November 13, 2004

ROADS TO VIRTUE -- James Nuechterlein looks at Gertrude Himmelfarb's account of the British Enlightenment in a review of The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments. Quotable:
Virtue � not so much personal virtue as the social virtues of compassion, benevolence, and sympathy � was as central to the British Enlightenment as reason was to the French; and here, in Himmelfarb�s estimation, lay the British advantage. Although they did not deny reason, for the British it was the moral sense, the essentially innate grasp of right and wrong, that was antecedent and superior. In the thought of Adam Smith and others, belief in this moral sense generated a belief in natural human equality that significantly transcended political, social, and economic distinctions. By placing virtue at the heart of the British Enlightenment, Himmelfarb expands the circle of Enlightenment figures to include people normally thought irrelevant or even opposed to it, including Edmund Burke and John Wesley. Nor was the emphasis these moral philosophers placed on virtue merely theoretical or abstract. It created a social ethos that spawned an �age of benevolence� in Britain � and one that, in Himmelfarb�s view, had far more salutary effects in practice than were traceable to the climate of thought encouraged by the philosophes across the Channel. Tocqueville was wrong, she says, in identifying voluntary associations and civil society as unique products of 19th-century American society. A century earlier, Britain had established an astonishing range of private reform movements and philanthropic enterprises, both secular and religious. The spirit animating them was one of reform, not revolution; it produced a significant amelioration of a host of social problems. Nothing similar occurred in France.
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