The discoveries of natural science in the seventeenth century presented a new challenge to Christianity’s hegemony (even though its exponents, from Galileo to Kepler to Descartes to Newton, were devout Christians). They seemed to replace God with man armed with critical reason. Bakunin, who took this emancipation to an extreme, carefully described its philosophical origins:
The awakened intellect, freed from the swaddling clothes of authority, was no longer willing to accept anything on faith, and, separating itself from the actual world, and immersing itself in itself, wished to derive everything from itself, to find the origin and basis of knowledge within itself. ‘I think, therefore I am’. Here is how the new philosophy began in the person of Descartes.
Modern anthropocentrism, situating man in the universal scheme of things, opened up new modes of enquiry. ‘Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night,’ Alexander Pope exulted in 1730. ‘God said “Let Newton be!” and all was light.’ The new empirico-mathematical method seemed to offer a model for analysing everything in secular terms: ethics as well as politics and society, and religion itself.
Indeed, religion was first identified (and weakened) in the eighteenth century as yet another human activity, to be examined alongside philosophy and the economy. The European sense of time changed, too: belief in divine providence – Second Coming or Final Days – gave way to a conviction, also intensely religious, in human progress in the here and now. A youthful Turgot asserted in a famous speech at the Sorbonne in 1750 that:
Self-interest, ambition, and vainglory continually change the world scene and inundate the earth with blood; yet in the midst of their ravages manners are softened, the human mind becomes more enlightened … and the whole human race, through alternate periods of rest and unrest, of weal and woe, goes on advancing, although at a slow pace, towards greater perfection.
Science was to help in the conquest of nature and the overcoming of social evils. The new religion of secular progress was helped by sustained and rapid economic and demographic growth in eighteenth-century Western Europe, especially France. Tocqueville, who ruminated a great deal over why the world’s greatest political revolution erupted in France and not elsewhere, was among the first to describe its intellectual prehistory:
While kings were ruining themselves in great enterprises and nobles wearing each other out in private wars, the commoners were growing rich by trade. The power of money began to be felt in affairs of state. Trade became a political force, despised but flattered. Gradually enlightenment spread, and a taste for literature and the arts awoke. The mind became an element in success; knowledge became a tool of government and intellect a social force; educated men played a part in affairs of state.
These educated men of the Enlightenment who led the revolution in perspectives – the post-religious notion that men make their own world – belonged to a tiny minority of the literate and secular-minded. An anonymous tract ‘Le Philosophe’, which originally appeared in 1743 and was later reissued by Voltaire, summed up their self-image: worldly, witty, freethinking, devoted to reason, and especially contemptuous of the Church. They produced no single doctrine; their views could range from soberly comparativist (Montesquieu) to Voltaire’s militant resolves to crush the ‘infamous thing’ (the Catholic Church) and the technicism of Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie.
But the future belonged to them and their determination to hold nothing sacred in the political and social world, to examine all phenomena in the light of reason, and regard everything as susceptible to change and manipulation through human will and power. The philosophes hoped to apply the scientific method discovered in the previous century to phenomena beyond the natural world, to government, economics, ethics, law, society and even the inner life. As D’Alembert put it, ‘philosophy is the experimental physics of the soul’. Nicolas de Condorcet hoped that science would ensure ‘the indefinite perfectability of the human species’.
In fact, the words perfectibilité and civilisation made their first appearance in any European language in the 1750s. The adjective ‘social’ acquired currency at the same time, pointing to a new secular order, civil society, which was distinct from the state and from religion. Only a few years separated the publication of such major works of enlightened philosophy as Buffon’s Natural History and Condillac’s Treatise on Systems in 1749 and Montesquieu’s hugely influential The Spirit of the Laws in 1748. In 1751 the Encyclopédie began publication, cementing the Enlightenment’s claim that the knowledge of the human world, and the identification of its fundamental principles, would pave the path of progress.
As Diderot asserted, ‘all things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone’s feelings … We must ride roughshod over all these ancient puerilities, overturn the barriers that reason never erected, and give back to the arts and the sciences the liberty that is so precious to them.’ The philosophe was to lead this battle for a secular order. For him, as the Encyclopédie defined this figure, ‘civil society is, in a manner of speaking, a divinity on earth’.
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As always, there were, below the surface of high-minded philosophical arguments against the old God and demands for greater freedom of speech, deeper struggles for power and distinction. For like all modern intellectuals, the particular circumstances of the French philosophes shaped their ideology. (Not accidentally, one of the philosophes, Helvetius, founded the modern theory of ideology: the notion that ideas express the conflicting interests of individuals or groups.)
In this case, the interests of the people Tocqueville defined as ‘commoners growing rich by trade’ moulded new ideas. To these men, who had emerged after a long period of fear and frustration caused by Europe’s religious wars, commerce and prosperity under secular regimes seemed the right antidote to religious fanaticism. The acquisitive and competitive spirit of this rising commercial class also chafed against a religious tradition that had long idealized poverty.
The new class largely felt excluded from the traditional hierarchy despite its frequently superior ability and individual talent. Resentment and envy made the commoners thirsty for rapid and libertarian change. In their eyes, the social and religious order of Western Christendom was a barrier; it had to be demolished, and replaced by a new edifice based on rational principles and scientific knowledge.