil - We cannot do without it, but,
inevitably, it infringes the right of the individual
to do as he likes
• For Paine - less government there is, therefore,
the better.
• Government should confine itself to the
protection of the rights of man and should not
take on any more extensive functions than this
• It must moreover be responsible to, and
removable by, those whose government it is
 Society
• Society, says Paine, in a more radical version
of Locke’s doctrine of popular sovereignty, is
created by a social contract, and the people
then have the absolute right to make and
unmake governments as and when they see
fit
 Other ideas
• government exists to manage the affairs of the whole
nation, it cannot be the property of any individual or
family or faction
• All men are equal.
• Representative democracy, based on full male
suffrage, is the only rational, and therefore the only
legitimate, form of government.
• Under this rational government: (1) people would live
in peace and prosperity; (2) would be able to levy only
such taxes as the populace thought reasonable, and
(3) the populace would not, Paine assumed, wish to
finance wars.
 Advocate of public welfare measures
• The Rights of Man - state education for the
poor, old age pensions and state employment
• Agrarian Justice (1796) - redistributive
taxation to create a more equal society, and a
complex welfare-state system
• His ideas point towards a later socialism,
although his firm belief in the rights of
property and the benefits of commerce keep
him in the broadly liberal camp