What Happened to the Anglosphere? The Tale of Two Enlightenments

What’s wrong with Canada — or at least that part of the Canadian government that sees Communist China as a more reliable future partner than the U.S.?

For that matter, what’s wrong with Great Britain, where the government has felt free to arrest some 1200 people for social media posts it doesn’t like?

Or Australia, where the government put up with the spread of virulent anti-Semitic groups until the massacre in Sydney forced Canberra to rethink its policy after (according to one commentator), “hostility toward Jews becomes commonplace, normalized, and eventually legitimized.”

In short, what used to be called the Anglosphere — those countries that are direct heirs to English traditions of constitutional government, the rule of law, and individual rights — is now in disarray, and it’s not true that Donald Trump is entirely to blame. What is true is that the United States is the country that has remained closest to those shared ideals and classical liberal economic principles; the others have had governments and intellectual elites moving in very different directions and embracing policies and principles that directly undermine that inheritance.

In New Zealand, for example, where a center-right government insists on invoking the basic principle of “equality of citizenship,” the result has been massive protests in support of affirmative action-style policies privileging New Zealand’s Maori minority.

Even in the United States, the ideals that once animated what Winston Churchill called “the English-speaking peoples” as the vanguard of freedom and progress and made the Anglosphere the carriers of hope, stability, and security after the Second World War, as embodied in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network, have come under systematic attack as racist, imperialist, sexist, and whatever other accusation the political left can throw at a once-great cultural inheritance. 

What’s happened here?

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.

The Scottish Enlightenment urged tolerance as prudence, having learned to be skeptical of all claims to absolute knowledge and absolute truth. That skepticism is in fact the touchstone of liberty in the cultural as well as political sphere: do I respect another person’s ability to present their point of view as much as I do my own?

The heir to the Scottish Enlightenment says yes, but Rousseau and Marx’s student, the heir to the French Enlightenment, says no. His world is divided into heroes and villains, victims and oppressors, and he knows with certainty which is which. That’s why he feels free to silence and trample on others’ views: those who think differently are not “politically incorrect” but in fact pose a threat to dogmatic certainty.

Finally, the Scottish Enlightenment — even skeptics like David Hume — embraced the role of religion and belief in God as the one guarantor of certainty and stability in the moral sphere and as the ultimate buttress of the importance of human liberty. The heirs to the French version threw out religion, “the opiate of the masses” as Marx called it, precisely because it dared to elevate a set of timeless moral principles that transcend those dictated by political power. In fact, those timeless moral principles threaten political power and dare to challenge its view of the world as one determined only by force.

The spread of these Scottish Enlightenment ideas and ideals, first to England and the American colonies and then to the other English-speaking settlements in the British Empire, defined the cultural and political contours of the so-called Anglosphere until today. The spread of French Enlightenment ideas and ideals, in contrast, came to define the broad contours of intellectual and political life across the rest of Europe (via thinkers like Georg Friedrich Hegel and Auguste Comte), although Scottish philosophy did find corners of influence in places like post-revolutionary France and post-1848 Austria. Indeed, Scottish ideas often find a sympathetic haven in countries after they have experienced revolutions triggered by disciples of the French version, whether in crumbling empires like Russia and China or in the former Spanish American colonies.

Indeed, the fate of Hong Kong as an appendage of the Anglosphere and the rest of China in the twentieth century draws a sharp contrast between the legacy of the two enlightenments. The one emerged as a bastion of free market capitalism and prosperity with democratic institutions and a relatively free press even under British colonial rule, while the other wound up as the bloody killing field of civil war, revolution, the Great Famine, and the Great Leap Forward.

The contrasting legacies of these two enlightenment movements don’t just provide a key for understanding our modern age. They also explain why the United States remains the Anglosphere’s principal anchor and an outstanding representative of its basic values.

In the later nineteenth century, French Enlightenment-inspired ideas and movements — especially Hegelianism and Marxism — flowed into the Anglosphere’s principal hub, England and Britain.  The impact of Marxism would be felt in the other parts of the English-speaking world, reaching a crescendo in the twentieth century, followed by Deconstruction and other French intellectual trends in the latter half of the 1900’s. The Scottish Enlightenment’s legacy took a steady battering as a result.   

Nonetheless, the ideas and ideals of the Scottish Enlightenment found a more congenial and receptive home in the United States than in any other country. Scottish thinkers’ influence on the development of both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution was profound (as I’ve explained in my book How The Scots Invented the Modern World). That influence broadened and deepened with the influence of Scottish thinking on American education and intellectual life in the nineteenth century, through the philosophy of Common Sense, thanks to two figures who stood out as representatives of “the Scottish philosophy”: George Jardine and James McCosh. That influence took on additional shape at the end of the century with the exponents of American Pragmatism, William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, who saw themselves as the Scots’ successors.

In fact, most of the history of thought in modern America is the story of effort by other philosophies — Hegelianism, Marxism, deconstruction, radical feminism —to displace and replace this bedrock of “the Scottish philosophy” and its three principal tenets in the American life of the mind.

Unity of knowledge is the first tenet. The arts, including the liberal arts, and the sciences form a complete whole. That whole needs to be taught and understood as working together to create a free and rational human being.

Unity of experience is the second. It is the same person who sits in an algebra class, drives a cab, votes in elections, raises children, and goes to church on Sundays (or temple or mosque on Saturdays), because that person applies the same framework of shared experience to create an integrated self. Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid defined that shared experience as “common sense,” meaning the self-evident truths “which are common to men with whom we can converse and transact business,” and which form an epistemological and moral whole.

This is why Scottish philosophy was repelled by any form of religious or political fanaticism, because it introduces ideas and notions that fly in the face of common sense and undermine our common understanding with others. On the contrary, it is that shared common sense that enables us to make rational choices vis-à-vis others: it enables us to choose how to live, how to vote, how to earn a living, and how to worship God, all of which are hallmarks of human progress. 

Finally, the unity of Creation is the third tenet. When we investigate the universe closely, we learn that the truths religion reveals and those we understand through experience and reason form a consistent whole because a beneficent Creator decided not to leave us to choose one over the other.

This was one reason James McCosh, a leading spokesman for American Presbyterianism whom Princeton University brought from the University of Edinburgh in 1868 to become its president, stunned contemporaries when he proposed a reconciliation between Christianity and Darwin’s theory of evolution. “I am inclined to think that the theory contains a large body of important truths which we see illustrated in every department of organic nature,” he wrote, although he added, “but it does not contain the whole truth, and it overlooks more than it perceives.” Nonetheless, McCosh believed the theory of evolution could reinforce, rather than contradict, the idea of design with “God behind it,” as one critic put it.

In Scottish philosophy, there was no clash between religion and science, because both unlock the secrets of the cosmos — and existence. It may seem strange to think of ourselves as creatures of eighteenth-century minds, but doing so helps clarify certain key issues of our own time. It can be argued, for example, that the Cold War was, at bottom. a life-or-death struggle between the French and Scottish Enlightenments. Many have wondered who really won the Cold War, since communism has enjoyed a posthumous existence in universities and our political culture long after the Soviet Union’s fall.

But now we see it was not Soviet communism per se, but the heirs to the French Enlightenment who continue to wage this twilight struggle against those of us who are heirs to its Scottish rival, including across the Anglosphere. Winning that struggle depends on remembering where we come from, intellectually speaking, and drawing upon its strengths with confidence and optimism.

Arthur Herman is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute. The Pulitzer Prize Finalist author of eleven books, including the New York Times bestseller How The Scots Invented the Modern World, His newest book, Founder’s Fire: From 1776 to the Age of Trump, will be released by Center Street in April.