Dear All

The contents of this documents basically concern the European

enlightenment which basically constitutes the historical and intellectual
ground for the construction of Sociological theory.

You may read all of it or you may read that which interests you.
Thank you
Eddie

The Enlightenment

Although the intellectual movement called "The Enlightenment" is usually

associated with the 18th century, its roots in fact go back much further. But before
we explore those roots, we need to define the term. This is one of those rare
historical movements which in fact named itself. Certain thinkers and writers,
primarily in London and Paris, believed that they were more enlightened than their
compatriots and set out to enlighten them.

They believed that human reason could be used to combat ignorance,

superstition, and tyranny and to build a better world. Their principal targets were
religion (embodied in France in the Catholic Church) and the domination of society
by a hereditary aristocracy.

Background in Antiquity

To understand why this movement became so influential in the 18th century, it is

important to go back in time. We could choose almost any starting point, but let us
begin with the recovery of Aristotelian logic by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century.
In his hands the logical procedures so carefully laid out by the ancient Greek
philosopher Aristotle were used to defend the dogmas of Christianity; and for the
next couple of centuries, other thinkers pursued these goals to shore up every
aspect of faith with logic. These thinkers were sometimes called "schoolmen" (more
formally, "scholastics,") and Voltaire frequently refers to them as "doctors," by which
he means "doctors of theology."

Unfortunately for the Catholic Church, the tools of logic could not be confined to
the uses it preferred. After all, they had been developed in Athens, in a pagan culture
which had turned them on its own traditional beliefs. It was only a matter of time
before later Europeans would do the same.

The Renaissance Humanists

In the 14th and 15th century there emerged in Italy and France a group of
thinkers known as the "humanists." The term did not then have the anti-religious
associations it has in contemporary political debate. Almost all of them were
practicing Catholics. They argued that the proper worship of God involved admiration
of his creation, and in particular of that crown of creation: humanity. By celebrating
the human race and its capacities they argued they were worshipping God more
appropriately than gloomy priests and monks who harped on original sin and
continuously called upon people to confess and humble themselves before the
Almighty. Indeed, some of them claimed that humans were like God, created not
only in his image, but with a share of his creative power. The painter, the architect,
the musician, and the scholar, by exercising their intellectual powers, were fulfilling
divine purposes.

This celebration of human capacity, though it was mixed in the Renaissance with
elements of gloom and superstition (witchcraft trials flourished in this period as they
never had during the Middle Ages), was to bestow a powerful legacy on Europeans.
The goal of Renaissance humanists was to recapture some of the pride, breadth of
spirit, and creativity of the ancient Greeks and Romans, to replicate their successes
and go beyond them. Europeans developed the belief that tradition could and should
be used to promote change. By cleaning and sharpening the tools of antiquity, they
could reshape their own time.
 Galileo Galilei, for instance, was to use the same sort of logic the schoolmen had
used--reinforced with observation--to argue in 1632 for the Copernican notion that
the earth rotates on its axis beneath the unmoving sun. The Church, and most
particularly the Holy Inquisition, objected that the Bible clearly stated that the sun
moved through the sky and denounced Galileo's teachings, forcing him to recant
(take back) what he had written and preventing him from teaching further. The
Church's triumph was a pyrrhic victory, for though it could silence Galileo, it could not
prevent the advance of science (though most of those advances would take place in
Protestant northern Europe, out of the reach of the pope and his Inquisition).

But before Galileo's time, in the 16th century, various humanists had begun to ask
dangerous questions. François Rabelais, a French monk and physician influenced
by Protestantism, but spurred on by his own rebelliousness, challenged the Church's
authority in his Gargantua and Pantagruel, ridiculing many religious doctrines as
absurd.

Michel de Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne, in a much more quiet and modest but ultimately more
subversive way, asked a single question over and over again in his Essays: "What
do I know?" By this he meant that we have no right to impose on others dogmas
which rest on cultural habit rather than absolute truth. Powerfully influenced by the
discovery of thriving non-Christian cultures in places as far off as Brazil, he argued
that morals may be to some degree relative. Who are Europeans to insist that
Brazilian cannibals who merely consume dead human flesh instead of wasting it are
morally inferior to Europeans who persecute and oppress those of whom they
disapprove?

This shift toward cultural relativism, though it was based on scant understanding
of the newly discovered peoples, was to continue to have a profound effect on
European thought to the present day. Indeed, it is one of the hallmarks of the
Enlightenment. Just as their predecessors had used the tools of antiquity to gain
unprecedented freedom of inquiry, the Enlightenment thinkers used the examples of
other cultures to gain the freedom to reshape not only their philosophies, but their
societies. It was becoming clear that there was nothing inevitable about the
European patterns of thought and living: there were many possible ways of being
human, and doubtless new ones could be invented.
 The other contribution of Montaigne to the Enlightenment stemmed from another
aspect of his famous question: "What do I know?" If we cannot be certain that our
values are God-given, then we have no right to impose them by force on others.
Inquisitors, popes, and kings alike had no business enforcing adherence to particular
religious or philosophical beliefs.

It is one of the great paradoxes of history that radical doubt was necessary for the
new sort of certainty called "scientific." The good scientist is the one is willing to test
all assumptions, to challenge all traditional opinion, to get closer to the truth. If
ultimate truth, such as was claimed by religious thinkers, was unattainable by
scientists, so much the better. In a sense, the strength of science at its best is that it
is always aware of its limits, aware that knowledge is always growing, always subject
to change, never absolute. Because knowledge depends on evidence and reason,
arbitrary authority can only be its enemy.

The 17th Century

René Descartes, in the 17th century, attempted to use reason as the schoolmen
had, to shore up his faith; but much more rigorously than had been attempted before.
He tried to begin with a blank slate, with the bare minimum of knowledge: the
knowledge of his own existence ("I think, therefore I am"). From there he attempted
to reason his way to a complete defense of Christianity, but to do so he committed
so many logical faults that his successors over the centuries were to slowly
disintegrate his gains, even finally challenging the notion of selfhood with which he
had begun. The history of philosophy from his time to the early 20th century is partly
the story of more and more ingenious logic proving less and less, until Ludwig
Wittgenstein succeeded in undermining the very bases of philosophy itself.

But that is a story for a different course. Here we are concerned with early stages
in the process in which it seemed that logic could be a powerful avenue to truth. To
be sure, logic alone could be used to defend all sorts of absurd notions; and
Enlightenment thinkers insisted on combining it with something they called "reason"
which consisted of common sense, observation, and their own unacknowledged
prejudices in favor of skepticism and freedom.
 We have been focusing closely on a thin trickle of thought which traveled through
an era otherwise dominated by dogma and fanaticism. The 17th century was torn by
witch-hunts and wars of religion and imperial conquest. Protestants and Catholics
denounced each other as followers of Satan, and people could be imprisoned for
attending the wrong church, or for not attending any. All publications, whether
pamphlets or scholarly volumes, were subject to prior censorship by both church and
state, often working hand in hand. Slavery was widely practiced, especially in the
colonial plantations of the Western Hemisphere, and its cruelties frequently defended
by leading religious figures. The despotism of monarchs exercising far greater
powers than any medieval king was supported by the doctrine of the "divine right of
kings," and scripture quoted to show that revolution was detested by God. Speakers
of sedition or blasphemy quickly found themselves imprisoned, or even executed.
Organizations which tried to challenge the twin authorities of church and state were
banned. There had been plenty of intolerance and dogma to go around in the Middle
Ages, but the emergence of the modern state made its tyranny much more efficient
and powerful.

It was inevitable that sooner or later many Europeans would begin to weary of the
repression and warfare carried out in the name of absolute truth. In addition, though
Protestants had begun by making powerful critiques of Catholicism, they quickly
turned their guns on each other, producing a bewildering array of churches each
claiming the exclusive path to salvation. It was natural for people tossed from one
demanding faith to another to wonder whether any of the churches deserved the
authority they claimed, and to begin to prize the skepticism of Montaigne over the
certainty of Luther or Calvin.

Meanwhile, there were other powerful forces at work in Europe: economic ones
which were to interact profoundly with these intellectual trends.

The Political and Economic Background

During the late Middle Ages, peasants had begun to move from rural estates to
the towns in search of increased freedom and prosperity. As trade and
communication improved during the Renaissance, the ordinary town-dweller began
to realize that things need not always go on as they had for centuries. New charters
could be written, new governments formed, new laws passed, new businesses
begun. Although each changed institution quickly tried to stabilize its power by
claiming the support of tradition, the pressure for change continued to mount. It was
not only contact with alien cultural patterns which influenced Europeans, it was the
wealth brought back from Asia and the Americas which catapulted a new class of
merchants into prominence, partially displacing the old aristocracy whose power had
been rooted in the ownership of land. These merchants had their own ideas about
the sort of world they wanted to inhabit, and they became major agents of change, in
the arts, in government, and in the economy.

They were naturally convinced that their earnings were the result of their
individual merit and hard work, unlike the inherited wealth of traditional aristocrats.
Whereas individualism had been chiefly emphasized in the Renaissance by artists,
especially visual artists, it now became a core value. The ability of individual effort to
transform the world became a European dogma, lasting to this day.

But the chief obstacles to the reshaping of Europe by the merchant class were
the same as those faced by the rationalist philosophers: absolutist kings and
dogmatic churches. The struggle was complex and many-sided, with each
participant absorbing many of the others' values; but the general trend is clear:
individualism, freedom and change replaced community, authority, and tradition as
core European values. Religion survived, but weakened and often transformed
almost beyond recognition; the monarchy was to dwindle over the course of the
hundred years beginning in the mid-18th century to a pale shadow of its former self.

This is the background of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Europeans were

changing, but Europe's institutions were not keeping pace with that change. The
Church insisted that it was the only source of truth, that all who lived outside its
bounds were damned, while it was apparent to any reasonably sophisticated person
that most human beings on earth were not and had never been Christians--yet they
had built great and inspiring civilizations. Writers and speakers grew restive at the
omnipresent censorship and sought whatever means they could to evade or even
denounce it.

Most important, the middle classes--the bourgeoisie--were painfully aware that

they were paying taxes to support a fabulously expensive aristocracy which
contributed nothing of value to society (beyond, perhaps, its patronage of the arts,
which the burghers of Holland had shown could be equally well exercised by
themselves), and that those useless aristocrats were unwilling to share power with
those who actually managed and--to their way of thinking,--created the national
wealth. They were to find ready allies in France among the impoverished masses
who may have lived and thought much like their ancestors, but who were all too
aware that with each passing year they were paying higher and higher taxes to
support a few thousand at Versailles in idle dissipation.

The Role of the Aristocrats

Interestingly, it was among those very idle aristocrats that the French
Enlightenment philosophers were to find some of their earliest and most enthusiastic
followers. Despite the fact that the Church and State were more often than not allied
with each other, they were keenly aware of their differences. Even kings could on
occasion be attracted by arguments which seemed to undermine the authority of the
Church. The fact that the aristocrats were utterly unaware of the precariousness of
their position also made them overconfident, interested in dabbling in the new ideas
partly simply because they were new and exciting.

Voltaire moved easily in these aristocratic circles, dining at their tables, taking a
titled mistress, corresponding with monarchs. He opposed tyranny and dogma, but
he had no notion of reinventing that discredited Athenian folly, democracy. He had
far too little faith in the ordinary person for that. What he did think was that educated
and sophisticated persons could be brought to see through the exercise of their
reason that the world could and should be greatly improved.

Rousseau vs. Voltaire

Not all Enlightenment thinkers were like Voltaire in this. His chief adversary was
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who distrusted the aristocrats not out of a thirst for change
but because he believed they were betraying decent traditional values. He opposed
the theater which was Voltaire's lifeblood, shunned the aristocracy which Voltaire
courted, and argued for something dangerously like democratic revolution. Whereas
Voltaire argued that equality was impossible, Rousseau argued that inequality was
not only unnatural, but that--when taken too far--it made decent government
impossible. Whereas Voltaire charmed with his wit, Rousseau ponderously insisted
on his correctness, even while contradicting himself. Whereas Voltaire insisted on
the supremacy of the intellect, Rousseau emphasized the emotions, becoming a
contributor to both the Enlightenment and its successor, romanticism. And whereas
Voltaire endlessly repeated the same handful of core Enlightenment notions,
Rousseau sparked off original thoughts in all directions: ideas about education, the
family, government, the arts, and whatever else attracted his attention.

For all their personal differences, the two shared more values than they liked to
acknowledge. They viewed absolute monarchy as dangerous and evil and rejected
orthodox Christianity. Though Rousseau often struggled to seem more devout, he
was almost as much a skeptic as Voltaire: the minimalist faith both shared was called
"deism," and it was eventually to transform European religion and have powerful
influences on other aspects of society as well.

Across the border in Holland, the merchants, who exercised most political power,
there made a successful industry out of publishing books that could not be printed in
countries like France. Dissenting religious groups mounted radical attacks on
Christian orthodoxy.

The Enlightenment in England

Meanwhile Great Britain had developed its own Enlightenment, fostered by

thinkers like the English thinker John Locke, the Scot David Hume, and many others.
England had anticipated the rest of Europe by deposing and decapitating its king
back in the 17th century. Although the monarchy had eventually been restored, this
experience created a certain openness toward change in many places that could not
be entirely extinguished. English Protestantism struggled to express itself in ways
that widened the limits of freedom of speech and press. Radical Quakers and
Unitarians broke open old dogmas in ways that Voltaire was to find highly congenial
when he found himself there in exile. The English and French Enlightenments
exchanged influences through many channels, Voltaire not least among them.

Because England had gotten its revolution out of the way early, it was able to
proceed more smoothly and gradually down the road to democracy; but English
liberty was dynamite when transported to France, where resistance by church and
state was fierce to the last possible moment. The result was ironically that while
Britain remained saturated with class privilege and relatively pious, France was to
become after its own revolution the most egalitarian and anticlerical state in Europe--
at least in its ideals. The power of religion and the aristocracy diminished gradually in
England; in France they were violently uprooted.

The Enlightenment in America

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, many of the intellectual leaders of the American
colonies were drawn to the Enlightenment. The colonies may have been founded by
leaders of various dogmatic religious persuasions, but when it became necessary to
unite against England, it was apparent that no one of them could prevail over the
others, and that the most desirable course was to agree to disagree. Nothing more
powerfully impelled the movement toward the separation of church and state than
the realization that no one church could dominate this new state.

Many of the most distinguished leaders of the American revolution--Jefferson,

Washington, Franklin, Paine--were powerfully influenced by English and--to a lesser
extent--French Enlightenment thought. The God who underwrites the concept of
equality in the Declaration of Independence is the same deist God Rousseau
worshipped, not that venerated in the traditional churches which still supported and
defended monarchies all over Europe. Jefferson and Franklin both spent time in
France--a natural ally because it was a traditional enemy of England--absorbing the
influence of the French Enlightenment. The language of natural law, of inherent
freedoms, of self-determination which seeped so deeply into the American grain was
the language of the Enlightenment, though often coated with a light glaze of
traditional religion, what has been called our "civil religion."

This is one reason that Americans should study the Enlightenment. It is in their
bones. It has defined part of what they have dreamed of, what they aim to become.
Separated geographically from most of the aristocrats against whom they were
rebelling, their revolution was to be far less corrosive--and at first less influential--
than that in France.

The Struggle in Europe

But we need to return to the beginning of the story, to Voltaire and his allies in
France, struggling to assert the values of freedom and tolerance in a culture where
the twin fortresses of monarchy and Church opposed almost everything they stood
for. To oppose the monarchy openly would be fatal; the Church was an easier target.
Protestantism had made religious controversy familiar. Voltaire could skillfully cite
one Christian against another to make his arguments. One way to undermine the
power of the Church was to undermine its credibility, and thus Voltaire devoted a
great deal of his time to attacking the fundamentals of Christian belief: the inspiration
of the Bible, the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, the damnation of unbelievers. No
doubt he relished this battle partly for its own sake, but he never lost sight of his
central goal: the toppling of Church power to increase the freedom available to
Europeans.

Voltaire was joined by a band of rebellious thinkers known as the philosophes:

Charles de Montesquieu, Pierre Bayle, Jean d'Alembert, and many lesser lights.
Although "philosophe" literally means "philosopher" we use the French word in
English to designate this particular group of French 18th-century thinkers. Because
Denis Diderot commissioned many of them to write for his influential Encyclopedia,
they are also known as "the Encyclopedists."

The Heritage of the Enlightenment

Today the Enlightenment is often viewed as a historical anomaly, a brief moment

when a number of thinkers infatuated with reason vainly supposed that the perfect
society could be built on common sense and tolerance, a fantasy which collapsed
amid the Terror of the French Revolution and the triumphal sweep of Romanticism.
Religious thinkers repeatedly proclaim the Enlightenment dead, Marxists denounce it
for promoting the ideals and power of the bourgeoisie at the expense of the working
classes, postcolonial critics reject its idealization of specifically European notions as
universal truths, and postructuralists reject its entire concept of rational thought.

Yet in many ways, the Enlightenment has never been more alive. The notions of
human rights it developed are powerfully attractive to oppressed peoples
everywhere, who appeal to the same notion of natural law that so inspired Voltaire
and Jefferson. Wherever religious conflicts erupt, mutual religious tolerance is
counseled as a solution. Rousseau's notions of self-rule are ideals so universal that
the worst tyrant has to disguise his tyrannies by claiming to be acting on their behalf.
European these ideas may be, but they have also become global. Whatever their
limits, they have formed the consensus of international ideals by which modern
states are judged.

If our world seems little closer to perfection than that of 18th-century France, that
is partly due to our failure to appreciate gains we take for granted. But it is also the
case that many of the enemies of the Enlightenment are demolishing a straw man: it
was never as simple-mindedly optimistic as it has often been portrayed. Certainly
Voltaire was no facile optimist. He distrusted utopianism, instead trying to cajole
Europeans out of their more harmful stupidities. Whether we acknowledge his
influence or not, we still think today more like him than like his enemies.

The New Intellectual Order: Man, Nature and Society

It can be said that philosophy is a mirror of the age in which it was conceived and
expressed. Philosophers speculate on the character of the universe, nature, God,
man, morals, happiness, knowledge, and a hundred other things. The manner in
which each philosopher answers these questions is colored by their method of
approaching problems, by their premises, by their world view, in a word, by their
history.

In the Middle Ages, Ptolemaic geocentrism, modified as it was by centuries of Jewish

and Christian thought, prevailed as a world view. We have already identified this
world view with the convenient label, Christian matrix. God was the personal
anthropomorphic deity of the Old and New Testament. Theology took its seat as "the
queen of the sciences," and the chief interest of philosophers was the way of
salvation in the world to come. Nature was conceived as the handiwork of God,
created and ordered according to the account in the Holy Scriptures. Man's physical
characteristics were not seriously considered except as they related to the soul and
salvation.

The moral problem was evaluated in terms of righteous and sinful conduct, the
former being obedience to God's will, the latter its violation. Happiness was projected
into the world to come. The earth was a prison from which man would eventually
escape and find salvation. The outlook, the world view, was clearly other-worldly.
Even learned men knew little of the world outside of the Mediterranean. Knowledge
of world was local and became a dominant trait of social life.

However, intellectual developments between the 12th and 17th centuries shattered
this Medieval matrix. As science revealed more of the extent and workings of the
physical universe, the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition became less compatible
with the emergent picture of the cosmos and the laws of nature. Inductive science
slowed overcame deductive logic. The kingdom of man challenged the kingdom of
God. Nature came to be regarded as a complicated and impressive affair. Simple
biblical explanations of the cosmos and Nature were no longer satisfied the best
minds of Europe. God was portrayed as a law-giving and law-abiding being but
natural causes were sought to explain the workings of the natural world.

Man was still believed to possess an immortal soul. But the natural philosophers
were no longer willing to let man pass merely as the image of God. Among advanced
thinkers, morality was gradually divorced from the supernatural conception of sin and
related to behavior on this earth and its effects upon the individual and society.
Some of the more secular trends in humanism dared to defend happiness in the here
and now.

A new optimism regarding the future of man came into being and helped to produce
the notion that man was indeed a progressive being and that perfectibility was
perhaps possible in the City of Man. The exploration of lands outside Europe brought
new information, revealed new and diverse ways of life, stimulated curiosity and
developed the comparative approach towards customs and institutions. A new world
view was the result.

This lecture highlights the diverse thoughts of this new world view as it found itself
mirrored in the thoughts of a variety of philosophers. As such, this lecture provides
several "windows" into the past.

Giordano Bruno, 1548-1600

We have seen that Copernicus overthrew the Ptolemaic theory of the universe by
proving it to be heliocentric rather than geocentric (see Lecture 6). But Copernicus
kept the old astronomy by retaining the system of spheres and epicycles. Copernicus
had little understanding of the plurality of worlds or universes or of the free motion of
the heavenly bodies in space. It remained for the Italian philosopher, GIORDANO

BRUNO (1548-1600), to make the first complete assault on Ptolemaic astronomy

and the philosophical assumptions associated with it. Bruno was born at Nola, near
Naples, in southern Italy. At an early age he entered the Dominican order in Naples.
Charged with heresy in 1576, Bruno fled the convent and the Dominicans and
traveled widely across Europe. His spirit was in rebellion against the more
reactionary aspects of Catholicism, while his Catholic antecedents made many
Protestants suspicious of him. Therefore, Bruno was not entirely welcome in either
camp. This is especially important to recognize since his short life spans the period
in which Catholics and Protestants were engaged in heated battle.

However, Bruno was honored by scholars and he taught at many important centers
of learning, among them Toulouse, Paris, Oxford and Wittenberg. He made the
mistake of returning to Italy (1591), was betrayed by one of his pupils in Venice, and
turned over to the Inquisition. At the end of the Venetian trial he recanted his
heresies, but was sent to Rome for another trial. Here he remained in prison for eight
years, at the end of which he was sentenced as a heretic and, in February 1600, was
burned alive on the Campo de' Fiori, the first conspicuous martyr to the new world
view.

Bruno mastered the existing body of mathematics and understood the Copernican
system. Although he had at his disposal the necessary preparation for carrying out
his an astrophysical revolution, it was conceived within a devout and pious mental
climate. In the old astronomy, the earth was regarded as the center of the universe.
Copernicus had replaced the earth with the sun as the center of the system. Bruno
argued that there can be no such limitation of the physical universe as was implied in
the system of crystalline spheres. There is neither limit nor center to the universe.
Everything depends on the place of observation. Each observer on the earth may
regard his point of observation as the center, but it would no so appear to an
observer on the sun or on one of the other planets or the fixed stars.

Everything, then, is relative to the point of observation. Position is relative. Up and

down are terms that have precise meaning only when used in regard to a particular
spot in the universe. The same applies to motion -- it is likewise relative. There is no
absolute direction. Time is also relative.

Bruno's notion of relativity not only upset the old astronomical conceptions, it also
challenged a basic notion in Aristotle's physics. Aristotle (384-322) had suggested
that light and heavy are absolute phenomena. Heavy matter seeks the center of the
universe. This is the earth, and the earth is the heaviest element. Bruno insisted that
this is an error as it assigns false importance to the earth.
Even more revolutionary was Bruno's hypothesis of a plurality of worlds and
universes. Not only may there be other earths like ours -- other universes may exist
as well. Further, Bruno repudiated the notion that the materials in the heavens are of
a higher order than earth, air, fire and water. And it had been assumed that the
heavenly bodies are composed of a mysterious fifth element, the "aether." Bruno
believed that other heavenly bodies are presumably made up of the same materials
as the earth, a guess which required the spectroscope of the 19th century to prove
scientifically valid.

Finally, Bruno broke away from the notion of fixed starry spheres and epicycles. The
heavenly bodies move freely in space, he declared, although it required the work of
Galileo (1564-1642), Kepler (1571-1630), and Isaac Newton (see Lecture 7) to
elucidate the problems associated with their movements and orbits. These ideas
Bruno illustrated in three works: On Cause,Principle and Unity; On the Infinite
Universe and the Worlds; and On the Immeasurable and Countless Worlds.

Since the medieval world view had revolved about the Christianized Ptolemaic
system, embodied in Dante's Divine Comedy, it is not difficult to see why the faithful
might have looked upon Bruno with horror. He challenged geocentrism, refuted the
dogma of the perfection of the heavens, and suggested that there might be a vast
number of other worlds as well as universes. This last idea was particularly
disconcerting. Though Bruno had no such purpose in mind, it directly opposed the
creation tale specified in Genesis and constituted a grave challenge to the divinity of
Jesus. Bruno's heresy in the eyes of the Church is perhaps understandable,
particularly when he put it in clear and popular language. There was a very real
danger that Bruno would stir up widespread skepticism of the Christian world view.
Yet Bruno himself was not an agnostic nor did he embrace a mechanistic outlook.
He regarded God as at work in a creative and directive capacity in every part of the
vast universe of universes which he imagined. In his theology and in his views of
God and Nature, Bruno was a pious mystic and ardent Christian.

Michel de Montaigne, 1533-1592

Montaigne is an important figure in the intellectual history of the west because his
world view was so vastly different from that of the orthodox Christian, whether
Protestant or Catholic. He was the foremost apostle of urbanity after Plato (c.427-
c.347), Cicero (106-43) and Plutarch (c.46-c.120). He has been likened to his near
contemporary, Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), but Montaigne went much further in
his repudiations that Erasmus ever would have contemplated. Montaigne
demonstrates how the modern era failed to break sharply with the medieval. A
virulent critic of medieval Scholasticism, he was at the same time a moderate
follower of St. Augustine (354-430), the most dogmatic and intolerant of Christian
theologians. Like many French thinkers of his age, he adopted the Augustinian
attitude of highly personal introspection, skepticism of positive empirical knowledge,
and a self-conscious analysis of nature and human problems. Just the same, this did
not prevent Montaigne from embracing intellectual attitudes entirely at odds with
those held by the author of The City of God.

Montaigne's education and training partly explain his divergence from orthodox
patterns of thought. His religious background was highly diversified, his father being
a devout Catholic and his mother a Jew converted to Protestantism. I imagine that
this would have made it rather difficult for him to take seriously the presumptions of
any one sect. In his studies and his reading, he was skillfully prepared for intellectual
detachment and moderation. Montaigne was given a thorough classical education.
He was well-read in Greek and Latin literature and found his favorite authors among
the great pagans expositors of tolerance and secularism -- Plato, Plutarch, Cicero,
the Skeptics and Epicureans. The pagan slogan that those who seek the truth must
both refute without prejudice and accept criticism without resentment was
reincarnated in Montaigne. The old world view -- the Medieval matrix -- was
dissolved in Montaigne's day as the Attic world did in the time of Aristotle.
Philosophical calm had to be created from within rather than secured by external
institutions.

Montaigne was born in the early stages of the era of overseas discoveries and was
greatly impressed by them. He was interested in the diversity of customs and beliefs
entertained by mankind in various parts of the earth. This made it difficult for him to
take seriously the Christian contention that there was but one absolute moral code to
which men ought to subscribe. From his early training and his reading, then,
Montaigne was the type of man who was well-suited to become an apostle of
tolerance and moderation.

The starting point of Montaigne's philosophy was true intellectual humility. His
philosophy was not grounded in Christian religious debasement, founded as it was in
the assumption of sin, the fall of man and his spiritual unworthiness. Rather, he
understood well the paucity of information which any one individual could obtain and
assimilate and was also convinced of the intellectual limitations of humanity. In his
essay, "Of the Education of Children," Montaigne writes:

I aim here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn
something new which changes me. I have no authority to be believed, nor do I want
it, feeling myself too ill-instructed to instruct others.
It was necessary, Montaigne argued, that man constantly subject himself to the most
searching intellectual self-examination in order to impress upon ourselves how little
we really know. Such an attitude flew in the face of the medieval scholastic, smug in
his intellectual arrogance, who believed that, armed with the Scriptures and the
masters of theology, he possessed the sum total of necessary knowledge
(salvation).

Whereas the Christians had emphasized the unity of all true wisdom and the
uniformity of conduct essential to salvation, Montaigne stressed the opposite,
namely, that diversity and pluralism seem to be the rule of nature, and hence of God
as well. He arrived at this point of view because he was conscious of the varying
moods of the human individual from day to day and, as an outgrowth of his
observation of the enormous variety of human customs and beliefs, reported by
ancient observers and by contemporary explorers. Montaigne was overwhelmed by
how variable each individual indeed is, and how one's moods change from day to
day, because of external conditions and internal stimuli. We differ more from
ourselves than we do from each one another.

The combination in Montaigne of intellectual humility with a full comprehension of the

inconstancy of man and the diversity of conduct to be observed in the world, served
to develop in him a remarkable degree of tolerance and intellectual detachment.
something I imagine necessary considering the volatile religious environment which
characterizes his epoch. A factor making for his tolerance and urbanity was his
repudiation of the otherworldliness of Christian theology. The Christian could not be
tolerant or detached for the Christian could not remain indifferent to something which
inevitably meant the loss of his soul and perdition for others.

Montaigne took full safety in contemplating the human scene. If philosophy is to

teach us how to live rather than how to die, we must gather the largest possible
amount of information as to the ways in which men live and then analyze this mass
of material in calm and judicious fashion. When we allow emotion and prejudice to
enter the process of assimilating such knowledge, we will fail to derive wisdom form
the exercise. If nature reveals diversity to be the rule, then the theological effort to
teach and enforce uniformity in thought and action must be incorrect and dangerous.

It was perhaps inevitable that in his discussion of morality Montaigne should depart
from the Christian identification of morality with religious dogmas, and from the
Christian tendency to regard morality as chiefly a matter of chastity in sexual
relations. Because of his thoroughgoing secularism, Montaigne was able to attack
the problem of ethics in a detached fashion. He perceived that man has devised a
great variety of ways of meeting the chief problems of existence. Therefore, he could
not subscribe in any sense to the Christian view that the only defensible solution of
moral problems consisted of the narrow standards of conduct specified by orthodox
Christianity. For Montaigne, God and nature seemed to approve of diversity rather
than orthodoxy.

It ought to be clear that Montaigne challenged many of the leading tenets of

Christian ethics. He repudiated entirely the Christian tendency to separate body from
mind or soul, to regard the soul and its pleasures as good and the body and its
enjoyments as base, and to represent bodily pleasures as separate from, and
disastrous to, the operations of the mind. He argued that body and soul are given to
man by nature and God. Bodily pleasures are as natural and defensible as the
experiences of the soul. Indeed, reasonable indulgence in corporeal delights the
mind may actually be refreshed and stimulated. Montaigne thus helped to break
down the theological dichotomy of the world of spirit and the realm of the flesh, and
insisted upon viewing the human organism as a unity.

There is nothing so goodly and so lawful as to play the man well and duly; nor any
science so difficult as to know how to live this life well; and of our infirmities the most
savage is to despise our being. . . . It is an absolute perfection and, as it were, divine
for a man to know how to enjoy his existence loyally. We seek for other conditions
because we understand not the use of our own and we go outside of ourselves
because we know not what is happening there. Thus it is in vain that we mount upon
stilts, for, be we upon them, yet we must go with our own legs; and sit we upon the
highest throne in the world, yet we do but sit upon our own behind.

René Descartes, 1596-1650

A firm grasp of the direct significance of new scientific knowledge was perhaps best
expressed in the work of the French philosopher and mathematician, René
Descartes. He was born of a noble family at La Haye, a small town in Touraine,
France. Educated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche, he retained an admiration for
his instructors but later claimed that he found little of substance in their instruction --
only mathematics had given him any certain knowledge. In 1618, Descartes was in
Holland and served in the army of Maurice of Nassau and in this capacity he also
traveled to Germany. It was at Ulm, on the night of November 10, after a day of
reflection, that Descartes had certain dreams which he interpreted as a divine sign
that it was his destiny to found a unified system of nature based on mathematics. He
did not, however, begin to write on philosophy or science at this time but continued
to travel widely. His first substantial work was the never-completed Rules for the
Direction of the Mind (written 1628/29, published 1710).

In November 1628 RENÉ DESCARTES was in Paris, where he distinguished himself

in a famous confrontation with Chandoux whose views on science he attacked,
arguing that only absolute certainty could serve as the basis of human knowledge.
That year, Descartes retired to Holland where he remained until 1649.

In Holland Descartes worked on his system, and by 1634 he completed the scientific
work, Le Monde. When he heard of the condemnation of Galileo, however,
Descartes quickly had his book suppressed. This is an important event to recollect
since it demonstrates the caution and conciliation toward authority which Descartes
exhibited throughout his life. In 1637, he published a book containing three treatises
on mathematical subjects: the Geometry, the Dioptric and the Meteors (prefaced by
his equally famous Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and
Seeking for Truth in the Sciences). The Discourse on Method was remarkable in a
number of ways: it was autobiographical, it presented a concise statement of
Cartesianism, and it was composed in French. By writing in French, Descartes
intended (like Galileo before him) to aim over the heads of the academic community
and to reach educated men of good sense.

Descartes followed the Discourse in 1641 with a more metaphysical work, the six
Meditations on First Philosophy, which were published with six (ultimately seven)
sets of Objections from various authors, including Thomas Hobbes, Antoine Arnauld
(1612-1694), and Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), and also with Descartes' Replies to
the Objections.

In 1649, Descartes yielded to the request of Queen Christina of Sweden that he join
her distinguished circle she was assembling in Stockholm and instruct her in
philosophy. In this year he published The Passions of the Soul. In 1650, however,
and as a result of the Swedish climate, and the fact that Queen Christina requested
instruction at 4 AM, Descartes caught pneumonia and died.

Descartes' philosophic approach was purely mathematical. In that discipline he

thought he had found the key to the secrets of the universe. As he once expressed it:
"I am convinced that it [mathematics] is a more powerful instrument of knowledge
than any other which has been bequeathed to us by human agency, as being the
source of all others." His greatest practical contribution was the creation of analytic
geometry. Yet Descartes was no mathematical mystics. He had little use for "pure"
mathematics. What interested him most was the mathematical method and its
application.

Descartes in important in the western intellectual tradition mainly because of his

contribution to philosophical and scientific method. In his Discourse on Method he
set forth his body of principles. He asserted that the first step is to wipe away all
earlier and accepted authority and to start with a clear and unbiased mind. The
philosopher must never accept as true anything that cannot be proven so. Everything
must be stated at the outset in the clearest and simplest form, gradually and logically
advancing to more complex and involved formulations. Each specific problem must
be divided into as many parts as may be necessary to solve it. Thoughts and
perceptions must be arranged in an orderly sequence of ideas. In the end there must
be a complete analysis and a sufficiently comprehensive review of the whole
problem so that nothing is omitted.

The basis of Descartes' thinking was the omnipotence of rational consciousness,

summed up in the famous maxim, cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am" or, "I
think, therefore I exist"). He thought that he could discover truth by deductive thinking
in mathematical terms alone. In doing so, he created a completely mechanistic
world. From this mechanistic explanation he exempted two things: God and the soul
of man. Man is the only being in nature who possesses a soul, and the latter is the
only part of man which escapes mechanistic necessity. The lower animals he
regarded as pure automatons -- mere machines. Man, thanks to his soul, is a
conscious, reflective and directive machine.

Descartes is important because he assisted in breaking down the pretensions of

authority. If he underestimated the more obscure storehouses of tradition, like the
subconscious, and was inconsistent in both accepting and rejecting authority, he did
manage to destroy some of the more obvious hindrances to clear thinking.

Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679

Born at Malmesbury prematurely on April 5, when his mother heard the news of the
approaching Armada, THOMAS HOBBES was brought up by his uncle (his
clergyman father having died after striking a colleague at the church door!), and at
the age of fourteen, having translated Euripides' Medea into Latin, he studied at
Magdalen Hall, Oxford. It was at Oxford that Hobbes was nauseated by the
prevailing Aristotelianism. In 1603 he began his long tutorial association with the
Cavendish family which brought with it the benefits of an excellent library, the
acquaintance of such men as Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and Ben Jonson (1572-
1637), and two tutorial journeys to Italy and France. The first of these (1610) was
with William, later the 2nd Earl of Devonshire, and the second with the latter's son
the 3rd Earl, during which he was introduced into the Abbé Mersenne's intellectual
circle in Paris (1634), which included Gassendi and Descartes. He met with Galileo
in Florence in 1636. It was Hobbes' introduction to Euclidean geometry while
traveling tutor to the son of Gervase Clifton (1629-1631) that was his intellectual
turning point. Would it not be possible to extend such deductive certainty to a
comprehensive science of man and society?

Obsessed by the civil disorders of his time, Hobbes wrote The Elements of Law
(1640, published 1650) in which he defended the king's prerogative on psychological
and not on the spurious theological grounds of divine right. When Parliament
impeached Stafford and Laud, Hobbes took himself to Paris (1640), proud to have
been "the first of all that fled." He soon immersed himself in a controversy with
Descartes, arising out of his objections to the latter's Meditations. In 1642, Hobbes
published De Cive, a fuller statement of his views on government, and in 1646, A
Minute of First Draught of the Optiques, by which he sought to rival Descartes' views
on optics. In 1646, he was mathematical tutor to the Prince of Wales, later Charles II.
In 1651 he published his great work of political theory, Leviathan, or The Matter,
Form, & Power of a Commonwealth.

The basis of Hobbes' metaphysics is motion of bodies, attraction and repulsion in the
wills of men. "Good" and "evil" are inconstant names applied haphazardly by
different men to what attracts or repels them. This egotistical psychology makes the
life of man in a pre-social state of nature, "nasty, brutish and short," a constant war of
every man against every man. Rational, enlightened self-interest makes men want to
escape the state of nature by the establishment of a contract in which they surrender
the right of aggression, but not that of self-defense, to an absolute sovereign, whose
commands are the law, freedom being relegated to the spheres not covered by the
sovereign's commands. The social contract is binding only so long as the sovereign
has power to enforce. Sovereignty may be vested in a person or an assembly, but it
must not be indivisible, not a division of powers between Parliament and King, or
Church and State.

The Leviathan offended the royal exiles at Paris and the French government by its
reduction of the status of religious obedience, and so in 1652 Hobbes returned to
England and settled in London. Hobbes managed to become embroiled in numerous
controversies the remainder of his life. At the Restoration, Charles II gave his old
tutor a pension and probably used his influence to quash a bill aimed at Hobbes'
writings, after the Plague and Fire of London (1665-1666) had been explained as
God's wrath against England for harboring such an atheist. Hobbes wrote an
important dialogue against the defenders of Common Law, Behemoth, a history of
his times and an autobiography in Latin verse. At the age of eighty-six, and because,
as he said, he had nothing better to do, he set about to compose verse translations
of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (earlier in his career he translated the The
Peloponnesian War of Thucydides), all published in 1682. Hobbes died at Hardwick
Hall, Derbyshire.

Hobbes abandoned the obscurantism and dualism of Descartes and the so-called
rationalists and applied the new mathematical and mechanical principles to mind as
well as matter. He thus destroyed the contradictory and confusing dualism in
Cartesianism and established mechanical empiricism. He believed that all materials
of positive knowledge are the direct result of the impact of bodily particles on sense
organs. Whereas Descartes regarded the basic physical fact as extension, Hobbes
viewed it as motion. He held that "all that exists is body (matter); all that occurs is
motion.

There are two kinds of bodies ruled by the fundamental principle of motion: the
natural bodies of the physical and organic world and artificial bodies, or social
groups, culminating in the State. Man is a representative of both. As an organism he
is a natural body; as a member of the state he lives in an artificial body. Mind is the
link which connects the natural and artificial bodies. Three branches of philosophy
are needed to study all of these -- physics which studies natural bodies; psychology
which investigates man as an individual; and politics which deals with artificial
bodies.

Hobbes imposed impressive limitations on philosophical knowledge. It can never be

able us to know the external world. The latter may be real, but if so we cannot detect
or prove its reality. All we can know about it is the result of stimuli coming from the
motions of the external world and acting upon the substance of our brains. The
resulting sense perceptions are all that we can be conscious of, and they reveal only
our reactions to external stimuli, not the external world as it really is.

Both contemporary and later writers were strongly influenced by the ideas of Thomas
Hobbes, not only because his logic was compelling, but because he functioned like a
scientist. From his observations of man and society, he generated propositions about
human behavior and from these he deduced his political theory. Furthermore, he
applied a mechanistic view to man, thus reducing all that men do to simple appetites
and aversions. In doing so, Hobbes contributed to the popularity of the mechanistic
view of the universe, a theory derived, in part, from Descartes' philosophy. This
mechanistic view implies that the universe, including man, can be regarded as a
complicated machine and thus subject to scientific principles.

John Locke, 1632-1704

It is clear that philosophers like Descartes and Hobbes, impressed as they were with
mathematics, were both interested in erecting complete systems of philosophy by
utilizing the knowledge of the new science. In the case of John Locke, the subjects
treated were still diverse, but Locke concentrated mainly on the faculty of knowledge,
or the problem of how we come to know.

Born August 29 at Wrington, Somerset, JOHN LOCKE was educated at Westminster

School under Richard Busby and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he found the
prevailing Aristotelianism "perplexed with obscure terms and useless questions." He
was elected to a life studentship there, which was withdrawn in 1684 by order of the
king. His dislike of the Puritan intolerance of the College divines prevented him from
taking orders. Instead, he dabbled in medicine and scientific experimentation and
discussion and became known as Doctor Locke. In 1667 he became the physician of
the household of Anthony Ashley Cooper, later first earl of Shaftesbury (and author
of Characteristicks, 1714). After successfully operating upon the latter for an abscess
in the chest (1668) he became Ashley's close confidential advisor in political and
scientific matters and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (F.R.S.). The latter
directed Locke's interests towards philosophy. A small club for the discussion of
theological and philosophical questions was founded by Locke and at such a
gathering in the winter (1670-71), the group welcomed Locke's suggestion that
before attempting to solve any such questions, they should first of all discover what
the human understanding was fitted to deal with.

In 1672 Ashley became first Earl of Shaftesbury and lord chancellor, and Locke
secretary of the Board of Trade. For reasons of health, Locke spent the politically
troublesome years (1675-79) in Montpelier and Paris, where he made contact with
the circle of Gassendi and Arnauld. Shaftesbury, after a short spell in the Tower, was
restored to favor and Locke re-entered his service. In 1683, however, Locke found it
necessary to follow his master to Holland. Locke settled in Amsterdam and struck up
an intimate friendship with many liberal theologians. In 1687 he removed to
Rotterdam and joined the English supporters of William of Orange. His famous Two
Treatises on Government (1689), published anonymously, were not written to justify
the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In fact, there is evidence that the Treatises may
have been written as early as 1681 -- both Treatises attack the divine right theory of
Sir Robert Filmer and the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.
Locke also built up his political theory from the weaknesses of an imagined pre-civil
society, which for Hobbes was simply a war of all against all. Locke, however,
insisted on the natural morality of pre-social man. Hence, contracting into civil
society by surrendering personal power to a ruler and magistrates is for Locke a
method of securing natural morality more efficiently. The ruling body if it offends
against natural law must be deposed. This sanctioning of rebellion, together with
Locke's curious doctrine of private property, became for the American colonists and
the French revolutionaries in the next century, in the words of Michael Oakeshott, "a
brilliant abridgement of the political habits of Englishmen."

Locke's last years were spent at Oates, Essex, at the home of Sir Francis and Lady
Masham, an admirer, the daughter of Ralph Cudworth. Locke died October 28, 1704,
and was buried in the churchyard of High Laver.

Locke's philosophy argued that philosophy should pretend to deal only with problems
and conceptions that the human mind is capable of encompassing. Admitting definite
limitations to the human mind, he excluded from consideration many issues which
earlier philosophers and theologians had attempted to meddle with. Locke directed
his heaviest fire against the doctrine of innate ideas, that is, against the dogma that
ideas are inherent at birth in the human mind and that they are not to be tampered
with except on pain of upsetting the natural constitution of society. In attempting to
combat this notion, he used the figure of the tabula rasa (blank slate) to signify the
condition of the mind at birth.

Locke turned to the problem of how we come to possess the ideas with which the
mature human mind is stocked. He contended that these are the product of
experience and reflection on experience, that is, reason. He thus expressed his
famous theory in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding in the following
manner:

Let us then suppose the mind to be. . . white paper, void of all characters, without
any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which
the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless
variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer,
in one word, from experience; in that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it
ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either about external sensible
objects, or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by
ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking.
These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or
can naturally have, do spring.

By the rational elaboration of simple ideas we arrive at complex ideas. The

processes involved are the uniting of simple ideas, synthesizing activity, and
abstracting activity. Simple ideas are valid when they agree with observed reality.
Complex ideas, naturally, cannot resemble things, but they correspond to things. By
employing derived ideas in thinking we can reflectively test the validity of our
concepts and discover whether the combination of qualities implied is to be found in
experience.

Among the numerous and important personalities who managed to create the great
18th century Enlightenment, John Locke was rivaled only by Pierre Bayle (1647-
1706) and surpassed only by Voltaire (the latter of whom helped popularize both
Newton and Locke on the Continent). John Locke was the most popular philosopher
of his generation and perhaps the most influential as well. He created a new and
progressive type of psychology, led the fight against intolerance, defended reason
against faith in a period when this was more more dangerous than a century later,
started the revolt in education against pedantry and classicism, and was the most
important figure of the age in systematizing the type of political theory that would
dominate the western intellectual tradition in the next century. If Locke did not go as
far as Voltaire (1694-1778), the path of the latter was made much easier because of
Locke's work.

The Origins of the Industrial Revolution in England

The political and moral advantages of this country, as a seat of manufactures, are
not less remarkable than its physical advantages. The arts are the daughters of
peace and liberty. In no country have these blessings been enjoyed in so high
degree, or for so long a continuance, as in England. Under the reign of of just laws,
personal liberty and property have been secure; mercantile enterprise has been
allowed to reap its reward; capital has accumulated in safety; the workman has
"gone forth to his work and to his labour until the evening;" and, thus protected and
favoured, the manufacturing prosperity of the country has struck its roots deep, and
spread forth its branches to the ends of the earth. [Edward Baines, The History of the
Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain, 1835]

In the eighteenth century, a series of inventions transformed the manufacture of

cotton in England and gave rise to a new mode or production -- the factory system.
During these years, other branches of industry effected comparable advances, and
all these together, mutually reinforcing one another, made possible further gains on
an ever-widening front. The abundance and variety of these innovations almost defy
compilation, but they may be subsumed under three principles: the substitution of
machines -- rapid, regular, precise, tireless -- for human skill and effort; the
substitution of inanimate for animate sources of power, in particular, the introduction
of engines for converting heat into work, thereby opening to man a new and almost
unlimited supply of energy; the use of new and far more abundant raw materials, in
particular, the substitution of mineral for vegetable or animal substances. These
improvements constitute the Industrial Revolution. [David Landes, The Unbound
Prometheus, 1969]

The Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was revolutionary
because it changed -- revolutionized -- the productive capacity of England, Europe
and United States. But the revolution was something more than just new machines,
smoke-belching factories, increased productivity and an increased standard of living.
It was a revolution which transformed English, European, and American society
down to its very roots. Like the Reformation or the French Revolution, no one was
left unaffected. Everyone was touched in one way or another -- peasant and noble,
parent and child, artisan and captain of industry. The Industrial Revolution serves as
a key to the origins of modern Western society. As Harold Perkin has observed, "the
Industrial Revolution was no mere sequence of changes in industrial techniques and
production, but a social revolution with social causes as well as profound social
effects" [The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880 (1969)].

The INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION can be said to have made the European working-
class. It made the European middle-class as well. In the wake of the Revolution, new
social relationships appeared. As Ben Franklin once said, "time is money." Man no
longer treated men as men, but as a commodity which could be bought and sold on
the open market. This "commodification" of man is what bothered Karl Marx -- his
solution was to transcend the profit motive by social revolution (see Lecture 24).

There is no denying the fact that the Industrial Revolution began in England
sometime after the middle of the 18th century. England was the "First Industrial
Nation." As one economic historian commented in the 1960s, it was England which
first executed "the takeoff into self-sustained growth." And by 1850, England had
become an economic titan. Its goal was to supply two-thirds of the globe with cotton
spun, dyed, and woven in the industrial centers of northern England. England
proudly proclaimed itself to be the "Workshop of the World," a position that country
held until the end of the 19th century when Germany, Japan and United States
overtook it.

More than the greatest gains of the Renaissance, the Reformation, Scientific
Revolution or Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution implied that man now had not
only the opportunity and the knowledge but the physical means to completely
subdue nature. No other revolution in modern times can be said to have
accomplished so much in so little time. The Industrial Revolution attempted to effect
man's mastery over nature. This was an old vision, a vision with a history. In the 17th
century, the English statesman and "Father of Modern Science, Francis Bacon
(1561-1626), believed that natural philosophy (what we call science) could be
applied to the solution of practical problems, and so, the idea of modern technology
was born. For Bacon, the problem was this: how could man enjoy perfect freedom if
he had to constantly labor to supply the necessities of existence? His answer was
clear -- machines. These labor saving devices would liberate mankind, they would
save labor which then could be utilized elsewhere. "Knowledge is power," said
Bacon, and scientific knowledge reveals power over nature.

The vision was all-important. It was optimistic and progressive. Man was going
somewhere, his life has direction. This vision is part of the general attitude known as
the idea of progress, that is, that the history of human society is a history of
progress, forever forward, forever upward. This attitude is implicit throughout the
Enlightenment and was made reality during the French and Industrial Revolutions.
With relatively few exceptions, the philosophes of the 18th century embraced this
idea of man's progress with an intensity I think unmatched in our own century.
Human happiness, improved morality, an increase in knowledge were now within
man's reach. This was indeed the message, the vision, of Adam Smith, Denis
Diderot, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin (see Lecture 10).

"Tremble all ye oppressors of the world," wrote Richard Price -- and tremble they did
(see Lecture 14). The American and French Revolutions, building on enlightened
ideas, swept away enthusiasm, tyranny, fanaticism, superstition, and oppressive and
despotic governments. "Sapere Aude!" exclaimed Kant -- Dare to know!. With history
and superstition literally swept aside, man could not only understand man and
society, man could now change society for the better. These are all ideas, glorious,
noble visions of the future prospect of mankind. By the end of the 18th century, these
ideas became tangible. The vision was reality. Even Karl Marx understood this when
he wrote, "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point,
however, is to change it."
Engines and machines, the glorious products of science began to revolutionize the
idea of progress itself. If a simple machine can do the work of twenty men in a
quarter of the time formerly required, then could the New Jerusalem be far behind?
When you view the Industrial Revolution alongside the democratic revolutions of
1776 and 1789, we cannot help but be struck by the optimism so generated. Heaven
on Earth seemed reality and no one was untouched by the prospects. But, as we will
soon see, while the Industrial Revolution brought its blessings, there was also much
misery. Revolutions, political or otherwise, are always mixed blessings. If we can
thank the Industrial Revolution for giving us fluoride, internal combustion engines,
and laser guided radial arm saws, we can also damn it for the effect it has had on
social relationships. We live in the legacy of the Industrial Revolution, the legacy of
the "cash nexus," as the mid-19th century Scottish critic Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
put it, where the only connection between men is the one of money, profit and gain.

The origins of the Industrial Revolution in England are complex and varied and, like
the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution is still a subject of a vast historical
debate over origins, developments, growth and end results. This debate has raged
among historians since at least 1884, when Arnold Toynbee (1852-1883), an English
historian and social reformer, published the short book, Lectures on the Industrial
Revolution in England. Toynbee was in a fairly good position to assess the revolution
in industry -- England had, by the 1880s, endured more than a century of
industrialization.

Still, like any revolution, the Industrial Revolution leaves us with many questions: was
the revolution in industry simply an issue of new machinery or mechanical
innovation? did young boys and girls work and live shoulder to shoulder for more
than twelve hour a day? was industrial capitalism nothing more than a clever system
devised by clever capitalists to exploit the labor of ignorant workers? was the
revolution in industry the product of conscious planning or did it appear
spontaneously? I can't answer all these questions in one lecture -- indeed, an entire
course of study on the subject would perhaps get us no closer to the answers to
these important questions. However, we can make one serious confession -- what
the Industrial Revolution accomplished was nothing less than a structural change in
the economic organization of English and European society. This is what made the
Revolution revolutionary. In other words, England, then the Continent and the United
States, witnessed a shift from a traditional, pre-modern, agrarian society to that of an
industrial economy based on capitalist methods, principles and practices.

In general, the spread of industry across England was sporadic. In other words, not
every region of England was industrialized at the same time. In some areas, the
factory system spread quickly, in others not at all. Such a development also applies
to the steam engine -- one would think that once steam engines made their
appearance that each and every factory would have one. But this is clearly not the
case. The spread of industry, or machinery, or steam power, or the factory system
itself was erratic. I imagine the reason why we assume that industrialization was a
quick process is that we live live in an age of rising expectations -- we expect change
to occur rapidly and almost without our direction. Late 20th century developments in
technology are perhaps most responsible for this attitude. We know that technology
supplies a constant stream of products that are "new and improved." We know that
the moment we bring home a top of the line computer that within six months it will
become not necessarily obsolete but "old."

Historians are now agreed that beginning in the 17th century and continuing
throughout the 18th century, England witnessed an agricultural revolution. English
(and Dutch) farmers were the most productive farmers of the century and were
continually adopting new methods of farming and experimenting with new types of
vegetables and grains. They also learned a great deal about manure and other
fertilizers. In other words, many English farmers were treating farming as a science,
and all this interest eventually resulted in greater yields. Was the English farmer
more enterprising than his French counterpart? Perhaps, but not by virtue of
intelligence alone. English society was far more open than French -- there were no
labor obligations to the lord. The English farmer could move about his locale or the
country to sell his goods while the French farmer was bound by direct and indirect
taxes, tariffs or other kinds of restrictions. In 1700, 80% of the population of England
earned its income from the land. A century later, that figure had dropped to 40%.

The result of these developments taken together was a period of high productivity
and low food prices. And this, in turn, meant that the typical English family did not
have to spend almost everything it earned on bread (as was the case in France
before 1789), and instead could purchase manufactured goods.

There are other assets that helped make England the "first industrial nation." Unlike
France, England had an effective central bank and well-developed credit market.
The English government allowed the domestic economy to function with few
restrictions and encouraged both technological change and a free market. England
also had a labor surplus which, thanks to the enclosure movement, meant that there
was an adequate supply of workers for the burgeoning factory system.

England's agricultural revolution came as a result of increased attention to fertilizers,

the adoption of new crops and farming technologies, and the enclosure movement.
Jethro Tull (1674-1741) invented a horse-drawn hoe as well as a mechanical seeder
which allowed seeds to be planted in orderly rows. A contemporary of Tull, Charles
"Turnip" Townshend (1674-1738), stressed the value of turnips and other field crops
in a rotation system of planting rather than letting the land lay fallow. Thomas William
Coke (1752-1842) suggested the utilization of field grasses and new fertilizers as
well as greater attention to estate management.

In order for these "high farmers" to make the most efficient use of the land, they had
to manage the fields as they saw fit. This was, of course, impossible under the three
field system which had dominated English and European agriculture for centuries.
Since farmers, small and large, held their property in long strips, they had to follow
the same rules of cultivation. The local parish or village determined what ought to be
planted. In the end, the open-field system of crop rotation was an obstacle to
increased agricultural productivity. The solution was to enclose the land, and this
meant enclosing entire villages. Landlords knew that the peasants would not give up
their land voluntarily, so they appealed by petition to Parliament, a difficult and costly
adventure at best. The first enclosure act was passed in 1710 but was not enforced
until the 1750s. In the ten years between 1750 and 1760, more than 150 acts were
passed and between 1800 and 1810, Parliament passed more than 900 acts of
enclosure. While enclosure ultimately contributed to an increased agricultural
surplus, necessary to feed a population that would double in the 18th century, it also
brought disaster to the countryside. Peasant formers were dispossessed of their land
and were now forced to find work in the factories which began springing up in towns
and cities.

England faced increasing pressure to produce more manufactured goods due to the
18th century population explosion -- England's population nearly doubled over the
course of the century. And the industry most important in the rise of England as an
industrial nation was cotton textiles. No other industry can be said to have advanced
so far so quickly. Although the putting-out system (cottage industry) was fairly well-
developed across the Continent, it was fully developed in England. A merchant
would deliver raw cotton at a household. The cotton would be cleaned and then spun
into yarn or thread. After a period of time, the merchant would return, pick up the
yarn and drop off more raw cotton. The merchant would then take the spun yarn to
another household where it was woven into cloth. The system worked fairly well
except under the growing pressure of demand, the putting-out system could no
longer keep up.

There was a constant shortage of thread so the industry began to focus on ways to
improve the spinning of cotton. The first solution to this bottleneck appeared around
1765 when James Hargreaves (c.1720-1778), a carpenter by trade, invented his
cotton-spinning jenny. At almost the same time, Richard Arkwright (1732-1792)
invented another kind of spinning device, the water frame. Thanks to these two
innovations, ten times as much cotton yarn had been manufactured in 1790 than had
been possible just twenty years earlier. Hargreaves' jenny was simple, inexpensive
and hand-operated. The jenny had between six and twenty-four spindles mounted on
a sliding carriage. The spinner (almost always a woman) moved the carriage back
and forth with one hand and turned a wheel to supply power with the other. Of
course, now that one bottleneck had been relieved, another appeared -- the weaver
(usually a man) could no longer keep up with the supply of yarn. Arkwright's water
frame was based on a different principle. It acquired a capacity of several hundred
spindles and demanded more power -- water power. The water frame required large,
specialized mills employing hundreds of workers. The first consequence of these
developments was that cotton goods became much cheaper and were bought by all
social classes. Cotton is the miracle fiber -- it is easy to clean, spin, weave and dye
and is comfortable to wear. Now millions of people who had worn nothing under their
coarse clothes could afford to wear cotton undergarments.

Although the spinning jenny and water frame managed to increase the productive
capacity of the cotton industry, the real breakthrough came with developments in
steam power. Developed in England by Thomas Savery (1698) and Thomas
Newcomen (1705), these early steam engines were used to pump water from coal
mines. In the 1760s, a Scottish engineer, James Watt (1736-1819) created an
engine that could pump water three times as quickly as the Newcomen engine. In
1782, Watt developed a rotary engine that could turn a shaft and drive machinery to
power the machines to spin and weave cotton cloth. Because Watt's engine was
fired by coal and not water, spinning factories could be located virtually anywhere.

Steam power also promoted important changes in other industries. The use of
steam-driven bellows in blast furnaces helped ironmakers switch over from charcoal
(limited in quantity) to coke, which is made from coal, in the smelting of pig iron. In
the 1780s, Henry Cort (1740-1800) developed the puddling furnace, which allowed
pig iron to be refined in turn with coke. Skilled ironworkers ("puddlers") could "stir"
molten pig iron in a large vat, raking off refined iron for further processing. Cort also
developed steam-powered rolling mills, which were capable of producing finished
iron in a variety of shapes and forms.

Aided by revolutions in agriculture, transportation, communications and technology,

England was able to become the "first industrial nation." This is a fact that historians
have long recognized. However, there were a few other less-tangible reasons which
we must consider. These are perhaps cultural reasons. Although the industrial
revolution was clearly an unplanned and spontaneous event, it never would have
been "made" had there not been men who wanted such a thing to occur. There must
have been men who saw opportunities not only for advances in technology, but also
the profits those advances might create. Which brings us to one very crucial cultural
attribute -- the English, like the Dutch of the same period, were a very commercial
people. They saw little problem with making money, nor with taking their surplus and
reinvesting it. Whether this attribute has something to do with their "Protestant work
ethic," as Max Weber put it, or with a specifically English trait is debatable, but the
fact remains that English entrepreneurs had a much wider scope of activities than
did their Continental counterparts at the same time.