Ideas

by Peter Watson

  C.-L. de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), was the author of De l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws), published in 1748, which offered a contrary view to Rousseau. To Montesquieu (who was an amateur experimental scientist) it was self-evident that the social world, no less than the physical world, shows regularities and rhythms. From this he concluded, contrary to Adam Ferguson, that the world is not governed by blind chance and that the laws of human social conduct are discoverable. ‘Laws, taken in the broadest meaning, are the necessary relations deriving from the nature of things; and in this sense, all beings have their laws…’101 Despite a number of frankly questionable statements, such as his view that warm climates ‘expand the nerve fibres’, making people indolent, his more substantial argument involved an examination of different types of government–monarchies, republics, despotisms–and their consequences for freedom, education, and other aspects of social life. His most important point was his conclusion that it was not so much the system of government that determined how rule was exercised but how individuals administered the government. In the context of the times this was taken to be a criticism of the monarch’s claim of divine authority, and The Spirit of the Laws was placed on the Index.

  The final way in which the eighteenth century examined the laws of human nature was through the emergence of academic history. History itself was of course not new. What was new was, first, innovative techniques of study, which laid the groundwork for what would become an academic subject in its own right and second, an expansion of the historical imagination to include the history of civilisation. This helped produce the modern idea of progress.

  Both Voltaire’s The Century of Louis XIV (1751) and David Hume’s History of England (1754–1762) questioned dogmatic Christianity as the central theme of historical change, while Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788) ‘ended on a tone of irreparable loss rather than excitement over the foundation of Christian Europe’.102 In the 1750s a non-dogmatic view of history emerged. For example, the so-called ‘four-stages theory’ attributed social change to transformations in the mode of subsistence, from hunting, to pasture, to agriculture, to commerce. Though many people picked holes in this theory, nonetheless the idea of historical stages unrelated to Christianity proved popular because it accounted for the great diversity around the world that had been discovered in the age of exploration. It was in this way that the idea of progress became popular. If progress were to be possible, it had to be defined and measured, and that could only be done by the proper study of the past.103

  As early as the fourteenth century the Muslim philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) had argued that history was a science and should seek to explain the origin and development of civilisation, which he likened to the life of an individual organism.104 Francis Bacon also had an idea of advancement. ‘These be ancient times,’ he wrote, ‘when the world is growing old; our own age is more truly antiquity than is the time which is computed backwards, beginning with our age.’ For him, just as a mature person is considered wiser than a child, so people in later times may be expected to have a great accumulation of knowledge.105 Descartes also talked specifically of the ‘improvement’ of human health that would result from the discoveries of science. But it was in late seventeenth-century England, in a series of tracts, that there had been a celebrated exchange as to whether ancient or contemporary thought was better. In 1690 Sir William Temple, in his Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning, went so far as to deny the importance of Copernican theory and the circulation of the blood, and argued that Pythagoras and Plato surpassed Galileo and Newton. Even Jonathan Swift, a protégé of Temple’s, upheld (just) the superiority of the ancients in his satire The Battle of the Books (1697). Temple’s errors were exposed, partly by William Wotton in his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694), but the very existence of the battle itself shows how much ideas about progress were in the air.

  The French writer Bernard de Fontenelle (1657–1757) went further than any of the English authors. In A Digression on the Ancients and Moderns, he came to five surprisingly modern conclusions. These were that, from a biological point of view, there was no difference between the ancients and moderns; that in science and industry one achievement depends on another and that, therefore, ‘progress is cumulative’, meaning that the moderns have indeed surpassed the ancients; this does not make the moderns cleverer than the ancients, they simply take advantage of what has gone before–they have more accumulated knowledge; in poetry and rhetoric, the arts, there is really no difference between the two periods; we should remember that ‘unreasoning admiration’ for the ancients is a bar to progress.106 De Fontenelle was supported by Charles Perrault (1628–1703). Despite the accumulation of knowledge since classical times, Perrault thought the recent scientific discoveries had brought the modern world to perfection and that later ages would have little to add. ‘We need only read the French and English journals and glance over the noble achievements of the Academies of these two great kingdoms to be convinced that during the last twenty or thirty years more discoveries have been made in the science of nature than during the whole extent of learned antiquity.’107 Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727–1781) was only twenty-four when he delivered a lecture at the Sorbonne in December 1750, later published as On the Successive Advances of the Human Mind. Despite his youth, his theory became very influential–he argued that civilisation is the product of geographical, biological and psychological elements and that, basically, man’s biology doesn’t change. Mankind has a common treasury of knowledge, preserved in writing, and builds on what has gone before. He distinguished three stages of intellectual progress–theological, metaphysical and scientific. He accepted that perfection was possible and would be achieved one day.

  Voltaire wrote three works of history. The first concerned a single individual, Charles XII (1728), the second an entire century, The Century of Louis XIV (1751), and the third–his most important work–was the 1756 Essay on Customs (Essai sur le moeurs et l’esprit des nations), much more ambitious than the other books, aiming, as he put it, to explain the causes for ‘the extinction, revival, and progress of the human mind’.108 Voltaire’s approach was new too in concentrating not on political history but on cultural achievements. His self-imposed task was to show ‘by what stages mankind, from the barbaric rusticity of former days, attained the politeness of our own’. He called this process the ‘enlightenment’ of the human mind, ‘which alone made this chaos of events, factions, revolutions, and crimes worth the attention of men’.109 He was not concerned with divine or ‘first’ causes, but showed how things worked and went on from there. In the same book he also introduced the phrase ‘philosophy of history’, meaning that history was to be looked at as a science, critically, with an empirical weighing of evidence and with no place for intuition.

  Probably the most complete–certainly the most elaborate–idea about progress was that devised by the marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794) in his Outline of an Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, released in 1795. He took the view that ‘nature has assigned no limit to the perfecting of the human faculties, that the perfectibility of man…has no other limit than the duration of the globe on which nature has placed us’.110 He divided history into ten stages: hunters and fishermen; shepherds; tillers of the soil; the time of commerce, science and philosophy in Greece; science and philosophy from Alexander to the fall of the Roman empire; decadence to the crusades; the crusades to the invention of printing; printing to the attacks on authority by Luther, Descartes and Bacon; Descartes to the Revolution, ‘when reason, tolerance and humanity were becoming the watchwords of all’. He regarded the French Revolution as the dividing line between the past and a ‘glorious future’, in which nature would be mastered ever more completely, progress would be without limit, industry would make the soil yield enough food for everyone, there would be equality between the sexes and ‘death will be the exce
ption rather than the rule.’111

  The Englishman William Godwin (1756–1836) saw progress in frankly political terms–that is to say, he saw politics as a way to achieve overall justice for mankind, without which man’s fulfilment was impossible, and this fulfilment, he said, was the object of progress. The publication of his book Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), with the French Revolution at its height, caused a sensation. ‘Burn your books on chemistry,’ Wordsworth is said to have told a student. ‘Read Godwin on necessity.’112 Godwin’s theory was that mankind is perfectible but has not made much progress in the past and that this was due to the coercive power of oppressive human institutions, in particular government and the church. He therefore proposed that central government be abolished and that no coercive political organisation be allowed above the parish level. He proposed to abolish marriage and to equalise property holding. Progress, achieved when man is free to exercise his reason as he wishes (save for the moral censure of his peers), can be achieved only through political justice, which he felt depended on literature and proper education.113

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), like his contemporary Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), accepted that there was a great cosmic purpose in history, toward which men are unwittingly guided by their observance of natural laws. (Kant’s own laws were invariable; neighbours could set their watches by his daily walks.) For him one of the tasks of the philosopher is to uncover this universal plan for mankind. He thought that, in principle, these natural laws of history and progress would be discoverable, as Newton’s laws of the planets had been discovered. He concluded his philosophy of history by putting forth nine propositions that outline mankind’s progress. His main argument was that there is always a conflict within man, between the sociable being, who cares for the good of his neighbours, and the selfish being, who cares only for himself, for achievement and independence. This constant struggle, he thought, goes back and forth as times change, producing progress in both spheres, the social and the individual. This creative conflict, he argued, is at its best where there is a strong state, to regulate social life, and the most individual freedom, to let individuality thrive. He was clear in arguing that this was a moral concept of progress: the freedom of the greatest number–to realise their individuality and to look after their neighbours–was the aim.114 Like Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) felt that progress was essentially about freedom. Throughout history Hegel distinguished four main phases of historical progress, during which freedom expanded. There was, first, the Oriental system, in which only one person is free–the despot. Next came the Greek and then the Roman systems, in which some people were free. Finally, there is the Prussian system, in which all people are free. This brief summary bends Hegel’s views somewhat but he himself was required to bend quite a bit of evidence to show that his own world–nineteenth-century Prussia–was the best of all possible worlds.

  Finally, so far as progress is concerned, let us return to France and the theories of Count Claude Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) and Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Both men may be regarded as early sociologists, a concern with the concept of progress being a major focus of this fledgling social science. These two men were also more interested in realising progress than in merely theorising about it. (In this sense, the invention of sociology was itself part of progress.) In a well-known paragraph Saint-Simon said: ‘The imagination of poets has placed the golden age in the cradle of the human race. It was the age of iron they should have placed there. The golden age is not behind us, but in front of us. It is the perfection of social order. Our fathers have not seen it; our children will arrive there one day, and it is for us to clear the way for them.’115 Saint-Simon accepted the three stages of progress that had been put forward by Turgot, adding that the advances of the scientific and industrial revolutions had really started progress in a big way. Disappointed by the violence and irrationalism of the French Revolution, he thought that industrialisation was man’s only way forward and he became an eloquent propagandist for the machine. In particular, and most originally, Saint-Simon advocated certain new houses of Parliament, one which he called the House of Invention, to include engineers, poets, painters, architects, another the House of Examination, to include doctors and mathematicians, and a third, the House of Execution, consisting of captains of industry. His idea was that the first house would draw up laws, the second would examine them and pass them, and the third would decide how to put them into effect.

  In his book Positive Philosophy, Comte argued that history divided into three great stages, the theological, metaphysical and scientific. He adapted Saint-Simon’s ideas in the sense that he thought that the people who should guide industrial and technical progress were the sociologists (‘sociologist-priests’ as someone called them), that women should be the guardians of moral direction, and that the captains of industry, again, should actually administer the society. In politics he thought that ‘imagination’ should be subordinate to observation. Comte died in 1857, two years before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, when the theory of evolution transformed and simplified ideas of progress for all time.

  The eighteenth century, the Enlightenment, was characterised by the first attempts to apply the methods and approach of the natural sciences to man himself. They were not wholly successful but they were not a total failure either. It is a problem still very much with us. What we might call the ‘hard’ sciences–physics, chemistry and biology–have gone on making great progress. On the other hand, the ‘soft’ sciences–psychology, sociology and economics–have never acquired the same measure of agreement, or predictive power, and have never generated the same highly effective technology in the realm of human affairs as, say, nuclear physics, solid-state physics, organic chemistry and genetic engineering. Today, two centuries after the end of the Enlightenment, we still can’t say for sure what laws human nature obeys or even if these laws are the same as those that obtain in the ‘hard’ sciences. This disjunction is, essentially, the main topic of the last section of the book.

  27

  The Idea of the Factory and Its Consequences

  To Chapter 27 Notes and References

  ‘Coketown…was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes allowed it; but, as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound on the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.’1

  Who else but Charles Dickens in one his grimmest ‘industrial novels’, Hard Times? Coketown, Mr Gradgrind, the school headmaster, Mr Bounderby, the banker and manufacturer, Mr Sleary, the horseman, Mrs Sparsit, presiding over Mr Bounderby’s establishment and connected, in better days, to the Powlers and the Scadgers–the very names in Dickens always tell half the story. One of the main themes of the book, in Kate Flint’s words, is an investigation of the mind-set ‘of those who persist in seeing [the] workers as mere useful tools, as “hands”, rather than as fully functioning, complex human beings.’2 But Dickens was never a didactic writer: he didn’t need to be.

  If, as was maintained earlier, a crucial change in sensibility took place sometime between AD 1050 and 1200, to create what we may call the ‘Western mind’, a no less momentous change occurred in the eighteenth century.
It had three elements. One was that the centre of gravity of the Western world moved away from Europe, to lie somewhere between it and North America, and this shift westward to an imaginary point in the Atlantic came about as a result of the American Revolution (see Chapter 28). A second momentous change involved the substitution of democratic, elected governments in place of the more traditional and often absolute monarchies of Europe. Apart from England, this owed its genesis for the most part to the French Revolution, which set off a chain of other revolutions which extended through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, and partly to the ideas worked out in America. The third change in the eighteenth century was the development of the factory, that symbol of industrial life, so different to what had gone before.3

  Why did the factory and all that that implies occur first in Britain?4 One answer was that in England many feudal and royal restrictions which remained in place in other European countries had been swept away by the revolutions of the seventeenth century.5 Another reason, which we shall come to, was the shortage of wood, for this forced new developments in the use of the inferior but cheaper coal for fuel.6 We should also remember that the first industrial revolution occurred in a very small area of England, bounded to the west by Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, to the south by Birmingham, to the east by Derby, and to the north by Preston in Lancashire. Each played its part in what became the industrial revolution: at Coalbrookdale in 1709, Abraham Darby smelted iron with coal; at Derby in 1721, the silk-thrower Thomas Lombe designed and constructed the world’s first recognisable factory; in Preston in 1732, Richard Arkwright was born; in Birmingham in 1741 or 1742, John Wyatt and Lewis Paul first applied the system of spinning cotton by rollers, which Arkwright would appropriate and improve.7