American Enlightenment: The New World and Modern Western Thought

“In the beginning all the world was America,” writes John Locke (301) in one of the more gnomic lines of the Two Treatises of Government (1689). We might continue his allusion to the first lines of the Bible: “And the world was without form, and void. . . . And Europe said, let there be light: and there was light.” The face-tious extension of Locke’s formulation yields a fairly accurate account of what, until recently, has been the conventional way of conceptualizing the relationship between the Enlightenment and America. First, the New Thought emerges like a lightning strike in Europe; it is a geographically self-contained phenomenon, an autonomous decision on the part of British and Continental thinkers to emerge from man’s “self-incurred immaturity,” as Kant would put it retrospectively in 1784 (54). Then, America becomes for the first time something other than void; it becomes a crucial laboratory for Enlightenment thought. America is now a site for discovering first principles, a ground for expanding European taxonomies into universal ones; and, finally, it is the place where the new political and social theories are put into praxis as new nations emerge. As Henry Steele Commager put it succinctly a generation ago, “Europe imagined, and America realized the Enlightenment.”¹

This book stands that relationship of priority on its head. Instead, I argue that the European conquest of the American hemisphere and development of the Atlantic slave system provided the necessary preconditions for the subsequent intellectual innovations of the Enlightenment era—and that writings out of America provided the pretexts for modern Western philosophy. “The only wonder is that the beginning of the [New Thought]. . . could have entered anyone’s mind,” writes Francis Bacon in the opening pages of his New Organon (1620), throwing down a gauntlet to the intellectual historians of the future. But if the spur to Bacon’s creation of a new method for knowledge production was not apparent to him at the time, it might seem fairly obvious to a twenty-first-century reader: across his title page is splashed the famous engraving of a ship passing through the Pillars of Hercules—the classical boundaries of the known world—and sailing into the open Atlantic Ocean. The illustration is not, as is usually assumed, simply a metaphor. “Many pass through and knowledge is the greater,” reads a rough translation of Bacon’s Latin caption on the frontispiece; it is the change in what is known—Europe’s discovery of the New World—that requires a revolution in European ways of knowing. Thus Enlightenment thought is not geographically autonomous, but reactive to the global material conditions that surround its production; the New Thought appears as a post hoc creation of theory to explain, critique, and justify the imperial practices coming into being, rapidly and rapaciously, in the Atlantic world. By 1762, surveying the thought of the previous century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was already proposing just this: that the purpose of the culture of a society is to legitimate the power structure of its state—to transform “force into right, and obedience into duty” (43).

To apprehend the Enlightenment as fundamentally American—as produced by Europe’s encounter with an unexpectedly west-er West—is to engage in broad and enduring debates across the fields of early American studies, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European literary and intellectual history, and political theory.² In early American studies, major works (by Joyce Appleby, Bernard Bailyn, J. G. A. Pocock, Gordon S. Wood, and others), at least since the 1976 Bicentennial, have looked to Enlightenment thought for “the ideological origins of the American Revolution,”³ instantiating the historical model of interpretation in which Europe provides the theory of Western modernity and America acts upon it. More recently, early Americanists (Robert A. Ferguson, Andrew Lewis, Sarah Rivett, and others) have sought to recast American colonial subjects as not only recipients of Enlightenment thought, but also—by acting as agents of direct observation—participants in its production. These recent studies find that, as Susan Scott Parrish aptly puts it, “Empiricism. . . gave authority [to colonial subjects] where political empire...