The concept of natural rights as defi ned by Locke and other political theorists was
enormously important for the eighteenth-century thinkers of the Enlightenment.
They prepared translations, commentaries, and popularizations of works of political
theory, and rights joined reason as a topic for discussion in academies, salons, and
coffeehouses. Denis Diderot, one of the editors of the massive compendium of knowledge
known as the Encyclopédie , contributed to critiques of the slave trade, while the
French mathematician and philosopher Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis
de Condorcet (1743–94), called for broader political representation and the extension
of human (though not political) rights to women, non-Europeans, and Jews. Their
works were read, and ideas accepted, in European communities outside Europe. “All
men are created equal,” wrote Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), in the fi rst words of the
American Declaration of Independence, “endowed by their creator with certain inalienable
rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Enlightenment thinkers also built on Locke’s ideas about the role of experience and
the value of education. The Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume (1711–76)
wrote essays and popular philosophical works he titled “Enquiries,” advocating the
teaching of analytical skills and a wide array of subjects. Hume was a thoroughgoing
empiricist, holding that all ideas are based on experience; ideas about things we have
never experienced come simply from combining impressions in new ways. Because all
we have are sense impressions, we can never really know the substance of anything, and
our “deductions” about the world are really no more than beliefs, ultimately unverifi -
able; nature provided models of probability, not absolute certainty. Hume did argue
that we are all born with a capacity for sympathy toward others and common sense
about the way the world operates and the way we should behave. These “natural” sentiments,
combined with education, will allow us to build ethical political and social systems
whether or not we can know anything for certain. Condorcet agreed with Hume
about the value of education, though he was far less skeptical about people’s ability to
achieve true knowledge and more confi dent about human progress. “The number of
men destined to push back the frontiers of the sciences by their discoveries will grow in
the same proportion as universal education increases,” he wrote in Sketch for the Historical
Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1794), which will in turn lead to “the
general welfare of the human species,” and the “indefi nite perfectibility of mankind.”
Science also provided a ready model for philosophical works. In The Spirit of the
Laws (1748), which many historians see as the single most infl uential Enlightenment
text, Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), sought to construct social
science based on the methods of natural science – experiment, observation, deduction,
and rational inquiry. “The material world has its laws,” he wrote, “the intelligences
superior to man have their laws, the beasts their laws, and man his laws.” Montesquieu
studied governments and societies throughout time and around the globe, trying to
deduce general laws from these empirical observations. He asserted that there was no
liberty and no assurance of rights without law, and decided that the best form of government
was one in which the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of government
were separated and held in balance. Montesquieu’s ideas shaped the writing of
the United States constitution, and in 1811 Jefferson translated a French commentary
on Montesquieu’s text. The Spirit of the Laws was thus infl uential on both sides of the
Atlantic, serving as a foundation for later developments in the writing of history and
the conceptualization of economics as well as the creation of political systems.
While Montesquieu was primarily interested in human laws, others explored the relationship
between God’s laws and those of nature. God had fi rst established physical
and moral laws in creating the universe, but then, in the minds of many Enlightenment
thinkers, he largely left it alone. This idea, called deism, starts with the ideas of Descartes
and Newton, but accords God a much less active role than they did; God was the
clockmaker, in a widely used analogy, and the clock he created was so perfect it never
needed adjustment. The laws of nature would ultimately be discovered, argued many
Enlightenment writers, because God, who had endowed humans with reason, would
not have made a universe so complex that humans could not understand it. Hume went
even further, arguing that our perceiving the world as large and complex does not prove
it was made by an intelligent creator, for it could have come into existence by accident.
God remained far more than a clockmaker in the writings of other Enlightenment
thinkers. Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), a philosopher, biblical scholar, literary critic,
and Jewish community leader in Prussia, accepted Enlightenment ideas about the importance
of reason, using these to develop a Jewish philosophy of religion. Though
he observed traditional religious practices, he was also part of the Haskalah (a Hebrew
word meaning Enlightenment), a cultural movement that advocated reforming
and modernizing Jewish education and ways of life. Mendelssohn also advocated civil
rights for Jews, and produced a new translation and commentary on the fi rst books of
the Hebrew Bible.
SOURCE 28 The Encyclopédie
Written collections of information date back
to ancient Greece and China, but the form of
the modern encyclopedia, with an alphabetic
arrangement, cross-references, many authors,
and bibliographies, was set in the eighteenth
century. Ephraim Chambers, an English mapmaker,
published a two-volume Cyclopaedia, or
the Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, in
1728. It sold very well, and a French publisher
commissioned two close friends, the writer Denis
Diderot (1713–84) and the mathematician Jean
le Rond d’Alembert (1717–83), to begin work on
a translation. This grew into the twenty-eightvolume
Encyclopédie (Encyclopedia or Reasoned
Dictionary of the Sciences, the Arts, and the
Crafts), written by more than 150 contributors
and published over the period 1751–72, with
seven more volumes added later. In his article
about the Encyclopédie itself, Diderot succinctly
captures Enlightenment ideas about the power of
knowledge and the responsibility of each generation
to pass on what it knows:
The purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect
knowledge disseminated around the globe;
to set forth its general system to the men
with whom we live, and transmit it to all
who will come after us, so that the work of
preceding centuries will not become useless
to the centuries to come, and so that our offspring,
becoming better instructed, will at the
same time become more virtuous and happy,
and that we should not die without having
rendered a service to the human race …
We do not know how far a given man can go.
We know even less how far the human race
would go, what it would be capable of, if it
were not halted in its progress …
One consideration above all must not be
lost sight of, and that is that if man or
the thinking, observing being is banished
from the face of the earth, this moving and
sublime spectacle of nature is nothing but a
sad and silent scene … It is the presence of
man that gives interest to the existence of
beings …
I have said that only a philosophical century
could attempt an encyclopedia; and I said this
because this work everywhere requires more
boldness of mind than is normally possessed
in centuries of cowardly taste. One must
examine and stir up everything, without exception
and without cautiousness … We must
trample underfoot all that old foolishness;
overturn barriers not put there by reason;
restore to the sciences and arts their precious
liberty.
(Denis Diderot, “Encyclopedia [Philosophy],” trans.
Philip Stewart, from Encyclopedia of Diderot and
d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, at www.
hti.umich.edu/d/did. Reprinted in Dena Goodman and
Kathleen Wellman, eds., The Enlightenment [Boston:
Houghton Miffl in, 2004], pp. 14, 16, 19, 20.)
Nature not only provided a model for human society, but shaped it, according
to many Enlightenment thinkers. Refl ecting on his observations, Montesquieu
decided that there are three basic types of government: despotisms, monarchies,
and republics. The last, in which leaders are chosen by the people, was the
best, but only possible for people who lived in cold or moderate climates, where
people “have a certain vigor of body and mind, which renders them patient and
intrepid, and qualifi es them for arduous enterprises.” Especially in places with
moderate climate – of which France was the best example – there was “a genius
for liberty that renders every part extremely diffi cult to be subdued and subjected
to a foreign power, otherwise than by the laws and the advantage of commerce.”
By contrast “the effeminacy of the people in hot climates has almost always rendered
them slaves … Power in Asia ought, then, to be always despotic, for … there
reigns in Asia a servile spirit, which they have never been able to shake off …
Africa is in a climate like that of the south of Asia, and is in the same servitude.” 3
This servile spirit extends to domestic relations as well as political ones, for in hot
climates women marry at a young age when “their reason never accompanies their
beauty … [so that] these women ought then to be in a state of dependence.” In temperate
climates, women marry later, so “they have more reason and knowledge at the time
of marriage,” though never so much that they should dominate their husbands, for “it
is contrary to reason and nature that women should reign in families.” Montesquieu
sees dire consequences if Parisian norms for women’s behavior were introduced into
the warmer climates of Asia or Africa:
Let us only suppose that the levity of mind, the indiscretions, the tastes and caprices of our
women, attended by their passions of a higher and a lower kind, with all their active fi re, and
in that full liberty with which they appear amongst us, were conveyed into an eastern government,
where would be the father of a family who could enjoy a moment’s repose? The men
would be everywhere suspected, everywhere enemies; the state would be overturned, and the
kingdom overfl owed with rivers of blood. 4
For Montesquieu, the possibility of liberty based on reason was thus infl uenced by
climate and gender, an idea shared by many other eighteenth-century thinkers, including
Adam Smith. Climate and gender were also related, as can be seen in Montesquieu’s
reference to the “effeminacy” of people in hot climates. European travel literature and
cultural comparisons based on this literature almost always discuss the scanty clothing
of indigenous peoples, which was viewed as a sign of their uncontrolled sexuality. Hot
climate – which we would probably view as the main infl uence on clothing choice –
was itself regarded as leading to greater sexual drive and lower inhibitions. Indigenous
peoples were often feminized, described or portrayed visually as weak and passive in
contrast to the virile and masculine conquerors, or they were hypersexualized, regarded
as animalistic and voracious (or sometimes both). Racial hierarchies became linked
with those of sexual virtue, especially for women, with white women representing purity
and non-white women lasciviousness.
The world’s three zones – torrid, temperate, and frigid – were both climatic and
sexual, with this schema linked to the advancement of civilization. “No people living
between the tropics,” wrote Hume in Political Discourses (1752) “could ever yet attain to
any art or civility.” Hume considered the differences between groups of people more
fully in Of National Characters (1753), and decided that it was not climate alone that
shaped these, but skin color:
I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four
or fi ve different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation
of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or
speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences … Such a uniform
and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had
not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men. 5
Such racist ideas were not especially new, as European Christians and Arabic Muslims
had used African “barbarity” as justifi cation for the slave trade since the fourteenth
century, but Hume rooted his ideas not in religion – whose authority he rejected –
but in “nature.” He described his observations as based on empirical study, the same
methods used by his contemporaries exploring the physical world, but they were not;
Hume spent much time in Paris, but did not leave Europe. In the nineteenth century,
however, scientifi c methods of measuring and experimentation were used to affi rm the
racial differences Hume (and others) posited.
Nature had not only created distinct and permanent differences between the
races for many Enlightenment thinkers, but also between the sexes. Women and
men who were part of the “Republic of Letters” argued about women’s intellectual
capacities, moral virtues, and proper social role. Some, such as Voltaire’s close
friend and patron Emilie du Châtelet (1706–40), who translated Newton’s Principia
into French, held that women’s unequal and limited education was responsible for
women’s lesser contributions in science and philosophy. Condorcet agreed, arguing
that “among the progress of the human mind that is most important for human
happiness, we must count the entire destruction of the prejudices that have
established inequality between the sexes, fatal even to the sex it favors.” 6 Others
were less sure, arguing that women’s lack of achievement was the result of a smaller
capacity for reason, and that men and women were fundamentally different in
their basic natures. Women might have moral superiority to balance their intellectual
inferiority, but the proper sphere for demonstrating that morality was the
private sphere of the family, not the public world of politics. Even Condorcet sees
the primary benefit of treating men and women equally as the “greater happiness
of families, and … the spread of the domestic virtues, the first foundation of all
other virtues.”
The most infl uential voice arguing for women’s and men’s radically different natures
was the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who commented that “a perfect woman
and a perfect man ought not to resemble each other in mind any more than in looks.” 8
Rousseau was born in Geneva, in French-speaking Switzerland, and came to Paris intent
on making his intellectual mark. Success eluded him as a young man, and he grew
suspicious of his philosophe friends and the salon hostesses who supported them. He
also began to doubt Enlightenment belief in reason and progress, attacking rationality
and culture for destroying human freedom and corrupting humanity. In his treatise
Emile: Or, On Education (1762), Rousseau calls for education that removes children
from the corrupting infl uences of cities, and places boys under a wise tutor who will
understand them and guide their interests. Most of the book – which became one of
the most widely read books on education throughout the world – discusses the education
of Emile, the boy at its center, but the last chapter turns to the education of Sophie,
the girl destined to be Emile’s wife. “Woman,” Rousseau declares, “is made specially to
please man … and to be subjugated.” Her education was to focus on purity, virtue, and
“the cares of her household,” though she should gain some knowledge, for “how [else]
will she incline her children toward virtues she does not know?” Rousseau did not use
his own children to test his ideas; he had fi ve, by the illiterate seamstress who lived with
him and whom he eventually married, but he sent them to orphanages.
For Rousseau – as for most early modern political thinkers – marriage was a contract
between partners understood to be unequal. In The Social Contract (1762), written in
the same year as Emile and one of the most infl uential works of political philosophy in
western history, Rousseau also considered contracts more broadly. In contrast to Hobbes
and in agreement with Locke, Rousseau saw early human society as basically good;
in contrast to Locke, and in agreement with Hobbes, he saw it slowly degenerating as
private property increased inequality and competition. At this point, the wealthy and
powerful forced the weak to agree to laws and political structures that reinforced their
dominance. The only way out of this was for individuals to join together in a social
contract, in which they agreed to submit to what Rousseau terms the “general will of
the people.” By this he means not a majority vote, but what the community of citizens
would unanimously agree to if everyone had complete information, good sense, and
public spirit. Objecting to this “general will” would mean someone was putting his or
her “particular will” above the common good, so that “whoever refuses to obey the general
will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body.” Because it is the general will
that assures freedom from the tyranny of one individual or from chaos, this means that
people “will be forced to be free.” Rousseau was clearly not setting out a practical plan
for political change, though his ideas were later used by both democratic revolutionaries
and dictators, all of whom claimed to be representing the true “general will.” Rousseau’s
relationship to the Enlightenment is similarly complicated: some historians see him as a
key Enlightenment thinker and others a strong voice against the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment has been seen as both a liberating movement that resulted in the
revolutions of the later eighteenth century, and an authoritarian movement that justifi ed
racism and European imperial domination. Its legacy is clearly complex. Most Enlightenment
thinkers did not advocate political revolution, but were more concerned on a practical
level with achieving limited civil rights such as freedom of religion or freedom of expression.
Other than a few radicals, Enlightenment thinkers in Europe did not advocate
expanding these rights to non-Europeans, men who were poor and uneducated, or women.
Nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-fi rst-century movements advocating the expansion of
rights to many different groups, however, have found Enlightenment concepts useful.
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