Things are a little sleepy at Horizon in these dog-days of summer, and likely to remain so at least until September; but let me just throw in a passing comment about Gertrude Himmelfarb's new book The Roads to Modernity: The British, French and American Enlightenments. Extolling the Anglo-American intellectual tradition at the expense of the French (which appears to be the book's main selling point, if not its thesis) is the kind of pointless pissing contest that history could do without - one might as well ask which is more important to the engine, the oil or the petrol? - but I was intrigued by Himmelfarb's suggestion that religion is a dividing line between the Anglo- and Francophone Enlightenments. The retrofitting of long-dead conservative heroes with 21st Century values is hardly a novelty, but it seems particularly outrageous in this case. Take, for example, the three signal figures of the Scottish Enlightenment: Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and David Hume. Hutcheson developed a theory of utilitarian ethics which the Glasgow presbytery condemned for its suggestion that "a knowledge of good and evil without and prior to a knowledge of God" was possible. Smith was a borderline Deist who wrote a biographical treatment of Hume that has been described as "a powerful blow against Christianity." As for Hume himself, his skepticism towards natural and revealed religion extended famously to his deathbed and brought him the honor of proscription in the Index. Still, misrepresentation can have amusing results. I hope Himmelfarb's book encourages an exploratory reading of, say, Hume's Of Miracles at the next White House Bible Study group...
Posted by Alan Allport at August 30, 2004 08:45 AM