Porter, The Creation of the Modern World



Readers approaching Roy Porter's book, The Creation of the Modern World should not be put off by it's periodized title. This book is, somewhat uniquely, about the influence of British thought on the High Enlightenment (i.e., France). Evidence presented in the book suggest that it is, in fact, the case that on several points, English ideas were the role models for the Voltaires and lesser-known thinkers in the period from roughly 1600 to 1850. As such, Porter is specifically interested in filling in the gaps of Enlightenment still widely missing from the story, the British part.

Cultural historians today are settled with the idea that the reading public before the Enlightenment were in a state of stagnation. Roy Grafton, in his "New Worlds, Ancient Texts", where he argues that before 1492, the world's knowledge was, essentially narrow and "stable." As such, he is a prime example of this tendency, however much it echoes the now discredited view of the Middle Ages as a period of no change and stagnation. In any event, Porter believes that Enlightenment thinking was, because of the stagnation, naturally stimulated by printed media like the newspaper, encyclopedia, and-we can't forget Darnton's Grub Street Hacks-by porn. It was itself a sort of propagandist attitude ushering in the new and demanding people change their way of understanding their world.

That the "image of active Enlightenment, criticizing, cajoling and calling for practical improvement on a broad front, represents a major advance upon the dated image of posers prattling on in Parisian salons" is insightful in helping one determine what side of the debate Porter comes in from on the question of how the Revolution's eggs were laid (4). By "prattling," it would seem fair to say that Porter undervalues the importance of public debate espoused by Goodman with her salonnieres in The Republic of Letters of the Old Regime, who are anything but passive and Maza's actively engaged and rather gossipy "public" in her Private Lives, Public Affairs.

One of the key pieces of evidence of British influence on French Enlightenment, at any rate, are the many English historical greats who shaped the future of "modernity." Porter points out rather eloquently that "to Voltaire, Bacon [English, d. 1626] was the prophet of modern science, Newton [English, d. 1727] had revealed the laws of the universe, and Locke [English, d. 1724] had demolished Descartes [French, d. 1650] and rebuilt philosophy on the bedrock of experience," the latter of which, incidentally, was also the trend in science (and therefore for Bacon), if readers are familiar with Daston & Park's Wonders & The Order of Nature. One could almost take this as evidence that the French philosophes were the fuel to the fire of change already burning across Europe.

In England, the idea of Enlightenment was negative and Georgian gentlemen scoffed at Voltaire and Rousseau. The history of the "British Enlightenment" is historiographically rare, also. Ironic, then, that France, Italy, and Germany looked to Britain as the birthplace of the modern, celebrating Britain's constitutional monarchy and freedom under law, its open society, its prosperity and religious toleration.

This trend, argues Porter, points to a major British role in disseminating the ideologies and ideas of the "European" Enlightenment. Since they were the role-models in several ways of the French, so to speak, it only makes sense that observations of changes in modes of British thinking influenced French thinkers, even so far as to, he says, influence the Rights and Man (12-3). Ideas were changing in the 18th, he says, and the way he portrays it is as a kind of revisionism of thoughts: "biblicism and providentialism were being challenged by naturalism; custom was elbowed aside by an itch for change and faith in the new… in moral quandaries, self-identity, artistic tastes, reading habits, leisure pursuits-deference to tradition was spurned as antiquated, backward or plebeian by boosters conjuring up brighter futures" (13). This is the kind of thought processes evidenced in French Revolutionary sources, as well. Central to the process, naturally, was printing, which shaped the way most major historical shifts were carried out (see Eisenstein, "The Printing Revolution").

It is curious to note that Porter's "modernity" begins as early as the mid-1600s, if not earlier (53, e.g.). This is a striking contrast to the French story, which begins it at a few decades before 1789, when not directly as an outcome of the Revolution. For America, it was probably around the time of its Industrial Era, rather than its Revolution, where everything that came to symbolize America and its core capitalist democracy was born. All of this obfuscates the termination point between "early modern" and "modern," if one accepts first that there was a distinction between early and full-blown "modern" and not some whole "modern."

This book is not for the lighthearted when it comes to sitting through name dropping and discussions of other historians' works. While he doesn't frame the discussion quite in the same way that Canizares-Esguerras does in "How to Write the History of the New World," there is a significant amount of it to get through. It is also written by a British historian, in a British manner, which means that he occasionally drops words we don't recognize in the American English language. Without a dictionary on hand, this could make the volume difficult work to get through. All in all, however, "The Creation of the Modern World" is a significant contribution to any discussion of the High Enlightenment.