According to David Wootton, we are living in a world created by an intellectual revolution initiated by three thinkers in the 16th to 18th centuries. “My title is, Power, Pleasure and Profit, in that order, because power was conceptualised first, in the 16th century, by Niccolò Machiavelli; in the 17th century Hobbes radically revised the concepts of pleasure and happiness; and the way in which profit works in the economy was first adequately theorised in the 18th century by Adam Smith.” Before these thinkers, life had been based on the idea of a summum bonum – an all-encompassing goal of human life. Christianity identified it with salvation, Greco-Roman philosophy with a condition in which happiness and virtue were one and the same. For both, human life was complete when the supreme good was achieved.
But for those who live in the world made by Machiavelli, Hobbes and Smith, there is no supreme good. Rather than salvation or virtue they want power, pleasure and profit – and they want them all without measure, limitlessly. ...for these thinkers human fulfilment is something that is pursued, not achieved.....
...In this system, the only rational goal of society is the maximum satisfaction of wants, and the only way of achieving this is a commercial society based on a market economy, private property and limited government. In this view, goodness is simply a set of strategies for pursuing whatever human beings most desire. Moral reasoning of the sort practised by Aristotle and Aquinas depended on the belief that there is an objectively good way of life....
...When, at the end of the 20th century the collapse of communism seemed to herald a new world order, that order was to be based on Enlightenment principles: free markets, freedom of speech, the separation of religion from the state. When we talk about Western values, the values we have in mind are the values of the American Founding Fathers, which are Enlightenment values. When we describe what is good about our societies and when we criticise their failings, we are mobilising arguments developed within the Enlightenment paradigm….
Not only does this define the Enlightenment in terms of an American hegemony that is now plainly in the past. Focusing on a narrow subset of liberal ideas, it also excludes other ideas and movements that form part of the Enlightenment on any longer and wider view. Marx’s thought consisted in large part of a criticism of what Wootton defines as the Enlightenment paradigm. But Marx’s was an immanent critique of Enlightenment thinking, and the movements he inspired always regarded themselves as continuing an Enlightenment project.
...In fact most of these movements represented extensions of Enlightenment thinking rather than rejections of it. Social Darwinists believed they were developing an Enlightenment science of human nature based on physiology. The vastly influential 19th-century positivist Auguste Comte – who invented the word “altruism” in order to define his secular ethic – saw himself as working in the tradition of the 18th-century French encyclopedists. Freud insisted to the end that he was applying scientific rationalism to the study of the human mind. Even 20th- and 21st-century postmodernists take their lead from Nietzsche, a lifetime admirer of Voltaire who situated himself at the end of Enlightenment thinking not outside of it....
...A major ingredient in the intellectual melange from which these “wars of choice” sprang was the ideology of democracy promotion – the belief that human beings everywhere dream of being delivered from tyranny. Originating in core Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant – whose political thinking was shaped by the universalistic evangelism of Christianity – this secular faith has been at least as influential in modern politics as utilitarian cost-benefit analysis.
The third of Wootton’s intellectual revolutionaries, Adam Smith, also relied on the formative ideas of monotheism. His argument for free trade deployed a Christian belief in a divine providence that placed peoples with different skills in different parts of the world so that they could trade with one another productively. Similarly, the Enlightenment of the American Founding Fathers depended on theistic assumptions about human rights being grounded in duties to God. When 21st-century liberals piously defer to Enlightenment values, it is this theistic inheritance they unwittingly invoke.
...If Wootton’s Enlightenment is discarded in another paradigm shift it will not be because of the advance of technology but instead the imperatives of politics. The liberal Enlightenment will be ditched when it no longer gives people enough of what they want.
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Originally Posted by Chris
