Fire and Light: How the Enlightenment Transformed Our World - Hardcover

Burns, James MacGregor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1250024897 ISBN 13: 9781250024893

Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books, 2013

Synopsis

"With this profound and magnificent book, drawing on his deep reservoir of thought and expertise in the humanities, James MacGregor Burns takes us into the fire's center. As a 21st-century philosopher, he brings to vivid life the incandescent personalities and ideas that embody the best in Western civilization and shows us how understanding them is essential for anyone who would seek to decipher the complex problems and potentialities of the world we will live in tomorrow." --Michael Beschloss, New York Times bestselling author of Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989

"James MacGregor Burns is a national treasure, and Fire and Light is the elegiac capstone to a career devoted to understanding the seminal ideas that made America - for better and for worse - what it is." --Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author Revolutionary Summer

Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian James MacGregor Burns explores the most daring and transformational intellectual movement in history, the European and American Enlightenment

In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns brilliantly illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World, transforming thought, overturning governments, and inspiring visionary political experiments. Fire and Light brings to vivid life the galaxy of revolutionary leaders of thought and action who, armed with a new sense of human possibility, driven by a hunger for change, created the modern world. Burns discovers the origins of a distinctive American Enlightenment in men like the Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and their early encounters with incendiary European ideas about liberty and equality. It was these thinker-activists who framed the United States as a grand and continuing experiment in Enlightenment principles.

Today the same questions Enlightenment thinkers grappled with have taken on new urgency around the world: in the turmoil of the Arab Spring, in the former Soviet Union, and China, as well as in the United States itself. What should a nation be? What should citizens expect from their government? Who should lead and how can leadership be made both effective and accountable? What is happiness, and what can the state contribute to it? Burns's exploration of the ideals and arguments that formed the bedrock of our modern world shines a new light on these ever-important questions.

About this title

About the Author:

JAMES MacGREGOR BURNS is the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox and Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom. He is the author of more than two dozen other books, including The Deadlock of Democracy and Leadership, which remains the seminal work in the field of leadership studies. He is the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Government Emeritus at Williams College and lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1
 
 
The Revolution in Ideas
A century after Martin Luther unleashed the Reformation in Wittenberg, strife between Catholics and Protestants was reaching a terrible climax. The Thirty Years’ War engulfed Europe in brutal and chaotic conflict. Mercenary armies of competing emperors and popes, princes, dukes, and archbishops roamed Europe, pillaging towns and villages and slaughtering civilians. They destroyed food stocks and spread plague. Some regions lost more than half of their population. And even as the frenzy of all-against-all conflict gripped the continent, bloody civil war mounted in England that would end in a king’s execution and rule by Protestant zealots. Many Europeans despaired that the Apocalypse was at hand.
It was in this world of violence and fear that the first, frail lamps of the Enlightenment were lit. The early philosophers witnessed the devastation, testimony to the desperate need for new thinking, for a revolution in ideas about humankind. The question was simple and stark: How could people be secure in their lives, empowered to make choices conducive to their peace and liberty and happiness?
But those early philosophers were scarcely secure in their own lives or free to publish their writings. Apart from the deadly hazards of war, they faced persecution for their ideas. It could come from Catholics or Protestants or, in Benedict de Spinoza’s case, his fellow Jews. It might appear as the wrath of kings or of generals or the fury of a mob intent on lynching. Exile, freely chosen or not, could swiftly become dangerous as political winds shifted and sympathetic rulers changed their minds. The Catholic Inquisition condemned heretics like Galileo Galilei, while the church’s Index Liborum Prohibitorum condemned their works. Censorship operated throughout Europe; any petty dukedom might have its own list of banned books. And it took a brave printer to publish an author whose writings had been denounced publicly as blasphemous and dangerous. The massed attacks of priests and preachers, of traditionalist academics and government officials, meant that some of the most challenging works of philosophers were suppressed or hidden and unpublished in their lifetimes. This left their ideas to the mercies of fate or to loyal, tenacious followers willing to risk their own liberties and lives to bring them to the public.
In its early years, for the Enlightenment to take root and thrive, its leadership and its ideas had to survive.
THE STATE OF NATURE
Few men of the Enlightenment were as disputatious as Britain’s Thomas Hobbes. He provoked controversies in matters ranging from God’s responsibility for the sins of man to fine points of Greek and Latin grammar to mathematics, including his attempt to square the circle. Like so many of the great intellectuals of the age, he was a polymath, putting his stamp on nearly all the cutting-edge issues, with an intellectual leadership characterized as much by the enemies he provoked as by the followers he won. Unlike other Enlightenment philosophers—and here was a prime source of controversy—Hobbes had a remarkably grim view of human nature, one that saw men plunged into a violent anarchy, redeemed only by their power to reason and thus create for themselves safety in civil society. Hobbes indirectly offered reason an exceptional tribute by suggesting it could rescue men from utterly desperate conditions.
Hobbes’s difficult early years fed his combativeness, as well as his bleak view of what men were and how they lived. Born in 1588, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, he was brought up in an impoverished home ruled by his father, a poorly educated, quarrelsome curate who was given more to bouts with alcohol than churchly duties. Excommunicated after slandering another clergyman and facing new charges for brawling in a churchyard, Thomas Hobbes Sr. fled into obscurity. Happily, young Hobbes had a prosperous uncle, a glover able to put his young nephew through Oxford. Hobbes entered the university at the tender age of fourteen.
Shy and sickly, he had to compete with classmates two or three years older, in classes usually taught in Latin. He was no grind, absorbed more by catching jackdaws at his window than by attending dull classes, but he was presentable enough on graduation to be sought out by members of the Cavendish clan, a wealthy and powerful family with grand estates at Chatsworth and Hardwick. Hobbes was hired to tutor William Cavendish, heir to the first earl of Devonshire and only two years his junior, and he remained closely tied to the family for the rest of his long life, eventually tutoring William’s son and heir, serving as an agent in their political intrigues and a propagandist for their causes, becoming virtually a member of the aristocratic family.
The Cavendishes were bulwarks of the monarchy and its Church of England, created after Henry VIII’s rejection of papal authority. For a long time, Hobbes echoed their devotion, but he was motivated not by doctrinal faith, or piety, or self-interest. In an age when the old foundations of authority were being dismantled, he proposed a new, even sterner justification of power: the preservation of order against man’s instinct for selfishness and violence.
Aristotle and two millennia of pagan and Christian followers had held that “the polis belongs to the class of things that exist by nature, and that man is by nature an animal intended to live in a polis.” But for Hobbes, men were not naturally social creatures. The human being was an animal driven selfishly by appetites, by passions, above all by “a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death,” devoted to assuring “for ever, the way of his future desire.” Not naturally social creatures, men sought their own selfish ends at any cost. Their original state was lawless, a “War of every man against every man,” violent disorder, total insecurity, and fear. Far from “contented,” human lives in that state could be nothing but “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Hobbes’s terrifying portrait of the “state of nature” did not rely on the doctrine of original sin, nor was its alternative the city of God. He considered himself a scientist, and, like many of the Enlightenment’s most innovative thinkers, his “natural philosophy” aimed at a unified body of scientific thought, from fundamental principles of matter and motion to geometry, mechanics, physics, to moral and civil philosophy. Hobbes refused to acknowledge theology as a science and ridiculed churchmen who offered authoritative views about God, describing them as a “Confederacy of Deceivers” who endeavored to control men “by dark, and erroneous Doctrines, to extinguish in them the Light, both of Nature, and of the Gospell.” In his own doctrine, “the good,” the summit of ethics classical and Christian, was nothing more than “the common name for all things that are desired” and these were “relative to person, place, and time.”
But while Hobbes showed that men were powerfully inclined to pursue immediate goals, he also believed that they were capable of acting on long-term interests. In the Enlightenment, the highest quality of human beings was not their resemblance to God but their capacity to reason. For Hobbes, reason was what distinguished men from beasts; it gave humans the power to control and guide the passions. It also distinguished civil society from the chaos of the natural state. Men were motivated to join together in a social compact by fear and the desire for self-preservation. They reasoned that by sacrificing an anarchic freedom, they would gain the safety of laws.
Hobbes imagined that civil society was conventional, the product of an agreement among men to submit to government. But given his gloomy view of human nature, how could government achieve its main end, “the procuration of the safety of the people”? As he warned, “Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.” Obedience to the laws, if not given freely, must be coerced. Or as philosopher Alan Ryan summarized it: “The sovereign in effect says to us, ‘If you submit, I will not kill you.’”
Hobbes was no democrat. To allow men a voice in their own government was to invite conflict, factionalism, and perhaps a relapse to the anarchy of nature. For similar reasons, he objected to any group or allegiance that might stand between sovereign and citizen and dilute the latter’s submission to the former. He was suspicious of aristocracies and universities and guilds—even those of beggars—that might challenge the authority of the sovereign.
As for the church, it should be under the complete control of the sovereign power; otherwise it would establish “ Supremacy against the Soveraignty, Canons against Lawes, and a Ghostly Authority against the Civill.” In Hobbes’s commonwealth, it was not private belief that counted but conformity in conduct, a willingness, as political scientist Patricia Springborg put it, “to profess what is commanded” by the sovereign as “commander of the faithful.” Conscience was free, a personal matter, but speech was public and subject to control. “The tongue of man,” Hobbes warned, “is a trumpet of warre, and sedition.”
So dire was the state of nature, he reckoned, that men would sacrifice everything except their lives to escape it. His was a profoundly pessimistic view of men, medieval in its gloom, lacking the faith in human progress that would drive and inspire other Enlightenment leaders. But the medieval church and its philosophers had at least offered the possibility of grace and ultimate salvation. For Hobbes, there was only the eternal struggle against the darkness and disorder that were the work not of the devil but of men themselves, written in their nature. Yet his justification of civil society and his account of its formation by the consent of the governed became cornerstones of Enlightenment thought, adopted by such diverse thinkers as Spinoza and Locke and Rousseau as well as American and French revolutionaries.
*   *   *
Through the Cavendishes, Hobbes had met Francis Bacon, whose proposal of a new empirical science to replace the arid abstractions of medieval scholasticism gave the Enlightenment its characteristic methods of inquiry and reason. Born in 1561, Bacon was well connected in the courts of Elizabeth I and James I and held an array of offices before reaching the pinnacle as lord chancellor in 1618, about the time Hobbes met him and, according to biographer John Aubrey, served as his secretary. Bacon was a lord, a courtier, a statesman, a polymath, yet he had the revolutionary idea that the search for truth began with the humble station of a fact. For millennia scientists and philosophers had trod in the path of Aristotle, beginning with their conclusion, the assertion of a “truth,” and then seeking proofs for it. “In the manner of spiders,” Bacon wrote, they spun “webs from their own entrails.” Science and philosophy had been left to the “blindness of traditions, the swirling bluster of arguments, or the turbulent waves of chance”—to everything but “experience marshalled and well-grounded” in fact. Fact was reason’s raw material, from which the scientist or philosopher could reach more and more general truths, ascending “the proper ladder by successive, uninterrupted or unbroken steps, from particulars to lower axioms, then to middle ones, each higher than the last.” Ultimately, they would arrive at what Bacon considered the grand prize, knowledge of the laws that govern the physical world. And knowledge was power: “the sovereignty of Man lieth hid in knowledge … which kings with their treasure cannot buy, nor with their force command.”
This powerful man did not disdain the gritty work of gathering facts. Indeed, according to a story Hobbes told Aubrey, Bacon died of it. Traveling in a coach through snow one day in March 1626, Bacon suddenly was struck by the question whether “flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in Salt.” Stopping the coach, he went to a poor woman’s house nearby and bought a hen. After the woman gutted it, Bacon stuffed the bird with snow. The outcome of the test is not known, nor has a connection between this experiment, the chill the snow gave him, and Bacon’s subsequent illness been proven. The fact, at least as attested by Hobbes, is that the father of the modern scientific method died two or three days later.
Following Bacon, Hobbes built his own general ideas up from observations and experience, including, doubtless, his own profound fears of violence, dissolution, and death. The battles of the Reformation continued to rage, and in Protestant England, they grew ever more intense, with the threat of aggression by Catholic Spain, the nearly successful attempt in 1605 by Catholic extremists to blow up the king and Parliament, and the rising tensions between Crown and Commons, a power struggle embittered by sectarianism. All this threatened to destabilize Hobbes’s world. In 1640, as Parliament undertook to examine “the prerogative of the king,” Hobbes felt “a disorder comming on” and feared that, owing to his own defense of monarchical power, anti-royalist enemies would persecute him. He found haven in France, where, for a decade, while England exploded into a civil war that climaxed with the beheading of Charles I in 1649, Hobbes enjoyed his most creative period, culminating with the publication of his masterwork, Leviathan, in 1651. A special vellum copy of the book was presented to the late king’s heir, Charles II, also in French exile.
But Hobbes was nothing if not a realist. Leviathan’s description of the religious establishment as a “Kingdome of Darknesse” that seduced men “by abuse of Scripture” made him enemies in Charles’s Anglican circles, as well as among the powerful French clergy, who reportedly sought his arrest. In 1652, Hobbes returned to England, where the old royalist soon enough made peace with Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan Commonwealth. And why not? Cromwell met the two critical conditions of a sovereign—he had the power to protect the people, as Charles over in France did not, and he had the consent of the people, which, even if gained through force and fear, was valid. Even monarchists owed the Commonwealth obedience.
The consistency of Hobbes’s stance failed, of course, to impress the royal court and its clerics after Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660. Though he had come safely back into the Cavendish fold, Hobbes was denounced from the pulpit as an atheist and denied membership in the Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, created by the king after the Restoration. The Royal Society would become one of Europe’s greatest vehicles of enlightenment, a place for leading scientists to discuss experimental results and new hypotheses. But so soon after the Civil War and Restoration, even members sympathetic to Hobbes were inclined to be cautious. They may have respected his ideas, but they feared his notoriety, while Aristotelians and religious conservatives rejected him on principle. Hobbes, naturally, gave as good as—or better than—he got, jeering at the Royal Society’s cult of laborious experimentation, the waste of “the expense of machines of difficult manufacture, just so you could get as far as Hobbes had already progressed.” Why, he asked arrogantly, continuing in the third person, “did you not use the principles he established?”
Hobbes continued to write, argue, and criticize well into his final years. He was ninety when a crisis erupted that was all too reminiscent of the prelude to the Civil War. In 1678, after Charles’s heir apparent...

About this edition

• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1250024897
• ISBN 13: 9781250024893
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400