In connection with my recently posted entry Crowning Miss Shopkeeper, I’ve been asked: how come France gets the credit for the Enlightenment, when its celebrated Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen was adopted, in its earliest version, in 1789, whereas the American Declaration of Independence had been adopted thirteen whole years prior to the French document?! Answering this admittedly easy question should be so educational, that I thought that the answer deserves to be turned into a separate entry, and here it is.
Regarding the Enlightenment as such, there is no historical consensus as to its specifics, and even the broad outlines, such as the general timeline, and such, have been laid out with some considerable controversy.
Here is the Britannica definition of the term:
“Enlightenment, French: Siècle des Lumières (“Age of the Enlightened”), German: Aufklärung,-- a European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which ideas concerning God, reason, nature, and man were synthesized into a worldview that gained wide assent and that instigated revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, and politics… Central to Enlightenment thought were the use and the celebration of reason, the power by which man understands the universe and improves his own condition. The goals of the rational man were considered to be knowledge, freedom, and happiness.”
But here is the Webster’s definition of the term:
“The Enlightenment: an 18th-century European philosophical movement characterized by rationalism, an impetus toward learning, and a spirit of skepticism and empiricism in social and political thought.”
There is an immediate discrepancy in dates. Britannica gives us the 17th century, in addition to the 18th. This is usually meant to include Dèscartes, as the starting point of the Enlightenment movement, and John Locke as one of its snow-capped summits. But read Webster’s, and the parameters of the Enlightenment here are restricted to a single century. Now, going back to the Britannica, we are reminded of the fact that the term Enlightenment is of French origin (Siècle des Lumières, first used in 1733); the English term Enlightenment was a mid-18th-century translation from the French, made in reference to the specific French Enlightenment; and, finally, the German Aufklärung is Kant’s first use of the term, made in 1784.
Despite this considerable confusion regarding the dates, and even personages, of the Enlightenment (besides Dèscartes,--- Spinoza, Newton, and even Bentham, are often mentioned as its pillars), there is no dispute about the fact that the 18th-century France was the principal source of the Enlightenment in its narrowest, technical definition as a specific phenomenon. It is true that, say, John Locke is quite frequently mentioned as an “Enlightener,” but the most compelling symbol of the Enlightenment is still L’Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, published by Diderot and D’Alembert in France from 1751 to 1772, with later supplements and revisions. The greatest contributing minds of the Encyclopédie were Diderot himself, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, and the most revolutionary subject in it was the political theory, that is, le Contrat Social, initiated by Montesquieu’s political theories and accentuated in Rousseau’s celebrated 1762 work.
So, it can be said without exaggeration that both subsequent Declarations, the American and the French one, were dramatically influenced by the French thinkers of the Enlightenment, to an even larger extent than by the works of John Locke, to which effect both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson have amply testified in their own writings. Thus, in so far as their principal sources are concerned, it does not really matter that the American Declaration of Independence predated, by so many years, the French Declaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen.
But having said that, this remarkable fact of historical precedence must not be downplayed, either. After all, the American Declaration of Independence was the first such government-approved document in history, and, no matter what its source might have been (one can say that each source has its own source, in this case going back to Machiavelli, and undeniably even earlier, to the Greeks), no one can take this world-historical achievement away not just from Franklin, Jefferson, and all other individuals participating in its writing and editing, but from the American nation as a whole.
Regarding the Enlightenment as such, there is no historical consensus as to its specifics, and even the broad outlines, such as the general timeline, and such, have been laid out with some considerable controversy.
Here is the Britannica definition of the term:
“Enlightenment, French: Siècle des Lumières (“Age of the Enlightened”), German: Aufklärung,-- a European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which ideas concerning God, reason, nature, and man were synthesized into a worldview that gained wide assent and that instigated revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, and politics… Central to Enlightenment thought were the use and the celebration of reason, the power by which man understands the universe and improves his own condition. The goals of the rational man were considered to be knowledge, freedom, and happiness.”
But here is the Webster’s definition of the term:
“The Enlightenment: an 18th-century European philosophical movement characterized by rationalism, an impetus toward learning, and a spirit of skepticism and empiricism in social and political thought.”
There is an immediate discrepancy in dates. Britannica gives us the 17th century, in addition to the 18th. This is usually meant to include Dèscartes, as the starting point of the Enlightenment movement, and John Locke as one of its snow-capped summits. But read Webster’s, and the parameters of the Enlightenment here are restricted to a single century. Now, going back to the Britannica, we are reminded of the fact that the term Enlightenment is of French origin (Siècle des Lumières, first used in 1733); the English term Enlightenment was a mid-18th-century translation from the French, made in reference to the specific French Enlightenment; and, finally, the German Aufklärung is Kant’s first use of the term, made in 1784.
Despite this considerable confusion regarding the dates, and even personages, of the Enlightenment (besides Dèscartes,--- Spinoza, Newton, and even Bentham, are often mentioned as its pillars), there is no dispute about the fact that the 18th-century France was the principal source of the Enlightenment in its narrowest, technical definition as a specific phenomenon. It is true that, say, John Locke is quite frequently mentioned as an “Enlightener,” but the most compelling symbol of the Enlightenment is still L’Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, published by Diderot and D’Alembert in France from 1751 to 1772, with later supplements and revisions. The greatest contributing minds of the Encyclopédie were Diderot himself, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, and the most revolutionary subject in it was the political theory, that is, le Contrat Social, initiated by Montesquieu’s political theories and accentuated in Rousseau’s celebrated 1762 work.
So, it can be said without exaggeration that both subsequent Declarations, the American and the French one, were dramatically influenced by the French thinkers of the Enlightenment, to an even larger extent than by the works of John Locke, to which effect both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson have amply testified in their own writings. Thus, in so far as their principal sources are concerned, it does not really matter that the American Declaration of Independence predated, by so many years, the French Declaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen.
But having said that, this remarkable fact of historical precedence must not be downplayed, either. After all, the American Declaration of Independence was the first such government-approved document in history, and, no matter what its source might have been (one can say that each source has its own source, in this case going back to Machiavelli, and undeniably even earlier, to the Greeks), no one can take this world-historical achievement away not just from Franklin, Jefferson, and all other individuals participating in its writing and editing, but from the American nation as a whole.
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