The Enlightenment has fallen on hard times in recent years. It is true, of course, that the modern West is to a large extent a product of the Enlightenment. Our liberal democratic politics, our market capitalist economies, our embrace of technological progress and scientific inquiry, our toleration of religious pluralism – all were inspired or encouraged by the Enlightenment. As Paul Hazard declared many decades ago, “Rich and weighty as were the legacies bequeathed to us by old Greece and Rome, by the Middle Ages and by the Renaissance, the fact remains that it is the eighteenth century of which we are the direct and lineal descendants.”¹ Yet there is widespread agreement across much of today’s academy that Enlightenment thought falls somewhere on the spectrum from hopelessly naive and archaic to fundamentally and dangerously misguided. On both the Left and Right, the Enlightenment is routinely associated with a hegemonic form of moral and political universalism, a blind faith in abstract reason, and a reductive and isolating focus on the individual, among other sins. My aim in this book is to contest these charges through a recovery and defense of a central strand of Enlightenment thought that I call the “pragmatic Enlightenment.”

While numerous thinkers throughout eighteenth-century Europe could be included in this category, I focus on four of the leading figures of the period: David Hume, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. These thinkers, I argue, exemplify an especially attractive type of liberalism, one that is more realistic, moderate, flexible, and contextually sensitive than many other branches of this tradition.²Some forms of liberalism that emerged during the Enlightenment, such as Lockean contractarianism, Kantian deontology, and Benthamite utilitarianism, were highly idealistic in character, grounded in first principles such as the immutable dictates of natural law, the rational (and therefore categorical) requirements of human dignity, or the universal imperative to maximize the greatest good for the greatest number. In contrast, the liberalism of Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire was far more pragmatic, in many senses of that term: it was grounded in experience and empirical observation instead of transcendent or a priori first principles; it addressed practical human concerns rather than aiming to satisfy abstract standards of right derived from God, Nature, or Reason; it was flexible in its application and attentive to the importance of historical and cultural context; and it favored gradual, piecemeal reform over the pursuit of perfection or the imposition of strict requirements for legitimacy. Thus, the outlooks of these four thinkers demonstrate that “pragmatic Enlightenment” is far from a contradiction in terms.³

This defense of the pragmatic strand of Enlightenment thought is meant in part, but only in small part, as a response to Jonathan Israel’s recent vindication of what he calls the “Radical Enlightenment.”⁴ Throughout his weighty tomes, Israel argues that “from beginning to end” the Enlightenment was “always fundamentally divided ... into irreconcilably opposed intellectual blocs,” the Radical Enlightenment and the “moderate mainstream,” and he consistently champions the former.⁵ In fact, much of his intellectual energy is devoted to unmasking and criticizing the moderate Enlightenment, including the four thinkers who are the focus of this book, for its intellectual modesty and social conservatism. Taken together, Israel’s books constitute the most ambitious and comprehensive attempt to come to terms with the Enlightenment since the work of Peter Gay – perhaps since the Enlightenment itself – and his breadth of knowledge is extraordinary. However, I disagree profoundly with his basic claim that the neat “package” of Radical Enlightenment ideals that he derives from Spinoza, Bayle, Diderot, and others (but that none of these thinkers embraced in its entirety) is the only truly coherent and emancipatory philosophical outlook, and conversely that the moderate Enlightenment, with its doubts about the power and scope of human reason and its compromises with the existing order, was ultimately a blind alley and a source of oppression.⁶

The main target of this book, however, is neither Israel nor his Radical Enlightenment but rather the Enlightenment’s (many) critics. The Enlightenment was condemned in some circles almost from the moment of its inception, and since World War II the opposition has emerged with renewed vigor and from nearly every direction, uniting liberals and conservatives, pluralists and communitarians, postmodernists and religious fundamentalists.⁷Indeed, Darrin McMahon summarizes the current climate well when he remarks that “Enlightenment bashing has developed into something of an intellectual blood-sport, uniting elements of both the Left and the Right in a common cause.”⁸ While the Enlightenment is criticized from a wide variety of perspectives and for a wide variety of reasons, the main lines of criticism can be grouped into three broad categories:

1. Hegemonic Universalism. One of the most pervasive criticisms of the Enlightenment in recent years relates to its supposed belief in the existence of universal, ahistorical, transcultural truths in morality and politics. It is widely assumed that Enlightenment thinkers were either unaware of or dismissive of the historical and cultural differences among peoples and beliefs, and that this renders their outlook utterly implausible and dangerously exclusive.

2. Blind Faith in Reason. Another prevalent charge leveled against the thinkers of this period is that they believed reason could do anything and everything. Critics have long contended that the key to the Enlightenment outlook was an overconfidence – many have said “faith” – in reason’s power and compass. This charge is often accompanied by the claim that the Enlightenment outlook entails a naive belief in progress, a conviction that the spread of reason will inevitably produce a corresponding advance in human well-being.

3. Atomistic Individualism. A final major criticism is that the Enlightenment focused on individuals and rights rather than communal ties and duties, thereby undermining the moral fabric of the community. By ignoring the shared values and attachments that give meaning to people’s lives, the critics claim, the Enlightenment outlook reduces people to self-interested, rights-bearing atoms and thereby makes a healthy community impossible.

A closer look at these critiques will have to wait until the following chapters, where we will see that for each of these vices that are attributed to the Enlightenment, Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire – all of whom are central to the Enlightenment on any plausible understanding of its meaning – actually exhibited the contrary virtue. Far from adopting a hegemonic form of moral and political universalism, they emphasized the importance of context in the formulation of moral standards and adopted a flexible, nonfoundationalist form of liberalism. Far from having a blind faith in reason, they continually stressed the limits and fallibility of human understanding and advocated a cautious reformism in politics. And far from promoting atomistic individualism, they saw people as inherently social and sought a healthier and more reliable way to unite them than the traditional bonds of blood, religion, and nationalism, which they found above all in commerce.

Before turning to a more detailed examination and defense of these four thinkers, however, it may be helpful to situate my broader argument within the present state of Enlightenment studies. Most contemporary scholars of eighteenth-century thought concur that the “Enlightenment” that is so reviled by its critics is often a gross caricature of the actual ideas of the period. The recent boom in scholarship on this period has produced a number of valuable works that aim to defend certain aspects of Enlightenment thought or to reclaim individual Enlightenment thinkers, which I will have the advantage of drawing upon in making my own case. Nevertheless, my approach runs against the grain of contemporary Enlightenment studies in several respects.

To begin with, many historians of the Enlightenment now regard the study of the leading figures of the period – a small canon of almost exclusively male thinkers – as unacceptably elitist. Beginning with the work of Daniel Mornet in the early twentieth century, and continuing with such leading scholars of the period as Robert Darnton, Daniel Roche, and Roger Chartier and the Annales school, historians have tended to focus on the social milieus in which Enlightenment thinkers lived and wrote and on the diffusion of their ideas, to the almost total exclusion of the ideas themselves.⁹ Much attention has been paid to the rise of sociability and the public sphere – academies and salons, coffeehouses and cafés, debating societies and Masonic lodges, the book industry and Grub Street – while far less has been paid to the arguments of the leading thinkers of the period. Indeed, alongside the move toward what the historians proudly call the “low” Enlightenment has come a kind of scorn for the “high” Enlightenment of the leading thinkers; Roy Porter derisively calls these latter thinkers the “superstars” of the period and suggests that we move beyond conceiving of the Enlightenment in terms of “periwigged poseurs prattling on in Parisian salons.”¹⁰

As a work of political theory, however, this book will necessarily focus on the so-called high Enlightenment – indeed, the very highest of the high Enlightenment. This is not to deny the historical importance or intrinsic interest of the “low” Enlightenment, of course, but in terms of significance for the present, it is the ideas of the period – and the leading exponents of those ideas – that matter most. The Parisian salons, Grub Street pamphleteers, and international book industry may have helped to propagate the liberal values that we in the modern West have inherited from the eighteenth century, but it is the values themselves that concern us today. As Robert Wokler has argued, when historians of the Enlightenment disdain the study of the ideas and leading thinkers of the period, they thereby abandon the legacy of these ideas and thinkers to the Enlightenment’s critics.¹¹ It is for its ideas that the Enlightenment is attacked, and so it is by its ideas that it must be defended.

Those scholars who do focus on the ideas and leading thinkers of the eighteenth century, for their part, commonly deny the very existence of the Enlightenment as a coherent movement. As James Schmidt and others have emphasized, the term “the Enlightenment,” used to designate a specific period and movement of thought, did not arise until the late nineteenth century, and the growing consensus among scholars of eighteenth-century thought seems to be that this term – particularly in the singular, with the definite article and a capital “E” – has become analytically useless and even harmful, insofar as it serves to paper over the great diversity of thought in this period.¹² As Schmidt writes, “the explosion of eighteenth-century studies over the last several decades has had one notable consequence: an incredulity towards generalizations about ‘the Enlightenment.’”¹³ Thus, many scholars now insist that it is only in the plural that the many different “Enlightenments” of the eighteenth century can be understood properly. The leading advocate of this perspective is probably J. G. A. Pocock, who contends that the process of Enlightenment “occurred in too many forms to be comprised within a single definition and history,” and so “we do better to think of a family of Enlightenments, displaying both family resemblances and family quarrels (some of them bitter and even bloody).”¹⁴Pocock is far from alone in holding this view, however: most political theorists and philosophers who specialize in eighteenth-century thought now concur with Sankar Muthu’s conclusion “that ‘the Enlightenment’ as such and the notion of an overarching ‘Enlightenment project’ simply do not exist” and thus that “it is high time ... that we pluralize our understanding of ‘the Enlightenment’ both for reasons of historical accuracy and because, in doing so, otherwise hidden or understudied moments of Enlightenment-era thinking will come to light.”¹⁵

Here I agree in part, but also disagree in part. There is no question that the Enlightenment was a multifaceted, diverse movement; I myself am focusing primarily on one strand of Enlightenment thought – the pragmatic Enlightenment of Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire – which I distinguish throughout from other strands, above all those exemplified by Locke, Kant, Bentham, and some of the more radical philosophes. On the other hand, the larger claim that the Enlightenment simply did not exist seems to me to go much too far. It is important not to miss the forest for the trees here: the presence of diversity within a movement does not render it any less of a movement, and the existence of national, ideological, or other subgroups does not mean that the broader category “the Enlightenment” does not exist. (Do the differences between Luther and Calvin render the very notion of a Protestant Reformation unintelligible?) Nor must such a category encompass every thinker and idea in the eighteenth century. Critics of the idea of the Enlightenment often argue that, since there are no principled grounds on which to choose one set of thinkers or ideas over another, the term “Enlightenment” should be used strictly as a temporal adjective to designate the entirety of the period.¹⁶ Yet this would render the term superfluous, since the period designation alone would suffice for this purpose. It seems to me more sensible to narrow the scope and to ask instead whether a certain kind of thinker or a certain set of widely shared principles and values can plausibly be said to make up the Enlightenment.¹⁷

One powerful reason to suppose that it is possible to identify the Enlightenment in this manner is that many of the leading thinkers of eighteenth-century Europe saw themselves as part of a collective enterprise. As Wokler observes, there was a widespread sense in the eighteenth century of “shared principles, a campaign, an international society of the republic of letters, a party of humanity.”¹⁸ Indeed, one of the most striking features of the Enlightenment was the deliberate, self-conscious nature of the movement – the awareness, on the part of its proponents, of a broad set of shared goals and of their distinctive place in history. Even Pocock concedes that many eighteenth-century thinkers “were aware ... of what they and their colleagues and competitors were doing – aware even of their historical significance, to a degree itself new in European culture – and the metaphor of light (lumière, lume, Aufklärung) is strongly present in their writings.”¹⁹ As the prevalence of this metaphor suggests, even if the term “the Enlightenment” did not yet exist in English in the eighteenth century, it did exist in some form in French, Italian, and German, and the idea was certainly present in Britain and America as well.²⁰ Nor were the proponents of the Enlightenment alone in ascribing to themselves a common identity: their enemies too saw them as a single group.²¹

What, then, did the Enlightenment outlook consist of? A conclusive or comprehensive answer to this question is probably impossible, but the definition offered by John Robertson – one of the relatively few contemporary scholars to embrace the idea of a unitary Enlightenment – constitutes a reasonable starting point: “the commitment to understanding, and hence to advancing, the causes and conditions of human betterment in this world.”²² A number of broadly liberal principles and values generally followed from this desire to improve the human condition in the here and now, including support for limited government, religious toleration, freedom of expression, commerce, and humane criminal laws.²³ Indeed, I would submit that those eighteenth-century thinkers and groups who diverged from these broad liberal ideals, to the extent of the divergence, also diverged from the Enlightenment.²⁴Of course, there were important differences even among those who supported these ideals. To borrow the concept made famous by John Rawls, the Enlightenment can be conceived as an overlapping consensus in which the members of the movement all supported a number of basic liberal ideals but did so in different ways, and for different reasons. For example, some Enlightenment thinkers, such as Locke, promoted these liberal ideals on natural law or natural rights grounds; others, such as Kant, grounded them in the requirements of human dignity; still others, like Bentham, based them on the imperative to maximize utility; while yet others, including Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, advocated these ideals on nonfoundationalist grounds. Moreover, the various ways of grounding these ideals frequently led to differences in the character of the liberalism espoused by different Enlightenment thinkers. For some, liberalism was a radical or even revolutionary outlook, while for others – including, again, the four thinkers who are the focus of this book – it was a more moderate and reformist one. Similarly, the liberalism of some Enlightenment thinkers was highly individualistic in conception, rooted in individual rights, choices, and interests, while that of the pragmatic strand of the Enlightenment was much more insistent on the social nature of human beings and concerned with the character of the community.

Thus, while the Enlightenment’s critics commonly assume that Enlightenment thought necessarily appeals to universal moral and political foundations, that it necessarily places a great deal of confidence in the power and scope of abstract reason, and that it necessarily rests on individualistic premises, I show that the pragmatic Enlightenment does not fall prey to any of these charges. This is an absolutely crucial strand of the Enlightenment, at that: Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire are each every bit as central to the movement as are thinkers such as Locke and Kant. Hume and Smith are almost universally seen as the two towering thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the importance of the Scottish Enlightenment for the Enlightenment as a whole is now well established. Hume was, in the judgment of many, the greatest philosopher of the eighteenth century – or at least the greatest rival to the “sage of Königsberg” – and even the greatest philosopher ever to write in the English language. Partly for this reason, Alfred Cobban dubs him “the philosopher, par excellence, of the Enlightenment,” and Peter Gay casts him as the signature “modern pagan” in his study of the period.²⁵Smith, for his part, has long been recognized as the leading theorist of commercial society in the eighteenth century; indeed, Wokler claims that The Wealth of Nations is “perhaps the most influential of all Enlightenment contributions to human science.”²⁶ Moreover, Smith’s philosophy as a whole is now starting to be appreciated for the achievement that it was, and we will see that his writings exemplify many of the key ideals of this pragmatic strand of the Enlightenment.

Similarly, Montesquieu and Voltaire were plainly two of the leading figures among the French philosophes. Given Montesquieu’s enormous influence not only in France but also in Scotland, North America, and beyond, Gay concludes “after due deliberation and with due consideration for the claims of potential rivals” that “Montesquieu was the most influential writer of the eighteenth century.”²⁷More recently, Thomas Pangle has proclaimed that The Spirit of the Laws “towers as the most ambitious expression of the Enlightenment political philosophizing that lays the principled basis for our liberal republican civilization.”²⁸Yet even Montesquieu cannot rival Voltaire for the sheer extent to which he was and is associated with this period; indeed, the Enlightenment is sometimes referred to as “the Age of Voltaire.”²⁹While Voltaire’s thought has garnered strikingly little attention from political theorists and philosophers in recent years, Friedrich Nietzsche calls him “the man of his century,” and Isaiah Berlin dubs him “the central figure of the Enlightenment.”³⁰So great was Voltaire’s influence during the eighteenth century that John Adams, in Paris as the American ambassador to France, gave voice to the widespread worry that the “republic of letters” was in danger of becoming a monarchy.³¹ To repeat, these four thinkers by no means make up the whole of the Enlightenment; I make no claims to comprehensiveness in these pages. Still, these thinkers are all sufficiently central to the movement that any critique of the Enlightenment that does not apply to any of them stands in need of immense revision, if not of being discarded altogether.³²

Nor were Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire alone, among Enlightenment thinkers, in adopting a generally pragmatic outlook; many others did so as well. Any list is bound to remain incomplete, but other candidates for membership in this strand of the Enlightenment would include, for example, d’Alembert, Condillac, Condorcet, and Diderot in France; Adam Ferguson, John Millar, and William Robertson in Scotland; Edward Gibbon, Samuel Johnson,³³ and Josiah Tucker in England; Gotthold Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, and Christoph Wieland in Germany; and Cesare Beccaria, Ferdinando Galiani, Antonio Genovesi, and Pietro Verri in Italy.³⁴ Of course, it is neither possible nor desirable to divide the thinkers of the period into a number of discrete and rigidly defined groups that are set in opposition to one another; the various strands of the Enlightenment are, like the Enlightenment itself, bound to have blurry edges. I only mean to stress here that Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire were far from outliers, and that the pragmatic strand of the Enlightenment includes not only these four leading figures but also a host of others.

The obvious question arises: Why has the Enlightenment been so widely and so persistently seen as rigidly universalist, dogmatically rationalist, and narrowly individualist, given that such key figures of the period as Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire – among many others – controvert each aspect of this caricature? Answering this complex historical question fully would likely require at least a book of its own, but a few preliminary suggestions are possible here. One source of this caricature, surely, is the Enlightenment’s perceived relationship to the French Revolution. During the revolutionary period and the succeeding years, both the proponents and the critics of the revolution had a vested interest in depicting philosophes such as Voltaire (and, to a lesser extent, Montesquieu) as adherents of the revolutionary ideology – the proponents in order to claim the authority of the philosophes for their cause, and the critics in order to demonstrate that the crisis was brought on by a relatively small cabal of instigators, rather than by fundamental and deep-seated problems in the ancien régime.³⁵The reputations of Hume and Smith, on the other hand, were distorted in the opposite direction: they were read as narrow conservatives, even reactionaries, by those who wished to save them from association with the revolution.³⁶ In other words, the supporters of Hume and Smith sought to distance them from the Enlightenment (which they associated above all with France) and its presumed radicalism and rationalism. As a result, the narrative that the revolutionary generation handed down to posterity tended to exaggerate the divergences between the leading philosophes, on the one hand, and the preeminent Scottish thinkers, on the other, making what were mostly differences in tone and temperament seem like crucial differences in substantive ideals. More broadly, the Enlightenment itself came to be associated with revolutionary notions of universal natural rights and the triumph of reason, rather than with the kind of moderate, flexible liberalism that was characteristic of so many of the leading figures of the period.

A more recent, but equally conspicuous source of the Enlightenment’s reputation for universalism, rationalism, and individualism has been the staggeringly disproportionate scholarly focus on Kant as the chief representative of the period. Kant is regularly taken to be the prototypical Enlightenment thinker, for several reasons. First, he wrote a famous essay answering the question “What Is Enlightenment?” that is conveniently (although inappropriately) taken as the definitive account of what the Enlightenment stood for.³⁷Second, Kant has arguably exerted greater influence over contemporary moral and political philosophy than any other canonical thinker; the many followers of Rawls and Habermas, for example, are far more likely to appeal to Kant as their intellectual forebear than to thinkers such as Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. Finally, the Enlightenment’s critics tend to find this focus on Kant congenial, for, as James Schmidt notes, his “emphasis on the themes of universalism, autonomy, and self-legislation, is tailor-made for critics seeking to arraign the Enlightenment on the familiar charges of arid intellectualism and abstract individualism.”³⁸ Yet Kant represents only one strand of Enlightenment thought, and far from the dominant one, at that; to equate the Enlightenment with his outlook is to miss much of what it stood for.³⁹

Connected with both of these points is perhaps the most fundamental reason for the prevalence and persistence of the caricatured view of the Enlightenment: because the Enlightenment did so much to inspire and encourage liberal values, practices, and institutions, critics of liberalism from across the political spectrum and from the eighteenth century to the present have sought to portray the thinkers of this period as rigid universalists, dogmatic rationalists, and narrow individualists in an attempt to color the way liberalism itself is viewed. From Rousseau to Foucault and from Maistre to MacIntyre, those who have found liberal principles or societies wanting have almost invariably laid much of the blame at the Enlightenment’s doorstep. The critics seek to render their attacks on liberalism all the more comprehensive and conclusive by showing that the alleged shortcomings – the undermining of community and religion, the injustices of capitalism, the ills wrought by modern science, and the rest – are not incidental or avoidable aspects of liberalism but rather inherent in its very origins. As we will see in the following chapters, liberals from Tocqueville to Rawls have, for whatever reason, proven all too willing to distance themselves from the Enlightenment and thereby, in effect, to abandon its legacy to the critics. When these liberals accept or even embrace the damning depiction of the Enlightenment advanced by the critics, they not only make an interpretive mistake but also thereby cede the argumentative high ground. Indeed, it is precisely because our conception of the Enlightenment so deeply colors our views of liberalism and the modern West that it is crucial for us to understand it for ourselves rather than allow our views to be shaped by phenomena such as the politics of the French Revolution, the scholarly fascination with Kant, and the biases of liberalism’s critics.

While critics tend to denounce the Enlightenment in fairly broad strokes, among those who do single out specific thinkers or groups, many focus on those who fall outside the pragmatic strand of the movement, such as Locke, Kant, Bentham, or the more radical philosophes, or even on pre-Enlightenment thinkers such as Bacon, Descartes, or Hobbes.⁴⁰ Thus, my responding to their criticisms through an examination of Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire may seem to miss the mark. Yet we will see that many of the critics do include these four thinkers, explicitly or implicitly, in their charges. Moreover, even for those who do not, the main purpose and effect of their criticisms are to color our view of the Enlightenment as a whole – an issue that is not, I would suggest, merely academic. Given all that we have inherited from the Enlightenment, its legacy is necessarily of great importance for us. Just as our understanding of the American founding (Lockean liberal or classical republican? Christian or secular? “We the people” or a conspiracy of the propertied elite?) influences the way we view the contemporary United States, our understanding of the Enlightenment forms an important part of how we view liberalism and the modern West. If all strands of Enlightenment thought did in fact have the rigidly universalist, dogmatically rationalist, and narrowly individualist character that the critics ascribe to it, then it might very well make sense for us to disown it, as they urge. If, however, at least one central and influential strand of the movement does not fall prey to these charges, then perhaps today’s liberals should turn to their Enlightenment origins with a more open and sympathetic mind than they have often done in recent years. Perhaps, indeed, the Enlightenment still has something to teach us.

In the remaining chapters of the book I examine the political theory of Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, broadly construed to include their views on human nature, morality, and commerce, as well as some features of their attitudes toward epistemology, science, and religion. This is not, however, a comprehensive study of their political thought. I say little in these pages about their views on international relations, including their (almost uniformly hostile) attitude toward empire and colonialism, in part because this topic has been well canvassed by others.⁴¹I also largely omit discussion of their views on race, ethnicity, and gender. There is no question that these thinkers occasionally expressed views on these scores that are deplorable by today’s standards – Voltaire’s anti-Semitism, Montesquieu’s “Orientalism,” Hume’s infamous racist footnote – but, contrary to the claims of some of the Enlightenment’s critics, these views were not integral to their thought. After all, it is easy to find passages in their works that are nearly the opposite of racist or Eurocentric,⁴² and many of the retrograde statements that they did make were put forward in the service of other aims⁴³ or represented a deviation from their broader outlook.⁴⁴ Moreover, all four of these thinkers were vigorous opponents of religious intolerance, colonialism, slavery, and the oppression of women.⁴⁵

While this book seeks to defend the pragmatic strand of the Enlightenment, it does not adopt an entirely uncritical view of Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. However sympathetic to them one might be, there is no need to suppose or pretend that these thinkers were without faults. In addition to holding some views that no reasonable person of the twenty-first century would accept, such as Voltaire’s casual disdain of the ignorant masses, we will see that these thinkers sometimes contradicted themselves, they sometimes failed to live up to their own ideals, and they sometimes fell short of resolving the problems they addressed. My aim is not to show that there is a flawless and comprehensive worldview to be found in the writings of these thinkers, or that the pragmatic Enlightenment somehow contains the hidden keys to solving all of today’s problems. Rather, I seek to demonstrate that the outlooks of these leading Enlightenment thinkers were far more compelling than the caricature presented by the critics of this movement, and that they still have a number of important lessons to teach us.

The six substantive chapters of the book focus on the three broad criticisms of the Enlightenment mentioned earlier, with two chapters devoted to each one: Chapters 1 and 2 address the Enlightenment’s supposed hegemonic universalism, Chapters 3 and 4 address its alleged blind faith in reason, and Chapters 5 and 6 address its perceived atomistic individualism. Chapter 1, “Morality in Context,” shows that, far from positing a universally applicable set of moral standards, Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire all held that moral standards can, do, and should vary according to context. While the moral theories of Hume and Smith were far more developed and sophisticated than those of their French counterparts, all four of these thinkers sought to ground morality in the sentiments and evolving communal standards rather than in the dictates of God, transcendent natural law, or Kantian universal reason. For these thinkers, morality begins with the sentiments, but it is developed through sympathy and other forms of social interaction. Thus, the way in which moral standards are formulated may be the same everywhere and always, but the content of morality – what actually counts as moral – is in large part socially determined, and so differs in different contexts. Needless to say, this view does not entail complete moral relativism: these thinkers saw the morality that originates in people’s sentiments as “real” and binding, which means that individuals are subject to moral standards that they do not choose in any direct or immediate sense. Thus, there is an element of indeterminacy or cultural relativism inherent in their view, but also a basis for moral standards that place limits on what individuals can morally do.

In Chapter 2, “Pragmatic Liberalism,” I argue that while these four thinkers were all liberals, broadly speaking, their liberalism was quite pragmatic and flexible in terms of both its basis and its implications. They adopted a nonfoundationalist approach to politics, concluding that liberal practices and institutions are preferable not because they are in accord with Reason or Nature – as Locke, for instance, had done – but because historical and comparative analysis revealed them to be relative improvements on the alternatives. Nor did they rely on a single standard or benchmark in making these comparisons: sometimes they lauded liberal regimes and practices for the personal freedom they afforded, while at other times they lauded the security they provided, the happiness they produced, the prosperity they made possible, and/or the character traits they encouraged. Moreover, none of these thinkers believed in a perfect, single best, or uniquely legitimate form of government. On the contrary, they stressed that different laws and practices are appropriate for societies with different circumstances, histories, customs, and so on, and they essentially set aside the notion that there is a specific set of criteria that all regimes must meet in order to attain legitimacy. To repeat, this does not mean that these thinkers had no political principles or preferences, but rather that their liberal principles and preferences were sufficiently flexible that they did not insist on (or even allow for) a single set of institutions or a comprehensive view of the good life that would be applicable in all times and places.

Chapter 3, “The Age of the Limits of Reason,” demonstrates that, despite the moniker “the Age of Reason” that has been affixed irrevocably to this period, the leading Enlightenment thinkers I examine all stressed the limits of human reason. Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire all advocated relying on observation and experience rather than a priori first principles, mocked rational “systems” and system builders, and stressed the fallibility of human understanding. Thus, their conceptions of reason were far humbler than those of the great rationalist thinkers of the seventeenth century such as Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz, and even those of some earlier empiricists such as Hobbes and Locke. Further, while they saw the scientific method as the best way to compensate for the limits of the human mind, they denied that it could provide conclusive or complete knowledge of the natural world. They certainly welcomed the practical advances that the natural sciences afford, but by no means did they think science could solve all human problems. Finally, while these thinkers all rejected the claims of revealed religion and devoted great amounts of intellectual energy to condemning religious fanaticism and intolerance, their basic stance toward religion was actually quite moderate, especially in comparison with the more radical philosophes such as La Mettrie and d’Holbach. They all regarded the inclination to believe in a higher power as natural in some sense, and they aimed to moderate or “liberalize” religion – to restrain its most dangerous impulses and consequences and to encourage its more beneficial ones – rather than to eradicate it altogether. Nor did they believe that reason could conclusively disprove the claims of revealed religion; on the contrary, their skepticism regarding religion was simply a manifestation of their general skepticism regarding any claims of absolute certainty. In all of these ways, the pragmatic Enlightenment was decidedly a limits-of-reason movement – hence my reversal of the traditional moniker of this period in the title of the chapter.

Chapter 4, “The Perils of Political Rationalism,” extends the argument of Chapter 3 to the political sphere. It is widely claimed that Enlightenment thinkers embraced a kind of political rationalism, meaning that they advocated subjecting all laws, institutions, and practices to the withering light of reason, and discarding those found wanting by its standards. I show, however, that Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire all adopted a practical, pragmatic outlook that supports the reform of existing institutions but opposes efforts to form a wholly new “rational” order from scratch. To be sure, none of these thinkers was simply an advocate of the status quo. They did want to “change men’s common way of thinking,” to borrow Diderot’s famous line from the Encyclopédie,⁴⁶ and to push their societies in a broadly liberal direction, but they did not insist that these reforms must be made all at once, or that the political and legal slates must be wiped clean in order to make room for a more liberal order. Further, these thinkers were deeply and manifestly – one wants to say instinctually – antiutopian. None of them believed that progress toward liberal practices and institutions was in any way inevitable or could possibly be endless or uniform. They believed in progress in the sense that they thought the Europe of their time constituted an improvement in many respects over what had gone before it, but they did not believe in any kind of supernatural agency, transcendent design, or Hegelian dialectic that meant that it had to be better than what preceded it, or that the future would be better still. They were far too realistic, too alive to the shortcomings of even their comparatively enlightened age, to be dupes of the sort of faith in the “historical process” that came to enthrall later generations of thinkers.

The fifth chapter, “The Social and Encumbered Self,” shows that these thinkers did not adopt the individualistic and reductive assumptions about human nature that communitarian critics often attribute to the Enlightenment. First of all, Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire were unequivocal in affirming that human beings are inherently social – drawn to others not just for instrumental reasons but also out of an innate desire for companionship. Hence, they all rejected the idea of a social contract made by otherwise isolated individuals: they denied that there ever was a presocial state of nature, and they envisioned political institutions as having arisen spontaneously and gradually over time, more from necessity and habit than consent or contract. Moreover, they concurred that people’s characters, beliefs, and values are fundamentally shaped by their circumstances and their communities, rather than somehow developed in a vacuum. (To use Michael Sandel’s terms, they saw human beings as invariably “encumbered” rather than “unencumbered” selves.) Far from demanding a strong form of moral autonomy, they argued that it is only in and through society that people become moral beings at all. In short, these thinkers did not see people as abstract, self-interested atoms at their core; on the contrary, they consistently saw people as fundamentally interdependent, not only economically and politically, but also morally and psychologically.

Chapter 6, “Negative Liberty for a Positive Community,” demonstrates not only that Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire did not seek to promote atomistic individualism with their political and economic ideals, but that they sought to do precisely the opposite. They did, of course, adopt a largely “negative” conception of liberty, where liberty means protecting the individual from interference from and dependence on others. They did so, however, not because they held an implausibly “unencumbered” view of the self, because they dogmatically insisted on the inviolability of natural rights, or because they wanted to reduce people to self-interested atoms who have no connection to others or to the community at large. Rather, they advocated negative liberty because they saw clearly the dangers inherent in communities that are dedicated to shared ends and “higher” purposes, above all coercion, exclusion, and intolerance. For this reason, these thinkers would see the pitting of the individual against the community as a false dichotomy: by focusing on the protection of the individual, they were seeking to reduce the conflict produced by the pursuit of consensus and thereby safeguard the community. Similarly, these thinkers supported commerce and economic freedoms not in order to encourage unbridled greed and selfishness, but rather in hopes of finding a healthier way to unite people than the traditional bonds of blood, religion, and nationalism. They recognized that extensive commerce might be incompatible with strict republican virtue, but they also believed that a focus on material self-interest would help to replace dangerous and divisive passions such as xenophobia, religious intolerance, and the thirst for military glory. In their view, rather than atomizing people, commerce draws them together, leading not only to greater prosperity but also to greater concord and civility by making people and nations interdependent. In a word, their support of negative liberty and commerce was not a support of atomism and selfishness; on the contrary, they supported negative liberty and commerce precisely because they saw them as prerequisites of a healthy community.

The Conclusion summarizes some of the lessons, both historical and normative, that emerge from an examination of the pragmatic Enlightenment of Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. On the interpretive front, such an examination serves to challenge not only those who criticize the Enlightenment for being overly universalist, rationalist, or individualist, but also those who would posit a deep divergence – even diametrical opposition – between the French and Scottish Enlightenments, as well as Jonathan Israel’s recent defense of the “Radical Enlightenment,” over and against the “moderate mainstream.” Most of all, though, it serves to remind us that the types of liberalism that we have inherited from Locke, Kant, Bentham, and other “idealistic” Enlightenment thinkers were not the only ones to emerge from this period, and that a more moderate, flexible variety of liberalism too is as old as the Enlightenment. The book concludes with some reflections about why I find this latter strand of the liberal tradition to be a particularly attractive one.