American Enlightenment: The New World and Modern Western Thought

Abstract

“In the beginning all the world was America,” writes John Locke (301) in one of the more gnomic lines of the Two Treatises of Government (1689). We might continue his allusion to the first lines of the Bible: “And the world was without form, and void. . . . And Europe said, let there be light: and there was light.” The facetious extension of Locke’s formulation yields a fairly accurate account of what, until recently, has been the conventional way of conceptualizing the relationship between the Enlightenment and America. First, the New Thought emerges like a lightning strike in Europe; it is a geographically self-contained phenomenon, an autonomous decision on the part of British and Continental thinkers to emerge from man’s “self-incurred immaturity,” as Kant would put it retrospectively in 1784 (54). Then, America becomes for the first time something other than void; it becomes a crucial laboratory for Enlightenment thought. America is now a site for discovering first principles, a ground for expanding European taxonomies into universal ones; and, finally, it is the place where the new political and social theories are put into praxis as new nations emerge. As Henry Steele Commager put it succinctly a generation ago, “Europe imagined, and America realized the Enlightenment.” This book stands that relationship of priority on its head. Instead, I argue that the European conquest of the American hemisphere and development of the Atlantic slave system provided the necessary preconditions for the subsequent intellectual innovations of the Enlightenment era—and that writings out of America provided the pretexts for modern Western philosophy. “The only wonder is that the beginning of the [New Thought] . . . could have