The Scottish Enlightenment

Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress

Silvia Sebastiani

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137069795
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The Scottish Enlightenment shaped a new conception of history as a gradual and universal progress from savagery to civil society. Whereas women emancipated themselves from the yoke of male-masters, men in turn acquired polite manners and became civilized. Such a conception, however, presents problematic questions: why were the Americans still savage? Why was it that the Europeans only had completed all the stages of the historic process? Could modern societies escape the destiny of earlier empires and avoid decadence? Was there a limit beyond which women's influence might result in dehumanization? The Scottish Enlightenment's legacy for modernity emerges here as a two-faced Janus, an unresolved tension between universalism and hierarchy, progress and the limits of progress.

1

Hume versus Montesquieu: Race against Climate

There is a general course of nature in human actions, as well as in the operations of the sun and the climate. There are also characters peculiar to different nations and particular persons, as well as common to mankind.¹

The European debate about human diversity, whose terms had been dictated for two centuries by biblical criticism, received a fresh burst of impetus with the publication, in 1748, of Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois. By treating human laws as physical laws, this work contributed to turning the discussion about different peoples into an evaluation of different societies. Montesquieu’s concept of the general spirit showed how societies could be analyzed by looking at the functional connections of different factors, such as climate, religion, laws, customs, and manners, which also made it possible to compare and classify them. This perspective emphasized the multiplicity of causal links. However, in the immediate stir generated by the text throughout Europe, Montesquieu’s relativistic approach remained in the background. It was the salience he gave to physical causes, especially climate, that drew attention.

David Hume’s essay “On National Characters,” published a month after the Esprit des lois, set out the main terms and issues that would characterize the Scottish debate on human diversity: at the heart of his work was a sharp criticism of climate theory. Besides discarding physical causes, Hume’s dialogue with Montesquieu touched on the question of the relationship between equality and diversity in the analysis of human phenomena. His explanation of the functioning of societies and the formation of different national characters was based on the uniformity of human nature: in similar circumstances men reacted in a similar way, because they were governed by the same passions. These passions took on different social forms in different historic periods and in different countries, a point made by Adam Smith through a complete historicization of national characters.

The uniformity of human nature could be split, according to Hume, into local uniformities relating not only to different social and national groups, but also ages and sexes. Within the general context of Hume’s philosophy, in which these categories were constantly associated, “Of National Characters” worked on two planes: while it offered a sort of sociological explanation of the diversity between peoples, it also emphasized the idea of a bedrock of natural diversity. Though it remained in the background in the first edition of the essay, this aspect became explicit in a footnote added in 1753–54, where Hume suggested a polygenetic differentiation between human groups. This note, which would become famous in the second half of the eighteenth century among defenders and detractors of the unity of humankind, tied in with other reflections by Hume. In particular, a passage of his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) tended to naturalize the historic superiority of the Europeans over other peoples. The 1753 footnote must also be related to the debate Hume was pursuing at the time with Robert Wallace about the populousness of ancient nations, at the center of which there was the question of slavery.

Hume’s essay on national characters laid the foundations for a discussion in sociological terms of the differences between peoples. However, such an analysis was limited to the context of the European nations, as natural differences were invoked for non-European peoples. In line with his belief that modern liberty was superior to that of antiquity, Hume contributed to distancing the classical ideal in time and to placing it in the category of barbarity. At the same time, he offered a criticism of slavery that was not grounded on the principle of human equality.

National characters and the spirit of laws

The Esprit des lois, published anonymously in Geneva in 1748, marked a turning point in European thinking about diversity. The category of diversity opens Montesquieu’s most important work and delineates its field of inquiry: “I began by examining men; and I believed that, amidst the infinite diversity of laws and mores, they were not led by their fancies only.”² Montesquieu gathered together material accumulated over decades of heterogeneous accounts about the characters differentiating peoples and the legacy of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political reflection. He examined them within an overall theory of the relationship between citizens, society, and politics, in order to offer scientifically grounded solutions to the moral crisis of French society stemming from the absolutism of Louis XIV.³

Starting from the assumption that human laws function like physical ones, in which all diversity is uniformity and every change constancy, his aim was to explain different customs and forms of government by moving from the particular to the general, and then to ascertain that specific cases adapted to principles “almost spontaneously.”⁴ Such an approach, while implying the possibility of encompassing all human variety within a single and universal field of inquiry, freed itself from two centuries of discussion about the genealogy of peoples. Law after law, the comparison no longer went back to the origins of humanity, nor to the solitude of supposed individuals in the state of nature, but to their “natural” space: society. In construing a natural history of politics, Montesquieu arrived at the naturalization of politics.⁵

On the basis of these assumptions, Montesquieu’s science of politics outlined the functional connection between a variety of factors in determining different forms of government, and reformulated the traditional classification of political regimes in the complex dimension of a geography of political, social, and economic systems. In book XVIII of the Esprit des lois, emphasis was laid on the close relationship between laws and the way in which different peoples subsisted. A more tightly structured code of laws was necessary for a people engaged in commerce than for a farming one, who in turn had more laws than a people living from herding; this one had a more extensive code than that required by a hunting people. The expansion of the civil code was due above all to the division of land: nations where this had not occurred had very few laws. The same criterion of proportion applied to population number. The contrast between barbarity and civilization, highlighted by seventeenth-century philosophers, was now explained in functional terms through the articulation of sociological categories. The term “savage” was associated with hunting peoples, few in number and at the bottom of the scale of complexity of political systems, and “barbarian” with herding peoples.⁶

The commerce d’économie was the dominant principle of republics, while that of luxe characterized monarchies. The history of different nations was comprehensible within a typology of sociopolitical systems, distinguished by the relativistic openness of the concept of general spirit. Montesquieu argued that the functioning of the political system was determined by the relative impact of a range of factors:

Many things govern men: climate, religion, laws, the maxims of the government, examples of past things, mores, manners; a general spirit is formed as a result. To the extent that, in each nation, one of these causes acts more forcefully, the others yield to it.⁷

Climate, religion, laws, political principles, traditions, customs, and manners formed a mosaic of conditions in which different societies took shape. Montesquieu had already examined the interrelationship of the different factors in the Lettres persanes, but the very structure of the Esprit des lois indicated a rational thread in the pattern of their relative influence: the first chapters of book XIX showed how government depended on the ways of thinking and on the customs of peoples, whereas the last one, on England (chapter 27), indicated how the system of laws could influence every aspect of social, political, and cultural behavior.

However, the problem of the immobility of Asiatic despotism, which the accounts of François Bernier had brought to the attention of European political debate,⁸ led Montesquieu to emphasize the role of climate. Drawing on a long philosophical tradition dating back to Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen, but with direct precedents such as Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Espiard de la Borde, and the Scottish physician John Arbuthnot,⁹ Montesquieu transfers the physiological reflection about the influence of climate on man’s character into the ambit of the laws regulating societies. The cold, by shrinking the body’s fibers and allowing a better circulation of the blood, makes peoples stronger and more supple; the heat, by contrast, in relaxing and stretching the fibers, reduces their strength and suppleness. Consequently, the character, spirit, and passions of peoples vary according to climate, inducing other differences in political and legal systems. The populations of cold and temperate countries, then, are brave, frank, resistant to pain, and eager for freedom, whereas the peoples of hot, torrid countries are cowardly, easily tempted by sensual pleasures, and with a predisposition for servitude. This paved the way for despotism.

The absence of temperate climes in the great Asiatic expanses deprived peoples of the stimulus to change, condemning them to inactivity. In the Orient, laws, manners, and customs, even the most apparently insignificant ones, had not changed for thousands of years, which is why the Eastern Indies were and would always remain the same.¹⁰ The radical conclusion that could be drawn from such reasoning is that not all climates produce liberty, which is thus beyond some peoples. This assumption is at the basis of the antiabsolutist aspiration for reform, which was a constant feature of French thinking about national characters in the second half of the eighteenth century. Rousseau’s Contrat social spells it out.¹¹ In the Esprit des lois, however, the physical and moral effects of climate were always seen as contingent and reversible, and not inherent to nations: the peoples of the North, when they moved to the South, never managed to attain achievements equal to the ones they had been capable of in their own climate; likewise, the courage of the children of Europeans living in India was much feebler than that of their fathers.¹²

The Esprit des lois was widely read and proved an enormous public success: at the beginning of 1750, Montesquieu noted in a letter to the Duke of Nivernais that as many as 22 editions had been published on the European continent.¹³ The work was printed in Edinburgh in 1750 (in French), and in the same year, an English translation by Thomas Nugent appeared in London, with the title Spirit of Laws. It reached its fifth edition in 1767, while at least seven different English editions were published in Scotland in the second half of the century.¹⁴ The work immediately sparked a heated querelle—always a good way of achieving success in the publishing market—about its stance on religion. Montesquieu was accused of deism and Spinozism, because he treated morals and laws as human phenomena, unrelated to the absolute models of divine origin. It was in this context that his thesis about the influence of climate became the subject of dispute.¹⁵

But polemic aside, climate theory could be criticized along lines traced by Montesquieu himself. Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, an attentive reader of the Esprit des lois, deployed this argument in his project for integrating history, geography, and the theory of politics, which was also written in 1748 but remained in manuscript form. Turgot pointed out that the attempt to explain the diversity of nations through the influence of climate had produced paradoxes even in the “finest genius of our century.”¹⁶ The climatic explanation, as Turgot noted in his Plan d’un ouvrage sur la géographie politique in 1750 (which also remained unpublished), had to be countered by the real causes of these effects: moral causes.¹⁷

Montesquieu’s climate determinism was more the product of the interpretation of his contemporaries in the framework of the ideological dispute than a real implication of the Esprit des lois as such. The treatise divided the planet into three clear-cut geographic sectors along a North-South axis: while herding, agriculture, and civilization developed in the temperate climes, the extremes of cold and heat, characterized respectively by a harsh nature and an overly prodigious one, condemned the peoples living in those areas to a savage state. However, moral causes were, in Montesquieu’s view, as determinant as physical ones, if not more.¹⁸

The concept of climate in Montesquieu’s work was very broad, and included social conditioning as well: different climates created different needs, which peoples dealt with in various ways, depending on the kind of society they lived in, how they gathered their food, what their religion and laws were like, and the type of government they had.¹⁹ Some space was also granted to human agency in building the social environment and forming the general spirit. The explicit task of the good legislator was to resist the vices of climate, and not to yield to them: Montesquieu opposed the active Chinese to the passive Indian, who had condemned India to immobility. The legislator should not be a spectateur tranquille, as his actions had an impact on national characters. But any modification of manners required great prudence.²⁰ By means of mediation between man and nature, consisting of needs, Montesquieu maintained a relativism in a way that could dissolve climate theory itself. Moral causes also acted upon and modified the human body, acquiring growing strength with the development of societies and education; but in the most advanced forms of society, other factors, such as manners, laws, and customs, could be determinant.²¹

This reasoning held true for the Orient as well, according to Turgot. Physical and climatic causes acted only indirectly, creating different environmental cont...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Note on Terminology
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Scottish Enlightenment as Historiographic Problem
• 1  Hume versus Montesquieu: Race against Climate
• 2  The Natural History of Humankind and the Natural History of Man
• 3  Ignoble Savages: A Blank in the History of the Species
• 4  Universal Prerogatives of Humankind
• 5  Measures of Civilization: Women, Races, and Progress
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index