This book is at once a narrow comparative case study between Scotland and Naples in the 18th century and a broader look at the Enlightenment’s ideas and its movement across Europe. Robertson begins by making the case for a single “the Enlightenment”, as opposed to multiple “enlightenments”, which took place in distinct geographies or involved just specialized fields of study such as philosophy or literature. He makes the case that what unified the Enlightenment thinkers was not just a resort to reason, but a skepticism about the world and a “deliberate attempt to join mental and moral philosophy into a single science.” The key to this was a Europe-wide Republic of Letters, promoted by Erasmus, which was a network of correspondence and exchange of notes, manuscripts, specimens, antiquities, and books that from its inception, while certainly not excluding clergy, was founded on lay principles.
Scotland and Naples shared the commonality of being “courtless kingdoms”, ruled from England and Hapsburg Spain respectively. The citizenry, led by their nobles, revolted form time to time and at other periods acquiesced to foreign rule. During this time the ideas of Epicurus, Democritus, Lucretius, the Stoics, Pyrrho, Grotius, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Bayle, and Locke were being circulated around Europe. Against this free-thinking trend, the Papacy in Italy and the Presbyterians in Scotland were fighting a rearguard action for orthodoxy, often imprisoning or executing supposed heretics. Following the long death of Charles II, the Spanish succession crisis would have a large intellectual impact on both kingdoms. For Naples, it was the more obvious decision of who would be their new king and how their government might modernize. For Scotland, King William and Queen Anne’s own impending deaths without heir were to weigh heavily on the Act of Settlement and eventual Act of Union in 1707. Both Naples and Scotland were fully coopted into empires and became “kingdoms governed as provinces.” This meant that their interests were often disregarded, wealth left their lands through taxation and absentee landlords, trade and commercial development was ignored, and formal government was locally absent or removed. In the while, international commerce was supplanting feudal landholding as the foundation and wealth of the monarchies of Europe. These combustable times bred thinkers willing to challenge the old ways.
For Naples, the preeminent proto-Enlightenment thinker was Giambattista Vico. He was far from a heretic. In fact, most of his writings, while espousing quasi-Epicurean strains, tried to explicitly refute Hobbes and Bayle, particularly the latter’s assertion that a community of atheists could be virtuous. His work sought to uphold “the idea of providence in a world fluctuating between the ‘chance’ of Epicurus and the ‘necessity’ of Descartes.” When studying the nature of man Vico wanted to consider him as he was, not as we might wish him to be. “Legislation considers man as he is in order to make good use of him in society. Thus out of ferocity, avarice, and ambition, the three great vices found across the human race, it creates the military, merchant, and governing classes which provide the strength, wealth, and wisdom of states; out of vices which could destroy mankind, in the other words, it makes civil happiness.” Whereas Machiavelli had written for the prince, Vico meant for his work to be widely circulated amongst the literate classes. It was not a manual for a leader, but a study for the benefit of society at large. Vico laid the groundwork for later explicit studies of the political economy of a particular country, as well as for nations in general.
In Scotland, it was David Hume who would lead scholarship into the Enlightenment. In his Treaty of Human Nature he would state that his subject was “the science of man.” His was a theory from induction- observation and experience taking precedence from a priori reasoning. He also believed that reason was a slave to the passions, which were the first to stimulate man. Still, he tempered his Epicureanism by stating that sympathy for other men led to a moralization of the base passions. “Moral distinctions, therefore, must be derived from a ‘moral sense’. That is, they must be felt, and take the form of ‘moral sentiments’.” Justice, Hume believed, was not a natural virtue, but an artificial one that man had come accustomed to accept through experience. “It may not always be in an individual’s immediate or direct interest to behave justly towards his fellows; but this does not alter the fact that justice, and hence society, are in every individual’s interest.” Besides sympathy for his fellow man, Hume believed that man in society relied most on custom. Custom was what caused sentiments to first develop and to eventually become regarded as natural in society. Natural laws derived from custom. Although Vico and Hume did not communicate directly, they were engaged in debate with the same authors: Bayle, Descartes, Hobbes, as well as the older Hellene philosophers. “Vico possessed a keen sense of the power of the passions, and of their origin in the physical senses; he acknowledged the force of the Epicurean account of human nature. But he sought to offset this by an Augustinian morality by which, as a result of the Fall, sin was equated with indulgence of the passions, and virtue with restraint…. Hume maintained that many of our moral sentiments derive naturally from our passions, as we find them to be ‘useful and agreeable’. In adopting the useful and agreeable as the standard of morality, Hume was endorsing and elaborating the Epicurean theory of Bayle, but repudiating the Augustinian residue still present in Mandeville, who (like Vico in this respect) had persisted in identifying virtue with a strict idea of self-denial.” For Hume morality did not tame the passions, but was in accordance with basic human nature. Through sympathy and custom, moral sentiments in society would channel the passions to create a just nation.
What Hume and Vico shared was a conception of the world where man had constructed the social structures in which he lived and by tinkering and reforming these structures could create a more perfect life here on Earth. Man was responsible for his life while on this Earth. That tradition was the founding of modern thought and The Enlightenment.
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