Liberty, commerce, and literature do have at least one thing in common — as we now think of these very different subjects, they are all products of the Enlightenment. This is not so surprising, given that so much else in our culture is a product of the Enlightenment.
Liberty is obvious. Our ongoing preoccupation and continuous engagement with liberalism — however the concept may have mutated and modified over the centuries — reflects that the word originally meant the concern for liberty. The liberalism we now call “classical liberalism” was the philosophy of liberty, and that is the bedrock foundation upon which we shift so uncomfortably nowadays. Because it is bedrock, however, it is too often buried, and for that reason the modern concern with liberty has had to take another name, libertarian.
The Enlightenment conception of liberty was less Romantic-individualist than we are accustomed to thinking of it now. The Encyclopedists and the gentlemen (for the most part) of the English and the Scottish and the American Enlightenment essentially invented the notion of individualism that was later nuanced so excruciatingly by the romantic stories of exemplary sufferers that run from Young Werther to Mimi and Rodolfo. Not that these stories stopped appearing in 1890, but the trope had less originality in the twentieth century, which tended toward imitation of a story too good to pass up and good enough for one more retelling. But in the eighteenth century, the gentlefolk of the Enlightenment took their individualism hot from the press, and they did so within the context of another new-old idea — that of “the public.”
Of course, to them “the public” meant that group of the educated and the informed who made up a tranche across classes and even across cultures sometimes. Their idea of the public was more like the Junto study groups Benjamin Franklin put together among his fellow artisans and tradesmen than like the salon society of European aristocrats—in other words, the enemy. It was not comprehensive and all-inclusive; 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 experim