This is the title of a book by Gertrude Himmelfarb. Why did I try to read it? Well, it’s subtitle is “The British, French and American Enlightenments” and the phenomenon of the Enlightenment fascinates me. I have an anthology of Scottish Enlightenment writings edited by Alexander Broadie and I enjoyed Arthur Herman’s “The Scottish Enlightenment” and Christopher Berry’s “Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment”. The idea of Modernity is also fascinating and I thoroughly enjoyed Stephen Toulmin’s books on that (“Cosmopolis”, and “Return to Reason”). But the other reason was that I read in a newspaper that Gordon Brown, our PM, is a big fan of Himmelfarb’s work and has this particular work on his bookshelf. I’m not sure what makes Gordon Brown tick but he strikes me as a thoughtful man and I wondered what it was about this book that he found appealing.
Well, dear reader, I failed! I gave up. Here’s why………
In the prologue she goes to great lengths to diminish the French. In particular she attacks their Enlightenment agenda of reason, and is quite, quite scathing about Diderot and les philosophes. I found that pretty irritating. OK, I thought, it’s refreshing to read such a different and skeptical view of the French Enlightenment project, but as the pages turned it felt increasingly like she just dislikes the French and French thought and culture. Well, I don’t. I enjoy French thought and culture and their philosophes, but you don’t have to agree with everything an author writes. We can all have different opinions. But then she laid into the Scots, going to great lengths to try and make the case that the Scottish Enlightenment was really just a part of the British Enlightenment (whatever that was!) and going to even greater lengths to claim that the great Scottish thinkers of that time didn’t like to be known as Scots at all but preferred to downplay their Scottishness and claim Britishness instead! (now I see why Gordon Brown likes this!). OK, so she was really losing me now, and we’re still in the Prologue! I kept going though, but didn’t feel any greater affinity with the text.
However, I finally gave up when I got to the American Enlightenment and read –
America was, however, saddled with two problems that Britain was happily spared, the Indians and slavery, both of which proved to be very nearly intractable.
Ouch! Is it just me, or is there something very uncomfortable about that sentence?
She goes on –
For economic if for no other reasons, the displacement of the Indians was the precondition for the very existence of the settlers.
and
What they did have [the settlers] in addition to a clear recognition of their own interests and needs, was a strong sense of their superiority, as human beings, as Christians, and as citizens. “Savages”, in popular parlance, was almost synonymous with Indians….
Is she just unemotionally describing how things were in those days? Or is this a justification for these attitudes?
The problem of slavery was even more formidable than that of the Indians
There was a widespread and deeply held conviction of the ineradicable differences of the races and the inferiority of the blacks.
Now I don’t know if it’s just her style to write in this matter of fact way, but I found this whole section deeply disturbing. And I don’t get it either…..this is a description of some kind of “Enlightenment”? Some kind of “politics of liberty”?
However, I did find her very neat summary of the British, French and American Enlightenments very appealing –
The sociology of virtue, the ideology of reason, the politics of liberty – the ideas still resonate today.
I like that little phrase. I just don’t like this book. I didn’t finish it.
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