I don't think I've got anything surprising to say for anyone whose read Enlightenment texts concerned with ethics texts at all attentively, at least in terms of pointing out what is obviously there, but what I'm discussing as far as I can see is underplayed in most discussion, and certainly in the 'average understanding' that circulates prior to any close reading of texts.
The obvious exception is Rousseau who gets understood as the back to 'natural man' nostalgic. Some recent work on Smith and Rousseau (e.g. Dennis Rasmussen) maybe gets to some degree at Smith's concerns about the 'progress' of commercial society, and there is a discussion in Foucault of the relation between the subject of eighteenth century political economy and the 'savage', though that is not so much about endorsement of 'savage' ethics as bringing out a supposed persistent 'natural' person. Given that Vico was already criticising any tendency to read legally defined rights back into 'natural' humanity in the early eighteenth century, we should be careful about simply attributing a brute identification of individual rights in commercial society with 'natural or 'savage' humanity on the part of all Enlightenment advocates of commerce and legalism.
The 'average reading' of Enlightenment ethics is that it suggests a constant moral progress, maybe through an expanding circle of moral concern, which itself has been a popular model for those wishing to expand our moral calculations, reasonings, or sympathies in cosmopolitan ways, or with regard to the ethical status of non-human animals. This is far from being any kind of misunderstanding, it is not a complete appreciation though.
The idea of the expanding circle of concern is usually associated with Hume and clearly there are various ways in which he seems a commercial society of evolving laws and civil institutions as preferable to barbarism or savagery, or even antiquity. Nevertheless, there is some expression of loss with regard to the social stage of antiquity, going back to where 'barbarism' and antiquity meet, which is the Bronze Age Greek society represented in the Iliad and the Odyssey, though with the intrusion of centuries of Iron Age Greek history.
While Hume does not recommend a return to a Mycenaean-barbarian warrior ethic, he is conscious of the intensity of friendship in antiquity, which gets it ideal form from the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad. This is the intense comradeship of men devoted to fighting and to slaughter in defence of 'honour', which of course also requires bravery and endurance. Something about the commercial and civil society Hume advocates lacks that heroic intensity of friendship. The modern world for Hume has a cooler kind of polite friendship, which leaves individuals more detached and self-contained. Hume does not exactly condemn the more recent kind of friendship, but there is an evident melancholia and nostalgia in his account.
Hume is conscious of the link between friendship and civic life in antique societies, though of course we should be careful here about the difference between idealised fictions and lived realities. Even being careful, I will go so far as to suggest that prevalent idealised fictions have some impact on lived experience, on the imagination and hopes that real individuals bring to living. The lingering idealisation of intense friendship, including that arising from the share dangers and violence of war still has some shaping influence on us. Back in the Enlightenment era, Saint-Just brought the classical idealisation of friendship to the goals of the French Revolution, suggesting a civic duty to have a recognised friend.
In some ways that is an exceptional idea, the utopia of a fanatic who has become notorious even compared with the other fanatics of the Terror during the French Revolution. However, the fanatics of the Committee for Public Safety, were not acting out of ideals remote from most educated people of the time. Their political aims draw no only on the often scapegoated Rousseau, but also on those usually taken to be models of moderation and humane realism, like Montesquieu or indeed the Renaissance humanism of Montaigne. Montesquieu's presentation of antique republicanism was not a complete endorsement, but it was eloquent enough to suggest consşderable sympathy of some kind, and to influence at least some readers in that direction, Sant-Just included.
Finally let us turn to Hume's friend Smith, of course an appropriately distant and not too intense friend, no Achilles and Patroclus there. We might pause to recall Hume's disastrous friendship with Rousseau, which seems to appropriately sum up the difficulties for both Rousseau and Hume in the relation between modern civility and antique friendship.
For Smith, antique republics were both troubling and attractive. They were troubling, because too focused on war and state imposed conformity, but attractive because they had a sense of common purpose and moral unity in military life and civic unity. Smith suggests education as the substitutes in commercial society, which also has the advantage of compensating for the narrowing of personality associated with repetitive work in situations of advanced division of manual labour.
However, education as the solution, does not cover all of Smith's concerns with the loss of old ethics. He notes the tendency of the 'savage' to have a personal concern with the community as above self-centred concerns, for laws to work through customs embedded in habit rather than through a remote state imposing punishments for breaching written codes. The identification of the individual with the community has a narrowing affect in some respects, since it is a limited community, but suggests an openness of the self and a non-calculating attitude absent from civil society. Smith has an account of the immediacy of ethical reactions, as moral sentiment, in his work as a moral philosopher, but this itself rest on a detached individuality that interacts with an outside world, rather than an un-reflective sense of shared community. There is a strong element of compensation for a lost state of moral community in the moral theories of Enlightenment thinkers, even if that is not the whole story.
In some way Foucault brought this out in Discipline and Punish when he suggests a preference for the tragic struggle of the individual with public spectacular execution, a communal event, to the individuation and normalisation of 'disciplinarity'. It would not do to think that Foucault was urging a return, but as other writings show there is regret, and a wish to emphasise what comes before the legalisation or 'juridificaiton' of not only social relations, but our ethical self-relation.
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