Three Generations: A Plausible Interpretation of the French Philosophes?

Abstract

Three Generations: A Plausible Interpretation of the French Philosophes? Louis Gottschalk SeVERAL TERMS in the title of this address stand in need of precise definition. I borrow from Lester Crocker’s An Age of Cri­ sis1 his definition of philosophes'. By philosophes ... we designate that group of eighteenthcentury French writers who, refusing to abide by Christian doc­ trines and dogma and by the authority of the Church, searched for the truth in the light of reason and experience. They were not (excepting Condillac) systematic philosophers in the usual sense, but were primarily combative social and moral thinkers, usually with a strong tinge of scientific dilettantism. By that definition my term French philosophes is a pleonasm, but I have expressly included the word French because I seek to avoid those English, Scottish, German, American, and other nationals who in the eighteenth century ’’searched for the truth in the light of reason and experience.” I have found the French philosophes themselves hard enough to shoe-horn into three generations. The reader does not need to be reminded that the philosophes were not the whole of the Enlightenment but only an intellectual elite— more important perhaps to scholars of a later age than they were to their own contemporaries. The three generations I have in mind comprise that dominated by Montesquieu (roughly 1721-50); that dominated by the Encylopedie (ending roughly around 1780, when the Table analytique was published); and that dominated by Condorcet (interrupted by but continuing beyond the outbreak of the French Revolution 3 Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Century and Condorcet’s death). I shall explain the choice of these chrono­ logical limits later. The term plausible interpretation and the question mark ( ?) in my title are attributable to a parti pris. I have already committed myself in several publications to the contention that whereas the evaluation of evidence in the historiographical process is as scien­ tific as any other process that examines a recognizable object for data that may be credited, debated, or discredited for a larger con­ text, the choice of a historical context is an imaginative, creative decision that can rarely if ever be characterized by words like fac­ tual or truthful or objective, but must be, rather, by words like plausible or tenable. A context may thus be, as you all know, a the­ ory or a hypothesis that must be discarded if it is found to be con­ trary to the facts derived from a scientific evaluation of the evi­ dence or to the rules of logic, but it depends for general acceptance upon whatever conviction it carries as an interpretive concatena­ tion or Gestalt of the relevant facts. It need not be the unique, ex­ clusive truth, but it must have a factual, logical structure, though perhaps only one among several such. From these definitions, it must now be abundantly clear, I mean to argue that the philosophes can convincingly be studied by a chronological ordering into three periods which, for want of a bet­ ter name, I have called generations. A number of other students of the Enlightenment have already suggested that it may well be divided into two generations splitting somewhere about 1750. Let me cite some recent American examples. Henry Guerlac, in his study of the reputation of Isaac Newton,2 indicated (as did several earlier writers)3 that, about mid-century, French scientific circles were predominantly Cartesian and afterward became predominant­ ly Newtonian.4 Peter Gay cites with approval Arthur Wilson’s quo­ tation of the historian Ruhliere’s address in 1787 to the French Academy: "It had been precisely in 1749, not a year earlier, or later—that philosophy had liberated itself from the [royal] Court," and Gay then goes on to show, now citing Ernst Cassirer, that Voltaire, d’Alembert, and other philosophes felt that at mid­ century "public opinion was beginning to rule France’’ and that "the philosophes were beginning to rule public opinion," reflecting 4 Three Generations and producing ’’irreversible, if often subterranean, changes in Western politics, economy, and society.”6 Gay, furthermore, not only agrees that the triumph of Newtonianism over Cartesianism came in France by mid-century6 but also points out that utilitarian doctrines began to...