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.

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:

Important Figures

“Ancient Rome is important.” So saith Mary Beard in the first sentence of her book, “SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.” I knew nothing of her, but was on the hunt for something on the topic. Gibbon seemed daunting, and I was “saved” from being tempted by the discovery that his theory of the fall of Rome may be passé. This was further confirmed when I spotted a book by Peter Heather, the Oxford University Press blurb for which confidently related that he “convincingly argues that the Roman Empire was not on the brink of social or moral collapse. What brought it to an end were the barbarians.”