The Enlightenment in Britain: Reason, Liberty, and the Anglo-American World

The British and Scottish Enlightenment was the cradle of the broader European movement, in the sense that its institutional and intellectual conditions — constitutional monarchy, a free press, an established but non-persecuting church, a sophisticated market for books — were the conditions under which Enlightenment ideas could take root most securely. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 had established a constitutional monarchy and a Bill of Rights, the Royal Society had been the model for the new scientific institutions, and the great English and Scottish philosophers — Locke, Newton, Hume, Smith, and many others — had set the terms of debate for the entire eighteenth century. The British tradition of empirical philosophy, mixed government, religious toleration, and commercial prosperity became a model that other nations attempted to emulate. Whether the model was, in fact, a model or a useful fiction is one of the questions the Cambridge school has spent half a century asking.

This article explores the British Enlightenment in all its diversity. It examines the political and intellectual background of the British movement, the major figures of the British and Scottish Enlightenments, the great achievements of British thought in philosophy, political economy, and historical writing, and the long-term influence of British Enlightenment ideas on the modern world.

The Political Background

The British Enlightenment developed in a political environment that was, by Continental standards, exceptionally favorable to intellectual freedom and political experimentation. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 had established a constitutional monarchy in which the powers of the king were limited by Parliament, and the Bill of Rights of 1689 had enshrined a set of fundamental rights against royal authority. The settlement was, in many respects, a Whig achievement, and the long Whig interpretation of English history that emerged in the eighteenth century — Bolingbroke, Hume, Catherine Macaulay, and (much later) the great Whig historians of the nineteenth — was, in effect, the official ideology of the British Enlightenment.

The Settlement of 1689

The political settlement of 1689 was the foundation of the British Enlightenment. The Declaration of Right, presented to William and Mary when they accepted the crown, condemned a series of practices of the Stuart kings — the suspension of laws, the levying of taxes without parliamentary consent, the maintenance of a standing army in peacetime, the interference with the administration of justice — and required William and Mary to govern in accordance with the laws and customs of the realm.

The Bill of Rights, the Toleration Act, and the Act of Settlement, all passed in 1689–1701, established the legal framework of constitutional government. The independence of the judiciary, the right of Parliament to meet freely, the freedom of speech in parliamentary debates, and the right of Protestants to worship in their own way all became settled features of the British constitution. The settlement was, of course, a Protestant settlement; the Toleration Act of 1689, despite its title, excluded Catholics (who were, in fact, the main targets of the post-1689 penal laws) and anti-Trinitarian Protestants. The fact that the British “settlement” of religious toleration was, in fact, a settlement for Protestant Dissenters is part of the longer story of the slow extension of toleration that did not, in England, include Catholic emancipation until 1829 and Jewish emancipation until 1858.

This political settlement had a profound influence on British political thought. The Whig interpretation of the constitution, developed in the eighteenth century by writers such as John Locke, the Cato’s Letters authors (John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon), and Henry St John, first Viscount Bolingbroke, held that the proper function of government was to protect the natural rights of the citizens, and that the British constitution was a model of this kind of government. The 1730s and 1740s saw the publication of the Craftsman (1726–1736) and the Cato’s Letters (collected 1724), the two most important Whig journals of the period; they provided the conceptual framework in which the American revolutionaries would later think.

The Augustan Age

The period from about 1689 to 1750 is sometimes called the Augustan Age, after the period of Roman history to which it was compared. It was an age of great political stability, of commercial expansion, and of cultural confidence. The literary culture of the period — Pope, Swift, Addison, and Steele in poetry and prose; Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding in fiction — established the modern English literary tradition.

The political thinkers of the Augustan age built on the achievements of the previous generation. The two Treatises of Government, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and the Letter Concerning Toleration were read and debated throughout Europe. The political settlement of 1689 was widely admired as a model of constitutional government, and it provided a model for the American revolutionaries of the next century. The Continental admiration for the English constitution was, in many respects, a misreading — the English constitution was not, in fact, a separation of powers in the American sense, and the actual workings of parliamentary politics in the eighteenth century involved a much greater degree of patronage, corruption, and oligarchic control than the textbook version suggests. But the misreading was politically useful, and the political utility is, in this case, more important than the historical accuracy.

The British Empiricist Tradition

The British contribution to the Enlightenment was, above all, philosophical. The British tradition of empiricism — the doctrine that all knowledge derives from experience — was one of the great intellectual achievements of the early modern period, and it set the terms of philosophical debate throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

John Locke

John Locke (1632–1704) was the founder of British empiricism and one of the most important philosophers of the early Enlightenment. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) argued that the human mind was, in its original state, a “blank slate” (tabula rasa) and that all knowledge derived from experience. This was a powerful argument against the doctrine of innate ideas, and it established the empirical approach to philosophy that would dominate British thought for the next two centuries.

The Essay is, in many respects, a more careful book than it is given credit for. The famous tabula rasa argument is not, as is sometimes suggested, a denial of native cognitive equipment; it is, rather, an argument that the content of our ideas — not the operations of our minds — comes from experience. Locke believed in the existence of innate faculties of understanding, including the faculty of reason itself. The distinction is important, and the common misreading of Locke as a blank-slate behaviorist is one of the more persistent errors in the history of philosophy.

The Two Treatises of Government (1689) provided a systematic defense of the Glorious Revolution. The First Treatise was a refutation of the doctrine of divine right; the Second was a defense of the natural rights of individuals, the social contract, and the right of resistance to tyranny. Locke’s political philosophy was the immediate source of the American revolutionary doctrine of natural rights, and it remains one of the foundations of modern liberalism. The Second Treatise’s chapter on property, in particular, is one of the founding documents of modern political economy; it is also, in retrospect, a striking example of how an argument for natural rights can be turned into an argument for unlimited accumulation.

George Berkeley

George Berkeley (1685–1753) was an Irish philosopher and bishop who developed an idealist critique of Locke’s empiricism. Berkeley argued that the material objects of which Locke spoke so confidently did not exist independently of being perceived. “To be is to be perceived” (esse est percipi) was his famous formula. The ultimate mind that perceives everything, Berkeley argued, is God.

Berkeley’s philosophy was less influential in Britain than Locke’s, but it had an important influence on the German Idealists, especially Hegel, and on the founders of American philosophical idealism, including the American Transcendentalists. The Berkeley case is, in this respect, a good example of how a philosopher can be very important for the subsequent history of philosophy without being important for the immediate tradition in which he was working.

David Hume

David Hume (1711–1776) was the most formidable skeptical philosopher of the Enlightenment. His Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740) attempted to apply the experimental method of natural science to the study of human cognition, with results that shocked his contemporaries. Hume argued that causation was not a matter of logical necessity but of habitual association; that personal identity was a fiction constructed by the imagination; and that the foundations of morality were to be found in sentiment rather than reason.

Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and Enquiries Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) presented his views in more accessible form. The second Enquiry is, in fact, the better book of the two; the argument is sharper, the prose is clearer, and the central thesis — that morality is founded on sentiment, not on reason — is presented with a directness that the Treatise only intermittently achieved. His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), published posthumously, applied his skeptical methods to arguments for God’s existence and helped to undermine the natural-theology tradition in Britain and elsewhere. The Dialogues were published, as we noted, three years after Hume’s death, having been held back by Adam Smith for years out of deference to Hume’s friends who were alarmed by the work’s arguments.

Hume’s influence on later philosophy was enormous. He provoked the responses of Kant and the German Idealists. He influenced the utilitarian tradition in Britain. His skeptical arguments are still debated in contemporary philosophy. His history of England was for generations the standard account of English political history. The fact that a philosopher of his stature is still being argued about, two and a half centuries later, is the best argument for the seriousness of the British Enlightenment.

The Scottish Enlightenment

The Scottish Enlightenment was one of the most extraordinary intellectual movements of the eighteenth century. Concentrated in the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, it produced a remarkable body of work in philosophy, political economy, history, sociology, and the natural sciences. The Cambridge school of intellectual history, with its arguments about the priority and distinctness of the Scottish moment, has spent half a century arguing that this is the most important Enlightenment of all. They may be right. They are also, perhaps, slightly biased by the fact that they themselves work in small northern universities with a long memory.

The Scottish Universities

The Scottish universities were organized differently from the English. They were more responsive to the needs of the country, more open to the new philosophy, and more oriented to the practical training of ministers, lawyers, and physicians. The result was a generation of thinkers who combined philosophical rigor with empirical attention to history, society, and political life. The Scottish system of parish schools, in particular, produced a remarkably well-educated population for the period, and the universities recruited from a broader social base than their English counterparts. The intellectual density of late-eighteenth-century Edinburgh — Hume, Smith, Robertson, Ferguson, Reid, Kames, Monboddo, all in one small city, all knowing each other, all meeting in the same clubs and societies — is one of the most striking facts in the history of modern thought.

The principal figures of the Scottish Enlightenment were:

Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), the founder of the Scottish tradition of moral philosophy. Hutcheson developed the “moral sense” theory, the view that human beings were equipped with a natural capacity for moral judgment. He also wrote on aesthetics and political philosophy. Hutcheson was, by all accounts, an excellent teacher; he was, by the standards of his more famous successors, a less original writer.

David Hume, who, although born in Edinburgh, spent much of his life in France and became a central figure of both the British and the European Enlightenment. Hume’s French reception was, in many respects, more enthusiastic than his British one.

Adam Smith (1723–1790), the founder of modern economics. Smith’s two great books — the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and the Wealth of Nations (1776) — established the foundations of modern social science. Smith spent the last years of his life in Edinburgh, revising the Moral Sentiments and serving as a sort of elder statesman of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), the founder of modern sociology. Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) developed a theory of the development of human societies that anticipated later evolutionary and historical sociology. Ferguson is, in the twenty-first century, less well known than he deserves to be; the Essay is one of the founding documents of the modern social sciences.

Thomas Reid (1710–1796), the founder of the “common sense” school of Scottish philosophy. Reid’s Enquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764) was a response to Hume’s skepticism, and it became the dominant school of Scottish philosophy for the next century. Reid’s argument is, in the modern literature, less often discussed than it deserves; the “common sense” school was, in its own time, the dominant Scottish philosophy, and the reaction against Hume was the most important Scottish philosophical event of the late eighteenth century.

William Robertson (1721–1793), the principal historian of the Scottish Enlightenment. Robertson’s History of Scotland (1759), History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769), and History of America (1777) were widely read throughout Europe.

The Political Economy of the Scottish Enlightenment

The Scottish Enlightenment was particularly important in the development of modern political economy. The work of Hume on money, trade, and economic growth, and of Smith on the division of labor, the “invisible hand,” and the proper role of the state, established the foundations of modern economic thought.

The Scottish thinkers were not, in general, advocates of laissez-faire in the modern sense. They were critical of monopoly, of corporate power, and of the excessive influence of merchants and manufacturers on government. But they did believe that markets, when free from regulation and corruption, tended to allocate resources efficiently, and they were skeptical of the elaborate system of regulations that the mercantilist state had imposed on economic life.

The Scottish tradition of political economy had an important influence on the development of economic thought in the nineteenth century, both in Britain and in the United States. The work of David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and Alfred Marshall in Britain, and of the American institutionalists, all drew on the Scottish tradition. The fact that the late-twentieth-century revival of “free market” economics was, in significant part, a rediscovery of the Scottish tradition is one of the more interesting features of recent intellectual history.

The Literature of the British Enlightenment

The British Enlightenment was also a major literary movement. The eighteenth century saw the development of the modern English novel, the rise of periodical journalism, and a flourishing of historical, philosophical, and political writing.

The Rise of the Novel

The English novel was a product of the eighteenth century. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722) established the genre. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748) developed the epistolary novel. Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Joseph Andrews (1742) developed the comic novel. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) experimented with the form itself.

The novel became the characteristic literary form of the modern age. It allowed writers to explore the inner lives of individuals, to depict the social world in unprecedented detail, and to address the great questions of ethics, religion, and politics in a popular form. The rise of the novel was closely connected to the rise of the reading public, and it was an important feature of the cultural infrastructure of the Enlightenment. The fact that the novel became, in the eighteenth century, the principal literary form for thinking about moral psychology and social life is one of the more significant shifts in the history of modern culture; it is, in many respects, the moment when literature became a vehicle for the new empirical conception of human nature.

The Periodical Press

The periodical press was another major feature of British Enlightenment culture. The Tatler (1709–1711) and Spectator (1711–1712) of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele established a new model of literary journalism, mixing essays, satire, and social commentary. The Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922) provided a forum for political and literary discussion. The Edinburgh Review (founded 1802) and the Quarterly Review (founded 1809) were important organs of the political and literary culture of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Edinburgh Review was, in particular, a Whig institution; the Quarterly was Tory; the two reviews set the terms of the political and literary debate of the early nineteenth century.

The periodical press was an important factor in the creation of a national public sphere in Britain. It allowed political ideas to be debated, literary works to be reviewed, and current events to be analyzed, and it helped create a sense of shared national culture that transcended regional, class, and religious differences.

Historical Writing

The British Enlightenment produced a remarkable body of historical writing. The works of Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, and many others established a new model of critical, evidence-based history. The great Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900) and the various histories of England, Scotland, and Ireland that appeared in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were products of this tradition. The most discussed single work is, of course, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (1776–1789), whose famous fifteenth and sixteenth chapters — on the rise of Christianity and the progress of monasticism — provoked a public controversy that has not, in fact, ended. Gibbon’s prose style is one of the great achievements of the English language; the irony is that Gibbon himself would, in many respects, have been an eighteenth-century skeptic about the most serious claims of the religion he was describing.

The Influence of British Thought

The British Enlightenment had an enormous influence on the broader European movement and on the development of the modern world. British ideas were read and debated throughout Europe, and British political institutions were widely admired as a model of constitutional government.

The American Revolution

The American revolutionaries drew directly on British political thought. The Declaration of Independence was a development of Locke’s theory of natural rights. The Federalist Papers engaged directly with the British constitutional tradition. The American system of government — a written constitution, a separation of powers, a Bill of Rights — was an attempt to embody the principles of British constitutionalism in a more systematic and durable form.

The American republic was widely admired in Britain and on the Continent. Edmund Burke, who had been a defender of the American colonists, was one of the first to recognize the significance of the new republic. Burke’s Speech on Conciliation with America (1775) is one of the great political speeches of the period; the fact that Burke’s speech did not succeed — the war happened anyway — is one of the great political counterfactuals. The American example helped inspire the constitutional movements of the early nineteenth century, from the French Revolution to the independence movements of Latin America.

The French Enlightenment

The French philosophes were deeply influenced by British thought. Voltaire’s Letters on the English Nation (1733) was a celebration of British constitutionalism and a comparison of English and French civilization. Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws drew heavily on the English constitutional example. The French reception of Newton, Locke, and Hume transformed the French intellectual landscape and made possible the great collaborative projects of the French Enlightenment.

The French Revolution, although different in many respects from the British constitutional tradition, was the political child of the British Enlightenment. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was directly influenced by the American Declaration of Independence, which was in turn directly influenced by Locke’s political philosophy. The French revolutionaries, even when they went far beyond anything Locke would have approved, were working in a tradition that had been established in late seventeenth-century England.

The European Constitutional Tradition

The British constitutional model was widely admired on the Continent. The great European constitutional movements of the nineteenth century — the Spanish Constitution of 1812, the Norwegian Constitution of 1814, the Belgian Constitution of 1831, the various German constitutions, the Italian Risorgimento — all drew on the British and American examples.

The contemporary European constitutional tradition is a descendant of the British Enlightenment. The European Convention on Human Rights, the European Court of Human Rights, and the constitutional courts of the European nation-states all operate in a tradition that traces its lineage back to the British constitutionalism of the late seventeenth century. Whether the actual operation of the European Convention and Court is faithful to that lineage is, of course, another question; the institutional reality of human rights law in Europe is the result of a long historical process that has, at many points, departed from the original.

The British Enlightenment and Religion

The relationship between the British Enlightenment and religion was complex and varied. The British tradition included both the most skeptical figures of the Enlightenment (Hume, Gibbon) and the most prominent defenders of natural religion (the Boyle lecturers, William Paley). The Anglican establishment, the Scottish Presbyterian Kirk, and the various Dissenting communities all had their own relations with the new philosophy.

Latitudinarianism and the Anglican Enlightenment

The Church of England, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was dominated by a tradition known as Latitudinarianism. The Latitudinarians — so called because they took a broad or “latitudinarian” view of theological doctrine — sought to reconcile Christianity with the new natural philosophy and with the spirit of rational inquiry. Their leading figures included John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Joseph Butler, Bishop of Durham, whose Analogy of Religion (1736) was a sophisticated defense of the rational foundations of Christian belief. Butler’s argument is, in many respects, the most serious theological response to the British deists; it deserves more attention than it usually gets.

The Latitudinarian tradition was important in the development of the British Enlightenment. It provided a model of Christianity that was compatible with the new natural philosophy, and it helped to create a cultural climate in which scientific and philosophical inquiry could flourish.

Methodism and the Evangelical Revival

The later eighteenth century saw a powerful religious revival in Britain, centered on the Methodist movement of John Wesley (1703–1791) and his followers. Methodism emphasized personal religious experience, the importance of scriptural authority, and the social responsibility of Christian communities. The Methodist revival was in part a reaction against what its adherents saw as the cold rationalism of the Latitudinarian tradition, and it introduced a new emotional intensity into British religious life.

The evangelical revival had important social and political consequences. The Methodist movement was closely connected to the social reform movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — the antislavery movement, the prison reform movement, the educational reform movement. The Clapham Sect, a group of evangelical Anglicans who were among the leaders of the antislavery movement, demonstrated the social engagement that evangelical Christianity could produce. The fact that the same religious tradition that reacted against the rationalist Enlightenment also produced, in the case of Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect, the most consequential single political achievement of the period — the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 — is one of the more striking features of late-eighteenth-century British history.

Dissent and Religious Freedom

The English Toleration Act of 1689 had granted freedom of worship to Protestant Dissenters, but it had not removed the political and social disabilities under which they labored. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Dissenters campaigned for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which excluded them from public office, and for the rights of Protestant Dissenters and, gradually, of Catholics and Jews.

The cause of religious freedom in Britain was a project of the Enlightenment. The Dissenters and their allies drew on the arguments of Locke and his successors, and the political campaigns for the rights of Dissenters were closely connected to the broader project of liberal reform. The Test and Corporation Acts were repealed in 1828, Catholic emancipation was achieved in 1829, and Jewish emancipation was achieved in 1858. The long road to religious freedom in Britain was, in large part, a consequence of the Enlightenment critique of religious intolerance, and the fact that the achievement came in stages — and only after a long, hard political fight — is more typical of the actual history of Enlightenment ideas than the standard narrative of inevitable progress allows.

The Long-Term Legacy

The British Enlightenment left a permanent mark on the modern world. The English-speaking democracies — Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand — all bear the marks of the British constitutional tradition and of the philosophical achievements of Locke, Hume, Smith, and their successors. The international order of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, dominated by Britain and the United States, was deeply influenced by the political and economic ideas of the British Enlightenment.

The British tradition of empirical philosophy, of constitutional government, of religious toleration, and of commercial society has been one of the most consequential in modern history. The arguments developed in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain are still the arguments of contemporary politics, and the institutions developed in that period remain the institutional framework of modern liberal democracy.

The contemporary world, with its global challenges, its political instabilities, and its continuing struggles for liberty and equality, has not exhausted the legacy of the British Enlightenment. To engage seriously with the thinkers of that period is to engage with the foundations of the modern world, and to recognize both the achievements and the limitations of one of the most influential intellectual traditions in human history. The limitations are, in many respects, the same as those we have noted in the French case; the achievements are also similar. The fact that the British tradition is so often presented as a success story in a way that the French tradition is not is, in large part, a function of the political circumstances of the late twentieth century, not of the actual content of the two traditions.