Illuminati

A couple of years ago, I read a two-volume work by Peter Gay on the Enlightenment, which is itself a model of undogmatic humanist scholarship and prose. But it got me thinking about a few other Big Topics that seem to be relevant to the political questions of the day, and since then I've been thinking of composing a series of What Is...? studies--such as What is the Enlightenment? What is fascism? What socialism? Capitalism? What is imperialism?

Well, given the scarcity of time, you've got to start somewhere. Therefore, as a kind of a memo to myself and a spur, I've typed up a page from my notes on the chapter on the Enlightenment, the period and the broad philosophical-social movement, in Norman's Davies's workmanlike Europe: A History.

Enlightenment and absolutism: 1650-1789

• The age of absolutism is characterised by a much wider variety of political systems than just absolutism.


• The colonies and colonialism form a backdrop to the period.


• The Enlightenment outlook is distinguished by its emphasis on rational thinking, and an appeal to evidence. It aims to be undogmatic and tolerant. “The light of reason” shines particularly strongly in the fields of science, epistemology and moral philosophy. Rules and patterns in the arts: classicism. The mania for encyclopedias. In religious thought, it is epitomised by deism. In economics, mercantilism and the physiocrats. In political theory, Locke and Montesquieu. The question of historiography: How should history be written? Key figures include Voltaire and the transitional figure of Rousseau.


• Reacting against Enlightenment rigidity and reductionism, Romanticism emphasises the spiritual, the supernatural, the spontaneous; imagination and emotion. Vico, Kant, Haman , Herder.


• This is the period of French supremacy, primarily under the reign of Louis XIV, the sun king (r 1643-1715) in the seventeenth century, whose religious policy turned against the Huguenots and the Jansenists, and who conducted four major wars (the war of devolution; the Franco-Dutch war; nine-years’ war; the war of Spanish succession). In the eighteenth century: stagnation and hunting under Louis the XV; Louis the XVI: before the deluge.


• In the British Isles, it is the time of the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution, the Act of Union with Scotland (1707)—the basis of modern British identity. The Glorious Revolution enshrines parliamentary sovereignty, as against monarchical or popular sovereignty. Charles II lives it up. James II is seen as too soft on the Catholics. William and Mary are invited in. The reign of the Hanoverians: George I, II, III, IV (1714-1830). The American Revolution (1776-83).


• In rest of western Europe in the eighteenth century: the Bourbon kings in Spain and the auto-de-fe; in Portugal, John the priest king and the Lisbon earthquake; in Italy, rivalry between the House of Savoy in Turin, the Habsburgs in Milan and the Duchy of Tuscany: enlightened despotism.


• In central and eastern Europe: the last surge of the Ottomans and the siege of Vienna, along with a revival of Hapsburg fortunes: Maria Theresa and Joseph II, the “crowned revolutionary”; “Josephism” and education of the state elite; the incorporation of Hungary (1687) and the Rakoczy rebellion (1704-11); the rise of Prussia under the Frederiks, especially Frederick the Great (r 1740-86), said to be—nor least by himself—one of the wonders of the age. The expansion and consolidation of Russia (eg down to the Black Sea), especially under Peter I (r 1682-1725), who killed his son and initiated thoroughgoing Westernisation, and Catherine II (1762-96), who was German and killed her husband; succession by palace revolution; the war with Sweden; the construction of St Petersburg; the subjugation of Ukraine and the Hetman State. The decline of Poland-Lithuania.


• The deleterious role of Orthodoxy in the Balkans, as conservative, anti-Western: “none of the great civilising movements that shook the Western world…could effectively penetrate…Political traditions owed little to rationalism, absolutism or constitutionalism; kinship politics dominated at all levels; nepotism lubricated by bribery was a way of life.”


• Mozart.