The failure of enlightened hopes
THE END OF ENLIGHTENMENT Empire, commerce, crisis
RICHARD WHATMORE 496pp. Allen Lane. £30.
IN MAY 1789 Friedrich Schiller, already well known for his histories of the Dutch Revolt and the Thirty Years War, delivered his inaugural lecture as professor of history at the University of Jena. His subject was the study of world history. He depicted it as a narrative of progress, increasingly secured by international commerce. Enlightened self-interest ensured that the European powers, too heavily armed to risk war, would maintain peace. “The European society of states seems transformed into a great family.”
By the time Schiller’s lecture was published in November 1789, the Bastille had fallen, the Rights of Man and the Citizen had been declared, the French National Assembly had expropriated the Church and Edmund Burke, appalled, was already contemplating the Reflections, in which he would describe the French Revolution as “the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world”. Its subsequent descent into regicide and terror seemed to confirm Burke’s gloomy forebodings and render ridiculous the enthusiasm with which many intellectuals, including Schiller, had initially greeted it. In the essay “On the Sublime”, written at an uncertain date in the mid- or late 1790s, Schiller had changed his mind. He declared that the world, as a historical object, was merely “the mutual conflict of natural forces”, which could never satisfy the ethical demands made by philosophy.
Although Schiller does not appear in The End of Enlightenment, his movement from optimism to disillusionment matches the trajectories of many of the thinkers whom Richard Whatmore discusses. These thinkers are all British, except for the French revolutionary Jacques-Pierre Brissot, who spent several years in Britain and America, and knew such radical thinkers as Catharine Macaulay and Thomas Paine (also prominent in this book). They are united, in Whatmore’s argument, by the reluctant admission that the ideal here attributed to David Hume, “an enlightenment composed of peace, toleration and moderation”, was bound to fail and be replaced by one of numerous possible futures, all of them dark.
Whatmore’s witnesses are dissentient voices in a period when British national self-confidence, especially after the defeat of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, was running high. The Protestant succession was now secure. Landed proprietors coexisted happily with merchants engaged in international commerce (the “landed interest” and the “monied interest”). National prosperity was strengthened by overseas possessions in America (until the War of Independence), the West Indies and ever-larger tracts of India governed by the East I
