Another fleeting thought

[fpb]

France, and to a lesser extent Germany, lay claim to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as to a kind of national treasure and heritage; and the rest of the West tends to agree. Yet those elements of the Enlightenment that had a permanent, positive and enduring impact on the West came neither from Paris nor from the university towns of Germany, but from Edinburgh (Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations), Milan (Cesare Beccaria's Crimes and Penalties) and from the fledgling, English-speaking United States of America. No work of any French or German author, not even Voltaire or Kant, compares.

Comments

[joetexx.livejournal.com]

I think you are probably right as far as the direct world of fact is concerned, but I'm not sure I'd read out
Kant so quickly. His influence on modern philosophy was overwhelming, and via the Hegelians, Marxists, and theorists of liberal democracy had a real world impact, at least in Europe.

Have you read Logicomix? I enjoyed it even if it was a NY Times bestseller. The authors argue that the foundational crisis in mathematics led (via Turing and Von Neumann) at least indirectly to the computer age. And the foundational crisis might never have happened if Kant had not gotten European philosophy started on the limits of possible human knowledge.

I admit I have less than no qualifications to be untangling theses threads of intellectual history.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The derivation of Hegel from Kant is a matter of debate - Popper, for one, saw it as Hegelians co-opting Kant in their own tradition when he really had nothing to do with them. And even if that were not the case, would you call Hegelism and its derivates a positive and constructive element in Western history?

[joetexx.livejournal.com]

Positive and constructive? No. Long lasting, yes. Permanent and enduring - I hope not.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Montesquieu gave us the concept of the separation of powers, taken up by the early US even though it was based on a mis-reading of how Britain worked. Wikipedia says he's credited among the precursors of anthropology, making him influential if not eternal.

Rousseau is generally mentioned in the same company as Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu in philosophy of government.

Condorcet was a foundational thinking in voting theory, with a method and paradox named after him, and apparently was a bigger Enlightenment philosopher than I'd heard of, including being largely responsible for the Enlightenment idea of Progress.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Condorcet
"Unlike many of his contemporaries, he advocated a liberal economy, free and equal public education, constitutionalism, and equal rights for women and people of all races."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympe_de_Gouges wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Women.

And I assume you meant to exclude the natural sciences, as opposed to excluding Buffon, Cuvier, d'Alembert, Laplace, the whole Bernoulli family, Lavoisier, Leibniz, Linnaeus...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_d%27Holbach
who was a major writer for atheism, which you might not find positive but others of us would

And then of course there are all the thinkers and writers whose work may not have been eternal but who were part of the ferment, and influential on those who were permanent, or what happened. Lots of continental names there.
Such as that Beccaria was inspired by Helvetius.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Linnaeus was Swedish and the Bernoullis, IIRC, Swiss. And yes, I am excluding science. It began before the En. and did not end with it.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

At any rate, I never said that France and Germany did not have important En. figures. I only said that nobody I could think of had the immediate and enduring effect of Smith and Beccaria, whose work not only went around Europe in years, but induced both immediate reforms and a permanent alteration of the way to look at the civil commonwealth. Montesquieu may have a comparable claim, but he had neither the same immediate impact nor the same universal permanence; people don't frame the question in his terms as they frame economy in the terms set by Smith or the debate on criminal law in the terms set by Beccaria.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

You didn't actually say "Nobody I could think of", you said "No work of any French or German author, not even Voltaire or Kant, compares." Perhaps you meant to be speaking from your limited knowledge, but you sounded like a sweeping claim.

Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws was in 1748; the Constitution in 1787. It seems to have spread rapidly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_of_the_Laws Translated into English in a year, and prohibited by the Catholic Church within 3. Catherine the Great referred to him 20 years later. Seems perfectly comparable to Smith, or Beccaria, whom to be honest I'd forgotten if I'd ever heard of him before; and every time someone talks about separation of powers they are using Montesquieu's terms.

Wikipedia credits him with popularizing the terms "feudalism" and "Byzantine Emprie", too.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

No, no, no. Everyone who speaks of separation of powers used the Founders' terms, and I tell you that as a continental, because people always refer to the English expression "checks and balances" when they do so. They are not impressed by
Montesquieu (incidentally, the fact that the Church condemned his work is not a compliment, especially since we are talking about the Church of Benedict XIV), but by the living and functioning example of a practical republic. And your ignorance of Beccaria, who brought about immediate and profound judicial reform throughout Europe within a few years of his publication, just supports what I said. Beccaria and Smith changed the landscape by the mere force of their thought; Montesquieu had to wait forty years for an armed revolution to begin to give relevance to his cogitations.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I've seen "checks and balances" credited to Montesquieu himself, though I can't find a primary citation (and of course it'd be filtered through translation), but he certain had a concept of the different branches balancing each other, not just being separated in their own spheres. If the Continent looks to the US -- well, that's nice, and practical, but the US looked to Montesquieu; not our fault if y'all have forgotten that. And "separation of powers" is used as much as "checks and balances".

"forty years" is specious; it's easier to change penal or economic laws than the very structure of government.

I freely acknowledge my ignorance of Beccaria. You seem determined to downplay the French contribution.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

And I am not saying that the French and GErmans had no important En. figures - that would be ridiculous. What I am saying is that misguided national prejudice leads to a crass undervaluing of En. figures from Italy, Scotland and elsewhere.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

From my American public education, the major Enlightenment figures who come switfly to my mind are Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Smith, Newton, Leibniz; also Voltaire and Diderot. Hardly seems overly biased to the Continent.

I've certainly heard of Hume, though I didn't have him fixed in time well enough to tag him as Enlightenment. Ditto some of the other names here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Age_of_Enlightenment
Gibbon, Johnson, Goethe, and for that matter Kant.

Then there's the various French thinkers who gave us http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-faire which was perhaps more positive in its original context, but has certainly been a powerful and permanent term; that article doesn't mention Quesnay, who coached Adam Smith.

My schooling skipped Beccaria, but it also skipped Condorcet. Italy may be undervalued, I don't think France is overvalued. Germany... well, I never thought of it as a primary source of the Enlightenment, so hardly overvalued to me, though Frederick gets mentioned in the enlightened despotism line.