The Conservative Enlightenment

While our knowledge of the Enlightenment and of eighteenth-century political debate has increased exponentially over the past two decades, most recent work (e.g. Israel, 2001 and 2009) tends to focus almost exclusively on republican political thinkers and publicists such as Baruch de Spinoza and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. However, some of the most influential and famous political thinkers of the Enlightenment, such as David Hume and Charles-Louis de Montesquieu were far less critical of the monarchy. Enlightenment ideals such as freedom and religious tolerance, they believed, were perfectly capable of being realized in a society dominated by kings and queens. Indeed, monarchies were actually better at delivering these goods than democratic republics. In order to defend this position, these thinkers developed a highly sophisticated understanding of central political concepts such as liberty, an understanding which, however, has been largely ignored in recent literature.

By unearthing the political theory of the conservative Enlightenment, I have two goals. First, a better understanding of Enlightenment monarchism will make clear that the Old Regime rested on firmer ideological foundations than recent historiography might lead us to suppose. Far from being ideologically bankrupt, the monarchy in France and elsewhere was still capable to inspire intellectual allegiance among its most sophisticated subjects. This will help to remind us, in turn, that the French Revolution was, from an ideological perspective, a more profoundly unexpected event than it might seem with the benefit of hindsight. Second, and perhaps more importantly, this paper aims to draw attention to the intellectual sophistication of Enlightenment monarchism, and especially to its remarkable welding of liberalism and monarchism. Thinkers like Montesquieu help to remind us that enlightened ideals such as freedom are not necessarily tied to any particular political regime – an insight which, in this age of democracy-building, surely bears repetition.