The Enlightenment and Enlightened Despotism

This is Unit Six of Western Civilization Two, part one of two: the Enlightenment and enlightened despotism, the exam's fourth band. Unit five ended with describing giving way to discovering. This unit applies the method to everything else, and its governing idea, which part two pays off, is a paradox: a movement that meant to reform monarchy strengthened some monarchs and dissolved the ground under all of them. The philosophes rejected superstition and tyranny but almost never monarchy; their politics were muted; the despots who read them reformed administration and kept their power, and three of them carved up Poland. Yet once legitimacy rested on fair laws and privilege had to be deserved, the society of orders had lost its reasons. Sample question three, Wollstonecraft, lives in this part and is worked in the next. By the end you will be able to define the movement and its cause. To describe where it happened. To describe eight thinkers. To explain its muted politics and its rights. To describe three despots and their limits. And to describe Poland's partitions and the disruption that came anyway.

Four entries on what the movement was: Kant's definition, the anchor's century, what the philosophes rejected, and Newton as the cause.

Dare to know.

WC2 0501 Kant's Question: What Is Enlightenment?

In seventeen eighty-four Kant answered his own question: enlightenment is release from self-incurred tutelage, the courage to use one's own understanding without direction from another. Sapere aude, dare to know, is the motto. Historians keep his name for the movement while rejecting the idea that it was one self-conscious campaign. Part two reads the essay.

Four beliefs we owe the century.

WC2 0502 1688 to 1789: Reason Applied to Everything, and What We Owe It

The anchor's dates run from the Glorious Revolution to the French. Reason was applied to science, philosophy, morality and society, and four modern beliefs date from it: limitless scientific progress, equality before the law, government by rational laws for the public interest, and a physical universe knowable by science. Each is a claim the exam tests; the dates are convenient, the anchor says.

Few atheists, one republican.

WC2 0503 Superstition, Deism, and Tyranny: What the Philosophes Rejected

The philosophes rejected superstition, miracles and transubstantiation, and kept a remote creator: deism. They rejected tyranny, arbitrary rule indifferent to subjects' welfare, but almost none rejected monarchy; the ideal was an enlightened king under reasonable laws, with Britain after sixteen eighty-nine the model. Few atheists, many church critics, one republican, Rousseau.

Laws of nature, laws of human nature.

WC2 0504 Newton as Cause: Laws of Nature, Laws of Human Nature

The anchor says the Enlightenment begins with the Principia of sixteen eighty-seven. If nature ran on immutable rational laws, human nature must too, and the philosophes set out to find them: how people learn, how government should be designed, why people deviate from reason. Reason was the faculty ordering sensory data, universal and inherent. The witness calls Newtonianism the Enlightenment's foundation.

Three entries on where it happened: a reading public and the novel, coffee houses and salons run by women, and a network that reached a glassworker.

A public that argued in print.

WC2 0505 The Reading Public, the Novel, and the Vernaculars

Urban literate classes grew: the bourgeoisie, and artisans and petty merchants schooling their sons. A book market, official and pirated, fed them; the novel became the century's fiction; newspapers and cheap print made a public sphere; and state vernaculars spread far from the capitals. By the seventeen eighties a generation argued politics in official French. Literacy stayed a minority.

Unlimited coffee, and women who ran the rooms.

WC2 0506 Coffee Houses and Salons: Women as Moderators

English coffee houses charged an entry fee, poured unlimited coffee, mixed the classes and stocked the periodicals. French and Central European salons were aristocratic, philosophes reading their work aloud, and in most cases led by women, whom the anchor calls the best moderators, Madame Geoffrin its illustration. Women ran the rooms; philosophes still wrote against them as peers.

A glassworker who drank with Rousseau.

WC2 0507 The Republic of Letters, From Philosophes to a Glassworker

Parallel to the republic of science ran a republic of letters: correspondence, manuscripts, reviews. Cheap print carried it down the social scale; the anchor's example is Ménétra, a Parisian glassworker whose memoir claims he drank with Rousseau. A network with its own momentum, in Kant's phrase. Ménétra is anchor-only; the point is reach, not the anecdote.

Eight entries on who said what: Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, du Châtelet, the Encyclopedia, Hume, Smith and Rousseau.

The founder, with Newton.

WC2 0508 Locke: Revocable Sovereignty and the Blank Slate

Locke, born sixteen thirty-two, stands with Newton as the Enlightenment's founder: sovereignty granted by the people and revocable, toleration because religion is inherited and no one holds exclusive truth, and the mind a blank slate, so a rationalized education can perfect society. Unit five's white-paper passage is the exam's Locke quotation. The anchor's thirty-seven is corrected.

Liberty as structure.

WC2 0509 Montesquieu and the Separation of Powers

The anchor never names Montesquieu; the witness does. In The Spirit of the Laws of seventeen forty-eight he argued for a constitutional government with powers separated among legislative, executive and judicial branches, an idea the American framers adopted with enthusiasm. Liberty as a matter of structure, not virtue. This entry rests on the witness texts, not the anchor.

Wit, and an invented God.

WC2 0510 Voltaire: Wit Against Injustice, and His Ambiguities

Voltaire, born François-Marie Arouet, is arguably the single most influential philosophe in the anchor's judgment: novels, poems, wit against superstition and injustice, and interventions for the unjustly convicted. He also doubted human improvement and thought the masses needed a God; if God did not exist, he wrote, one would invent him. The witness adds two years at Frederick's Potsdam.

Newton in French.

WC2 0511 Émilie du Châtelet: Newton in French

Émilie du Châtelet, who died in seventeen forty-nine, wrote on physics, mathematics, the Bible and happiness, and made the annotated French translation of the Principia that carried Newton into the Enlightenment. Accepted in the republic of science, she was Voltaire's companion. The witness names her a leader; the translation is the anchor's, and it is the anchor's link between the two movements.

Twenty-eight volumes, pirated.

WC2 0512 The Encyclopedia, 1751: Diderot, d'Alembert, and Pirated Chapters

Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie began in seventeen fifty-one and, the witness says, ran to seventy-two: twenty-eight volumes and sixty thousand articles by the anchor's count, most by other philosophes, organized to refute church and state knowledge and to catalog every trade. Too expensive for most, it spread in pirated chapters. The counts are the anchor's.

No miracles, and no faith in the crowd.

WC2 0513 Hume: Against Miracles, and Against the Common People

Hume, of the Scottish Enlightenment at Edinburgh, held miracles invalid in an orderly universe and a personal God a primitive fear; the witness adds that passion, not reason, governs behavior, and that there are no innate ideas. The anchor stresses his contempt for commoners: philosophes did not champion ordinary people's political rights. The exam tests the miracles.

Newton applied to markets.

WC2 0514 Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations and the Invisible Hand

Adam Smith, also of Edinburgh, published The Wealth of Nations in seventeen seventy-six, the witness's first work of modern economics: a mostly free market yields growth and near-universal prosperity, monopolies and tariffs obstruct it, and an invisible hand aligns private gain with public good. With Ricardo, the founder of classical economics: economics as rational, knowable law.

The general will.

WC2 0515 Rousseau: The General Will and the Contrarian Enlightenment

Rousseau won an essay prize about seventeen fifty by attacking civilization as a corrupt facade, and made the general will the source of sovereignty, citizens devoted to it and to their morals; the witness adds that authority lies in the consent of the governed. Sparta was his model, which the anchor calls inaccurate and anachronistic. The Revolution's ideological basis, the anchor says.

Four entries on what the movement did and did not attack: censorship and muted politics, Beccaria against torture, rights and the women left out, and the smugglers' underground.

Muted in intent.

WC2 0516 Censorship, Pseudonyms, and the Muted Politics of the Philosophes

Official censorship ran nearly everywhere, so philosophes used pseudonyms, illegal presses and smugglers, and salons as safe spaces and financiers. They attacked egregious injustices of kings and churches but, skeptical of commoners, advocated only a better monarchy and flattered enlightened monarchs. Political implications, in the anchor's phrase, surprisingly muted; disruptive in effect, as the last entry of this part shows.

Torture barbarous and useless.

WC2 0517 Beccaria, 1764: Crime, Punishment, and the End of Torture

Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments of seventeen sixty-four argued that the state must protect the life and dignity even of the accused, that rich and poor should face the same laws, that prevention matters as much as punishment, and that torture is barbarous and useless. Several monarchs banned torture, and justice was rationalized over decades. The anchor's Cesare Bonesana is Beccaria.

The women left out.

WC2 0518 Human Rights, Abolition, and the Women Left Out: Wollstonecraft, 1792

Rationalism plus a new sensibility of shared humanity produced the rights of man: abolitionism, torture and slavery reconceived as injustice. Women were left out. Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman of seventeen ninety-two demanded the Revolution's liberating promise for them; the witness: women, like men, rational beings. The anchor's chapters disagree on the year; the course uses ninety-two.

The smuggler as distributor.

WC2 0519 The Radical Enlightenment: Freemasons, Smugglers, Pirated Books

Historians' term for ideas too scandalous for the mainstream, atheism above all: Freemasonry's lodges for male elites, illegal publishers in the Netherlands and Switzerland, banned works, dumbed-down pirated Encyclopedia articles, attacks on Christianity, pornography. The underground made mainstream ideas accessible to far more people. Radical describes the ideas' distance from the mainstream, not a program.

Five entries on the despots: the pattern, Frederick, Joseph, Catherine, and what none of them did.

Enlightened means, despotic ends.

WC2 0520 Enlightened Despotism: Efficiency Without Surrendering Power

Monarchs attracted to the new ideas read them as efficiency: rationalized bureaucracies, codified law, education, religious toleration where it cost nothing. None renounced power; some eased serfdom on royal lands. The anchor's phrase for the pattern is enlightened despotism, and the exam's three are Frederick, Catherine and Joseph. Enlightened describes the means; despot describes the end.

Voltaire's host.

WC2 0521 Frederick the Great: Voltaire's Host, Serfs Freed on Royal Land, Exams for Office

Frederick the Second, king from seventeen forty, read and wrote French, kept a salon, and hosted Voltaire for two years until they quarreled. He freed serfs on royal lands, banned the most onerous noble dues, and staffed a rationalized bureaucracy by formal examination. German, he reportedly said, was for horses. Exams opened limited mobility; serfdom on noble land stood.

The reformer who went furthest and lost.

WC2 0522 Maria Theresa and Joseph II: Reform From Vienna

The anchor names Joseph the Second only as Maria Theresa's co-ruler, so the witness supplies his reign: full legal freedom extended to serfs in seventeen eighty-one and eighty-two, the Church made a tool of the state, and reversal under landlord pressure after his death. At ease with Enlightenment ideas, the witness says. His reforms rest on the witness texts, not the anchor.

Correspondent of philosophes, ruler of serfs.

WC2 0523 Catherine the Great: Correspondent of Philosophes, Ruler of Serfs

Catherine corresponded with the philosophes, patronized Enlightenment art and learning, expanded the bureaucracy, reorganized the provinces and broadened officer education, and wrote plays and memoirs celebrating Russia. Her enthusiasm cooled after seventeen eighty-nine. Nobles' privileges expanded and the vast majority stayed serfs; nothing to do with democratic impulses, the anchor says.

Efficiency accepted, legitimacy never questioned.

WC2 0524 The Smolny Institute, the Limits of Enlightened Rule, and What the Despots Did Not Do

Catherine's Smolny Institute was Russia's first girls' school, training compliant wives in the anchor's ironic reading. Its point is the pattern: enlightened rulers reformed administration, education and justice, and left serfdom, noble privilege and their own absolute power intact. The irony is the anchor's; the school is the record.

Three entries on Poland and the disruption: three partitions, why a kingdom could be taken, and why the elites' Enlightenment exploded anyway.

Three slices, three dates.

WC2 0525 The Partitions of Poland, 1772, 1793, 1795

Prussia, Austria and Russia divided Poland in seventeen seventy-two, the anchor's date, and the anchor then jumps to Poland extinguished by ninety-five. The witness gives three partitions, seventy-two, ninety-three and ninety-five, the initiative Frederick's and the leading role Catherine's. The exam's bullet, and the three dates are its answer; the middle one rests on the witness.

A veto that paralyzed a diet.

WC2 0526 Why Poland Could Be Partitioned

The anchor calls Poland-Lithuania a state in rapid, painful decline and stops. The witness explains: an elective monarchy, a nobility whose veto paralyzed the diet, and a Russian empress who became the kingdom's protector in seventeen sixty-eight before dividing it. The one state on unit four's map too weak to survive. This entry rests on the witness texts, not the anchor.

Disruption beyond intent.

WC2 0527 Why the Enlightenment Was Disruptive Despite Its Elites

Philosophes rarely attacked the hierarchy they belonged to, and only Rousseau wanted a republic. Yet the thought disrupted: if legitimacy rests on prosperity and fair laws, the people may judge a king's competence; privilege must be deserved; revealed religion was dismissed. Ideas became constitutions in America and France. Disruption beyond intent, the anchor says, and violent upheaval with it.

Look at what you can now do. You can define enlightenment with Kant, date the century, name what the philosophes rejected, and trace the cause to Newton. You can describe the reading public, the coffee houses and salons, and a republic of letters that reached a glassworker. You can describe Locke, Montesquieu from the witness, Voltaire, du Châtelet, the Encyclopedia, Hume, Smith and Rousseau. You can explain the muted politics, Beccaria's program, the rights of man and the women Wollstonecraft spoke for, and the underground. You can describe Frederick, Joseph and Catherine, and what none of them surrendered. And you can describe three partitions, why Poland could be taken, and why the ideas disrupted anyway. Part two works the sample question on Wollstonecraft, reads Kant, sorts the philosophes and the reforms, and pays off the paradox.