In Search of Humanity: The Role of the Enlightenment in Modern History

By Alfred Cobban

First published in 1960, In Search of Humanity: The Role of the Enlightenment in Modern History represents an analysis of the decline of moral and political standards in the 20th century in light of their development during the 17th and 18th centuries. Professor Alfred Cobban not only provides a thorough and comprehensible overview of the political ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers, but also illustrates how these ideas are relevant for our own age. Along with discussing the general tenets of the Enlightenment, Prof. Cobban also attempts to demystify some of the myths surrounding the impact that the Enlightenment had on the French Revolution, and political philosophy thereafter. Professor Cobban gives a clear outline of the profoundly classical liberal nature of the Enlightenment, which is the basis of the “humanity” he seeks to re-discover, treasure and cherish. Anyone intending to defend classical liberalism in our time should take heed of the ideas espoused in this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789124620

Alfred Cobban

Alfred Cobban (1901-1968) was an English historian and professor of French history at University College, London, who along with prominent French historian François Furet advocated a Revisionist view of the French Revolution. Born on May 24, 1901 in London, Cobban was educated at Latymer Upper School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Before his professorship at University College, London, he was a lecturer in history at King’s College in Newcastle-on-Tyne. He held a Rockefeller Fellowship for research in France and was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and Harvard University. An editor of History magazine, Cobban also published articles in the English Historical Review, the Political Science Quarterly, International Affairs and other historical and political journals. He also published numerous historical books, including: Burke and the Revolt Against the Eighteenth Century (1929), Rousseau and the Modern State (1934), Historians and the Causes of the French Revolution (1946), The Debate on the French Revolution, 1789-1800 (1950), the three-volume A History of Modern France (1957-1965), The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (1964), Aspects of the French Revolution (1968) and The Eighteenth Century: Europe in the Age of Enlightenment (1969). Cobban died in London on April 1, 1968, aged 66.

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Text originally published in 1960 under the same title.

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IN SEARCH OF HUMANITY

THE ROLE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN MODERN HISTORY

BY

ALFRED COBBAN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

PREFACE 4

PART ONE—INTRODUCTION 6

I—The Problem of the Twentieth Century 6

II—The Decline of Political Theory 12

PART TWO—THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT 19

III—The Rise of Modern Science 19

IV—Cartesianism 28

V—Scepticism 32

VI—The Rise of Toleration 38

VII—Locke’s Theory of Knowledge 48

VIII—The Problem of Good and Evil 53

IX—The Rise of Political Liberalism 65

X—Montesquieu and the Rule of Law 72

XI—The Historiography of the Enlightenment 77

PART THREE—THE ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 82

XII—Materialism 82

XIII—Voltaire and the War on Religion 87

XIV—The French Utilitarians 93

XV—Hume and Philosophie Scepticism 99

XVI—Diderot: Science and Morals 104

XVII—Rousseau 110

XVIII—The Politics of the Enlightenment 120

PART FOUR—THE FRUSTRATION OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT 135

XIX—The Wars of the French Revolution 135

XX—The Rise of Nationalism 145

XXI—The Idea of Sovereignty 155

XXII—Idealism and Pessimism 158

PART FIVE—CONCLUSION 166

XXIII—The Moral Crisis of the Twentieth Century 166

XXIV—The Restoration of Moral and Political Theory 171

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 183

PREFACE

THE term ‘Enlightenment’ is hardly naturalized in English. This is curious, because the intellectual and moral revolution which it describes perhaps obtained its most widespread acceptance and exercised its most lasting influence in Great Britain and the English speaking world. But although the word is not familiar, and is open to some objection, other possible titles are even less happy. Why, for example, should we describe as the ‘Aufklärung’ a movement which had, or so I believe, only a superficial and transient influence on the German mind? Again, we can legitimately concentrate on the eighteenth century as ‘le siècle des lumières’ and give the Enlightenment that title; but at the risk of forgetting that practically all its essential ideas were inherited from the previous century. If we go back to that flowering-time of genius we shall find that it already has a name in the text-books: it is the Age of Reason. And its philosophic rationalism, while in some respects the ally, was also the enemy of the empiricism which was one of the dominant elements in the Enlightenment.

The ambiguities of the term ‘reason’, and the conflict between empiricism and rationalism, is a second source of confusion about the Enlightenment and one of the reasons why it has been the subject of such different and even contrary interpretations. I do not pretend to be in agreement with all my predecessors on this subject. If Hazard’s classic La crise de la conscience européenne would fit in very well with my theme, Taine’s L’ancien régime, Carl Becker’s brilliant Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-century Philosophers, or Professor Talmon’s influential Origins of Totalitarian Democracy represent a fundamentally opposed view; and Cassirer’s ‘Aufklärung’, beginning in Leibniz and culminating in Kant, may seem to trace the history of quite another intellectual development, as indeed it largely does. These differing interpretations partly stem from concentration of interest on the intellectual history of separate countries, and partly from a tendency to exclude, or at least to regard as somehow not part of the general European movement, the development of ideas in Great Britain. It seems to me, on the contrary, that such thinkers as Bacon, Newton, Locke, Hume and Bentham, occupy key positions in the whole evolution of ‘enlightened’ Europe.

This study of the ideas of the Enlightenment does not, of course, claim to discuss the thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a whole. Some of the greatest names in the history of philosophy—Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Vico, Berkeley, Kant—are omitted, because they do not seem to me to belong to my subject. Again, much of the religious thought of the period has no place here: Law, Butler, Wesley, Malebranche, Lamy, Fénelon, Zinzendorf and many others are alien to the story. Even in respect of the Enlightenment proper it has been necessary to concentrate attention mainly on England and France, and on their greater, or more influential, thinkers. It would have been easy to be less selective and to crowd this study with a thick growth of minor writers and forgotten books, but only at the risk of losing the wood for the trees. My object has been to mark out in its main lines what seems to me a dominant, but often misunderstood, feature in the landscape of modern history, not to itemize every stone or blade of grass composing it.

Nor can I pretend that this is history ‘for its own sake’, whatever that may mean. I would not have written it if I had not thought that the subject was important, both for the understanding of the historical development of the modern world and in a particular sense for us today. On the contemporary issues that are involved, impartiality is impossible, and if possible would be undesirable. The major part of the book, however, is an historical study of the ideas of the Enlightenment. A short piece I wrote earlier on the Enlightenment produced the criticism that it seemed cool to this great movement and conscious of its weaknesses. This may be true, and I do not apologize for it. Even if the historian is committed in the present, he need not allow that commitment to blunt his faculties in dealing with the past, particularly with a movement which contributed so much to the creation of critical history.

Although the subject of this book is one which has been in my mind for many years, it was an invitation to lecture at Harvard University in 1958 which gave me the stimulus and opportunity to write it. I must express my gratitude to the Harvard History School for the invitation, to the students of Harvard and Radcliffe, who provided such an enjoyable and easy audience, and to Professor David Owen, the Master, and the Fellows of Winthrop House, in whose hospitable walls the first draft of the book was written.

I am indebted to Dr. Winifred Edington for her assistance in the task of verifying my references, and to the editors of the Political Science Quarterly, The Review of Politics, The Hibbert Journal, Encounter and History for permission to use in a revised form some material that has appeared in articles in their pages. Except where otherwise indicated, translations are by myself.

ALFRED COBBAN

University College London. 1959

PART ONE—INTRODUCTION

I—The Problem of the Twentieth Century

EACH age has many problems, but among them one or another seems in turn to take precedence and to present the major threat to society, or to civilized life, if it is not eliminated. In fact—and this is encouraging—such problems seldom are solved: most often they are transmuted by time, fade into the general mass of difficulties that beset every generation, and under the influence of some obsessive new threat are seen to be no longer as fundamental as was once thought. Boom and slump, inflation and deflation, mass unemployment, over-production and under-production, economic crisis in all its forms, presented the basic problem of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties of this century. In the ‘thirties the economic problem became also a political problem, assuming the menacing shape of totalitarianism. This in turn merged into total war, which in the period since the Second World War has mushroomed into the ultimate threat of the atomic or hydrogen cloud. As we look back on these several crises they melt into one another and are seen to be less separable than we may have thought at the time, as well as less novel. Economic distress, political tyranny, war—though now on a larger scale than ever before—are not new. Basic to them all are not the changing though calculable objective facts but the changeless and incalculable human behaviour that can at any moment give urgency to a perennial danger.

To admit so much is to perform the opening gambit in the familiar manœuvre which begins with a platitude and ends with Original Sin, the most convenient, indubitable and compendious of explanations for all human evils. It has many advantages. Since it came about once for all, and so long ago, we ourselves need not feel more than a vicarious responsibility for it. At the same time, since it is now an integral part of human nature, we can hardly be expected to change it, at least in other people, who make up the majority of the human race. Original Sin, as such or secularized as simple human nature, is the perfect scapegoat for all the ills of society.

If, however, we concentrate our attention on human behaviour rather than human nature, the whole argument changes, for human behaviour has frequently been altered in the past and therefore presumably can be altered again. Thinking in terms of behaviour, and forgetting that elusive thing human nature, we may be less willing to seek salvation only by plunging into those mystic depths in which all remedial action is sunk without trace, and more prepared to conceive the possibility of positive effort to counter current evils. It is not unreasonable to approach our problems from this direction. Economic crises, totalitarianism, war, may or may not be the inevitable consequences of human nature. They may be the product of good or bad, noble or ignoble motives. They may be calculated, or unintended, results of our actions. But at any rate they are all aspects of human behaviour, and we deplore them not because of their varying and suppositious motivation, but because of the effects that flow from them. From this point of view they can fairly be considered together, for not only are they bound together historically but their results are fundamentally the same. Economic crisis meant declining standards of life, destitution, and a kind of suspended animation for masses of the people; totalitarianism meant inter alia the murder, torture, exile, or use as slave labour, of incalculable numbers of human beings; and we should have a fair idea what total war in the form of the hydrogen bomb means. All these add up to the deliberate infliction of pain or death on such a colossal scale that it numbs the imagination. Yet it is only the monstrous proportions that prevent us from recognizing what we dislike in all this as a very simple and common thing. On a smaller scale it would be called cruelty. There may be other reasons for objecting to economic distress, totalitarianism and war, but the major reason why we regard them as such great evils is, I suggest, because they are inseparable from the infliction on a colossal scale of otherwise avoidable pain, suffering and death. This may be a mere emotional reaction, but it is a widespread and influential one and it is probably the determining factor in the identification of our major problems; because if we did not have this reaction we should not necessarily have found these forms of behaviour objectionable, or not objectionable in the particular way in which we do. It may be said that such a supposition is inconceivable; but it would only be so if the feeling of revulsion against cruelty is as much to be taken for granted as we are apt to suppose.

That this assumption needs further consideration could easily be demonstrated from the contemporary world. It was brought to my mind during a short pleasure trip along one of London’s canals, when the helmsman pointed out a family of ducks—a mother and six or seven ducklings scuttling through the water in the prettiest way. There were nine or ten to begin with, he said, and she will be lucky if she rears two of them. He added, apart from those that will die from cold nights and natural enemies, the boys kill them by stoning. It seemed a pity, but for one’s mind to veer to Belsen and Buchenwald was perhaps rather inconsequent. Between killing a baby duckling for pleasure and the murder of six, eight or ten million human beings, the difference is so great that it seems almost indecent to mention them in the same breath. Yet boys, or men and women, have done, or do, both; and one has only to look at popular fiction or films to suspect that many people, even those who would not easily bring themselves to do cruel things, enjoy reading about them or seeing them represented.

The liking for cruelty has come to be regarded as particularly a sexual perversion more or less by historical accident, because it is associated with the name of the marquis de Sade. He enticed young women into his house for the purpose of making scientific experiments, including near-poisoning and flagellation. His was a very mild case and only really notable because he wrote a book to prove that this method of expressing a natural tendency was a good thing. Other books have subsequently been written to show that he was a great if misunderstood moralist. He was undoubtedly rather mad. But the regrettable marquis did not invent sadism, he merely provided it with a name. The Nazi regime in Germany was an exhibition of sadism on a colossal scale, but the scale, not the thing, was new. Cruelty, it must be confessed, is an ingredient in human nature and is to be found in all peoples and at all times.

It is often believed that, say, the Germans, Japanese and Russians, during the last generation, have committed, or acquiesced in, cruelties of such an extensive nature that no other nation could have, or has, been guilty of their like. Yet if, as I have just suggested, a taste for cruelty is so common, why should they be different from the rest of us? The evidence scarcely suggests that they have any monopoly of cruel proclivities. The Nazis had no difficulty in recruiting their torture gangs from the natives of conquered countries. In France the Darnand militia was more feared than the German secret police. The Balts are alleged to have been particularly useful in the extermination camps. The Rumanians outdid the Germans in atrocity when they invaded Russia. The Poles were less efficient in their persecution of the Jews, but they had done their best in the past with slower and more old-fashioned methods. We know about the German concentration camps and the Gestapo. We do not know the death-rate in the forced transfers of population in the Soviet Empire or the number of the victims of the Russian secret police. On the other side of the world, Japanese atrocities during the Second World War are well known: did the Chinese Nationalists and Communists commit none on a comparable scale? Or are atrocities only atrocities when they are committed by the enemy?

But why should this inquiry be confined to the present day? If we go back two or three centuries, the tortures and massacres which have astounded and shocked us so much in recent years would have seemed much more normal and presumably therefore less shocking. Nor need we go to Germany or Eastern Europe, Russia or Asia, for examples. The tortures and massacres in France during the Religious Wars, the still admired proceedings of the Spanish Inquisition, the burning of hosts of unfortunate old women—and sometimes, which was perhaps even more pleasing, young ones—as witches in most Western countries, the ordinary processes of judicial torture—such things, if those involved at any one time were fewer than the victims of the Nazis or Communists, went on much longer and were more a part of normal everyday life. The French Revolution witnessed some tolerably bloody massacres and counter massacres, quite apart from the harvest of the guillotine. What are we to say of Cromwell and his troops in Ireland? Were the Englishmen of those days a different breed from us, with a different nature? It would be a nice question to what extent the use of forced labour in the Soviet Union has exceeded in atrocity or fallen below the English and French exploitation of the slave trade in the past. The only clear distinction I can discover is that the British abandoned the slave trade a century and a half ago, though the Arabs still continue it; the massacres in Ireland took place in the seventeenth century, and the massacres of the Jews and the Russian labour camps in the twentieth.

It is tempting to suggest that this change in behaviour, so far as it has occurred, must be the result of progress in civilization. I hardly think that this view can be maintained in the ordinary sense of the word. For centuries Rome spelt civilization, not by our ideas a very humane one. China, some three centuries ago, might well have been considered the greatest civilization in the world, and the Chinese were famed, rightly or wrongly, as specialists in the art of torture. More recently the Germans, who invented Nazism, reckoned themselves the most civilized of European nations. The United States is technically the most advanced community that the world has ever seen, but the cult of violence is not absent from American life or popular art. In British prison camps in Africa it seems possible that civilization may have been inculcated by beating prisoners to death. If it was ever seriously believed that progress in material civilization necessarily meant a decline in cruelty, that illusion should have been shattered by now.

There may be a suspicion in the mind of the reader that my argument is leading up to some sort of apology for totalitarian excesses. This does not follow from what I have said. What does follow, I think, is that the significant fact that requires explanation is not that all nations have perpetrated cruelties on the grand scale at some time or other, but that some nations have on the whole stopped torturing and massacring people, whereas others apparently have not.

The most profitable line of approach to this problem is to examine a few specific cases to see how and why some national patterns of behaviour have been changed in this respect. For example, why did we stop burning witches? To say that it was because we became more humane is mere tautology: to stop burning witches and doing a lot of other cruel things is to become more humane. The real answer may perhaps be found by asking why we burnt witches in the first place. They were burnt simply because they were, or were believed to be, witches, who by an unholy communion with the Devil had acquired all sorts of dangerous powers. They could make little manikins of their enemies and by mutilating these inflict pains and ills on the persons they represented and ultimately achieve their death. From a distance, by their devilish arts, they could cast diseases on animals, burn down houses, cause children to be stillborn, produce blindness or madness. They stole babies and murdered them for their magical practices. They desecrated all holy things and their covens were conspiracies for the overthrow of all religion and morality.

Various painful devices were the only way of detecting a witch and burning the only safe method of disposing of her. I dare say some, especially the professional witch-hunters, rather enjoyed, as well as profited from, the proceedings; but given the generally accepted facts, the customary methods of dealing with witches, however unpleasant, were logical and necessary. Only when the accepted facts were examined empirically in a scientific spirit and shown to be no facts at all, or misinterpretations of phenomena which had other and more reasonable explanations, did the whole institution of witch-burning break down.

To take another example: French law, like many other legal systems, assumed that the way to discover the truth about a crime, and above all to secure a confession, which was regarded as the only certain proof of guilt, was by torture. This belief in the importance of securing a confession obviously survived in the twentieth century in Russia and Eastern Europe. English law in general did not subject the accused person to torture, but it had an appalling list of capital offences, because it was held that only by savage punishments could crime be prevented. Humane men often lamented the sad fate of criminals or suspected criminals, but alas they knew there was nothing that could be done about it. And nothing was done about it until the eighteenth century, when a great school of law reformers ceased lamenting and challenged the assumptions on which the criminal laws were based. Writers like Beccaria and Bentham simply said: your facts are wrong, this is not the best way of detecting and preventing crime. And when their views were put into practice in reformed legal systems they were proved to be correct.

It is not quite so easy to explain why people stopped burning one another for the sake of the true religion, but at least part of the explanation is to be found in a change of opinion about the facts involved in religious persecution. In the sixteenth century, and largely in the seventeenth also, it was practically a universal opinion that two religions could not exist side by side in the same State without tearing society to pieces. Given the experience of many States this was a reasonable opinion. It was held with such axiomatic conviction that it was only really put to the test when, in France, the Politiques, wearied of incessant bloody civil strife, concluded that even such a risky experiment might be worth making. In due course, after a certain number of false starts, it turned out that it was in fact possible for more than one religion to survive, comparatively peaceably, in the same State. In other words, the facts which were assumed in the theory of religious intolerance were at least in this respect wrong.

In each of the examples I have given, a major step in the direction of increased humanity and a notable decrease in man’s inhumanity to man was the result, in part, of a more correct appreciation of the relevant facts. But of course this new appreciation would not have been found if it had not been sought, and the fact that it was sought suggests that there may be, as well as an inclination towards cruelty, also a tendency in human nature to condemn whatever is regarded as unnecessary cruelty. There is also the implication that, by and large, this tendency is the stronger. This is a reasonable supposition, for if it were not so we should all of us be living all our time in a society no better than Hobbes’s State of Nature, and life would be permanently even more nasty, brutish and short than it is.

Moral and humane tendencies presumably provided the motive force for ethical advance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; but they were only released when the empirical investigation of the facts assumed by systems of organized cruelty eliminated their appearance of rational justification. The consequent great reappraisal of social institutions, which brought down many Molochs of cruelty, was largely the work of the empirical and utilitarian thinkers of Western Europe. They did not discover, as is sometimes implied, that men liked what they liked and disliked what they disliked, and that pain fell into the latter category: this was already known. But they concentrated attention on the newly discovered fact that pain is in itself a bad thing. The systematic theory they erected on this basis had its flaws and limitations; but at least it led men to consider whether all the pain which resulted from the normal processes of society was actually necessary in the interests of some higher end. It was soon concluded that it was not.

This was part of the movement known to historians as the Enlightenment. It brought with it a great change, not in human nature but in judgments about human behaviour. In other words, it effected an ethical revolution. This would hardly have been possible unless, in spite of the sadistic elements in man, there were also a disposition to feel disapproval in some circumstances of acts of cruelty, and to express this disapproval in the form of ethical judgments. Now the peculiar character of these is that they are not, in the last resort, susceptible of proof. If I tell you that it is wrong to drive your car all over the road, you may reasonably ask why. To the answer, because this will involve the risk of injuring or killing harmless passers-by, which would be wrong, you may also ask why it would be wrong, but without any reasonable expectation of an answer except in terms of a restatement in fuller terms of the same judgment.

Ethical judgments, it has been suggested, cannot be proved or disproved, because they are data given by experience and not conclusions. Yet they differ from other facts of experience in one important respect. Every sane person knows that if he puts his hand in the fire he will burn it: there is less general agreement, it seems, on ethical matters. This does not necessarily invalidate the ethical judgment, but it means that the problem of differences in ethical judgment cannot be ignored. How was it that English and French, as well as most other nations in the past, and millions of Germans more recently, could regard as good, actions and policies which now seem to us atrociously wicked? To attempt an answer by hypothesizing great differences in human nature is fanciful as well as unnecessary. What we have to explain, as I have said, is not human nature but human behaviour. Obviously there are those who act under the influence of a more or less insane sadism; but when a whole society appears to be thus perverted, some further explanation is required. Exhibitions of cruelty for purposes for public entertainment have been common but are usually of limited scope. Wanton cruelty, by which I mean cruelty purely for pleasure, though it exists, is normally restricted in the interests of the more important ends of social life, which could not be achieved if the tendency to cruelty were allowed unrestricted play. It may, or may not, have been true in the past, but at least in more recent times social and political measures which involved cruelty of an atrocious nature and on a nationwide scale have had to be provided with the appearance of a rational justification to enable them to win general acceptance.

This is why organized cruelties, when they are part of the mores of a society, are commonly justified on