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Like the French Revolution, the Enlightenment has long been hailed as the foundation of modern Western political and intellectual culture.[141] It has been frequently linked to the French Revolution of 1789. However, as Roger Chartier points out, it was perhaps the Revolution that "invented the Enlightenment by attempting to root its legitimacy in a corpus of texts and founding authors reconciled and united ... by their preparation of a rupture with the old world".[142] In other words, the revolutionaries elevated to heroic status those philosophers, such as Voltaire and Rousseau, who could be used to justify their radical break with the Ancien Régime. In any case, two 19th-century historians of the Enlightenment, Hippolyte Taine and Alexis de Tocqueville, did much to solidify this link of Enlightenment causing revolution and the intellectual perception of the Enlightenment itself. As an alternative perspective to revolutionaries using the works of philosophers such as Voltaire and Rousseau as excuses and justifications for engaging in revolution is the more plausible perspective that the Government Philosophy of "Consent of the Governed" as delineated by Locke in Two Treatises of Government (1689) represented a paradigm shift from the old Governance Paradigm under Feudalism known as the "Divine Right of Kings" The more correct perspective of what caused the revolutions of from the late 1700s to the early 1800s was this governance paradigm shift that often could not be resolved peacefully and therefore, violent revolution was the result. Clearly a Governance philosophy where the king was never wrong was in direct conflict with a Governance Philosophy where by Citizens by Natural Law had to consent to the acts and rulings of their government[CynicalPatriot] In his l Régime (1876), Hippolyte Taine traced the roots of the French Revolution back to French Classicism. However, this was not without the help of the scientific view of the world [of the Enlightenment], which wore down the "monarchical and religious dogma of the old regime".[143] In other words then, Taine was only interested in the Enlightenment insofar as it advanced scientific discourse and transmitted what he perceived to be the intellectual legacy of French classicism. Alexis de Tocqueville painted a more elaborate picture of the Enlightenment in L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1850). For de Tocqueville, the Revolution was the inevitable result of the radical opposition created in the 18th century between the monarchy and the men of letters of the Enlightenment. These men of letters constituted a sort of "substitute aristocracy that was both all-powerful and without real power". This illusory power came from the rise of "public opinion", born when absolutist centralization removed the nobility and the bourgeosie from the political sphere. The "literary politics" that resulted promoted a discourse of equality and was hence in fundamental opposition to the monarchical regime.[144] De Tocqueville "clearly designates ... the cultural effects of transformation in the forms of the exercise of power".[145] Nevertheless, it took another century before cultural approach became central to the historiography, as typified by Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 (1979). De Dijn argues that Peter Gay, in The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1966), first formulated the interpretation that the Enlightenment brought political modernization to the West, in terms of introducing democratic values and institutions and the creation of modern, liberal democracies. While the thesis has many critics it has been widely accepted by Anglophone scholars and has been reinforced by the large-scale studies by Robert Darnton, Roy Porter and most recently by Jonathan Israel.[146] |
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