CONTEXTS AND EXPECTATIONS

The preceding, extended comparison of the philosophies of Vico and Hume ended by emphasising difference. Vico had developed in successive versions of his New Science an account of human sociability in which men's actions manifested the guiding hand of divine providence, and from which it was impossible to infer a principle of progress. What Hume elaborated in the Treatise of Human Nature, by contrast, was an account of morality and society as purely human creations, the outcome of a remarkable combination of human nature and artifice. But no less important to the comparison was the identification of common ground between the two philosophers; without this, indeed, the comparison would have had little historical point. Vico and Hume, it was argued, shared a common preoccupation with the Augustinian-Epicurean account of the human condition, according to which men were weak and driven by their passions, to the extent that their pursuit of their own utility was barely compatible with the maintenance of society. Likewise common to Vico and to Hume was the conviction that the problem of unsociability could only be resolved in the course of history, in a process of socialisation. It was on these common foundations – in an important sense Epicurean foundations – that Vico and Hume built their different philosophies; and the same foundations, I now want to argue, provided the platform from which the Enlightenment was brought to Naples and Scotland in the middle of the eighteenth century.

If the primary purpose of this book is to make the case for the Enlightenment as a coherent, Europe-wide intellectual movement, its substance derives from studying Enlightenment's emergence in two distinct, contrasting contexts, the kingdoms of Scotland and Naples. These contexts now need to be evoked and set before the reader. Accordingly the aim of this and the following chapter is to establish the framework from which Enlightenment thinking was subsequently to emerge in the two places. In the present chapter, the focus will be on the political, economic, and social circumstances of the two kingdoms at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in the next, it will be on the structures of intellectual life. Following Bloch's guidelines for comparative history, these chapters will be studies in dissimilarity, highlighting the many, often marked differences between the two countries' political systems, economic condition, and intellectual culture. At the same time, it will be seen that the dissimilarities were not so great as to prevent the historian from observing patterns of convergence in both the political and economic situations and the intellectual interests of the Scots and the Neapolitans. In neither case was the convergence straightforward or exact; but it was sufficient to establish a common ground of experience between the two countries, while enabling thinkers in both to draw on the same intellectual resources.

‘ATHEISTS’ ON TRIAL

There were trials of ‘atheists’ in both Scotland and Naples at the end of the seventeenth century. As so often in such prosecutions, the victims in the two cases were young men. In other respects the trials were markedly different. In Naples the case was complex, protracted, and inconclusive. It began in 1688, when the twenty-one-year-old Francesco Paolo Manuzzi denounced two slightly older acquaintances, Basilio Giannelli and Giacinto Cristofaro, to the Inquisition. By 1690 Manuzzi himself had been arrested, and in 1692, as others were implicated, Giannelli was persuaded to turn his evidence against Cristofaro. Even then the case did not reach a conclusion, since the civil authorities succeeded in taking their objections to Rome; and though the accused suffered varying periods of imprisonment, they were all released by the end of the decade. In Scotland, by contrast, the case was straightforward, the trial and its aftermath mercilessly short. Thomas Aikenhead was charged on 10 November 1696, tried on 23 December, sentenced the following day, and hanged on 8 January 1697, two months short of his twenty-first birthday.

What were the charges against these unfortunate young men? Since in both cases the key witnesses were themselves vulnerable as associates of those on trial, it is all too likely that they said what they thought the respective authorities wanted to hear, rather than accurately reporting the opinions of the accused.

THE SPANISH SUCCESSION CRISIS

By 1700, it has been suggested, Neapolitan men of letters were aware that the currents of scepticism, Epicureanism, and Augustinianism flowing so strongly from France had the potential to transform the understanding of man's place in this world. Scots were slower to appreciate this potential, quite possibly because those responsible for intellectual leadership were reluctant to engage with the new thinking; nevertheless they too were to recognise it eventually. But why should Neapolitans and Scots have become particularly interested in understanding man's place in this world? What made this increasingly their chief intellectual preoccupation? An answer, I shall suggest, lies in the incentive to thought offered by the circumstances of the two kingdoms. Before Neapolitans and Scots turned to systematic reflection on human society and its history, they had already devoted heir intellectual energies to discussion of the specific political and economic problems which they found in their own countries. Prompted by the onset of political, and in the Scottish case also economic, crisis in the late 1690s, both Neapolitan and Scottish observers began to consider the reasons for their countries' predicaments, and the means by which they might hope to escape them. Moreover it was not simply the subject matter of these discussions which pointed the Neapolitans and the Scots towards the more general analysis of the human condition; the debates also served as a testing ground of the existing conceptual resources for such analysis.

The idea of this book had two origins: a remark by Arnaldo Momigliano that Edinburgh and Naples were good places from which to observe the legacy of feudalism in the eighteenth century, and a journey in 1978 through southern Italy in the company of my wife Maxine, my late brother Mark, and Norman Douglas's Old Calabria. The latter's tales of flying monks and the pleasures of ‘reposing at Castrovillari’ were happily confirmed by observation and experience; but gradually I also appreciated the deeper affinity which Douglas felt as a Scot for the Italian south. Waiting the obligatory hours for the bus connection between the railway station for Matera and the city, itself still many miles distant, I was struck by a resemblance between the landscapes of Basilicata and the Scottish Highlands. In colour and natural aspect, of course, they could hardly be more different: by late September the hills of Basilicata are bleached white, turning lunar in appearance. Yet there was a historical, human reality in common: this too was a land once occupied by many more inhabitants, who had laboured for their lords until modern commercial agriculture had made the way of life redundant. In the event, neither feudalism nor the Highlands were to play more than a very small part in the book, and the truth of Momigliano's remark (to which I return only in the conclusion) remains to be properly investigated.

THE QUESTION OF VICO'S ‘CONTEMPORARIES’

Over October and November 1725 Giambattista Vico dispatched presentation copies of his newly published Princìpi di una Scienza Nuova (the New Science) to a number of friends, fellow men of letters, and potential patrons. In the letters which accompanied the book he expressed his hopes for its success, and took the opportunity to point out the targets against whom it was directed. Writing to one of his closest friends among the Neapolitan clergy, the Capuchin Father Giacco (then out of the city for health reasons), Vico contrasted the New Science with his previous works. Those had been written to demonstrate his suitability for the university chairs for which he had been a candidate; now that he had been judged unworthy of such positions, he had been free to write the new book as he chose, for the benefit of the few who were truly wise. With this work, he told Giacco, he felt as if he had dressed himself as ‘a new man’.

Another, much more distant recipient of a presentation copy of the New Science was Jean Le Clerc. In his accompanying letter Vico fulsomely thanked Le Clerc for his review of Vico's previous publications in his Bibliothèque Ancienne et Moderne in 1722; it was Le Clerc's favourable judgement which had encouraged Vico to continue with the new work.

TWO CONTEXTS, ONE ENLIGHTENMENT

In the two very different ‘national’ contexts of Scotland and Naples, it has been argued, there emerged one Enlightenment. More precisely, there emerged in the two countries in the middle decades of the eighteenth century thinkers who saw themselves as members of a wider, European intellectual movement, dedicated to understanding and publicising the cause of human betterment on this earth. In both cases, the terms in which this objective was articulated were those of political economy. To Antonio Genovesi and Ferdinando Galiani in Naples, as to David Hume in Scotland, political economy furnished the concepts required to understand the economic and social predicament of their respective countries. At the same time, the arguments of political economy could be more or less freely aired in print, and thus set before a ‘public’ much wider than the narrow circles of rulers and their ministerial advisers who had hitherto monopolised the discussion of such matters, reserving them to ‘reason of state’. As a coherent intellectual discourse, even discipline (in the sense that it bound its exponents to certain forms of argument), which could also be addressed to the public at large, political economy supplied the terms in which the case for Enlightenment could be made both in Naples and in Scotland. In these two cases, it would seem, we do not need to follow John Pocock in supposing that different contexts fashioned plural Enlightenments.

By the end of the twentieth century, the Enlightenment was beleaguered. In the eyes of many philosophers as well as of a wider, educated public this eighteenth-century movement of ideas was still regarded as having laid the intellectual foundations of the modern world. By its confidence in the power of human reason, its commitment to individual freedom of expression against clerical or royal tyranny, and its optimistic assumption that these were the values that would improve the human condition everywhere, it was believed to have inspired and justified the nineteenth- and twentieth-century achievements of industrialisation, liberalism, and democracy. But this lay-philosophical view of the Enlightenment easily acquired another, darker face. For the Enlightenment was also charged with fostering ideals, of rationalism, universalism, and human perfectibility, to which could be traced the modern world's greatest evils. The charge was pressed particularly by those who held the Enlightenment responsible for the violence of the French Revolution, which followed so quickly upon it. In this perspective it was argued that Nazi genocide, Western imperialism, and Soviet communism all had their intellectual origins in the Enlightenment. Not surprisingly, it became increasingly fashionable to conclude that if this was where the Enlightenment had led the modern world, it was time to repudiate it, and to create a postmodern world on new intellectual foundations. The Enlightenment stood condemned as a misguided ‘project’ to establish a single, universal, rational standard of morality.

FINDING ‘DIVERSION AND IMPROVEMENT’ IN BAYLE

At some point in the spring or early summer of 1729, the eighteen-year-old David Hume experienced ‘a new Scene of Thought’, which inspired him ‘to throw up every other Pleasure or Business’ to devote himself entirely to it. The ‘new Scene of Thought’ was almost certainly the germ of the Treatise of Human Nature. But for reasons he would explain at length in the ‘Letter to a Physician’ of March 1734, Hume was unable to realise the promise of that revelatory moment for over five years. A succession of physical complaints prevented him devoting himself to sustained work; but Hume also observed that his attempts to console himself with ‘peevish Reflections on the vanity of the World & of all humane Glory’ – the shibboleths of Stoic philosophy – had been to no avail. If he found any relief during this period, it was apparently in a work by Bayle, which he recommended to his friend Michael Ramsay in 1732 as ‘a Book you will yourself find Diversion & Improvement in’. What this book was is not known. It may have been the Dictionnaire historique et critique, but it may also have been the collected Oeuvres Diverses, recently published at The Hague in four volumes between 1727 and 1731. It may not be coincidental that during this period Hume also filled what he later described as a ‘Manuscript Book’, in which he recorded the gradual progress of his thoughts (or doubts) on religion.