The American Enlightenment

The Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume IX, Number 1, Spring, 197g The American Enlightenment Henry Blumenthal. American and French Culture, /800-1900: Interchanges in Art, Science, Literature, and Society. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975. 554 + xv pp. Henry Steele Commager. The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment. Garden City: Anchor Press-Doubleday, 1977. 342 pp. Henry F. May. The Enlightenment in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. 419 + xix pp. Howard P.Segal Ironically, while American intellectual history in recent years has suffereda loss of prestige and popularity at the hands of the quantitative and the"new~ social historians, some of the finest works ever published in the fieldhave appeared-for example, Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood's Creation of the American Republic, and David Brion Davis's two volumes on The Problem of Slavery. lndeed,a1 historians have increasingly emphasized the role of non-cognitive forceseconomic , sociological, and above all psychological-these same works hau insisted upon the significance in history of ideas themselves. Furthermore, they have contributed to a field allegedly reserved for quantitative andsocial historians: comparative history. The three works under review also demonstrate the enduring importance of intellectual history and the role of ideas in shaping human affairs. Theydeal wholly or in part with the American Enlightenment and relate it toiti European counterpart. Although only a portion of his book treatsthe Enlightenment, Henry Blumenthal is as concerned as Henry Steele Commager and Henry F. May with the fundamental question whether there actuallywai an American equivalent of the European Enlightenment, and, if so, asallthree argue, what its nature, significance and legacy were. The issue of the existence of an American Enlightenment is far frommoot. Daniel Boorstin, among others, has argued that the notion of a nathi Enlightenment is only a myth invented by historians unable or unwillingt0 The American Enlightenment 85 acceptthe "obvious" uniqueness of American culture: its temperamental indifferenceto abstract ideas, especially foreign ones; its wholly nonideological and pragmatic character; and its derivation from a distinctively American experience of whatever ideas have happened to circulate. The fact thatBoorstin himself once wrote a work on Thomas Jefferson and his circle, whoallegedly deemed themselves philosophes and took their ideas quite seriously, is a considerable irony in its own right. 1 Severalhistorians have gone nearly as far as the later Boorstin in depicting Jeffersonand the other Founding Fathers, the would-be leaders of any American Enlightenment, as utterly practical men who scarcely needed any formaltheory, least of all a European one, to prompt the Revolution, the Declarationof Independence and the Constitution. Other historians, as PeterGay notes, concede that the Founding Fathers were thinkers but contend that their ideas were native-born rather than imported from Europe. 2 Inlight especially of May's impressive scholarship, neither of these views remains tenable. More than anyone else, May has amassed simply too much evidence that the Founding Fathers, and their less prominent fellow citizens aswell,not only regarded themselves as philosophes but looked unabashedly toEuropefor inspiration. Tobe sure, May is hardly the first historian to hold this general position. Commagertoo puts the argument succinctly: "The Old World imagined, invented and formulated the Enlightenment, the New World-certainly the Anglo-Americanpart of it-realized it and fulfilled it.... it was Americans who not only embraced the body of Enlightenment principles, but wrote them intolaw,crystallized them into institutions, and put them to work" (p. xi). May's contribution is not a reformulation or qualification of this position. It is aprecise,detailed, above all scholarly presentation and defense of it. Accordingto Commager, America's leading thinkers and statesmen were ''very much" a part of a trans-Atlantic community of activist intellectualsComrnager 's notion of philosophes-who "embraced a common body of ideas, subscribed to a common body of laws, shared a common faith." 3 Basically theybelieved in four tenets: the orderliness of nature and the potential orderliness of society; the ability of human reason to discern the former and to establish the latter; the necessity of complete intellectual freedom, including religious, political and academic freedom; and the necessity of complete physical freedom, including freedom from tyranny, barbarism and slavery...