Two Revolutions and Enlightenment Legacies

Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851)

In the penultimate chapter of his book The Enlightenment, Ritchie Robertson turns to the subject of revolutions, specifically the American and French revolutions. Robertson writes that these revolutions “might be seen as the climax of this book. Both, after all, famously invoked the ideal of human happiness.” [p. 706]

A Wild & Mischievous System

Congressional pugilists (1798)

“My own contempt for the wild & mischievous system of Democracy will not suffer me to believe without positive proof that it can be adopted by any man of sound understanding and historical experience.”
—Edward Gibbon, Letter to John Gillies (24 June 1793)

Early in the chapter “Forms of Government” in his book on the Enlightenment, Ritchie Robertson reminds us: “When thinking about forms of government, or anything else, one has to start from where one is. Enlighteners, looking round eighteenth-century Europe, saw that the prevailing form was monarchy.” [p. 656] It should thus be unsurprising to learn that Enlighteners spent a good bit of time assessing monarchy as a form of government, along with so-called enlightened absolutism. Republics were only slightly on the screen, and democracy even less so.

Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

Ritchie Robertson, in his book The Enlightenment, opens his chapter on cosmopolitanism with the observation that “[a]n ideal of the Enlightenment was to be a cosmopolitan or ‘citizen of the world’.” [p. 600] As always with Robertson, he himself traverses a wide terrain, elucidating along the way that nothing is exactly as it seems.

Making History, Enlightenment Style

Jean Huber, Voltaire Presiding at a Dinner of Philosophers (18th C.) (Numbered in ink: 1 Voltaire, 2 Père Adam. 3 L’Abbé Mauri. 4 D’Alembert. 5 Condorcet./ 6 Diderot. 7 Lah/arpe)

One of the epigrams for Richard Cohen’s book Making History is Hilary Mantel’s observation that “[b]eneath every history, there is another history—there is, at least, the life of the historian.” There is much in Robertson’s chapter, “Philosophical History,” from his book The Enlightenment, that bears out that statement.

Vain Hope!

Jacques Bertaux, “The storming of the Tuileries Palace on 10 August 1792” (1793)

“Vain hope! The moral possibility is lacking, and a moment so prodigal of opportunity finds a generation unprepared to receive it.”—Friedrich Schiller

A recent Times Literary Supplement opened with a review by Ritchie Robertson entitled “Liberty in danger: The failure of enlightened hopes.” Within it, Robertson offers the observation that the French Revolution “did not bring freedom because the people conducting it were not free.” [TLS, 2/2/24, p.4]