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Notes -
I apologize if my tone upthread has been rude and I'm trying to be more polite here, I just think I'm very confused by your argument because it seems to hinge on two things that I don’t think anyone really considers up for debate:
Individual rights are not relevant in the enlightenment, such that when we see less individual rights we should consider a country more enlightened.
The American and British revolutions are not manifestations of enlightenment political philosophy.
We have three countries that had revolutions led by rationalist, secularized Christians who lionized reason and rejected divine revelation, conducted in the name of replacing the monarchs with more democratic rule and establishing individual rights.
Two of these revolutions that most fulfilled these goals you seem to think did a pretty good job, maybe even contributed towards the industrial revolution. But you look at the third and conclude that the enlightenment:
This is a... downright strange argument. These are all the enlightenment. Not just France. If you think post-revolutionary Britain and America did a good job then you too are a supporter of the enlightenment.
Who systematically trampled on individual liberties more, Tudor England with its strict restrictions on publishing and the importation of books, or post revolutionary England with its freedom of press? Who systematically trampled on individual liberties more in the 1848 revolutions, the monarchies with their restrictions on freedom of press and speech and democratic participation, or the protestors who demanded more of these rights? Are we to conclude that the kings and queens or yore were more authentically enlightened than the liberal movements that fought their repression? Few would find this line of thinking convincing.
You've mentioned several times that you think France is the most central / most enlightened of the revolutions (based on their ultimate rejection of core enlightenment principles?) I understood that this is your position but until your last comment I never realized that you thought everyone else believed this too. To be clear, I have never heard anyone say that, not ever. It's completely natural to say that the revolution that retained the most of the old world's absolutism and intolerance was the least successful in implementing enlightenment norms. It would be like arguing that the Young Turks were the most enlightened revolution.
The reason you see a bunch of users referencing pre-revolutionary France is that you’re making some really strong claims about how the enlightenment brought novel things like tyranny and religious persecution without acknowledging that these things got better most places other than France, and in France in the longer run, and that they were extremely commonplace and generally worse before the enlightenment.
When you say the enlightenment "systematically trampled" individual rights you have to grapple with the fact that in most places these rights were only invented and enshrined in the enlightenment era; nearly all of Europe previously were monarchies with serious restrictions on speech, press, religion, and association.
When you say that the enlightenment brought absolutism and state repression you have to grapple with the fact that pre-revolutionary regimes did things like kill everybody in an entire village or city for defying them (France, Russia, England).
When you say that the enlightenment brought religious persecution you have to grapple with the fact that literally dozens of these countries ethnically cleansed their Jewish populations without a second thought.
When you say that the enlightenment brought unprecedented war you have to grapple with the fact that wars of the Middle Ages were staggeringly violent, with the French Wars of Religion killing some two to four million people, the Thirty Years War killing up to 50% of Germany, and Renaissance Italy having an average life expectancy of 18.
When you say that the enlightenment made all these things worse you have to confront the fact that in most of the West absolutism declined and religious tolerance increased with the advent of liberalism.
You’ve already said you think the post-revolutionary enlightenment nations of America and Britain contributed significantly to the industrial revolution so there isn’t much to argue that you don’t seem to already agree with.
But first, on an economics level, abolishing aristocratic monopoly privileges allows for competition, which lowers prices and encourages innovation and the adoption of technology to keep your competitive edge; abolishing feudalism allows people to own their own land and property which raises the self interest that drives work; abolishing guilds (the vastly more restrictive versions of unions of the day) and allowing free movement between jobs and regions allows people to shift into the most productive versions of the work they can do. You already seem to agree we see this in enlightened America and Britain, I’ll point out you even see this France as well - in Acemoglu’s “The Consequences of Radical Reform: Post Revolutionary France,” he and his co-authors measured that the areas occupied and reformed by Napoleon demonstrated significantly higher long run growth when compared with the areas that did not.
The cultural argument is that, beyond replacing faith and relevation with the more scientifically productive norm of reason, previously in western societies the ideal life (in yes, heavily protestant-work ethic Christian societies) was considered to be a gentleman who received passive income, whereas merchants were seen as base and materialist. Over time people came to value knowledge, innovation, and progress for its own sake and the ideal life was seen as one that contributed to society. If you want the long form argument the go-to is Joel Mokyr's “A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy” or “The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850,” that “the root of modernity is in ‘the emergence of a belief in the usefulness of progress’, and that ‘it was a turning point when intellectuals started to conceive of knowledge as cumulative’
This is also well argued by Diedre McCloskey’s six-part Bourgeois Era series. To quote myself from the first OP:
I find these arguments pretty convincing, most especially on the economic level. To the extent that I’m not convinced, the remaining plausible argument for the industrial revolution does come down to interventionist government - most of the countries that industrialized first did so during high tariffs and industrial policy.
Of course, the burden of proof hangs more on the skeptics. If our extremely novel social system coincides with unprecedented success then it’s kind of on you to present a serious alternative theory.
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