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1 INTRODUCTION

Scott Breuninger

Th e Enlightenment RevisitedTh e traditional view of the Enlightenment forged in the aft ermath of Kant’s famous essay, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, tended to focus upon the French philos-ophes and their supposed valorization of reason as a tool to challenge the church and extol the virtues of liberty, humanity and toleration. While this inter-pretation was never truly refl ective of the European thought during the long eighteenth century, it provided a simplifi ed version of events that could be used to either laud the advance of freedom and equality, or more darkly could be cited as the root cause of the modern horrors of Nazi totalitarianism, Western impe-rialism and Soviet communism.1 Some historians of philosophy followed Ernst Cassirer’s infl uential interpretation and extended the reach of the Enlighten-ment as far as Konigsberg, on the grounds that it reached its apogee with Kant, but this reading still viewed it as a movement founded in an appreciation for the role of rationality in contributing to an ideal of progress.2 During the 1960s, these assessments formed the backdrop to Peter Gay’s infl uential argument that there was ‘only one Enlightenment’, characterized by ‘secularism, humanity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom’. While ‘the variety of political experience pro-duced an Enlightenment with distinct branches’, these diff erences were relatively minor and thus Enlightenment thinkers as a whole could be seen as composing a single ‘family’.3 Although acknowledging that the seventeenth century exerted some infl uence upon the Enlightenment, Gay saw the Enlightenment as being bounded by the English and French Revolutions, which fi t nicely with his geo-graphic focus on northwestern Europe.4

While infl uential, Gay’s analysis may be seen in retrospect as the dying gasp of the traditional reading of a unitary Enlightenment. During the late 1960s, scholars such as Robert Darnton quickly took Gay to task for neglecting the social dimension of the Enlightenment and further called for the study of the

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low life of ‘Grub Street’ journalism to compliment the ‘High Enlightenment’.5 Other historians, such as Daniel Roche, focused their attention upon the pub-lishing history of Enlightenment texts, seeking to illustrate the extensive social reach of these ideas.6 Interest in the social aspect of the Enlightenment also drew upon Jurgen Habermas’s contention that a ‘public sphere’ emerged during the early eighteenth century that ushered in a new era of sociability, which in turn could help explain the nature of the Enlightenment.7

Th ese insights into the social thought of the Enlightenment have been complemented by a renewed interest in the role of religion. Rather than seeing matters of faith as inimical to Enlightenment values, some scholars have con-tended that ‘religion and religious controversy acted as the chrysalis as well as a casualty of the modern political world’.8 In a similar manner, David Sorkin has suggested that that ‘the Enlightenment was not only compatible with religious belief but conducive to it’. According to Sorkin, ‘religious enlighteners attempted to renew and rearticulate their faith, using the new science and philosophy to promote a tolerant, irenic understanding of belief that could serve a shared morality and politics’.9 Finally, J. G. A. Pocock argues that the Enlightenment (or Enlightenments) was ‘a product of religious debate and not merely a rebel-lion against it’.10 While the particular details of these interpretations diff er, they share an assumption that a close consideration of national contexts is essential for understanding the relationship between confessional belief and Enlighten-ment values. For instance, the political circumstances and religious beliefs that led the English deists to embrace ‘public discussion of ideas’ along the way to a ‘rational theology’ varied even within England itself.11 Taken together, these studies have shown some of the diffi culties inherent in constructing a single nar-rative of Enlightenment thought, a problem that may also be seen in the fl urry of scholarship devoted to the Scottish Enlightenment.

Since the 1960s, there has been a dramatic growth of interest in the Scot-tish Enlightenment, a fi eld that had previously been barely acknowledged. As historians explored the Scottish dimension of Adam Smith and David Hume, they soon elevated their contemporaries such as Adam Ferguson, William Rob-ertson and Th omas Reid to the pantheon of Enlightenment thinkers. Th ese interpretations are important in light of recent scholarship concerning the roles of ‘improvement’ during the Enlightenment, since the study of sociability and cosmopolitanism fi ts well within this growing fi eld.

Drawing upon his work on the Scottish Enlightenment, John Robertson argues that due to the political loss of independence caused by the 1707 Act of Union, Scottish thinkers sought to fashion a new sense of identity in the commercial fi eld. Robertson identifi es three related areas of inquiry as central to Enlightenment thought. According to this interpretation, Enlightenment explorations of human nature, political economy and the civilizing process ‘con-

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verged upon the concept of “sociability” … to establish the material and moral conditions and mechanisms of sociability, the better to clear the path for human betterment, and to assess the prospects of its realization’.12

Robertson’s argument for a reassessment of the content of Enlightenment thought stresses that this cosmopolitan aspiration and commitment to the goal of improving the lives of humans ran across national borders and confessional divides. By highlighting how these strands of thought combined in the notion of sociability, Robertson shows areas of commonality between earlier studies of the ‘high’ Enlightenment and more recent studies of ‘Grub Street’ removed from the airy realms of philosophy. Th is emphasis on the notion of sociability also provides an important vantage point from which to view the social and politi-cal dimensions of the Enlightenment. Furthermore, the study of sociability has not been limited to Scotland.13 In his study of French thought, Daniel Gordon suggests that the concept of sociability provided a way for individuals living in absolutist states to address changes in the public sphere, particularly in a con-text where power and authority was strictly rationed. For Gordon, the related ideas of sociability and cosmopolitanism act as ‘tools’ to study the institutional dynamics of absolutist monarchies. Gordon distinguishes between advocates of a ‘latent’ (or ‘innate’) form of sociability and those who argued that social relations were the result of rational consideration of natural laws. In both cases, Gordon contends that during this period the study of ‘society’ came to occupy a privileged place among French and Scottish thinkers.14

In addition to these reassessments of the content of the Enlightenment, some historians followed the path of Franco Venturi and examined how Enlighten-ment thought developed within a variety of national contexts. In his infl uential study, Venturi argued that, ‘the Enlightenment was born and organized in those places where the contact between a backward world and a modern one was chronologically more abrupt and geographically closer’.15 Th is stance formed the foundation of an important collection of essays edited by Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich that helped to spark interest in oft -overlooked national traditions of thought. Th is collection of essays played a key role in undermining the notion of a unitary ‘Enlightenment’, in favor of a number a distinct ‘Enlightenments’. Th is volume was predicated upon a desire to address the ‘geographical, social and political location’ of Enlightenment thought, thus highlighting the need for scholars to consider how various national traditions fi t within this movement.16 Th e essays included by Porter and Teich accepted a ‘certain common identity in the Enlightenment’, primarily associated with the social history of culture, but located these issues within thirteen national contexts. Collectively these pieces provide a broader sense of the ways Enlightenment thought was deployed dur-ing this period, but the nations chosen for inclusion are predominantly located in western or central Europe and thus fail to address the intellectual fervor on

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the ‘fringes’ of Europe, much less the Atlantic world.17 Additionally, the broad nature of these essays results in a correspondingly disjointed analysis that oft en neglects to identify particular ideas (such as sociability and cosmopolitanism) whose infl uence crossed national borders and could thematically unify these otherwise excellent contributions.

Considerations of Enlightenment thought outside the traditional core countries has also been the subject of a collection edited by Richard Butterwick, Simon Davies and Gabriel Espinosa entitled Peripheries of the Enlightenment. Th is collection of essays explores how the Enlightenment was perceived and interpreted in a variety of national contexts away from its supposed epicentre of France. By incorporating recent scholarship on the Enlightenment, this vol-ume represents an important addition to Porter and Teich’s work. Still, while these contributions help illuminate the variety of thought in circulation dur-ing the Enlightenment, their topics remain heavily indebted to the traditional Francophilia that has oft en characterized intellectual histories of this era. Of the thirteen essays included in this text, eight of them focus on French, English or German developments, thus belying its editors’ claim to represent the ‘peripher-ies’ of the Enlightenment.18 While these essays include keen insights into the nature of Enlightenment across national borders, no broader themes are used to unite these otherwise disparate analyses and consequently the volume lacks a greater sense of coherence.

While these books contain useful surveys of intellectual developments across national borders, they do not provide a thematic analysis of issues at play in these countries; rather, they present piecemeal analyses that lack a larger sense of unity. Furthermore, despite their claims to the contrary, these works also display the traditional focus on north-western Europe. Our volume aims to expand the study of the Enlightenment in a geographic sense, while also being guided by the assessment of the roles of sociability and cosmopolitanism advanced by Robert-son and Gordon. Th e essays that follow are devoted to exploring how aspects of sociability and cosmopolitanism were central to the formation of Enlighten-ment thought outside the Paris–Edinburgh axis. While the methods and foci of these essays diff er, they share a belief that sociability and cosmopolitanism were crucial themes during the Enlightenment. As a result, this collection illustrates the wide range of approaches and attitudes toward sociability and cosmopoli-tanism in areas typically seen as peripheral to the Enlightenment proper.

Sociability and the Fringes of the EnlightenmentTh e essays in this volume explore how the key Enlightenment notions of socia-bility and cosmopolitanism were articulated in a number of national contexts that have typically been seen as being on the fringes of eighteenth-century

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thought. Th e essays are divided into three geographic sections, although there is signifi cant overlap between each of them. Th e fi rst section focuses upon areas of Europe that are rarely mentioned in discussions of the Enlightenment: Ireland, Spain and Italy. Each of these pieces share a conviction that notions of socia-bility and cosmopolitanism were central to Enlightenment thought, whether espoused by philosophers such as George Berkeley and Francis Hutcheson, embodied in the curriculum of schools for the deaf, or displayed by the interac-tion of British and Italian women. Th e second section moves east to the borders of Europe, analysing how Europeans such as Montesquieu viewed Persia and issues of sociability in Russian court society. Taken together, these essays show both vibrant cultures engaged with Enlightenment debates and how local tradi-tions of thought shaped the expression of these ideas. Th e third section of this volume turns to the Atlantic world, showing the global reach of these concepts. Th e fi rst essay in this section explores how Benjamin Vaughan’s trans-Atlantic vision of international relations was built upon notions of sociability and cosmo-politanism. Th is essay sets the stage for two closer studies of how sociability was expressed in colonial Pennsylvania, the fi rst looking at the Pittsburgh Enlighten-ment and the second considering the Philadelphia thinker Benjamin Rush and his infl uence upon rural farmers.

In the fi rst essay, ‘Science, Religion, and Sociability in Early Eighteenth-Cen-tury Irish Th ought’, Scott Breuninger contextually examines the contributions of two key Irish thinkers, George Berkeley and Francis Hutcheson, to early eighteenth-century debates concerning human sociability. In an important essay in Th e Guardian, Berkeley outlined his theory of social ‘gravity’, claiming that a divinely inspired force acted to hold humans together, just as gravity attracted heavenly bodies to each other. Berkeley’s application of Newton’s celestial insights to society marked an important moment in the history of social thought that shows the growing convergence of scientifi c and moral theories. Hutcheson echoed this use of scientifi c rhetoric to explain sociability in his Dublin writings during the 1720s, providing an avenue for the dissemination of these ideas in Scotland. In both cases, these thinkers drew upon the Stoic notion of oikeiosis to indicate that the rational ‘elevation’ of individuals was part of a divine plan for the common good of humanity. Breuninger argues that this melding of scientifi c and classical thought provided an important contribution to more ‘mainstream’ Enlightenment conceptualizations of sociability.

In the second essay, ‘Visualizing Spain’s Enlightenment: Th e Marginal Uni-versality of Deafness’, Benjamin Fraser examines work on deafness by Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro and other Spaniards during the eighteenth century (including the century’s leading philosophical fi gure Benito Jerónimo de Feijóo y Monte-negro – who is oft en seen as the Spanish counterpart to Kant). Fraser argues that their work was an attempt not merely to argue for the socialization and inclu-

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sion of a marginalized and misunderstood group but simultaneously an attempt to grapple with questions of language, sociability and the essential unity of all human beings. Th e instruction of the deaf, which was discussed in great detail by both Hervás and Feijóo went beyond purely national concerns and was itself implicitly a call for a cosmopolitan approach to history. Grounded in contempo-rary debates on deafness, this essay reconciles a close reading of texts by Hervás (1795) and Feijóo (1752) with a much wider assessment of the cultural history of deafness. Th e approach to deafness in eighteenth-century Spain appealed to the rhetoric of ‘universal benevolence’, ‘sympathy’ and ‘compassion’ in attempt-ing to uproot long-standing misunderstandings of deaf people. In so doing, Fraser shows how Enlightenment thinkers such as Hervás ultimately staked out a radical position that is still greatly relevant to the struggles faced by deaf people in and outside of Spain today.

Th e third essay, by Marianna D’Ezio, turns to issues of gender in Italy. In this piece, ‘Sociability and Cosmopolitanism in Eighteenth-Century Venice: Euro-pean Travellers and Venetian Women’s Casinos’, D’Ezio explores how women travellers to Venice reported their experiences of the Carnival season. Th rough a close reading of how urban ‘spaces’ were described, D’Ezio looks at intellectual British women travellers to the continent and investigates their relationship and interaction with the Italian women writers they encountered on the Grand Tour. Th is allows for an examination of the Italian tradition of sociability and cosmo-politanism in eighteenth-century city salons that explores the link established between British and Italian intellectual women, thus tracing possible literary infl uences on their works from both directions and perspectives.

Th e second section of this volume turns to the east and begins with Mark Nixon’s ‘At Home in the World of Fictions: Commercial Sociability in Monte-quieu’s Persian Letters’. Th is essay develops a reappraisal of Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes that challenges both traditional historical and more recent feminist interpretations of this famous text. It proceeds by situating the novel against the background of domestic socio-political debates produced by the emergence of commercial society in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. By telescoping the world of Regency France with an imaginary oriental world, Montesquieu explored the links between a commercial economy based on new forms of mobile property and the French-centred culture of politeness that spread across Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nixon’s analy-sis examines how these forces created the possibility of a cosmopolitan public sphere in which questions of truth and reality were displaced in favour of a more contingent and fl exible mode of organizing social relations through self-fashion-ing and performance.

In the second essay of this section, ‘Prince M. M. Shcherbatov’s Critique of the “Open Table” and the Dynamics of Russian Sociability’, David Burrow anal-

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yses how cultural critic Prince Mikhail M. Shcherbatov employed his reading of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws and the concepts of the doux commerce cycle to criticize the state of the Russian empire in the late eighteenth century. Shcherba-tov focused much of his wrath on the substantive changes to Russian sociability brought by Emperor Peter the Great through the institution of noble Assem-blies (legislated in 1718) and by bringing ‘new men’ – those from outside the ranks of the Muscovite noble families – into the elite of court and service. One of these ‘new men’, Peter’s favourite, Alexander Menshikov, began the practice of the ‘open table’ that fl ourished under Empress Catherine the Great. Shcherba-tov criticized the open table for its ubiquity and ostentatious display, claiming it was a vehicle for corruption. Others, such as Admiral Nikolai S. Mordvinov, employed the ‘open table’ as a vehicle for socializing junior offi cers under their command. Th is essay examines for the fi rst time Shcherbatov’s use of the lan-guage of commerce and modern prudence. By viewing Shcherbatov through the lens of Enlightenment models of sociability, this essay argues that Russian Impe-rial identity was challenged by its expansion into the Western European cultural world and examines the tensions associated with this process.

Th e third section of this volume focuses upon the Atlantic world. In the fi rst essay, ‘Benjamin Vaughan on Commerce and International Harmony in the Eighteenth Century’, Andrew Hamilton contends that writers on political economy in eighteenth-century Europe were deeply concerned with the topic of borders. In fact, various proponents of liberal political economy defended their ‘new’ system of laissez-faire economics by claiming that it transcended national borders and was a universal, international and cosmopolitan system opposed to earlier mercantilist policies, which they characterized as narrowly conceived, selfi sh and inward-looking. Members of the Scottish Enlightenment, such as David Hume and Adam Smith, developed much of the conceptual lan-guage used to endorse the positive and unifying aspects of free trade. As part of their promotion of free trade, these theorists created a powerful argument for the various humanizing aspects of commercialization. Th is essay examines Benjamin Vaughan’s New and Old Principles Trade (1788) and his contributions to this chapter in the history of political economy. Well schooled in Smithian theories of free trade, Vaughan promoted a new relationship between Britain and the newly independent America. Hamilton contends that ambitious eff orts at modern federation, such as the European Union, have signifi cant Enlighten-ment precursors within the Atlantic world and that Benjamin Vaughan’s New and Old Principles is an important part of that heritage.

Th e second essay in this section, Leonard von Morze’s ‘“Self-Created Soci-eties”: Sociability and Statehood in the Pittsburgh Enlightenment’, turns to Pittsburgh and the frontier. In 1786 Pittsburgh was described as little more than the aggregate of thirty-six log houses and fi ve small stores. Yet within a few years

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the town became the focal point of the new nation’s fi rst major test of social unity. At issue in the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 was not simply the legal right of the federal government to impose a tax, but also Enlightenment conceptions of the social contract that were brought to the forefront of debate by the anger surrounding this tax. Some of these arguments about the social contract were autochthonous in origin, but they were also inherited from European debates. Th e legacy of European Enlightenment was well known to the region’s largely Europe-born population and these frontier fi gures saw themselves as marginal to the republic, regarding Pittsburgh as the antitype to the centre of scientifi c Enlightenment in the new nation, Philadelphia. Th is essay explores how during the 1790s the very marginality of these thinkers put their assumptions about sociability into sharp relief within the context of late eighteenth-century Ameri-can politics.

In the fi nal essay, ‘Th e Margins of Enlightenment: Benjamin Rush, the Rural World and Sociability in Post-Revolutionary Pennsylvania’, Michael McCoy con-tends that during the years aft er the American Revolution, concepts like ‘social bonds’ and ‘the common good’ were transformed into sites of struggle upon which hinged the very success of the American experiment. Trained in Edin-burgh, Benjamin Rush believed that commerce united his society. Drawing on Adam Ferguson, philosophes like Rush adapted a stadial theory of development to the American context, championing commerce as the symbol of moder-nity and the foundation of a virtuous republic. Important though the bond of commerce was, not all of the young republic’s citizens – especially those in the frontier – were well versed in its attributes. Th us, in the 1780s, Rush undertook a ‘civilizing mission’ to the Pennsylvania hinterland, building a country college that he hoped would ‘cultivate’ commerce among a people in desperate need of scientifi c agriculture and new economic outlooks. Th is essay then highlights two problems in the theory and praxis of Rush’s commercial sociability. Th e fi rst stems from an oppositional discourse of the ‘common good’ that emerged from the supposedly unlettered frontiers and the second problem resulted from the rustics’ creation of an alternative, lower class theory of social inclusion. By examining these issues of sociability within the Atlantic context, this essay will illustrate the abiding purchase of European thought in the early republic and how it was transformed by circumstances on the American frontier.

Th is collection is guided by the belief that the related notions of sociabil-ity and cosmopolitanism were central to Enlightenment thought, providing a touchstone for a wide variety of thinkers in a number of diff erent national contexts. Th e contributors to this volume approach these issues from diff erent perspectives, but their common focus on the central concepts of sociability and cosmopolitanism acts to unify their essays. Taken as a whole, the interdiscipli-nary nature of this volume aims to encourage a broader engagement with these

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Introduction 9

themes, undertaken from the vantage points of intellectual history, literary anal-ysis, social history and political theory. Furthermore, this emphasis on the roles of sociability and cosmopolitanism helps illustrate the vitality of thought on the geographic fringes of the Enlightenment, thus contributing to the scholarly reas-sessment of the nature of eighteenth-century thought.