I would argue that this is the story of two divergent enlightenments. One arose in eighteenth century Britain and underpinned the political culture of what we call the Anglosphere. The other originated in France at almost the same time and advocated a very different set of political principles. Those principles spread across the rest of the globe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with sometimes hideous results, and left their imprint on intellectual elites across the Anglosphere as well.
The first enjoyed a kind of prelude in seventeenth century England, with the writings of John Locke, John Milton, and Algernon Sydney, among others. It reached a crescendo in eighteenth century Scotland, thanks to the intellectual legacy of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid, as well as that of English thinkers influenced by them like Edmund Burke and Edward Gibbon. Those ideas would continue to spread in the nineteenth century Anglosphere with John Stuart Mill’s lasting influence on philosophy, Thomas Macaulay’s on history, and Dugald Stewart and Herbert Spencer’s on political economy.
The other enlightenment burst upon the world with the French Revolution, as the radical ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and socialist Henri de Saint-Simon were translated into action with the Reign of Terror, and were passed along to Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, and Mao Zedong, and to later French thinkers like Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.
Today, our politics and culture are caught in an epic struggle between the heirs of the Scottish and French Enlightenments. To understand who will emerge as the winner in this battle over the future of both the Anglosphere and the global moral system, it’s important to draw up the balance sheet between the two movements and their contrasting views of politics, humanity, and God.
The first — the Scottish version — held that the aim of political and economic institutions was to give as much freedom and power as possible to the individual.
The other — the French version — saw the government and the state as the embodiment of what Rousseau called the General Will, i.e., the collective will of the citizenry aimed at the common good and public interest. Political and economic institutions’ aim, therefore, was to give as much freedom and power as possible in aid of the General Will. In the French version, freedom is the freedom to obey the laws enacted to sustain the General Will rather than to advance the “selfish” interests of individuals. When we hear New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani contrast “the warmth of collectivism” with “cold rugged individualism,” we are listening to the French Enlightenment’s authentic voice.
The Scottish Enlightenment saw an economy built around a free market approach — sometimes misleadingly called laissez-faire — as the optimal way to promote prosperity and freedom. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations embodies this view.
The French Enlightenment propounded the value of a more dirigiste approach to economic life instead; the government should enjoy full powers to intervene in the lives of individuals and institutions and to distribute the fruits of prosperity fairly and equally, equality being the most important social virtue.
The Scottish Enlightenment recognized the importance of the rule of law under established constitutions and institutions, in which social and economic changes require Burkean-style reforms to protect the whole.
The disciples of Jean-Jacques Rousseau — whom Edmund Burke dubbed “the insane Socrates” of his age — insisted there is only one rule, that of the General Will, which may require violent revolution to overturn the established institutions’ rules that interfere with those acting in its name.
The heirs to the Scottish Enlightenment understood politics as built upon a framework of persuasion and legislation. Their understanding of politics could embrace broad democratic values, but it always operates under the rubric of established law.
The heirs to the French Enlightenment, by contrast, have understood all politics to be built on the power of force and violence. That includes the political institutions that have come before, like the one created during the American Revolution, as well as the “democratic” institutions that will replace them. In Mao Zedong’s immortal phrase, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” This has been a truism of the modern left from the 1917 revolution, Venezuela, and Cuba.
Understanding Man to be Fallen, the Anglosphere accepts human nature as it is and does not expect government to alter it. Believing men to be perfectable, the Continent expects government to hammer humans into their desired shape.
