There are books that, in the manner of a legal brief, seek to present a
case, by marshalling evidence around a central thesis or ‘claim’. Then there
are books that are more like canvases: they assemble a wide variety of elements
into a hitherto unknown or at least unseen pattern. Roy Porter’s thesis, which
can be pieced together from a few half-sentences repeated at the beginning,
middle and end of this book, is (1) that there was a British
Enlightenment — which was general enough that he dispenses with the need to
address the question of ‘national enlightenments’, particularly the Scottish
and the Irish, in this case — and (2) that the British Enlightenment was the
genuine source, or site, of the creation of ‘modernity’ or modern society, even
“the birthplace of the modern” world (p. 6), as his title indicates. (I note
that the original, British title of the book was both more modest and more
understandable: Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World.)

We can then see that Porter’s book is of the second kind. The problem
is, not everyone can be Foucault in The Order of Things, Blumenberg in The
Legitimacy of the Modern Age, or even Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror
of Nature. To create a hodge-podge of disparate elements one must
nonetheless be quite systematic. Porter leaps wildly, sometimes by analogies,
sometimes because he seems to have composed mini-paragraphs which he then
assembles together, from how the Enlightenment ‘meant’ that “there was quite
literally more light around” (p. 44), which leads him to describe British
advances in the technology of street lighting, to neo-Platonic metaphysics of
light … which he manages to insert in the English context by pointing out that
it was an Englishman who had “actually discovered light, scientifically
speaking” (p. 45), that is Newton. Considering the alchemical interests of a
Newton (and, on the Continent, the Theosophical influences on Diderot), it then
seems naïve, as well as slightly contradictory to the above emphasis on
‘illumination within the Enlightenment’, when Porter bluntly opposes the Enlightenment
to the irrational (pp. 209-210).

Add to this that Porter mainly relies on other secondary sources, in
order to ‘weave’ his tapestry of the British Enlightenment; that he tends to
make unsupported claims such as “the key Enlightenment concept was Nature” (p.
281), which later becomes “the crux of the Enlightenment: are man and Nature
good?” (p. 472)[1], or claims
for the specificity of English thought which seem plainly wrong (Monboddo’s
discussion of the orang-outang is prefigured forty-odd years earlier by La
Mettrie and Buffon; the diffusion of ideas thanks to a thriving print culture
is indeed remarkable, with works such as the children’s book by ‘Tom
Telescope’, The Newtonian System of Philosophy [1761] selling over
25,000 copies — but in France, it is precisely due to royal censorship that
conceptual innovations such as ‘clandestine literature’ emerge); that he
mentions figures abruptly with no reason (Diderot on p. 362); that Francis
Hutcheson becomes Hutchinson (four times on p. 221 alone); that the chapter
divisions are far from obvious, and sometimes redundant (chs. 18 and 19,
“Reform” and “Progress,” appear to be about the same thing; Orientalism and the
status of ‘Europe’ are discussed in a chapter on “Education”; the importance of
‘print culture’ is discussed in almost identical terms in a chapter bearing
this title, and in a chapter on “The Science of Politics”; in the latter,
Porter glosses at length on a quote from Hume on “the people,” despite the
existence of a chapter devoted to this topic entitled “The Vulgar”), and it
becomes difficult to say something truly positive about this book.

Nevertheless, I should return to Porter’s ‘thesis’, to be fair, since it
is a bit more specific than I have described, and it leads him, sometimes
almost accidentally, into some extremely useful capsule discussions of British
moral thought, theology, social reform, etc.

First, Locke is the major source of all Enlightenment, i.e. 18^th-century,
trends. The narrative runs from Locke, Collins and Clarke at the beginning of
the 18^th century to Joseph Priestley and Erasmus Darwin at the turn
of the 19^th century. And this ‘British’ Enlightenment was crucially
influential on the better-known Lumières across the Channel: witness
Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques ou Lettres anglaises (1733), Diderot’s
early career as a translator of Shaftesbury, and of course the origin of the Encyclopédie
in a projected translation of Chambers’ Cyclopaedia.

Second, since “Enlightenment in Britain took place within, rather than
against, Protestantism” (p. 99), with a laicized clergy and a ‘rationalized
religion’, it cannot be adequately described by means of a traditional
‘Left-Right’ divide: Hume wants emancipation from religious authority within
the political status quo, whereas the Dissenter Richard Price wants radical
political freedom in the name of Providence. Swift is a critic of
metaphysics and Catholicism, and a political conservative. Porter
rephrases the point concerning Hume several times, in interesting ways: “Hume
wanted not to outrage readers but to reconcile them to the actualities of human
emotions, beliefs and conduct, and to guide them to social usefulness” (p.
178); “Hume’s conservative politics were as distasteful to Priestley as his
flippant unbelief” (p. 407).

Fundamentally, this is again a Lockean theme: religion is itself
rational, thus it would be irrational to deny it. So, e.g., atheists
deny the very foundation of order. “In Britain […], thanks to the Newtonian
synthesis, natural philosophy remained remarkably in tune with the rational
Christianity of the moderate Enlightenment” (p. 138). Even one of the few
self-proclaimed materialists in Britain, David Hartley, “framed his materialist
psycho-physiology in terms of an overarching Christian theology: materialism
could nowise be the road to atheism, precisely because […] God, in his wisdom,
endowed matter with all its powers” (p. 182).

Third, “distinctively British enlightening strategies” (p. 22) flow from
this seemingly less radical but also more practical context. One can hear this
different context when the Manchester cotton manufacturer and Dissenter Thomas
Walker declares: “The rule is not ‘let all mankind be perpetually equal’ — God
and nature have forbidden it. But ‘let all mankind start fair in the race of
life” (quoted by Porter, p. 423). No radical reform, then; indeed, the phrase
‘Enlightenment’ was used pejoratively in England to designate the radical
pamphleteers on the Continent who attacked the solid Church tradition which
England lived by: “The true Christian will never be a Leveller, will never
listen to French politics, or to French philosophy”! (Arthur Young, An Enquiry into the State
of the Public Mind (London: Richardson, 1798), p. 25.) Champions of freedom in England exulted in the
“sacred” Constitution and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which preserved a
legitimate monarchy (p. 193).

In a ordered Newtonian universe, politics did not entail a
destruction of order, but rather the affirmation of cosmic harmony, which
integrated the appetites of individuals qua atoms into a social
equilibrium, e.g. through Smith’s impartial spectator and invisible hand. To
mention Hartley again, determinism itself was viewed as confirming the chain of
causes, both physical and moral, and hence of God’s empire. Providentialism
gives way to probabilistic thinking.

           Fourth, Porter often alludes to a
mysterious connection between the new emphasis on and revalorization of
self-interest in the understanding of society and the economy, i.e.,
liberalism; the passions; hedonism in ethics; sensationalism in psychology; the
emancipation of women. All of this coalesces into a specifically British “moral
economy” (p. 16) which Porter terms “individualism.” He never provides a clear
explanation for these interrelations, but one can learn a good deal from his
summaries of each of these.

           Roughly, the idea is that starting
with Hobbes and Mandeville, a model of social reform which does not take
account of the realities of human nature is perceived as unavoidable, regardless
of how much these authors were attacked. In what Porter calls a
“psychologization of ethics,” Shaftesbury and Hutcheson integrate pleasure into
the moral frame: “the Enlightenment’s great historical watershed lay in the
validation of pleasure” (p. 258). With Hume and Smith, the status of the
passions shifts and sympathy comes to the fore. Put differently, if one takes
Lockean sensationalism as a starting-point, human nature will be approached
from a ‘motivational’ rather than ‘normative’ standpoint. This leads to
hedonism in ethics, and then by extension, to a notion of free economic
activity: if each individual knows his or her own pleasure, s/he will freely
seek it in the free market.

           Mandeville had shown how the most
naked egoism could be ‘tamed’ or channeled into a “peaceful and profitable
means for the fulfillment of wants” (p. 174). Hutcheson, when distinguishing
between violent and tranquil passions, had placed “the calm desire of wealth”
among the latter; Hume added that “self-interest is the original motive to the
establishment of justice”; “avarice” is the “spur” to civil liberty. (Hutcheson, quoted in A.O. Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests,
p. 65 ; Porter, p. 388. Hume,
Treatise 3.2.2, quoted by Porter, p. 199; “Of Civil Liberty,” quoted by
Porter, p. 250.) Porter quotes Josiah
Tucker: “Self-Love is the great Mover in Human Nature” (p. 263). In sum,
“Kantian categorical imperatives found their English counterparts in a hedonic
calculus” (p. 482). If happiness is put at the forefront of ethics, and it is
defined in terms of pleasure and pain, from Locke to Bentham, the result is
utilitarianism: “The English ideology, voiced through Lockean psychology, […]
utilitarianism and political economy, promoted refined hedonism and enlightened
self-interest within consumer capitalism” (p. 265).

           It is this fourth point which is
probably the most novel in Porter’s account; as an idea, it can be found in any
number of works, from Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests to
Macpherson’s The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. But
Porter extends the analysis deep into social and cultural history, in keeping
with current trends. I have not been able to similarly present his useful
discussions of the social context of Newtonianism in England, or, even more,
his discussions of natural theology in the pre-Darwinian era, from Locke to
Priestley. Such passages in the book are quite clear and well documented, and
indeed, the general bibliography is all by itself an impressive resource; but,
as noted above, there are too many flaws in this book to be able to recommend
it without great reservations.

© 2002 Charles Wolfe

Charles T.
Wolfe, Dept. of Philosophy, Boston University.