Roads to Modernity

Welcome back to the future, everyone. It's 2005! Another five years and we'll actually have a name for our decade again, either "the tens" or "the teens." For my first post of the year I'm going to make a few comments on Gertrude Himmelfarb's The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), as it is due tomorrow and I don't want to break my "no more late book return fines" New Year's resolution on the second day of the year.

Himmelfarb is a respected historian, and this short book fills what she perceived as a gap in general historical writing on the Enlightenment, namely a treatment focusing on the British Enlightenment, as opposed to the French and American episodes linked as they are to headline-catching revolutions. Her coverage of the British Englightenment naturally covers Locke (at the front end) and Hume (at the back end), but also devotes substantial time to thinkers such as Gibbon and Adam Smith, not normally associated with "the Enlightenment." She also made a good argument for John Wesley, Edmund Burke, and Lord Shaftesbury as paradigmatic Enlightenment figures. To do so, she had to broaden the scope of the whole period from the a struggle between reason and entrenched religious and political authority, as it appears to be in France and America, to accomodate what happened in Great Britain, where political and religious reform happened in the 17th century. There was nothing to revolt against in 18th-century England, so the British Enlightenment took on a different tone. But the different historical context and the resulting different tone and focus of British thinkers has caused many observers to miss the role of several of the above-named thinkers to The Enlightenment as a whole.

As for the Mormon angle, I was hoping to find a bit more discussion of the transition from 17th-century religion (beset with superstition and witchhunts) to what one might call "enlightened religion," but that was discussed only indirectly. The Methodism discussion highlighted how much John Wesley's program shared with the British Enlightenment's concern with morality and proper conduct, which Himmelfarb summarized as "the sociology of virtue." The flowering in England of a host of voluntary associations was a key development in this period, one that distinguished developments there from developments in France, where the philosophes represented an elite rather than a popular movement. Methodism was very much one of these "voluntary association" movements, and only later was forced into becoming a separate religious sect/denomination. In England, Methodism was a religious oddity; in America, that's how most sect/denominations came to be, including Mormonism (which attracted a fair number of Methodists and adopted a number of Methodist practices in its worship services).

From the American Enlightenment came "rational religion," represented by Jefferson (rather gently) and Paine (quite forcefully). If Mormonism has some roots in the Enlightenment, it seems to flow from Methodism and England rather than from the more skeptical American sources.

Comments

[Ronan]

And of course, THE United Brethren were Primtive Methodists.

[Dave]

Ronan, would you care to enlighten us on Primitive Methodism? I found a link giving basic information on Primitive Methodism. Sounds like they actually emerged after Regular Methodists became an identifiable body, readopting open-air preaching contemporaneous with American revivalism.

[Ronan]

Take a look at: http://wesley.nnu.edu/wesleyan_theology/theojrnl/26-30/29-05.htm

Grant Underwood looks at the Methodist-Mormon connection. Look at note 6.

[john fowles]

She also made a good argument for John Wesley, Edmund Burke, and Lord Shaftesbury as paradigmatic Enlightenment figures. To do so, she had to broaden the scope of the whole period from the a struggle between reason and entrenched religious and political authority, as it appears to be in France and America, to accomodate what happened in Great Britain, where political and religious reform happened in the 17th century.

This doesn't seem like a broadening at all to me, since Shaftesbury and Burke are regular fare in enlightenment studies in England, where I did my master's work in eighteenth-century literature. America was undoubtedly influenced by French enlightenment thinkers, but in doctrine actually follows the English (and Scottish) enlighteners more closely, i.e. Locke, Shaftesbury, Smith, and others. Anglo institutions and the rule of law, together with the English language and the philosophy of the English Enlightenment (which includes the economic thought of Adam Smith), have contributed to the success of the American system (as they have contributed to the success of other "children" of the English legacy, i.e. Canada, Australia, etc.). I haven't read Himmelfarb--these are just some of my perceptions from reading the original sources (Locke, Shaftesbury, Smith, Burke, as well as the French sources, Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesque, etc.) and from the spin that an Oxford education puts on these sources (i.e. the very firmly held belief of some of my professors there--shared by many European intellectuals of the eighteenth century--that the French Revolution was a horrible development and that, as one of my German lit professors there put it, the American Revolution, and not the French Revolution, was the "good child" of the Enlightenment, which, incidentally, is also what many German enlightenment thinkers, including Goethe and Schiller, thought).

[Pheo]

Here are some suggestions for what to call this decade from the Wikipedia (http://snipurl.com/bqs8).

- "doughnuts", because of the tasty treat's zero-like shape
- "the 0-0s", usually pronounced as "the oh-ohs". This pronunciation sounds like "uh oh", an expression of dismay; this similarity is no doubt intentional.
- "the 2Ks", a term that is rooted in the slang of the times. K is shorthand for the Greek prefix kilo meaning 1000; hence, 2K means 2000. In popular culture, the years of the decade are already being named according to this slang. For example, the year 2003 is referred to as 2K3. The "2K" term probably has its popular origins in the heavily-hyped Y2K bug that began the decade.
- "the Aughts" (or "Oughts"), keeping with the practice of the twentieth century.
- "the Nillies", derived from the term "nil", meaning nothing or zero.
- "the Noughties", referring to the nought, or zero, as the decade indicator; the word-play on "naughty" is intentional.
- "the Twenty Hundreds", though this could be confused with a name for the century.
- "the zeroes",
- "the Dark Ages v2.0", in reference to the ascension of religious fanaticism in political discourse.

[Justin]

Another recent article on the nameless decade:

Name That Decade