The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments [Paperback]

Gertrude Himmelfarb (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1400077222 | ISBN-13: 978-1400077229 | Publication Date: August 9, 2005

In an elegant, eminently readable work, one of our most distinguished intellectual historians gives us a brilliant revisionist history. The Roads to Modernity reclaims the Enlightenment–an extraordinary time bursting with new ideas about human nature, politics, society, and religion--from historians who have downgraded its importance and from scholars who have given preeminence to the Enlightenment in France over concurrent movements in England and America.Contrasting the Enlightenments in the three nations, Himmelfarb demonstrates the primacy and wisdom of the British, exemplified in such thinkers as Adam Smith, David Hume, and Edmund Burke, as well as the unique and enduring contributions of the American Founders. It is their Enlightenments, she argues, that created a social ethic–humane, compassionate, and realistic–that still resonates strongly today, in America perhaps even more than in Europe.The Roads to Modernity is a remarkable and illuminating contribution to the history of ideas.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Himmelfarb, a leading neoconservative historian of ideas (One Nation, Two Cultures, etc.), takes on the ambitious project of reclaiming the Enlightenment from what she sees as delusionary French thinkers and restoring it to the (apparently) virtuous moderation of the English. The French Enlightenment, she claims, was excessively preoccupied with reason and insufficiently concerned with individual liberty; the philosophes idealized Man in the abstract but despised the common man. In contrast, a distinctively humane British Enlightenment was underpinned by ideals of social virtue: compassion, benevolence and sympathy. These thinkers were tolerant and pragmatic, convinced that private self-interest and public welfare were ultimately compatible. Their legacy, Himmelfarb argues, exerts a major influence on contemporary U.S. culture. Himmelfarb's book is both sophisticated and accessible, and makes some valuable revelations: Adam Smith's hostility to the "business class"; Burke's antipathy to British rule in India. One wonders about the value of the term "Enlightenment" when it is so broad as to encompass John Wesley, and the author's exaltation of the English-speaking philosophical tradition appears particularly problematic in her treatment of the American Enlightenment. Was the American Civil War, allegedly fought in defense of liberty, any less terrible than the infamous Terror? Nonetheless, this is a book with important ideological implications that deserves to be read and debated across the political spectrum.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Reclaiming the Enlightenment would be an ambitious challenge for any historian, but it is perhaps even more daunting for one so closely identified with a particular brand of politics (neoconservatism). No one questions Himmelfarb’s credentials for tackling the job: she is professor emeritus at the City University of New York and the author of nine books. But she takes some hard lumps for attempting to link the Enlightenment to the current American political scene (one reviewer dubbed her "an apologist for the Bush administration"; another accused her of knowingly "reading her own political agenda into the text of the past"). Is it any wonder that the more conservative critics provided raves and liberals gave sharp critique? Detractors felt Himmelfarb ignored historical facts inconvenient to her viewpoint. Ultimately, as its mixed reviews illustrate, The Roads to Modernity succeeds in at least one area: inspiring impassioned debate about a controversial new idea.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (August 9, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400077222
• ISBN-13: 978-1400077229
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #236,802 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stimulating comparisons, June 16, 2008

By 

Ralph Blumenau (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (Paperback)

This superb, lucid and perhaps somewhat partisan book is primarily concerned with the British Enlightenment and with the differences between it and the Enlightenment in France and in America. The author points out that the mainstream of the British Enlightenment did not give absolute priority to Reason, which can easily lead people astray, but to innate moral sentiments and feelings of compassion and benevolence, which Reason and self-interest may support but can also pervert. Where the mainstream French Enlightenment aimed to regenerate mankind, the British wanted to improve it. Where the French were revolutionary, the British were evolutionary. Where the French were militantly anti-clerical, the British, even if they were Theists or Deists, had no intention to attack the Church as such - indeed men like Thomas Woolston, Conyers Middleton and Matthew Tindal were actually in Holy Orders. And the French philosophes generally had little sentiment to spare for the despised canaille, to whom they allowed `neither a moral sense nor a common sense that might approximate reason'. Education, important as it was in the writings of Helvétius and Holbach, would simply be wasted on them. They wanted enlightened reform, of course; but for the most part they pinned their hopes for this on the very unBritish notion of Enlightened Despotism, unreliable as their experience of actual Enlightened Despots turned out to be.

I have used the word `mainstream', which Himmelfarb does not use. She does of course recognize that there were two distinct varieties of the British Enlightenment - that associated with Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Adam Smith and which she seems to regard as `mainstream'; and that associated with Radicals like Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Tom Paine and William Godwin. These had more in common with mainstream French philosophy. In so far as evolutionary thought and practice has played a bigger role in British history than has revolution, the implication that the Shaftesbury-Smith tradition was in the British mainstream appears to be justified. Similarly, there are some Enlightenment thinkers in France - she discusses Montesquieu and Rousseau - who do not fit into the French mainstream as Himmelfarb has described it.

She challenges some ideas which, until fairly recently, were widely taught and accepted: that Adam Smith's fame rests on his work as an economist (The Wealth of Nations, 1776), whereas it had been established as a moral philosopher (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759) and that, moreover, the latter book had the same moral foundation as the former. I cannot personally agree with this argument. She does make a case for the latter also being based on moral principles (freedom, the fundamental equality of human beings, and self-interest); but I don't think they include the basic notion in the former that morality flows from innate benevolence.

Himmelfarb includes Edmund Burke among the figures of the British Enlightenment. The causes he championed in his earlier career (Ireland, the American colonies, India, the rights of John Wilkes) clearly qualify him as Enlightened; and Himmelfarb argues that his opposition to the French Revolution, which has made him appear to many, both at the time and since, as an opponent of the Enlightenment, cannot be read as such. His opposition was to the FRENCH conception of the Enlightenment (shared by the British Radicals), but it was quite consonant with the British Enlightenment ideas which descended from Shaftesbury.

The author includes even John Wesley in the mainstream of the British Enlightenment. There is a widespread view that Methodism was anti-intellectual and anti-rational, that it encouraged only the minimum of educational attainments in its schools (in order, it is argued, to make the poor more docile), and that therefore it could not be part of the Enlightenment. Himmelfarb effectively demolishes these accusations with quotations from Wesley himself and with showing what syllabuses his schools actually taught and what a broad range of educational material he published: in the best Enlightenment tradition, Wesley was as interested in the intellectual as he was in the moral edification of the people. And, being in the British mainstream, he was not hostile to the Establishment (although the Establishment was scornful of him), and the wide scope of Methodist philanthropic, humanitarian and charitable enterprises joined those of many other 18th century groups which put the notion of benevolence into practice. Most of the French philosophes, on the other hand, were suspicious of charitable works - in part because they were mostly run by the hated Church, but also because they thought that they would encourage indolence among the poor!

120 pages of praise for the British Enlightenment are followed by just under 40 pages of criticisms of the French Enlightenment before we get 35 pages on the American Enlightenment. The political institutions of America, with the pride it took in the very practical achievements of republican liberty, was of course more `enlightened' than the institutions of Britain and would be an inspiration for the early phases of French republicanism. Even more so than in the British Enlightenment, there was in the American one no antagonism towards religion. Indeed, it was thought the source of morality; and, although church and state were separated, church and society were not. Unlike in the British Enlightenment, philanthropy played a much smaller part in the American one, partly because at the time there was little poverty among white Americans. The great blot on the American Enlightenment was of course the treatment of the Indians and of the slaves. The Founders, well aware that it violated the notion that all men were created equal, had a bad conscience about it and hoped that both problems would eventually disappear.

The Epilogue is, in my opinion, the weakest part of the book. It claims that the American Enlightenment is alive and well today, while that cannot be said of either the British or the French Enlightenment. The arguments here seem to me to be very weak, and an otherwise splendid book would have been better without this Epilogue.

49 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Authentic Endeavors, September 24, 2004

By 

John Zxerce "[e-mail]" (Colorado ^^^) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (Hardcover)

I had mixed feelings about this book. Himmelfarb cannot be discarded as merely an undistinguished poorly reasoned historian (as some critics seem to want to suggest). On the contrary she's a redactionist of importance in the area of historical movements and measures. And this work proves it again.

What Himmelfarb tries to do is reclaim the Enlightenment from what she sees as misguided French thinkers. It's difficult not to see her connections between a decline of religion, and the cultural outflowing resulting from aspects of the French Enlightenment.

In contrast she presents the British Enlightenment as connected with social affections, based on a more solid moral foundation than that of the French with it's naked "ideology of reason" - a term I wish she would have explained in further detail.

With that said, I found her claims regarding the French Enlightenment to be over-simplified. She claims, a preoccupation with reason as the primary fault of the French Enlightenment. However, I don't find this convincing in that the English movement was also very much focused on rationality, logic, and reason. My guess is her reaction here is too strong and too generalized. Furthermore, does she miss the need for societies to be built on the ideal of rigorous intellectualism?

On the whole, her work is both sophisticated and easy to get at, and certainly makes credible contributions to this field with her more conservative approach. Any honest evaluator cannot write this book off as a docile and unenthusiastic romanticizing of the events. - rather, it's a worthy read, worthy of evaluation.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Let's Storm the French Revolution!, June 24, 2008

By 

D. Osborne "historybuff" (Virginia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (Paperback)

This is mental exercise on the part of Professor Himmelfarb. She is attempting to "make the Enlightenment more British and make the British Enlightenment more inclusive." This is a response to scholars such as Horkheimer and Adorno who savage the Enlightenmen and historians such as Johnathan Israel who essentially denies that there was a British Enlightenment and the French who have hogged it for several years.

Rather than dividing the Enlightenment in to radical versus conservative she divides it geographically, into British, French and American sections. Representing the British: Newton, Locke, Hume, Godwin, Wollcraftstone and others. Representing the French: Voltaire, Diderot, and the ususal gang of suspects. Representing the Americans: Paine and the Founding Fathers.

Her selections of Wesley and Hogarth are odd as "Enlightened" figures. Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church believed in witchcraft. Hogarth was a moral cartoonist, with a propensity for gory drawings.

Himmelfarb offers good scholarship, and (despite some reviews to the contrary) does tackle the problems of the treatement of Native Americans and slavery.

Her main flaw is not in ignoring the American flaws but in ignoring the French ones. The Reign of Terror is barely mentioned and Napoleon Bonapart (whose rise to power is generally considered to be the end of the Enlightenment) is skipped.

Himmelfarb is openly conservative, and much of the criticism-good and bad can be construed as having its low or high rating in the political attitudes of the reviewer.