In Our Time - The Enlightenment in Britain

Episode Date: January 18, 2001

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Enlightenment. In Germany it's called Aufklarung, in France it's the Siecle De Lumieres, and in Britain it's called the Age of Enlightenment. It's the period around the eighteenth century when an intellectual movement committed to science and opposed to superstition, embraced the greatest minds of Europe and America; Descartes, Kant, Leibniz, Montesquie, Diderot, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin. But where are all the British thinkers? According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 'ideas concerning God, reason, nature and man were synthesised into a world view that gained wide assent and that instigated revolutionary developments in art, philosophy and politics'. Some historians in the past have claimed that The Enlightenment passed these islands by, but in his new book Enlightenment: Britain and The Creation of The Modern World, Roy Porter says The Enlightenment was British first, and that the modern world started here. With Roy Porter, Professor in the Social History of Medicine, Wellcome Trust Centre of University College London, Linda Colley, Leverhulme Research Professor and School Professor of History, London School of Economics; Jeremy Black, Professor of History at Exeter University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the Age of Enlightenment is the period around the 18th century, perhaps the long 18th century from, say, 1688 to 1715, when an intellectual movement committed to, 17th century,

when an intellectual movement committed to the reasoning signs and opposed to the superstition in religion embraced the greatest minds of Europe and America. Descartes, Kant, Leibniz, Montesquier, Diderot, Volta, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, but where are the British thinkers? Some historians in the past have claimed that the Enlightenment passed these islands by,

but in his exuberant new book, Enlightenment, Britain and the creation of the modern world, Roy Porter says the Enlightenment was British first and that the modern world started here. Roy Porter is Professor in the Social History of Medicine at the Welcome Trust Centre of University College London and he's with me now. Also here to discuss whether the Enlightenment was British,

is Linda Colley, author of Britons, Forging a Nation, 1707 to 1837, and Professor of History at the London School of Economics, and Jeremy Black, author of 18th Century of Europe and Professor of History at Exit University. Roy Porter, let's start rather basically. What does the term the Age of Enlightenment actually refer to? I think it's a Europe-wide development

and it was rather nicely summed up by the German philosopher Emmanuel Kant in the 1780s when he said that enlightenment was mankind's escape from his self-imposed tutelage. In other words, man had somehow wrapped himself up in a mental straitjacket and at long last was growing up, bursting free, coming of age, and developing a sense of intellectual freedom, was ceasing to be dependent upon authorities, upon kings and priests and God, and was at last thinking for himself. The Encyclabini Botanica, which I quoted a little in the trail,

said it was a synthesis of God, reason, nature and man, synthesizing into a worldview that gained wide assent and instigated revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, and politics, and central to enlightenment thought, was the celebration of reason. Would you go along with that? I'd certainly go along with reason, in the sense that people believed that it was important to think for yourself, in other words, that you couldn't just simply get truth out of book,

or from institutions like the church. You had to criticise existing authorities, and instead of looking to faith, as traditional Christendom had done, for the ultimate truths about things, you had to use your reason on the evidence that was provided. That's one of the reasons why science itself is so important to the 18th century. After all, Newton had discovered the laws of the universe,

discovered the laws of gravity, discovered the laws of mechanism. Newton became one of the great kings of Enlightenment thought. And people look back to Newton and said, you know, if Newton has discovered the laws of the universe, now, on the basis of reason and experiment and observation, we can go forward, understand nature, change nature for human benefit. There's always a tendency of historians to box in decades and centuries and ages of, I mean, I've got a whole thing called the age of reason, collection of books, the age of this, the age of that, the age of the other. Are we talking really about a distinctive difference here?

Are you telling listeners, look, something really happened in this loose box? We can call it the long 18th century, we can say 1688 to 1815 and so on. But are you talking about it as something that really did clearly define itself? I think it's an extraordinarily important watershed in retrospect because it marks the change from an essentially religious outlook. I mean, if you go back to the 17th century to Milton, people still believe, people at large still believe, that the end of the world is nigh, people believe in Satan,

people believe in witches and demons, people believe in burning in hell in everlasting perdition, etc. And that's a very, very deeply literal Christian view of things. By the end of the 18th century, people are still Christians, people are still religious. But they have what we would nowadays call an essentially naturalistic and secular view. People are thinking in terms of what men can do for themselves. Before we go into the arguments which come out of Roy Porter's book, Lynne Nicolle, would you dissent from, agree with, go along with Roy Porter's definition of enlightenment?

I think the increasing tendency among scholars now is to take a very loose notion of the Enlightenment and to say, look, it has different manifestations in different countries at different times. It isn't always anti-supestition. It isn't certainly always anti-religion. It isn't always anti-court. There are fluctuations. And I think I'd go along with that. I think what I'd also want to stress, though, is when we talk about people believing this, people not believing,

We have to be very clear as to which people were meaning. There is an expansion of intellectual activity in the 18th century, long 18th century, which is terribly important, and I absolutely agree with that. And it's certainly true that some of the controls are coming off. The church is less important, the court is less important, and print culture is expanding. That said, even in Britain, where literacy is quite high, we're still dealing with the world where the bulk of men and certainly the bulk of women cannot read or write.

And those who can read overwhelmingly are much more likely to be reading the Bible than the spectator. So when we're talking about the Enlightenment, even in Britain, we have to remember it's a phenomenon which is characterizing the landed elite, perhaps the upper sectors of the middle classes. but it certainly isn't ubiquitous, it certainly isn't taking in the bulk of the population, because the bulk of the population is still very poor and isn't educated, and I think that needs to be stressed. Jeremy Black, again, just to round up this definition of enlightenment, would your definition be much different from that of Proreport or from the colleague?

I very much agree with Linda that the term Enlightenment cannot be used to describe the 18th century, but what was subsequently defined as Enlightenment was clearly located, within the 18th century. I mean, it's certainly true that knowledge was not necessarily and interest in new things as not necessarily what we would term rational. For example, one of the great interests in the 18th century in Transylvania was a revived interest in vampirism. You've got Dr. Mesmer and his, you know, rather strange scientific experiments.

And, I mean, the notion that, as it were, progress or what was termed progress in the 18th century should be, or what was termed rational in the 18th century would meet our definitions of So I think one one's got to be very, very careful about. And as Linda says, not only are there many people who are illiterate in Britain in the 18th century, there's still, although the government has, for example, abolished punishment, capital punishment for witches, there's still popular belief in witchcraft. Witches are still being, you know, women who are perceived as witches are still being thrown in ponds,

and that is reported in the newspapers. The culture of print is just as much printing astrological works, or a lot of millenarian works in the 1790s at the time. of the French Revolution just as much as it's printing Newton. So I think one of the difficulties is there's much in the 18th century among advanced intellectual opinion that we today would sympathise with. We today would sympathise with people who are opposed to torture, people who are in favour of freedom of opinion,

people who are in favour of religious toleration. But we've got to be very careful before we assume that that describes the opinions of all. Roy Porter, the Enlightenment traditionally thought, as I said, to have started in France and, to certain extent, Germany and flitted across to America. And Britain has scarcely been credited. In fact, you opened your book with a list of books about the Enlightenment,

which puts Britain bottom of the league, rather like those league tables where we bottom board children with spots and National Health Service and all that kind of carry on. It was happening then. Anyway, you say, ridiculous. We were at the forefront of the movement, and it was very rich in this country. Can you briefly punch that argument through now?

Yeah, I think, roughly speaking, what happened is that people assumed that the Enlightenment must have been so much more powerful in France because France had a revolution at the end of the century. Enlightenment is progressive, therefore it causes a revolution. And there's a truth in that for France. But as Linda was saying, Enlightenment comes differently in various different places. And England, in a sense, had its revolution at the beginning of the Enlightenment in 1688, which is the end of absolutist monarchy. James II is thrown out. William the Third comes in, and you get a constitutional government and various sorts of freedoms being

guaranteed. And as a result of that, there is an opportunity for English thought to thrive, not in opposition to the existing status quo, but within the status quo, interacting with it. There's an opportunity for the English Enlightenment to be a practical thing. And that is the reason why Enlightenment in England is able to thrive so early, because it's already working within a favourable seedbed. Then, Nicolle, would you agree with that? Would you bring the Enlightenment in England forward? Would you compare it favourably?

with France and Germany. Would you give it the weight that Roy Porter gives it? I don't think you can play these sort of apple and pear and orange games, which has the best enlightenment. This isn't how it works. But I think Roy's absolutely right to stress the importance and the distinctiveness of what is going on in England. But also I stress England because I think the enlightenment in Scotland

takes a rather different form. And in many ways it takes a form, rather more comparable to what's happening in France. There are these stellar intellectuals in 18th century Scotland, people like Hume, like Smith. And they're very much associated with the universities because Scottish universities in the 18th century are good. Now, I think one of the characteristics of the 18th century enlightenment in England

is that we only had two universities then, Oxford and Cambridge. they were particularly slumberous at that time. And so Enlightenment in 18th century England is much more an urban phenomenon and much more a London phenomenon. I think London is really crucial to it. I think that's one way that the Enlightenment continues to influence our concept of the intelligentsia in this country today.

We still have a London intelligentsia, but the English don't really value their universities. And I think that's probably a carry-on from the particular form that the Enlightenment took in 18th century England, much more a London metropolitan phenomenon than a university academic, great intellectuals phenomenon. Could you address this idea of the English Enlightenment? In your book, Royport, you splice the Scottish Enlightenment,

that's your word, into the British Enlightenment, you sometimes use the English Enlightenment, and you give us a page of two of great pleasure saying, look, I'm going to throw these terms about it and what the hell. Basically, that's what you say. And it works out quite well, and then we got on with the 700 pages of extremely enjoyable Enlightenment Enlightenment. But can you address this idea of the British Enlightenment's neglect, as it is outlined,

and where you find it after reading Roy's book or in your own studies now? I think Roy is absolutely right. There were, insofar as we're going to talk about Enlightenment and what we perceive as Enlightenment in France, in Germany and Poland and so on, you can find it more widely disseminated in urban, metropolitan culture in England. It's worth noting that leading French intellectuals such as Montesquieu and Voltaire visited London in the 1720s

were very, very impressed by what they saw there. Interestingly enough, they virtually never went outside London. Theirs was very much a London-based view. But I think that in England, the characteristic feature compared to much of the consonant is that what one might term advanced intellectual or cultural opinion was not dependent on a court society. so that in many parts of, for example, Germany, say, Prussia,

is very important what Frederick the Great feels. In a place like Bavaria, it's very important that Max the 3rd, Joseph, is very keen on advanced opinion, or if he isn't, that that then makes everybody wake up that morning and think, oh, what are we going to do to please the elector? Now, whatever one might say about re-evaluating positively George the 1, George the 2nd and George the 3rd, nobody is going to say that they were the centres

of intellectual life in England. The Royal Family is not going to be accused of intellectualism. I don't think that. I mean, George III was interested in Handel. He patronised the astronomer Herschel. I mean, I don't mean by that that he was a bore, but he was not central to intellectual or cultural strategies of anybody else. And I think that the characteristic feature of Enlightenment in England

is that it is not dependent on institutionalisation. And that means, as Roy has pointed out in his book, A lot of it is dependent upon people sitting there and buying books and therefore patronising writers through the anonymous media of the publishers. And I think that's quite important to the characteristic of English Enlightenment. Before we leave the general discussion of the Enlightenment, I'd like to ask Linda Colley to comment on the second half of the title of Roy Porter's book. The creation, Britain and the creation of the modern world,

there's a link here between, the Enlightenment and modernity. How do you see that? Does that worry you? I think I'd be cherry about stressing that too much because it's far too easy to cherry pick in a particular century or particular movement and say, yes, those bits are modern,

we approve of that, that's what we're going to say it is and look, it points forward to the present. And I have to come back to my point that the social depth of the Enlightenment in 18th century Britain is slim. And this continues to be in the 18th century a very undemocratic world. I mean, I suppose if we thought of, well, what do we see as modernity? Democracy would be a crucial part of it. Well, actually, England comes nearer to having democracy, arguably, in the 17th century and in the 19th century.

In the 18th century, the electorate is tiny. Similarly, I think we'd see as modern the idea that, that everybody should have an education. But in fact, 18th century England falls far behind other continental European countries in terms of its support for mass education. We still have a dominant landed class, which is really filling most of the senior political posts.

So in many ways, 18th century England is emphatically not modern. But there are certainly aspects of the Enlightenment, which we can see as attract. Anna's pointing to the way we live now, but only part of it. Roy Porter, is that what you meant by and the creation of the modern world? Is it a cherry-picking creation that you're talking about? Certainly Linda's right to say that there were many aspects of 18th century England which are not modern. But what was important was that its thinkers wanted it to be modern.

In other words, those thinkers looked around and said, yes, we need more education. Yes, we don't necessarily need democracy in the sense of every person having a vote. public at large needs to be taken into account. The public could be the arbiter of taste when it comes to literature or architecture or things like that. There's a sense of the involvement of the people at large. So I do think that what we're looking at is a sense of modernity in that the future is beginning to count for the first time on a grand scale. All traditional societies had looked to the past for their truths, be it the past of the Garden of Eden, be it the past of

a golden age of Greece or Rome. And for the first time, in the whole of history, people are actually saying, what counts is the future which we are going to create? Do you think that the large expansion of the print media in the 18th century was a particular factor in British Enlightenment? Very much so. England had the largest press in Europe.

The only other areas where there was press that didn't have pre-publication censorship of any scale is Hamburg in the United Provinces. what we would now call the Netherlands. And the English press is very extensive. I mean, obviously, as Linda points out, a lot of people can't read the press, and through taxation, the cost of it is pushed up,

but far more people are reading newspapers in England and magazines and other publications than elsewhere. As far as modernity is concerned, what Roy was saying, what I would suggest is there is a difference between in the 18th century people moving towards ideas of modernity, and he describes it in England, I think fairly. I think one could also refer to the ideas,

that lay behind the American Declaration of Independence. One could talk about the French radicals at the time of the French Revolution. These are all ideas of modernity, as opposed to, as it were, developments towards modernity, as Linda is describing in terms of democratisation, mass education, the urbanisation, secularisation, that one sees much more pronounced in the 19th century. So in part, it's a two-way street. And when one's looking at the ideas in the 18th century, one can say these ideas are influential for the future.

but they don't necessarily describe everybody's opinion at that time. Okay, let's try to get at the character of the British Enlightenment. In your book, Ripe what you write, quote, if the Enlightenment had a father, Locke's paternity claim is better than any other. Now then. Locke is the all-round intellectual at the end of the 17th century, and he's extraordinarily important in politics, because it's he who really comes up with the idea

that the state is not something God-given via a divine right king, but is something that is created by men for their own benefit, for the protection of their freedom, for the protection of their own property. He has an idea that there's a state of nature that comes before the state, and that men, as it were, set the state up for their own good and can cashier the state if need be. So there's a sense in which, politically speaking, is really important. But I think that Locke's importance goes far beyond that,

because he comes up with the notion of modern man, modern human psychology, if you like. Man, he says, is not created with original sin in him. He's not inherently wicked. Neither does he have in a sort of platonic way innate ideas. Man is born as a blank sheet of paper. Man is indefinitely malleable. Man is like a piece of sealing wax or a piece of plaster seat. You can create whatever sort of man you use by you want.

by environmental influences, by education, by experience. And what this means is that education suddenly becomes of extraordinary importance. The way that people are educated is the way they're going to turn out. Man becomes a creature of indefinite possibility, indefinite possibilities for progress. And so the whole vision of the improvement of the individual person and the improvement of the race, these become the models for future thinking. and Locke is endlessly cited in hundreds and hundreds of educational manuals that are published in the 18th century in terms of man's potential capabilities.

Linda Colla, do you see Locke and his ideas as central to the character of the British Enlightenment or is very important? I think he's important not just to the Enlightenment in England and Scotland, but perhaps even more to the Enlightenment in America and the new United States at the end of the 18th century he is, a Western figure of significance. But I think perhaps is what really makes him in Britain is that he's one of these rare intellectuals who hits the right political moment. He's very much associated with a successful 1688 revolution, which some call the glorious revolution. Now, not everybody in

Britain at the time thinks the revolution is a good idea, but it is a successful revolution. It It sorts out the problem of the monarchy. It makes Parliament very important in a new way. It starts Britain on a set of wars which paradoxically make the country richer and more prosperous and they tie it together better. And Locke's ideas are associated with this revolution. And the revolution itself is going to be vital for the Enlightenment because it solves eventually a lot of the political and religious issues that have been tearing England and Scotland. Scotland and Wales and Ireland apart in the 17th century and in the 16th century. I think a lot of what Roy is describing are the other side of it is much greater internal peace,

greater, though not absolute freedom from the fear of invasion, a lot more prosperity so that more people have more money to spend on books, more leisure, they are less afraid, they have a greater confidence in the future. And Locke is all connected with this. He's very important. saw female and male minds as being in a state of equal potential. What effect did that have in the 18th century and in Britain? Not as much effect perhaps as it should have done. I mean, Locke, like many great writers, writes so much that all sorts of lobbies can find what they're looking for in his writings.

So ultimately, people like Mary Wollstonecroft when they come along in the 1790s can look at Locke and say, yes, I find inspiration in Locke for my own point of view about greater freedom for women. But intellectuals can only do so much. And the forces against what we would now call women's liberation in the 18th century are so great that that implication of Locke, greater equality for men and women outside of the salons, is not really taken up. So any more than, of course, people read Locke about everybody being born like a blank page and says, okay, well of course then rich and poor are alike, black and white are alike, we must create an egalitarian society.

There's the potential of that, but that's not the lesson that people draw in the 18th century in the main. General Buck, we've neglected the popular perhaps mistaken idea that the 18th century rationalism and enlightenment drove out or drove away religion. There was a secularisation of society. Do you think that, in a sense, that's true still, on re-looking at this century?

I think one's got to be careful there. I mean, the 18th century is also the age of the Wesley's, the foundation of Methodism, pietism in Germany, the great awakening, so-called, in evangelical circles, a great movement of Catholic revival as well. So I think one's got to be careful there. I think it's certainly the case that the advanced intellectuals that Roy's talking about felt able many of them,

some of them were personally pious, but felt able many of them to write without reference to church authority. And many of them banished the deity and any nation of providentialism from individual life and banished a strong notion of sin. But that's not the same thing as saying that the age was one in which either all intellectuals or all print cults, or the vast majority of the public were irreligious. I'd be very, very careful before saying that. To just briefly mention Locke, it's no accident that Locke was often twinned with Newton in 18th century English comment.

And one of the purposes of that was for people to say, look, we have intellectuals as great as any that they may have on the continent. And in part, one of the points about building up Locke and Newton is a self-conscious attempt to say, We are as good. We are not culturally inferior to what is going on in the continent because during the 17th century there had been a sort of almost chip on the shoulder approach that was fairly widespread, that many, the idea that in a sense England was culturally and intellectually behind the continent, behind things like, for example, Dutch opinion, behind Baroque sensibility and so on.

And I think that part of the stress on Locke and Newton is a determined attempt at saying intellectually we are as good as anything that can be done anywhere else. Roy Poy, do you pick out Erasmus Darwin as an exemplary enlightenment figure? Could you tell us why you think him out and what was exemplary about him? Well, he's certainly somebody who could be sitting round this table now, engaging in discussion with us. I mean, if anybody is our contemporary in the 18th century, it is Erasmus Darwin. And he is a polymath, a man for all seasons. He's a person who followed Locke in all sorts of ways.

He wrote a whole book on female education. He was a physician. He believed that a great deal of the phenomena of religion like witchcraft and possession could be put down to pathology. I mean, he thought that everything started off from the body. And it's no accident, of course, that as the grandfather of Charles Darwin, he was the world's first great evolutionist. We don't completely agree with his idea of evolution nowadays. But the important thing was that he didn't see everything as being set in place fixed by God. everything had grown out of nature.

Nature was alive. Nature was all there was. Man was an outgrowth of nature as well. And he was a man who participated deeply in the new industrial revolution that was growing up. He lived in the West Midlands. He was a key member of the Lunar Society, that great gathering of manufacturers and dissenting preachers and educationalists and improvers and doctors

that met once a month around Birmingham, on full moon, light, enlightenment, moonlight. They could get home after their meetings because they could get home by moonlight. And he was a great friend of the Wedgwoods and the Bolton's and the Watts and the priestlers, etc. He had this sort of vision. So we're talking about chemistry, steam engine, China making.

Yes, gun making as well, metal making. An education above all. And he had this sort of tremendous vision that man had made himself by evolution and then man must remake his environment by transforming it through education, through technology. He was a kind of Leonardo da Vinci of the time. He had great visions of motor cars and aeroplanes. They didn't actually work,

but the sense in which technology was going to be the saviour of the future was very strong with him. Linda Collar, do you agree with that idea of the British Enlightenment man? What do you draw from, before we move on to Enlightenment and modernity? what do you draw from the British Enlightenment as a particular character which is not found in other Enlightenance? I think this is partly the other side of Britain having a very strong urban sector.

I mean urbanisation is not a mass movement of the bulk of the country is still rural. But the urban population is growing faster in England and Scotland than almost anywhere else in Europe. And with towns, Of course, you get clubs, you get the possibilities of meetings like the Lunar Society, a lot of informal exchanges of knowledge. And I think two of the most attractive aspects of what's going on in 18th century,

England in particular, is this sense that Darwin represents, that people can be polymaths, that knowledge is not so specialised and so compartmentalised. And therefore, you know, someone can be interested in, science, but also in literature and also in art. But also this sense that people who are practical, people who are in industry, people who are businessmen, can also be people of culture, people of ideas. There isn't this sense, which I think is a very unhealthy sense, and you still find very often now in British society, that, well, you've got highfaluting intellectuals on one hand, but you've got men of business earning the money doing the practical stuff on the other.

That idea would have been alien to a lot of 18th century metropolitan and provincial society, which took the much healthier perspective that men of business and men of knowledge could usefully come together and influence each other very productively, and they did. And do you think because of that congruence, that was part of the reason why our economy became explosive at that time? This is a vital part of what we later call the Industrial Revolution. There's no doubt about that. Ideas, not just metal and coal. At the risk of the scurling of pipes descending on Portland Place,

we've got to actually, although Roy Porter splices it in, to use the word, to accuse him of his splicing in the Scots, you splicer of Scots. Can you just, Jeremy, can you bring the Scottish Enlightenment to bear for a few moments on this discussion? Yes, I'll try to, very, very briefly. First of all, of course, if one was listening in Scotland or Ireland, one might be slightly worried to be told that 1688 brought in liberty and freedom, because, of course, certainly didn't for Irish Catholics, and of course it caused many problems in Scotland.

But what I think one can fairly say is that in Scotland in the second half of the 18th century, after Kalludan, after the suppression of capitalism as an option, there is a very much an advanced intellectual movement which looks primarily for its inspiration to Paris and to the low countries, to the Netherlands. That is much more institutional in the sense, as Roy says it's built, many of the people are influential in the universities.

And there are really some very brilliant individuals involved, and exactly as Linda says, they are linked very closely to developments in the economy. And the Scottish economy, of course, is the other great boom of the late, you know, we refer to the Industrial Revolution. If you were on Clydeside in 1780s,

you're seeing a very rapidly changing economy and the crucial thing about it which links up to Enlightenment is that this is applied knowledge. New ideas have pushed through very quickly into new equipment, into a determination to take advantage of every new possibility. And that kind of stress on novelty and on applied knowledge is, I think,

very central to the Scottish Enlightenment. It doesn't preclude an interest in, one might term, more abstract intellectual matters, the origins of anthropology, sociology, and economics being very important. ones, but it is all linked to the idea of practicality. That is very important, I think. And if you look at how British, both Scottish and English writers often differentiated themselves from continental writers, they would often argue that they were concerned with practical

improvement, that ideas had to be practically implied and employed, and they would argue that many of their counterparts on the continent were essentially people who were, as Linda puts it, high-faluting intellectuals, but not necessarily. concerned with developing these ideas in a practical way. Royport, your book sweeps on from Enlightenment, from Modernity to Progress. We go straight from the Enlightenment to the 1960s and so on and so forth. Where does Romanticism fit in?

I mean, for a lot of people, romanticism came up powerfully from the outside to the inside track in the late 18th century and has been at least as powerful as an influence as the Enlightenment over the last couple of hundred years in many areas, perhaps not as construct. and so and so forth. There's a huge argument there. You really put romanticism in its place,

which is kind of very near nowhere as far as I can make out. Well, I think that romanticism is the child of the Enlightenment, and like lots of children, it rebelled against its parents, but at the same time showed a great deal of affinity with them. And romanticism shares with the 18th century Enlightenment a sense of the importance of the individual, for example. It shares a sense of the crucial importance of culture and civilisation. And what it does is to build on so many of the aspects of the Enlightenment.

I mean, if you take, say, Shelley. Shelley is somebody who takes Enlightenment ideas of freedom to the extreme and comes out as a more or less full-blown anarchist. And yet at the same time, Enlightenment writers look back to the 18th century, sorry, romantic writers look back to the 18th century and say it's too scientific for us. It's too mechanistic. It's too urban-based. And so there's a kind of rebellion that goes back to another 18th century idea, nature,

but changes the idea of nature itself, emphasizes the wildness of nature, the sublimity of nature more than its beauty. But again, the sublime had been an enlightenment idea with Edmund Burke. So what one is seeing is a romantic movement that is in its own rebellion, nevertheless showing its own roots in the 18th century. Would you agree with that, Linda Colley? I would agree the fact that, you know, intellectual thought, any kind of sort, a partition doesn't come down. You know, we don't have the Enlightenment up to sort of 1781 and then, bang, the partition comes down,

hey, we're going to be all romantic now. It isn't like that. So, of course, one feeds into the other. But I think one's got to stress the seismic effect of the French Revolution. I think a lot of people, by the end of the 18th century, anyway are beginning to think, well, perhaps the cult of reason has been overpushed. Things are being left out. Things have been neglected. I mean, someone like William Blake is very worried about the cult of reason, the cult of industry, the cult of the new machinery.

He doesn't like it. He wants something else. The French Revolution caters to this notion, because after all, the first generation of French revolutionaries, French Republicans, are very much seeing themselves as children of reason. And you know, you can argue as the French Revolution goes wrong and haywire in many ways and leads to bad things as well as good, that, you know, the children of reason are indeed turning into monsters and perhaps we need to re-examine our intellectual notions. So I think that after 1789, partly because of events in France and the global repercussions they have, I mean the massive world war that follows,

ideas are shifting very rapidly, and romanticism is one aspect of that. Can we look at one and two observations in the Enlightenment from other commentators? Michel Foucault maintain that the Enlightenment's true logic, I'm quoting, was to control and dominate rather than to emancipate. Jeremy Black, what's your reaction to that? He's very much, I think, writing about developments in France,

and it's certainly true that in France, to the leading intellectuals. I mean, there's a book by Harvey Chiswick on French Enlightenment thinkers and their attitudes to the poor, and they're overwhelmingly disparaging about the poor. The poor were in their eyes, ignorant and superstitious people

that needed controlling. I don't think you'll find to the same extent that view. I mean, obviously there are intimations of that view in Britain, but you won't find it so that kind of social politics and that kind of notion of using the state in a coercive way to control the populace in order to enforce change. I don't think you'll find that to the same extent in Britain.

Although having said that, as you were aware, the enlightened state is also the state that, as it were, is participating in the slave trade, though individual enlightenment thinkers are opposed to slavery and slave trade. Someone's got to be careful. I don't want to say that the British are best. I simply want to say it's not the same social politics as what you get in France. But it's interesting that the British is, as Linda Colley pointed out earlier, or rather more complicated, because although it's participating in the slave trade, the British lead the way for the abolition of the slave trade. It's not led by, as it were, a caricature of Enlightenment figure. It's led by a religious person, read by evangelical forces and backed by the evangelism of the 18th century,

rather than the reason of the 18th century. But can I come to another comment on the Enlightenment, Linda Collier. Eric Hobbesbeau, I mean, on history, he wrote, The Enlightenment can be dismissed as anything from superficial and intellectually naive to a conspiracy of dead white men in Periwigs to provide the intellectual foundation for Western imperialism. That's end of quote. Do you think the Enlightenment should carry the blame for the excesses of imperialism? This is a theory very much pushed by thinkers like Edward Said recently.

And the argument goes like this, that because of the ferment of enlightenment ideas in Western Europe and White America generally, you get a great sense of intellectual pride, intellectual complacency, and the Westerners then turn around and say, look, we have. have knowledge, we have superior exuberance and wisdom and reason, which enables us to legitimise dominating other parts of the world. And that's what Saeed and others have said, happens, that the Enlightenment provides intellectual legitimisation for Western dominance in the 19th century. And that's one way of looking at it. I mean, once ideas are let loose, course how people subsequently use them is another matter. I don't think one can blame the

Enlightenment for the use that some of these ideas are put. I also would want to stress, again, that the diversity of the Enlightenment, that if we're going to take this view, well, did the Enlightenment foster Western ideas of empire, Western ideas of racial supremacy and so forth? You can cherry pick and point to ideas that do lead that way, but you must also say that many of Enlightenment figures, people like Hume, people like Voltaire, are very skeptical about imperialism, are very dubious about slavery,

are very ironical about notions that white people are necessarily superior to black people. Again, the Enlightenment is a huge, diverse, complicated phenomenon, and it's wrong to judge it in any monolithic way, pro or anti-modernity, pro- or anti-religion, pro-or-anty-emper. You can find views across the spectrum. Would you agree with that, Roy? Absolutely.

I mean, I think that the important thing about the Enlightenment is that it actually says everything is up for debate. Nothing is settled. Reason is reasoning. Reason is criticism. What you need is a coffee house where everybody, is involved in a talking shop. Yeah, but you do give it one or two defining characteristics,

and one of these is progress. You're right, and your chapter on progress, you write, quote, progress was the opium of the Enlightenment. That's pretty powerful stuff, and we know the little reference you're making. So you're saying something very, you're not being very equivocal there, are you? Well, I think that there is a very powerful sense

that out of debate, out of discussion, out of criticism, there will be improvement. And I can't stress strongly enough, the sense in which for the first time in the history of the world, there was this notion that people of their own devices can create a better future. That was not hubristic. Is it for the first time in history of the world?

Yes, it really was. Does anybody dissent? Is that the two of you dissent? Had that not happened before? I'd be a bit worried about how one describes the Renaissance compared to that. I mean, I think you'll find a sense of optimism and of change and of, you know, printing

the so-called discovery of the new world, a sense of great opportunity is also present in the early 16th century. A man like Erasmus strikes me as in many senses a classic figure who might describe all the virtues that Roy ascribes to the Enlightenment. You might describe to Erasmus. Would you have any qualifications to make to Roy's... Of course there have been. Yes, there have been rich senses of possibility before.

I mean groups like the levellers in the 1640s see no contradiction between. massive progress on earth, but also progress in heaven for them that is interlinked. But I think that what is new undoubtedly in the 18th century is the spread of these ideas. It's not a democratic spread, but because of the greater expansion of print, we're just talking about a much bigger phenomenon. One very important point is that the Enlightenment very much influences the constitution of the state that is to dominate the world in the 20th century, the United States.

And I think that is very important that, if you, If you think about the great world power that develops, it very much is affected by its moments of origin. Would you stick fine and briefly, Roy, to the idea that progress was the opium of the Enlightenment? Yes, and I think it exists the other side of the Atlantic, and it is indeed called the United States of America. Well, thank you all very much. I enjoyed that.

Linda Colley, Jeremy Black, Roy Porter, and thank you all very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about here, History, Science and Philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.