西方文化入门EconomicandPhilosophicalThinkersintheEnlightenment.doc

2010年西方文化入门(Handout 13)
Economic and Philosophical Thinkers in the Enlightenment
December, 2010
Part I The Encyclopedia
The mid-century witnessed the publication of the Encyclopedia, one of the greatest monuments of the Enlightenment and its most monumental undertaking in the realm of print culture. Under the heroic leadership of Denis Diderot (1713-1784), and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, the first volume appeared in 1751. Eventually, numbering seventeen volumes of text and eleven of plates (illustrations), the project was completed in 1772.
The Encyclopedia, in part a collective plea for freedom of expression, reached fruition only after many attempts to censor it and to halt its publication. It was the product of the collective effort of more than 100 authors, and its editors had at one time or another solicited articles from all the major French philosophes. It included the most advanced critical ideas of the time on religion, government, and philosophy. To avoid official censure, these ideas often had to be hidden in obscure articles or under the cover of irony. The Encyclopedia also included important articles and illustrations on manufacturing, canal building, ship construction, and improved agriculture, making it an important source of knowledge about eighteenth-century social and economic life.
Between 14, 000 and 16,000 copies of various editions of the Encyclopedia were sold before 1789. The project had been designed to secularize learning and undermine intellectual assumptions that lingered from the Middle Ages and the Reformation. The articles on politics, ethics and society ignored divine law and concentrated on humanity and its immediate well-being. The Encyclopedists looked to antiquity rather than to the Christian centuries for their intellectual and ethical models. For them, the future welfare of humankind lay not in pleasing God or following divine commandments, but rather in harnessing the power and the resources of the Earth and in living at peace with one’s fellow human beings. The good life lay here and now and was to be achieved through the application of reason to human relationships. With the publication of the Encyclopedia, Enlightenment thought became more fully diffused over the Continent, penetrating German and Russian intellectual and political circles.
(p. 659, The Western Heritage, Volume II)
Jean Le Rond D’Alembert (1717-1783)
The Enlightenment was a period of confident belief in the future and in the progress of mankind. D’Alembert shows clearly that he believes a new age has begun. He reveals the confidence of the century and its pride in its achievements. In the introduction to the Encyclopaedia, he looks at the progress that has been made by 1750 and notes how much change there has been. “It is difficult not to see that in some respects a very remarkable change in our ideas is taking place, a change whose speed seems to promise an even greater transformation to come.” This change is due to the great increase in knowledge and the birth of new disciplines, which allow the world to be investigated in new ways. Geometry has been developed and applied to the physical sciences, for example. Everywhere there are new forms of knowledge and in almost every field, “from the Earth to Saturn, from the history of the heavens to that of insects” science has been revolutionised. “Thus from the principles of the secular sciences to the foundations of religious revelation, from the study of reality to matters of taste, from music to morals, and from arguments of theologians to matters of trade, from the laws of princes to those of peoples ... everything has been discussed and analysed, or at least mentioned.”
Quotations from Buchdahl, G., The Image of Newton and Locke in the Age of Reason, Sheed and Ward, London, 1961, p61.

D’Alembert got his name “le Rond” from the place where he was abandoned as a baby by his mother, who was a literary hostess and did not want her illegitimate baby. He was brought up by a humble family. He studied law and medicine, but it was his exceptional mathematical ability that made him known and brought him to membership of the Academy of Sciences. Both Catherine the Great and Frederick the Great wanted him to lead science in their countries, but he remained in France. He worked with Diderot on the Encyclopedia for many years and wrote the very influential preface, from which the extract given below is taken.
The introduction to the Encyclopedia was called the Preliminary Discourse. D’Alembert begins by dismissing the belief of Plato that we have innate ideas. He points out that in the Middle Ages Aristotle’s view was accepted, that we get knowledge of the world from our senses, then for a period Plato’s ideas returned in the Renaissance. As D’Alembert says, these ideas had lost ground by his time, because of John Locke. The extract is a clear statement of the influence of the empiricism of John Locke; facts based on observation are preferred to hypotheses not based on experience.
D’Alembert divides knowledge into two main categories—“direct and reflective knowledge”. Direct knowledge comes to us through our senses, and reflective knowledge comes from the mind working on what is it has absorbed, “unifying it and combining it”.
He is quite uncompromising in his rejection of Plato’s ideas about innate knowledge, and traces the progress that was made in the Middle Ages by such people as Thomas Aquinas, who assisted greatly in bringing the empirical philosophy of Aristotle to general acceptance in universities. He points out that the battle has not quite been won—there are still people who believe in innate ideas “so great are the difficulties hindering the return of truth.”
In a way that is typical of his century, he emphasizes that the senses must be the source of our knowledge, and repeats the belief as stated by Newton that “deduction which is based on facts or recognized truths is preferable to one which is supported only by hypotheses”.
Quotations from The Enlightenment, eds. Hyland, P. with Gomez, O. and Greensides, F. Routledge, London, 2003, p.p.49-50

Part II The Physiocrats and Economic Freedom
Economic policy was another area in which the philosophes saw existing legislation and administration preventing the operation of natural social laws. They believed that mercantilists legislation (designed to protect a country’s trade from external competition) and the regulation of labor by governments and guilds actually hampered the expansion of trade, manufacture, and agriculture. In France, these economic reformers were called the physiocrats. Their leading spokesmen were Francis Quesnay (1694-1774) and Pierre Dupont de Nemours (1739-1817).
The physiocrats believed that the primary role of government was to protect property and to permit its owners to use it freely. They particularly felt that all economic production depended on sound agriculture. They favored the consolidation of small peasant holdings into larger, more efficient farms. Here as elsewhere, there was a close relationship between the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the spirit of improvement at work in eighteenth-century European economic life.

Adam Smith on Economic Growth and Social Progress.
The most important economic work of the Enlightenment was Adam Smith’s (1723-1790) Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)《国富论》. Smith, who was for a time a professor at Glasgow, believed that economic liberty was the foundation of a natural economic system. As a result, he urged that the mercantile system of England—including the navigation acts, the bounties, most tariffs, special trading monopolies, and the domestic regulation of labor and manufacture—be abolished. These regulations were intended to preserve the wealth of the nation, to capture wealth from other nations, and to maximize the work available for the nation’s laborers. Smith argued, however, that they hindered the expansion of wealth and production. The best way to encourage economic growth, he maintained, was to unleash individuals to pursue their own selfish economic interests. As self-interested individuals sought to enrich themselves by meeting the needs of others in the market-place, the economy would expand. Consumers would find their wants met as manufacturers and merchants competed for their business.
It was a basic assumption of mercantilism that the earth’s resources are limited and scarce, so that one nation can acquire wealth only at the expense of others. Smith’s book challenged this assumption. He saw the resources of nature — water, air, soil, and minerals — as boundless. To him, they demanded exploitation for the enrichment and comfort of humankind. In effect, Smith was saying that the nations and peoples of Europe need not be poor.
Smith is usually regarded as the founder of laissez-faire economic thought and policy, which favors a limited role for the government in economic life. The Wealth of Nations was, however, a complex book. Smith was no simple dogmatist. For example, he did not oppose all government activity touching the economy. The state, he argued, should provide schools, armies, navies, and roads. It should also undertake certain commercial ventures, such as the opening of dangerous new trade routes that were economically desirable, but too expensive or risky for private enterprise.
Within The Wealth of Nations, Smith, like other Scottish thinkers of the day, embraced an important theory of human social and economic development, known as the four-stage theory. According to this theory, human societies can be classified as hunting and gathering, pastoral or herding, agricultural, and commercial. The hunters and gatherers have little or no settled life. Pastoral societies are groups of nomads who tend their herds and develop some private property. Agricultural or farming societies are settled and have clear-cut property arrangements. Finally in the commercial state, there exist advanced cities, the manufacture of numerous items for wide consumption, extensive trade between cities and the countryside, as well as elaborate forms of property and financial arrangements. Smith and other Scottish writers described the passage of human society through these stages as a movement from barbarism to civilization.
The four-stage theory implicitly evaluated the later stages of economic development and the people dwelling in them as higher, more progressive, and more civilized than the earlier ones. A social theorist using this theory could thus very quickly look at a society and, on the basis of the state of its economic development and organizations, rank it in terms of the stage it had achieved. In point of fact, the commercial stage, the highest rank in the theory, described society as it appeared in northwestern Europe. Thus, Smith’s theory allowed the Europeans to look about the world and always find themselves dwelling at the highest level of human achievement. This outlook served as one of the major justifications in the minds of Europeans for their economic and imperial domination of the world during the next century. They repeatedly portrayed themselves as bringing a higher level of civilization to people elsewhere who, according to the four-stage theory, lived in lower stages of human social and economic development. Europeans thus imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment presented themselves as carrying out a civilizing mission to the rest of the world.

Part III Political Thought of the Philosophes
Nowhere was the philosophes’ reformist agenda, as well as tensions among themselves, so apparent as in their political thought. Most philosophes were discontented with certain political features of their countries, but hey were especially discontented in France. There the corruptness of the royal court, the blundering of the administrative bureaucracy, the less-than-glorious mid-century wars, and the power of the church compounded all problems. Consequently, the most important political thought of the Enlightenment occurred in France. The French philosophes, however, stood quite divided as to the proper solution to their country’s problems. Their attitudes spanned a wide political spectrum, from aristocratic reform to democracy to absolute monarchy.

Montesquieu and Spirit of the Laws
Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755), was a lawyer, a noble of the robe, and a member of a provincial parlement. He also belonged to the Bordeaux Academy of Science, before which he presented papers on scientific topics.
Although living comfortably within the bosom of French society, he saw the need for reform. In 1721, he published the Persian Letters 《波斯人信札》to satirize contemporary institutions. The books consisted of letters purportedly written by two Persian visiting Europe. They explained to friends at home how European behavior contrasted with Persian life and customs. Behind the humor lay the cutting edge of criticism and an exposition of the cruelty and irrationality of much contemporaneous European life.
In his most enduring work, Spirit of the Laws (1748)《论法的精神》, Montesquieu held up the example of the British constitution as the wisest model for regulating the power of government. With his interest in science, his hope for reform, and his admiration for Britain, he embodied all the major elements of the Enlightenment mind.
Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, perhaps the single most influential book of the century, exhibits the internal tensions of the Enlightenment. In it, Montesquieu pursued an empirical method, taking illustrative examples from the political experience of both ancient and modern nations. From these, he concluded there could be no single set of political laws that applied to all peoples at all times and in all places. The good political life depended rather on the relationship among many political variables. Whether the best form of government for a country was a monarchy or a republic, for example, depended on that country’s size, population, social and religious customs, economic structure, traditions, and climate. Only a careful examination and evaluation of these elements could reveal what mode of government would prove most beneficial to a particular people.
So far as France was concerned, Montesquieu had some definite ideas. He believed in a monarchical government tempered and limited by various sets of intermediary institutions, including the aristocracy, the towns, and the other corporate bodies that enjoyed liberties the monarch had to respect. These corporate bodies might be said to represent various segments of the general population and thus of public opinion. In France, he regarded the aristocratic courts, or parlements, as the major example of an intermediary association. Their role was to limit the