‘What was moderate about the enlightenment?’ Moderation in eighteenth-century Europe

ABSTRACT

Abstract: What does it mean to refer to the enlightenment as ‘moderate’? One answer to this question, and the one which abounds in historiography of enlightenment in the past two decades, is that of Jonathan Israel. For Israel, the ‘moderate enlightenment’ is the half-baked counterpart to the ‘Radical Enlightenment’. Where the Radical Enlightenment, in Israel’s version of events, was the crucible within which progressive modernity was forged, the ‘moderate enlightenment’ was the regressive vehicle for accommodating elements of this agenda within the social, political and intellectual structures of the ancien regime. This essay, and the special issue it introduces, seeks alternative ways to understand the prospect of a moderate enlightenment by inviting reflection on currents of moderation in eighteenth-century Europe. Turning the tables on moderate enlightenment, and framing it as an episode in a history of moderation, it proposes a range of lenses onto the intellectual culture of eighteenth-century Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Enlightenment
• moderation
• moderate enlightenment
• early modern Europe
• eighteenth-century Europe

1. Turning the tables on ‘the moderate enlightenment’

What does it mean to refer to the enlightenment as ‘moderate’? One answer to this question, and the one which abounds in historiography of enlightenment in the past two decades, is that of Jonathan Israel. For Israel, the ‘moderate enlightenment’ is the half-baked counterpart to the ‘Radical Enlightenment’. Where the Radical Enlightenment, in Israel’s version of events, was the crucible within which progressive modernity was forged, the ‘moderate enlightenment’ was the regressive vehicle for accommodating elements of this agenda within the social, political and intellectual structures of the ancien regime. Moderate enlighteners, for Israel, made peace with the forces of darkness. So doing, they betrayed the enlightenment as a project.¹

Israel’s dichotomy is a powerful, if contested, frame for thinking about the enlightenment, eighteenth-century Europe and the passage to modernity. Yet what if ‘moderate enlightenment’ were decoupled from ‘radical enlightenment'? What if, rather than ask what ‘the moderate enlightenment’ was, or how ‘moderate enlightenment’ related to ‘radical enlightenment’, we were to ask: ‘what was moderate about the enlightenment’?

Posing this question proposes a transposition from a negative to a positive enquiry into the prospect of a moderate enlightenment. It invites, too, a shift from a relative to a substantive understanding of ‘moderate’ as the demarcating term. With this it suggests a closer proximity between ‘moderate’ as adjective and ‘moderation’ as noun. Hence, we might ask: which attributes of the enlightenment were moderate in character? Which faces of enlightenment were defined by moderation? And what does that ascription of moderation do for our understanding of the enlightenment, and its bearing upon the present?

Pursued properly these questions bring into sight a related enquiry. Moderation may offer a window onto the history of the enlightenment and eighteenth-century Europe. But the eighteenth century, and with it, the enlightenment, also represents an episode in the history of moderation.

These two historiographical enquiries – the history of the enlightenment and the history of moderation – are at very different stages of development. Where the former is well-extended, even by some accounts exhausted,² the latter is under-extended and, in the main part, waiting to be written. Radicalism, extremism, fanaticism, revolution – all have been subjects of intense interest for historians and social scientists. Moderation, antonymic to all these categories, has been neglected, its meaning underdeveloped, its history untold. This has stunted understanding of the currents of moderation in contemporary politics, society and culture – and subsequently understanding of their modern, and early modern, inheritance.

2. The enlightenment as an episode in the history of moderation

This neglect of moderation is perhaps changing. In the past decade, scholars have worked to assemble histories of moderation in modern Europe and North America. Their rationale in doing so is, in part, nakedly presentist. Moderation’s pertinence for a contemporary society riddled by polarization, a contemporary culture haunted by extremism, and a contemporary politics where the centre-ground feels itself to be diminishing, seems self-evident. An appeal to moderation promises to act as a salve for liberal centrists under siege.³

Against, or alongside, this self-proclaimed ‘salvage-history’⁴ scholars of a different ilk have turned to a critical anatomy of moderation. On this charge, the problem with the present and recent past is not too little moderation but too much. The ills of late modernity are attributed to the mid-century dominion of liberal-conservative anti-ideological moderates who preached a doctrine of neutrality and the ‘third way’. Those moderates and their moderation have an intellectual heritage, operating at various depths, which needs dissecting.⁵

There is a space for presentism in historical scholarship, both for those historians seeking to recover moderations lost and for those seeking to unseat its perceived ascendance. But the terrain on which that dialogue takes place needs staking out. It needs to sit atop a disciplined historical enquiry into the uses and abuses of moderation in the past. Only through such an undergirding enquiry can what is currently a shallow history be deepened and enriched. Only through such an enquiry can the bearing of that history upon the present be more fully understood.

Rather than framing specific thinkers and intellectual currents as incubators or harbingers of moderation in the present, and legitimizing or condemning modernity on these terms, a conceptual history of moderation might be conceived. This would see the reconstruction by historians of one or several ‘moderating processes’ running through early modern Europe, akin to the ‘civilizing process' perceived in the mid-twentieth century.⁶ These ‘moderating processes’ may contain many things: the emergence of ideas of governance – of the self and the polity – and a more centralized state;⁷ the establishment of political parties and reinvention of political equilibrium;⁸ a new sense, at once internalized and socialized, of self-discipline;⁹ an embedding of politeness within commercial society;¹⁰ the rise of an epistemic modesty, a mistrust of speculative metaphysics, and an appeal to critique;¹¹ an aversion to enthusiasm, a distaste for dogmatism and a tempering of religious conflict;¹² a fear of utopia and a commitment to incremental improvement and this-worldliness.¹³

The legacy of this ‘moderating process’ can be debated and disputed, claimed and reviled – but, in the first instance, it needs to be understood in all its complexity. For that, early modern moderation itself needs to become an object of historical enquiry.

3. ‘Faces of moderation’ in eighteenth-century Europe

This special issue makes a modest contribution to a fleshier understanding of moderation in early modern Europe. Each article offers an enquiry into the intellectual cultures of moderation in eighteenth-century Europe. The sum of the whole may pose the question asked in the first section of this essay – ‘what was moderate about the enlightenment?’ – or it may work to contribute to an understanding of the ‘moderating process’ invoked in the section above. More immediately, however, each essay contains insights into how specific historical actors in specific historical environments either thought and wrote about moderation as a concept or sought to moderate the social and political dynamics they saw unfurling around them.

The effect is polyphonic: these essays gesture towards the richness of the intellectual cultures of moderation at play in the eighteenth century. That they hang unevenly together says something both about the lack of cohesion within and between those cultures, as well as the amorphous nature of ‘moderation’ as a guiding concept. Nonetheless, across their specificities several vistas come into light, and warrant detail as enquiries for further study.

3.1. Theological moderation

Firstly, they demonstrate the persistence in the eighteenth century of a theological discourse on moderation. This discourse was widespread through the early modern period, as earlier ideals of moderation were appropriated during the theological tumults of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The article by Robert Strivens surveys the long tail of this theological discourse into the eighteenth century, and the appropriation of ‘moderation’ by Philip Doddridge, English dissenting minister. Doddridge, as Strivens demonstrates, placed moderation at the centre of his pedagogy, entailing an epistemic modesty and charity towards differing viewpoints, while retaining an overall submission to scriptural authority.

Doddridge’s moderation was akin to that developed by non-conformist ‘latitudinarian’ churchmen through the seventeenth century. In this he shared an inheritance with his Scottish contemporary Robert Wallace, the protagonist in Elad Carmel’s article. Wallace styled himself as a ‘moderate freethinker’, equidistant from both radical freethinkers, with their perceived tendencies towards deism and an excessive scepticism, and orthodox clergymen, purveyors of a crude theological dogmatism. Wallace’s moderation, then, was a positional device mediating the clergy and avowed freethinkers. It was also, however, a substantive virtue, rooted – like that of Doddridge – in charity towards and toleration of dissenting views, so long as they didn’t cast into doubt the essentials of the Christian faith.

3.2. Moderating social and political change

If there was a crosspollination between theological moderation and intellectual civility in eighteenth-century Britain, this was framed by the broader processes of societal change afoot within eighteenth-century Europe. Navigation of these processes of social and political change is a second vista, featuring in articles by Damien Tricoire and Pauls Dajia. Tricoire’s and Dajia’s protagonists – Denis Diderot and Gustav Von Bergmann respectively – deploy ‘moderate’ strategies to mitigate the social and political rupture they saw occurring around them.

For Tricoire, Diderot has been unjustly drawn into the realm of radicalism by revisionist historians seeking to make hay with his legacy. Diderot may have, in private, expressed radical religious views. His political thought, however, displayed a consistent and fundamental commitment to a paternalistic monarchy in accordance with the French ancient constitution. Therein lay his political moderation.

Dajia’s Von Bergman similarly cautioned against overt political change. Amidst a Volkaufklärung enthusiasm for peasant education, Dajia depicts the Lutheran pastor’s accommodation of, on the one side, a drive to educate the lower classes and loosen the hold of serfdom with, on the other, a resistance to the structural emancipation being proposed by more radical voices afoot in the late eighteenth-century Baltic provinces. Von Bergman’s moderation lay in his incorporation of intellectual emancipation alongside social discipline.

3.3. Moderation against revolution

Tricoire’s case against ‘Diderot radicale’ is also a case against the back-casting of the French Revolution, and with it the advent of modernity, into the earlier decades of the eighteenth century. The final two papers diverge from Tricoire’s approach, in so far as they tackle head on the political-theoretical legacies of the intellectual voices advocating moderation in the years of Revolution and its immediate aftermath.

Nicolai von Eggers’ contribution traces the intellectual evolution of an advocate of moderation through the political disruption which beset France at the turn of the nineteenth century: François Dominique de Reynaud, better known as the comte de Montlosier. Unlike Diderot and Von Bergman, whose moderation is implicit, Montlosier extensively used the language of moderation to describe his project of a political order defined by a tempered aristocracy pursuing good governance in light of the advent of mass politics. The ‘sceptre of moderation’, for Montlosier, meant warding against revolution but without falling back on tradition and the ancien régime.

Montlosier’s brand of tempered counter-revolutionary politics, for Von Eggers, prefaced the emergence of modern right. Moderation’s pertinence for a different political-theoretical legacy is explored by Carlos Pérez Crespo: that of constituent power, in the thought of the Abbé Sieyès. Where Von Eggers probed the language of moderation in Montlosier’s thought, Crespo, instead, interprets the structure of Sieyès’ model of sovereignty, and locates a conceptual moderation at its core. Sieyès’ doctrine of pouvoir constituant, Crespo argues, has been associated with a liberal tradition: pace Rousseauist popular sovereignty, Sieyès has been seen as proposing ‘an exercise of popular power in “constitutent moments”’, legitimizing a political order which otherwise checks the dominion of the general will. Through a granular analysis of Sieyès’ thought, Crespo argues instead that it is more proper to frame Sieyès’ sovereignty as moderate and illiberal: the extraordinary representative of the state wills and acts in a metaphysical alignment, rather than constitutional articulation, with the volonté générale.

3.4. Moderation as political theory

Crespo’s enquiry raises to the surface the question of the antagonistic relationship between political liberalism and political moderation – to paraphrase Crespo: most liberal thinkers are moderates, but not all moderates are liberal, with Sieyès a case in point. Across these two articles there is a spectral troika of discourses on moderation: a loose and ill-defined politics of moderation in the ancien régime; a counter-revolutionary politics of moderation customarily defined as ‘conservative’;¹⁴ and a ‘liberal’ politics of moderation constructed retrospectively by twentieth and now twenty-first-century political theorists, which claims actors from the seventeenth century onwards for its own.¹⁵ Historians of political thought need to understand the threads of continuity and discontinuity through which these three discourses, their historical and historiographical composition, and their respective politics of moderation, can be related to one another. They might then be well-placed to interpret their bearing upon the meaning of enlightenment.

That this is a not a new enquiry is demonstrated through Mithen’s piece on the twentieth century search for a ‘moderate enlightenment’, featuring Leo Strauss and J. G. A. Pocock as protagonists. Both Strauss and Pocock articulated powerful visions of enlightenment which underpinned a mature political philosophy, explicitly in the case of Strauss, and implicitly for Pocock. Both their enlightenments and political philosophies reflected – again, explicitly in the case of Strauss, implicitly for Pocock – the species of moderation to which they hew. Locating either thinker within a stable political theoretical context is a persistent challenge.

4. Moderations, and enlightenments, yet untold

If these four ‘vistas’ – theological moderation; the moderation of social and political change; moderation against revolution; and moderation as political theory – point towards future enquiries, it is also true that this collection of articles is far from a comprehensive survey of ideas about moderation in eighteenth-century Europe.

Glaring in its absence is a contribution on southern Europe. Whether interpreted as an ecclesiological, theological or political paradigm, post-Tridentine Catholicism went hand in hand with moderation, and the species of enlightenment which emerged in Catholic Europe was, by necessity, moderate in conception and articulation.¹⁶ The processes of reform, counter-reformation, and Sozialdisziplinierung in Catholic Europe held an ethos of moderation at their core, and this persisted through into the eighteenth century and beyond.

Absent too, for the most part, are the canonical thinkers of enlightenment – and where these do appear, in the guise of Diderot and the Abbé Sieyès, what we find in these papers is a non-canonical account of their thought. Elsewhere, a few key canonical ‘enlightenment thinkers’ have been assessed by political theorists for the centrality of moderation to their thought.¹⁷ Where this has happened, it has tended to be in isolation from a wider culture of intellectual, religious or political moderation to which these actors individually and collectively belonged. Smith, Rousseau, Burke, Kant, Voltaire – all wrote on moderation, and all could benefit from a contextualist interrogation into the function of moderation in their thought.

The twenty-first century has seen something like the fragmentation of enlightenment scholarship. This is not the sort of theoretical disintegration imagined by the likes of J. G. A. Pocock or J. C. D. Clark around the turn of the millennium.¹⁸ Rather it is a diffusion of enlightenment as a cohesive political-philosophical problem in the face of historical enquiries into, among other things, enlightenment’s globality, its gendered credentials, its social fabric, its cultural attributes, and religious dimensions.¹⁹ Those queries have contributed enormously to our understanding of eighteenth-century history. They have not, however, consistently deepened our understanding of enlightenment and why it matters. Asking ‘what was moderate about the enlightenment?’ is one means to return the question of the political-philosophical meaning of enlightenment to centre stage. In particular, by collating themes of politeness, civility, toleration, discipline, self-restraint and governance, and locating them within commercial society, an assertively moderate enlightenment may act as a vehicle for reframing enlightenment’s moral and political economy.

This enquiry into the concurrent emergence from eighteenth-century Europe of political modernity and economic capitalism remains the sharp edge of enlightenment scholarship. It is assuredly absent from this special issue: here other faces of eighteenth-century European intellectual culture are explored. Nonetheless, by establishing moderation as a lens through which to view eighteenth-century Europe, they collectively prepare the ground for that enquiry, and enlightenment, to be engaged from a new, self-consciously moderate, perspective.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions [grant number 842070].

Notes

1 Israel’s invocation of a ‘moderate enlightenment’ appears in the preface of his 2001 Radical Enlightenment, v–vii, 9–11. It is given greater coherence in his 2006 Enlightenment Contested. On alternative histories of ‘moderate enlightenment’ see my ‘Searching for ‘Moderate Enlightenment’’, in this volume.

2 This sense of exhaustion at the close of the twentieth century is captured in the elegant, haunting essay by Giarrizzo, ‘Enlightenment’.

3 Craiutu, Faces of Moderation; A Virtue for Courageous Minds. See also: Lok and de Haan, The Politics of Moderation; Carrese, Democracy in Moderation; Vassilou, Moderate Liberalism and the Scottish Enlightenment. This recovery of moderation is the culminating call to arms of Francis Fukuyama’s Liberalism and its Discontents, 154.

4 Akin to a ‘salvage ethnography’ of moderation pursued by Smith, ‘Democracy Begins at Home’.

5 With a summary of recent work on moderate cold war liberalism see Steinmetz-Jenkins, ‘Yesterday’s Men’. For critical studies on strands within this landscape see Moyn, Christian Human Rights; Liberalism against Itself; Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice. There is a subtle, self-conscious, presentist critique of moderation latent in Shagan, The Rule of Moderation, revealed in pp. 338–340.

6 I borrow and expand this suggestion from Shagan, The Rule of Moderation, 340. The reference is to Elias’ The Civilizing Process.

7 As projected by classical accounts of Gerhard Oesterreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State and Tuck, Philosophy and Government.

8 Skjönsberg, The Persistence of Party; on other pathways to political equilibrium at the close of the early modern period, Serna, La république des girouettes.

9 Oesterich’s work on the state and philosophy (fn. 7) is rooted in his essentially Weberian concept of sozialdisziplinierung (‘Strukturprobleme des europäischen Absolutismus’). Extending this see Paolo Prodi, Disciplina dell’anima, disciplina del corpo e disciplina della società.

10 Summarising in an English context, see Klein, ‘Politeness and the Interpretation’; now Thomas, In Pursuit of Civility.

11 Levitin, The Kingdom of Darkness.

12 As shaped the arc of J. G. A. Pocock’s enlightenment, summarized in: ‘The Antiself of Enlightenment’.

13 A commitment to “the improvement of the human lot … in this world” is central to enlightenment in Robertson’s The Case for the Enlightenment, 32.

14 On the issues with ascribing this ‘conservative’ see Jones, Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism; Richard Bourke, ‘What is Conservatism?’.

15 On the construction of ‘liberalism’ see Stanton, ‘John Locke and the Fable of Liberalism’; Duncan Bell, ‘What is Liberalism?’.

16 On Catholic, and confessionalised, concepts of moderation in the eighteenth century see Mithen, ‘Two Concepts of Moderation in the Early Enlightenment’.

17 Osborne, ‘Moderation as Government’; Sagar, ‘Between Virtue and Knavery’.

18 Pocock, ‘The Re-Description of Enlightenment’; Clark, ‘Providence, Predestination and Progress’.

19 On the persistence of Enlightenment principally as ‘an organizing principle of research’, as its centrality as a political-philosophical enquiry wanes, see Robertson, ‘Enlightenment and Modernity’, 308–311. On the agenda of globalising enlightenment scholarship see Conrad, ‘Enlightenment in Global History’. Examples of works claiming enlightenment in their title yet in the main declining the question of enlightenment’s political-philosophical meaning include Jackson-Williams, The First Scottish Enlightenment; Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment; DeLucia, A Feminine Enlightenment.