The Modern 1 MEDIEVAL ENCOUNTERS: THE MODERN John Robertson Medieval Encounters Seminar, Cambridge: 17 May 2017 By contrast with the other two papers (by John Marenbon and Olivier Boulnois), the focus of my talk is the modern, not the medieval. In the short time available, I want to begin do two things, at present uncertainly connected. First, to outline the story of the moderns, or modern times, as it was constructed between the early seventeenth and the later eighteenth centuries, between Bacon and Hume. The point I will make is that this was a powerful story, not easy for those concerned with earlier periods to set aside, however uncongenial it may be. Having got as far as the second half of the eighteenth century, however, I shall then switch my focus, jumping forward to the twenty-first century to consider how historians are now using the idea of Modernity, particularly in relation to my own field, the Enlightenment. My point here is the perhaps more congenial one that modernity has become a value as well as a period, a concept which historians apparently feel free to use with the minimum of selfconsciousness, in many cases blithely unaware of modernity s contested status among philosophers. Rather than taking modernity for granted, I want to suggest, we should investigate its history as an idea and a value. I start, then, with the story of the modern as the supersession of the ancient and, by implication, of any era in between. The classic exposition of this story was by Francis Bacon though it did not originate with him; it is also to be found in Cardano, and doubtless others too. As told by Bacon, it is the story of the three discoveries unknown to the ancients: printing, gunpowder, and the magnet (the compass needle).
The Modern 2 For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world; the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes, insomuch that no empire, no sect, no star appears to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries. 1 (The New Organon, I cxxix.) Bacon did not characterise the newly-transformed world as the modern in context, his primary point was the greater importance to be attached to human inventions than to transformations of state. But the observation became a trope for the distance now separating Europeans from antiquity. Specifically, it carried achievement in the arts and sciences beyond the recovery of the art and letters of antiquity effected in the Renaissance, with the further implication that the period between antiquity and renaissance had still less to be said for it. Bacon s thesis was to be the issue, and the victor, in the famous Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, launched by Charles Perrrault with a celebration of the superiority of modern art and literature in 1688. As recent scholarship has emphasised, the debate was not as polarised as its name might imply. 2 Partisans of the Ancients emphasised their difference as much as their merits: for Mme Dacier, the great quality of Homer was his simplicity. Partisans of the Moderns acknowledged their debt to the achievements of the Ancients. But the choice between Ancient and Modern was accompanied by a slighting silence over what lay between the two and also reinforced the implication that those who had participated in the recovery of antiquity in the Renaissance could not be counted among the Moderns. 1 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620), I, no. cxxix; previously, Cardano, De subtilitate(1550), ch. xvii. 2 Levent Yilmaz, Le temps moderne. Variations sur les Anciens et les contemporains (Paris: Gallimard, 2004); Larry Norman, The Shock of the Ancient. Literature and History in early modern France (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011).
The Modern 3 In France, the immediate heirs to the Querelle were les lumières, the Enlightenment. In one of the most interesting recent interpretations of the Enlightenment, Dan Edelstein has argued that its proponents adopted the narrative of the ancients and the moderns as their own. 3 In his Discours préliminaire to the Encyclopédie, D Alembert gave the ancients their due, and traced the first appearance of lumières to the Renaissance. In between, however, there had been un long intervalle d ignorance. Even if the inheritance of the ancients was valuable, moreover, the achievements of Bacon, Descartes and Newton in natural philosophy confirmed the superiority of the Moderns. 4 At the heart of the Discours préliminaire was a narrative which culminated in the equation of Enlightenment with modern philosophy. But the story of the supersession of the ancient by the modern was not limited to the arts and sciences. It was also a narrative of transformation in society and government. This narrative was developed by the English neo-machiavellian, James Harrington, and his intellectual heirs. Its sharpest formulation was by the Scot, Andrew Fletcher, in his Discourse of Government (1698). The alteration of government which happened in most countries about the year 1500, Fletcher argued, should be explained by the restoration of learning, the invention of printing, of the needle, and of gunpowder. These had enabled first the Italians then all of Europe to come off from their frugal and military way of living, to embrace a new and expensive way of living. When by navigation they gained access to the luxury of Asia and America, they had experienced a total alteration in the way of living, upon which all government depends. The barons yielded the power of the sword, and the people, grown rich by trade, through their diets and parliaments supplied their princes with the sums needed to raise armies of volunteers and mercenaries. The result had been the emergence across 3 Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment. A Genealogy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010). 4 Jean D Alembert, Discours préliminaire de l Encyclopédie, ed. Martine Groult, (Paris: Honoré Champion Champion Classiques, 2011), pp. 110-37.
The Modern 4 Europe of a new form of government, after the French fashion of monarchy. 5 Again, therefore, we have a story which differentiated Europe after 1500 from what had preceded it, in this case by reference to military organisation and a new kind of monarchy. These several stories can be found together in the political and literary Essays published by David Hume in the 1740s and 1750s. Discussing the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences (1742, an early essay), he acknowledged that they had first flourished in the free republics of antiquity, but argued that the polite arts in particular must flourish better in a civilised monarchy. Ten years later, in Of Luxury (1752, from 1760 Of Refinement in the Arts ), Hume underlined his hostility to the small, forced societies and governments of the ancient world, and defended the social and political consequences of the luxury of present times. In another essay framed in the terms of the Ancients and Moderns debate, he argued that the populousness of the ancient world had been greatly exaggerated, and was almost certainly inferior to that of modern times. But his most original contribution to the story had come in an earlier essay, Of Liberty and Despotism (1741, from 1758, Of Civil Liberty ). Noting that all kinds of government be improved in modern times, he singled out monarchical government as having made the greatest advances towards perfection. This in turn he linked to a new understanding of the importance of commerce. Trade was never esteemed an affair of state till the last century; and there scarcely is any ancient writer on politics, who has made mention of it. Even the ITALIANS have kept a profound silence with regard to it, though it has now engaged the chief attention, as well of ministers of state, as of speculative reasoners. 6 (pp. 88-9.) 5 Andrew Fletcher, Discourse of Government with relation to militias (1698), in Andrew Fletcher: Political Works, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 2-31, esp. 2-19. 6 David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985): pp. 111-37: Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences ; pp. 268-80: Of Refinement in the Arts (previously Of Luxury ); pp. 377-464: Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations, with ancient and modern times on p. 383; pp. 87-96: Of Civil Liberty, quotations on pp. 88-9, 94.
The Modern 5 Behind this observation lay a still sharper observation in his manuscript Memoranda. There is not a Word of Trade in all Matchiavel, which is strange, considering Florence rose only by Trade. 7 Systematic thinking about commerce, in other words, was to be found neither in antiquity nor in the Renaissance and certainly not in times in between. It was the distinguishing feature of modern times. Extending still further the terms of the Ancients and Moderns debate, Hume gave the narrative of the modern a powerful new dimension, one that would be adopted across the Enlightenment. At this point, I want to switch focus, and look at the Enlightenment from the vantagepoint of twenty-first-century historians, for whom it has become the standard-bearer of modernity. How closely this part of the paper will connect to the foregoing I am not sure: at the very end, I shall glance backwards, to the early nineteenth century, to suggest how the story of the modern that I have just told may be joined to that of modernity. But what seems to me clear is that with modernity we have moved into a realm of values which has occupied philosophers rather longer than it has historians, and in which historians may be out of their depth. Surprising as it may seem, historians only became widely invested in the Enlightenment as a subject of scholarship after World War II. Before then, the Enlightenment was an issue for philosophers, and, after 1900, for French literary scholars. After the War, however, continental European historians were understandably in search of a better past than the one just experienced and looked back to the eighteenth century to find it. Franco Venturi led the way, first in Italy, then internationally, and other nations 7 E.C. Mossner, ed, Hume s early memoranda, 1729-1740: the complete text, Journal of the History of Ideas, 9 (1948), pp. 492-518, on p. 508, no. 92. Note that the dating of the Memoranda is disputed by scholars.
The Modern 6 historians quickly joined in. Although they did not usually acknowledge it, many of these historians were influenced by Modernisation theory, viewed as an alternative to Marxism as an account of progressive economic and social development and secularisation: their Enlightenment was constructed in this image. 8 But the equation of Enlightenment with modernity really came to the fore after 1989. Marxism having failed, but militant religion undergoing an unexpected revival, the Enlightenment came to seem still more valuable to liberal historians, who could attribute to it the intellectual foundations of modern, secular, democratic society. The loudest in identifying Enlightenment with modernity was Jonathan Israel, author of a three-volume study of Enlightenment, Radical Enlightenment (2001), Enlightenment Contested (2005), and Democratic Enlightenment (2011), the first two of which had modernity prominent in their sub-titles. 9 Another in this vein was Anthony Pagden s single-volume study, The Enlightenment, and why it still matters (2013) though in his case the subtitle may have been added by Oxford University Press editors. 10 But in truth almost all Enlightenment historians slipped into the equation at some point. (I m sure I did.) So doing, the historians were not simply asserting the merits of modernity; they were also, some more explicitly than others, defending their subject against the champions of postmodernity. To the postmodernists, the Enlightenment was guilty of an uncritical universalism of presuming that the values of Western liberal democracy were good for everyone. That this charge was being brought by philosophers and literary and cultural 8 For this historiographical outline: John Robertson, The Enlightenment. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), Ch. 1. 9 Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Mab 1670-1752 (Oxford, 2005); Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790 (Oxford, 2011). 10 Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment and why it still matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
The Modern 7 critics irritated the historians, but did not deter them from responding. Pagden, Robert Wokler and others responded in particular to arguments of Alasdair MacIntyre, and his charge that there had been an Enlightenment project. 11 More ambitious still, Israel counterattacked, suggesting that only a materialist and specifically a monist philosophy derived from Spinoza could or can provide a secure foundation for modern values. ( Could or can because Israel remained ambivalent whether such a monist philosophy just was a necessary condition of articulating these values in the eighteenth century, or always is so.) Not since historians avowed Marxism had one of our number showed such willingness to combine metaphysical claims with historical argument. What most of the historians refused to acknowledge, however, was that the relation between Enlightenment and modernity had been a philosophers question since at least the early twentieth century, and probably earlier. Moreover it was a relation which philosophers had from the first constructed critically. The postmodernists were the heirs to a critique which went back to Horkheimer and Adorno s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) and beyond. This is what should give historians all historians, in any field pause before they invoke modernity. Modernity is not simply a time, a period, it is a value, and a value that the philosophers have long contested. We historians should therefore be much more selfconscious in our use of the concept. Indeed before we assume its existence, let alone take its side, what we ought to be doing as historians is uncovering the concept s history, telling its story. I m afraid that I am unable to do that now, and not only because there isn t time. I suspect this is where I go back so far as almost to connect this second part of my paper with 11 Pagden, The Enlightenment, pp. 345-42; Robert Wokler, Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment, and their Legacies, ed. Bryan Garsten and Christopher Brooke (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 260-78: Projecting the Enlightenment, responding to Alasdair MacIntyre, Against Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981).
The Modern 8 the first that Modernity as a value was an early nineteenth-century construction: more precisely, that it was first constructed as modernité and (or) as modernität. The emergence of a historical sense of the modern forms part of Reinhart Koselleck s suggestion of a Sattelzeit at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and is sustained in the entry for Modern in the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. ( Modernität does not have a separate entry.) 12 Also suggestive is Ian Hunter s attribution to roughly the same period of the emergence of secularisation as a normative concept what he calls a combat concept. Hitherto simply a juridical concept denoting the conversion of ecclesiastical property and jurisdiction to civil, it became in the first half of the nineteenth century a value-laden concept accounting for the transition from a society based on religious belief to one based on autonomous human reason. 13 These references amount to secondary straws in the wind, no more: my suggestion that the story of modernity begins in the early nineteenth century is only an intuition. At the least, however, they underline my point that the story of modernity has still to be uncovered. Whether and how it will be connected to the story of modern times, which I began this paper by tracing from Bacon to Hume, can then also be addressed. So, to sum up, I m afraid that medievalists are facing a powerful story of the emergence of modern times after 1500. But modernity is another matter, far more valueladen than Hume s modern times. Its story is one we need to reconstruct, not take for granted. 12 Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe : historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, edited by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck,, 8 vols, (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1972-97), Vol 4, pp. 93-131: art. Modern, Modernität, Moderne. 13 Ian Hunter, Secularization: the birth of a modern combat concept, Modern Intellectual History, 12, (2015), pp. 1-32.