It was the fiery sword of the
Enlightenment which slashed to ribbons the pretensions of the ancien
regime to hold sway over all our lives, tearing apart the multi-millennial
stranglehold of hereditary privilege and monarchical right. Different authors
will emphasise the varying importance of
individual thinkers and regions; for example the relative impact of the Scottish Enlightenment over the British or the Dutch, or even the Italian - which produced some innovative thinking in regards to jurisprudence and law reform.
Roy Porter for example emphasises the early British contribution (Hume, Locke) while Jonathan Israel prioritises the relative freedom of the press and the open circulation of ideas in the Dutch Republic which created a conducive (though far from ideal) milieu for the spread of Enlightenment ideas, particularly Spinoza's - a thinker he incidentally regards as the cornerstone of the Radical Enlightenment as his republicanism ultimately drew from a monistic philosophy which repudiated all biblical authority and was moreover regarded as logically irrefutable by many even of his fiercest critics.
Most modern historians though, irrespective of their preferences for pin-pointing the ultimate regional origins of Enlightenment thought would regard the French philosophes of the mid to late 18th century (Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, d' Holbach, Condorcet etc.) as the crowning point and locus of most intense engagement of 'the movement'.
As to what "they believed" it was more a case of what should we be required to believe; scepticism towards established "truths" was encouraged (particularly of religious claims), empirical evidence-based research was promoted not just in the domain of the hard sciences but in trying to understand social and political structures - the Scottish Enlightenment in particular (Kames) is associated with the birth of anthropological-type inquiries with various progressive models of the growth of civilisations (so-called 'stage-ism') which was picked up and developed by Rousseau (drawing on critiques of Hobbes and influenced by Lockean contract theory) which became very influential in France and helped stir revolutionary discontent.
A type of progressive relativism was the natural by-product of questioning the justifying narratives of the established order (the ancien regime) which, broadly speaking, and usually in tandem with Church authority, suppressed calls for liberal, democratic reforms (press freedom, wider franchise etc.). So in France, Voltaire's deism led him to sympathises with oppressed Protestants while on similar grounds Raynal's Philosophical History of the West Indies berated the assumptions of European colonial powers to possess any kind of infallible template for correct or responsible governance & naturally critiqued slavery and exploitative economic relations built on such.
More than anything else the same confidence in the powers of the individual reasoning mind to discover new "truths" and displace old ones built on superstition, prejudice, monarchical "divine right" or aristocratic 'privilege' was to turn the microscope of inquiry towards inherited systems of governance and propose novel, more equitable solutions for the management of human affairs; so in America the egalitarian discourse of Paine and the intense engagement with theories of republican governance that we witness in the Federalist papers, not to mention France where the Revolution spurred on in the main by the distillation of all this type of thought announced itself must completely and irrevocably.
In terms of an earth-shattering relevance as viewed from the perspective of contemporaries clearly the French Revolution was both seminal and epoch-breaking.
For Wordsworth;
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!--
While for Goethe after the battle of Valmy no superlatives could satisfy;
"From this place and from this day forth commences a new era in the world's history and you can all say that you were present at its birth."
The entire world was caught up in the drama of what was happening in France; arguably the most powerful and influential nation on earth. It was one thing for the Thirteen Colonies to revolt from a sliver of land on the eastern seaboard of a yet to be explored New World but to see revolution spring up from within Europe's continental powerhouse was a different matter entirely - this had ramifications for the entire planet and every monarchy in the Old World shuddered in its acknowledgement.
As de Tocqueville later observed America (and the Russia with whom he prophetically compared it) was principally about 'potentiality' at this point - which is not to say that Paine's anti-monarchical, republican and egalitarian framing of the debate, Washington's Cincinnatus-like laying down of arms, the Declaration, Federalist Papers or US Constitution were unimportant; they clearly played an incendiary role - but rather, that the ideas of radical Enlightenment (Lockean social contract, Spinoza's monism, Rousseau's discourse and the rationalistic levelling principles of the philosophes) were finally filtered down, aired and broadcast while the "crowd", the "mob" or "the people", palpably took control of world-historical events, arguably for the first time in history, sending shockwaves everywhere in the process, nowhere more so than Haiti whose slave population, in one fell swoop, rose up in revolt to claim their "Rights of Man" effectively banishing that institution forevermore as a viable economic concern.
Via frantic Parisian printing presses the genie was thoroughly out of the bottle; "the people" had spoken and they haven't stopped gabbering since. What could possibly be more revolutionary? As W.B. Yeats once put it (though in a different context); "All changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born".
Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit was an attempt to address the profundity of what had occurred in philosophical terms, polished off just as Napoleon's cannonballs were pounding the walls of Prussian Jena. In his journal he wrote;
"I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it . ."
Note the language; all local or nationalist sentiment (which scarcely existed at this time as a motor agency compelling human events) is here suppressed in favour of the obeisance to this simple revolutionary ideal; the "Rights of Man" - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity - because the French Revolution, principally in order to protect itself, presumed to make its ideals universally valid, thereby nurturing domestic discontent everywhere, automatically (especially after the Flight from Varennes) setting itself against the traditional conservative forces of the ancien regime.
As we know, the somewhat abortive Napoleonic creature it became, was quashed finally with the Congress of Vienna while Metternich and Castlereagh re-aligned the cosmos in tune with the demands of Old Monarchy; a "forest of bayonets" was installed, a Pan-European spy network set in place while Mazzinni and fellow revolutionaries plotted relentlessly to retrieve promised liberal and democratic reforms. Such was the post-revolutionary atmosphere of false dawn in which Marx re-wrote Hegel, turned the master on his head and converted his dialectic of the spirit into a fable of class antagonisms.
And how could this be surprising given the conservative backlash, the glacial pace of reforms, the ubiquitous arms of state suppression and the crushing inequalities exposed by rapid industrialisation? Marx being the last great Enlightenment thinker who sought a totalising, all-encompassing conceptual framework to address the "failures" of the French Revolution, he now saw the peasantry, the bourgeoisie and petty nationalisms consume the hopes of the 1848 revolutions - deeper, underlying conditions had to be identified; the "true" animating forces of history exposed, and their logic dissected and explicated if ever the revolution were to succeed.
So, the Russian Revolution became to a large extent the by-product of the tenacity of the ancien regime to resist democratic change, the concomitant growth in nationalism which it encouraged, and the second, more aggressive Age of Imperialism which it spawned - all grist to the mill and perfect recruiting material for the "Golden Age" socialists and European radicals on the eve of the Great War; a conflict in which that Old Order so thoroughly consumed itself.
individual thinkers and regions; for example the relative impact of the Scottish Enlightenment over the British or the Dutch, or even the Italian - which produced some innovative thinking in regards to jurisprudence and law reform.
Roy Porter for example emphasises the early British contribution (Hume, Locke) while Jonathan Israel prioritises the relative freedom of the press and the open circulation of ideas in the Dutch Republic which created a conducive (though far from ideal) milieu for the spread of Enlightenment ideas, particularly Spinoza's - a thinker he incidentally regards as the cornerstone of the Radical Enlightenment as his republicanism ultimately drew from a monistic philosophy which repudiated all biblical authority and was moreover regarded as logically irrefutable by many even of his fiercest critics.
Most modern historians though, irrespective of their preferences for pin-pointing the ultimate regional origins of Enlightenment thought would regard the French philosophes of the mid to late 18th century (Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, d' Holbach, Condorcet etc.) as the crowning point and locus of most intense engagement of 'the movement'.
As to what "they believed" it was more a case of what should we be required to believe; scepticism towards established "truths" was encouraged (particularly of religious claims), empirical evidence-based research was promoted not just in the domain of the hard sciences but in trying to understand social and political structures - the Scottish Enlightenment in particular (Kames) is associated with the birth of anthropological-type inquiries with various progressive models of the growth of civilisations (so-called 'stage-ism') which was picked up and developed by Rousseau (drawing on critiques of Hobbes and influenced by Lockean contract theory) which became very influential in France and helped stir revolutionary discontent.
A type of progressive relativism was the natural by-product of questioning the justifying narratives of the established order (the ancien regime) which, broadly speaking, and usually in tandem with Church authority, suppressed calls for liberal, democratic reforms (press freedom, wider franchise etc.). So in France, Voltaire's deism led him to sympathises with oppressed Protestants while on similar grounds Raynal's Philosophical History of the West Indies berated the assumptions of European colonial powers to possess any kind of infallible template for correct or responsible governance & naturally critiqued slavery and exploitative economic relations built on such.
More than anything else the same confidence in the powers of the individual reasoning mind to discover new "truths" and displace old ones built on superstition, prejudice, monarchical "divine right" or aristocratic 'privilege' was to turn the microscope of inquiry towards inherited systems of governance and propose novel, more equitable solutions for the management of human affairs; so in America the egalitarian discourse of Paine and the intense engagement with theories of republican governance that we witness in the Federalist papers, not to mention France where the Revolution spurred on in the main by the distillation of all this type of thought announced itself must completely and irrevocably.
In terms of an earth-shattering relevance as viewed from the perspective of contemporaries clearly the French Revolution was both seminal and epoch-breaking.
For Wordsworth;
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!--
While for Goethe after the battle of Valmy no superlatives could satisfy;
"From this place and from this day forth commences a new era in the world's history and you can all say that you were present at its birth."
The entire world was caught up in the drama of what was happening in France; arguably the most powerful and influential nation on earth. It was one thing for the Thirteen Colonies to revolt from a sliver of land on the eastern seaboard of a yet to be explored New World but to see revolution spring up from within Europe's continental powerhouse was a different matter entirely - this had ramifications for the entire planet and every monarchy in the Old World shuddered in its acknowledgement.
As de Tocqueville later observed America (and the Russia with whom he prophetically compared it) was principally about 'potentiality' at this point - which is not to say that Paine's anti-monarchical, republican and egalitarian framing of the debate, Washington's Cincinnatus-like laying down of arms, the Declaration, Federalist Papers or US Constitution were unimportant; they clearly played an incendiary role - but rather, that the ideas of radical Enlightenment (Lockean social contract, Spinoza's monism, Rousseau's discourse and the rationalistic levelling principles of the philosophes) were finally filtered down, aired and broadcast while the "crowd", the "mob" or "the people", palpably took control of world-historical events, arguably for the first time in history, sending shockwaves everywhere in the process, nowhere more so than Haiti whose slave population, in one fell swoop, rose up in revolt to claim their "Rights of Man" effectively banishing that institution forevermore as a viable economic concern.
Via frantic Parisian printing presses the genie was thoroughly out of the bottle; "the people" had spoken and they haven't stopped gabbering since. What could possibly be more revolutionary? As W.B. Yeats once put it (though in a different context); "All changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born".
Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit was an attempt to address the profundity of what had occurred in philosophical terms, polished off just as Napoleon's cannonballs were pounding the walls of Prussian Jena. In his journal he wrote;
"I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it . ."
Note the language; all local or nationalist sentiment (which scarcely existed at this time as a motor agency compelling human events) is here suppressed in favour of the obeisance to this simple revolutionary ideal; the "Rights of Man" - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity - because the French Revolution, principally in order to protect itself, presumed to make its ideals universally valid, thereby nurturing domestic discontent everywhere, automatically (especially after the Flight from Varennes) setting itself against the traditional conservative forces of the ancien regime.
As we know, the somewhat abortive Napoleonic creature it became, was quashed finally with the Congress of Vienna while Metternich and Castlereagh re-aligned the cosmos in tune with the demands of Old Monarchy; a "forest of bayonets" was installed, a Pan-European spy network set in place while Mazzinni and fellow revolutionaries plotted relentlessly to retrieve promised liberal and democratic reforms. Such was the post-revolutionary atmosphere of false dawn in which Marx re-wrote Hegel, turned the master on his head and converted his dialectic of the spirit into a fable of class antagonisms.
And how could this be surprising given the conservative backlash, the glacial pace of reforms, the ubiquitous arms of state suppression and the crushing inequalities exposed by rapid industrialisation? Marx being the last great Enlightenment thinker who sought a totalising, all-encompassing conceptual framework to address the "failures" of the French Revolution, he now saw the peasantry, the bourgeoisie and petty nationalisms consume the hopes of the 1848 revolutions - deeper, underlying conditions had to be identified; the "true" animating forces of history exposed, and their logic dissected and explicated if ever the revolution were to succeed.
So, the Russian Revolution became to a large extent the by-product of the tenacity of the ancien regime to resist democratic change, the concomitant growth in nationalism which it encouraged, and the second, more aggressive Age of Imperialism which it spawned - all grist to the mill and perfect recruiting material for the "Golden Age" socialists and European radicals on the eve of the Great War; a conflict in which that Old Order so thoroughly consumed itself.
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