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.

“A new knowledge of reality”

“It was like/A new knowledge of reality”—Wallace Stevens

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1817)

Ritchie Robinson begins his chapter on the Enlightenment’s approach to aesthetics with the phrase, “[c]onsistent with its emphasis on happiness.” [p. 464] Funnily enough, I have found little addressing the “pursuit of happiness” that forms the subtitle of his book. And just when I think Robertson might be embarking on a demonstration of that pursuit, it morphs.

To people still spellbound by the cliché ‘the age of reason’

“To people still spellbound by the cliché ‘the age of reason’, it may seem astonishing that the incidence of insanity was as great as at other times.”
—Ritchie Robertson

Once one starts on a journey into the age of Enlightenment, invocations of what it’s alleged to have signified jump out everywhere. Here are three examples:

“Put a man in a forest and he will become wild”

Lupa Capitolina: she-wolf with Romulus and Remus. (13th century; twins are a 15th-century addition)

Man is born to live in society. Separate him, isolate him, and his way of thinking will become incoherent, his character will change, a thousand foolish fancies will spring up in his heart, bizarre ideas will take root in his mind like brambles in the wilderness. Put a man in a forest and he will become wild; put him in a cloister, where the idea of coercion joins forces with that of servitude, and it is even worse.

—Denis Diderot, The Nun, p. 104 (1780)

“Enlightenment thinkers agreed that humanity was naturally sociable.” [p. 351] So saith Robertson in the first sentence of his chapter on sociability. He then quotes the above paragraph from Diderot.