Alfred Cobban's View of the Enlightenment

A lfr e d C o b b a n 's V ie w rqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA o f th e E n lig h te n m e n t J. F . B o sh e r /ALFRED COBBAN had the Enlightenment in mind for nearly half a century. He published his thoughts on it over a span of forty years from 1929 to 1969. Of his eleven books, no less than eight touch on the Enlightenment, as do many of his essays. Yet very little of this writing deals directly with the subject; much of it is not even about the eighteenth century. No one would suspect Cobban of being a single-minded scholar of the Enlightenment. But, taken all together, his work gives a view of the subject so original as to seem perverse or even frivolous to some Enlightenment specialists. What distinguishes Cobban’s view more than anything else is that it is the view of a man who was not only a historian but also a political philosopher. In any assessment of Alfred Cobban, his po­ litical philosophy is not to be pushed aside lightly, because without it we shall not understand him at all. If we are to grasp his thought on the Enlightenment, we cannot treat his In S e a rc h o f H u m a n ity like a clam, winkling out the historical parts and throwing away the political theory like an empty shell.1 He had two distinct fields of thought. But working in them both he continually turned towards the Enlightenment, which more than anything else gave unity to his work. It is not too much to say that the Enlightenment was at the center of both his political thought and his history. Cobban’s view of the Enlightenment changed over the years. It changed slowly, but so completely that his first book and his last appear to have been written by different men. Only one of his main ideas on the Enlightenment can be traced back to his study of Burke, written in 1929, and even this was by no means fully developed there.2 At this time he already thought that utilitarianism was the 37 Th e Mo d e r n it y o f t h e Eig h t e e n t h Ce n t u r y creed of the eighteenth century and that the utilitarian Jeremy Ben'ham was the last and greatest of the Enlightenment prophets, and expressed this belief as a matter of course. It was an idea com­ mon enough; indeed, Kingsley Martin made more of it in his study of French liberal thought which appeared in the same year.3 In 1934 Cobban again described the YXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA p h ilo so p h e s as utilitarians, but he laid scarcely more stress on this point than did Preserved Smith that same year in the second volume of his H isto ry o f M o d e r n C u ltu re * In this early period Cobban had not yet reached the conclusion that the p h ilo so p h e s had built a practical program of humanitarian re­ form on the principle of social utility. Like so many others, he still believed that the p h ilo so p h e s had built intellectual systems upon "abstract ideas such as 'sovereignty,’ 'the laws of nature,’ 'natural man,’ 'the felicific calculus’ and the like.” As thinkers in this realm of abstractions he thought them rather poor in their crude empiri­ cism and summed them up with only two exceptions as "a host of charlatans.”5 By 1940, and even more by 1946, his attitude towards them had changed. He was still interpreting them as utilitarian and empiri­ cal, but in a more positive sense. He had come to think that histo­ rians had misjudged them in calling them p h ilo so p h e s so as to mark them off as lesser thinkers than the philosophers of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Most of the p h ilo so p h e s had deliberately turned their backs...