; nor was it supposed to be. But it was an idea that informed the century or so of reading and discussion that gave rise to classical liberalism. The struggle against the aristocracies of Europe, whether aristocracies of war or aristocracies of church, were struggles to end the dominance of class granfalloons. Keep that in mind whenever you think of Thomas Jefferson’s letter about the “natural aristocracy,” that of talent.
These mostly men of the new public read their Addison and their Steele and their Swift in The Tattler and in the other newspapers of the new literature and the new opinion at the new coffee houses that were even then birthing insurance companies and stock exchanges. They were engendering commerce in the new mode that was being brought into existence even as the old world tore itself apart in the Thirty Years War (1618-48) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14). The arts reflected— as they always do—the new mode of public life. You can still listen to J.S. Bach’s celebration of the coffee houses of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century in his Coffee Cantata or his secular motet about the comforts of his tobacco-pipe. Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson recently finished a monumental trilogy called The Baroque Cycle that is concerned with all the coming together of liberty and science and commerce in the context of this old-world-passing-away (The first half of the first book, The Confusion is a gargantuan retelling of Voltaire’s tiny wisp of a satire, Candide).
For science was an essential part of the mix, too. Like liberty and commerce (and even literature), science is also a product of the Enlightenment. We can even assign it a definite birth date to modern science: November 28, 1660 (Happy 402nd this fall!), the date on which the Royal Society was founded. These founders pledged to follow the philosophy of Francis Bacon and value only the result of experiment — which set them apart from the Churchmen’s theory-ridden natural philosophy. In John Locke’s hands, Bacon’s experimentalism became Empiricism — and the Enlightenment was under way.
Rationalism was also a hallmark of the Enlightenment, and it really became possible when Bacon’s ideas became prominent. The great social movement that preceded the Enlightenment was the reforming of religion from Medieval Catholicism. Purifying the church had an associated sense of self: the Puritan was personally charged with bringing about God’s will. The artisans and merchants of the new world were doing God’s work in the holy mission of commerce, and continued to do God’s work the next century with tobacco and coffee (and chocolate) in hand. It is a commonplace of American political theory that our individualism comes out of the Puritan tradition — but it is Puritanism put through a refiner’s fire, with all the godly dross burned away. The Puritan stands as God’s hand on Earth; the Enlightenment philosophe stands as his own value.
And these elevated individuals were interested in their own origins and status. The new individualism brought into existence a new literary genre, the novel, which went hand in hand with the romance through the nineteenth century. The romance, which gave its name to the entire period — the Romantic era — is a literary form about social standing, concerned with loss of status and the formation of societies; the novel is a literary form about the formation of an individual mind.
The distinction we now think important between High literature and Pop literature is a very recent evolution, dating from the end of the nineteenth century, when improved printing technology, high-speed presses, fast inks, and the invention of cheap, wood-pulp paper broadened out the definition of “the public.” But literature as a concept did not exist in the modern sense — that is, as a branch of language art distinct from useful or purely utilitarian writing — before about 1795.
The Enlightenment was a powerful and glorious new form of culture, transforming post-Medieval traditions in unexpected ways. Along the way it took in Romantic individ