Brooks on the Enlightenment

In yesterday’s New York Times David Brooks proposed made an interesting suggestion.

My second guess is philosophical. Kristol wrote in a time when intellectuals saw themselves as heirs to the Enlightenment, by which they meant the French Enlightenment. They put their faith in a rational elite and a moral avant-garde that would champion justice, virtue and equality by leading social and political revolutions.

But Kristol was drawn to the other Enlightenment: the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment, led by Lord Shaftesbury, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. This was a more prosaic Enlightenment, which was hostile to passionate politics. The leaders of the Scottish environment hoped that progress might come gradually and organically — if individuals were given the liberty to develop their own responsible habits and if they themselves built institutions to guide them on their way.

Talk of the Scottish Enlightenment is common enough but it is relatively unusual to come across the Enlightenment being discussed in this way.  I find it interesting for the following reasons.

• Not all intellectual thought in the (extended) 18th century fell into the revolutionary or reactionary camps.  A great deal of it was evolutionary, seeking to adapt what had gone before to the new circumstances.  This seems to dissolve a false dichotomy.
• It places those who were constructively sceptical of the more radical Enlightenment ideas firmly in the Enlightenment tradition.
• In some ways this is unfortunate as it blurs a convenient distinction that simply associated the Enlightenment with the radical ideas associated with the French revolution.  One of the most radical ideas of all is the daft conceit that modern industrial secular society has achieved some kind of Enlightenment.  By widening and accepting a more generous idea of Enlightenment this story—attacking the conceit and everything it stands for—gets spoiled.
• On the other hand sticking with the current scheme probably encourages the false dichotomy at the heart of Jane Austen and the war of Ideas, and deeply embedded in our intellectual culture, that all thought must follow the fault lines of the culture wars and be classified as either radically progressive or reactionary conservative.

Peter Knox Shaw pushed back against Butler’s reactionary thesis in Jane Austen and the Enlightenment (JASNA review).  We have had a fruitful exchange a couple of years ago on the history text that the Austen family would have used and has just gotten back in touch again to let me know of his latest (which I will report on here as soon as I get a chance to catch up on this).  So I am very pleased to find a way of thinking about the issue that helps me to better appreciate his important insight.