Salvation by Commerce

In a recent defense of the Enlightenment in Scotland and Naples, John Robertson focuses on the importance of commerce as an agent for renewing society. According to the summary of the TLS reviewer (March 24), Robertson “argues that the Enlightenment in Scotland and Naples began when David Hume, Ferdinando Gliani and Antonio Genovesi started to think that success in commerce might replace war and conquest as the means of national aggrandizement. Robertson rejects the current fasion for thinking in terms of a variety of Enlightenments, each with its ‘national context’ . . .

There was such a thing as the Enlightenment, and it can be defined in terms of ‘the commitment to understanding, and hence to advancing, the causes and conditions of human betterment in the world.’ Contrary to what used to be received wisdom, the Enlightenment is not to be regarded as a movement dedicated to the overthrow of religious superstition and clerical power in general, and of Christianity in particular. These were the concerns of seventeenth-century deists and skeptics. The typical Enlightenment thinker took advantage of a separation of the concerns of this world from those of the next, and chose to focus on the former, saying virtually nothing about the latter. The science of human nature is an essential part of the Enlightenment as Robertson defines it, and so is historical investigation into the structure and manners of human societies at various stages of their development; but the master discipline of the Enlightenment is political economy, study of the conditions specifically of the material improvement of all nations and all of society’s members.” If Christianity claims, as it does, that this world ought not be detached from the next, then the Enlightenment did in fact intend to assault Christianity. Yet, the separation that the Enlightenment thinkers adopted was one created by theologians and not by pagans.

Pierre Bayle stands at the origin of this development, the first to offer a new theory of human nature on which other Enlightenment thinkers build: Bayle sought “to explain the possibility of society in terms of the operation of the passions and amour propre , rather than in terms either of divine assistance or government intervention. This theory owed much to the revival of Epicurean moral philosophy in seventeenth-century France, but sought to rid itself of the opprobrium traditionally attached to Epicureanism by flaunting its affinities with the Augustinian conception of the postlapsarian human condition.” Both Hume and Vico take off from Bayle, and both in their very different ways laid “the philosophical foundations for the science of political economy.”