Joel Mokyr: We Owe Our Modern Prosperity to Enlightenment Ideas
[Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and a professor of economics and history at Northwestern University. His latest book is The Enlightened Economy: Britain and the Industrial Revolution.]
Was the Enlightenment a Good Thing? At first blush, the question sounds almost sacrilegious. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment, after all, taught us to be democratic and to believe in human rights, tolerance, freedom of expression, and many other values that are still revered, if not always practiced, in modern societies. On the other hand, historians question whether the Enlightenment actually led to brotherhood and equality (it did not, of course), and even freedom, its third objective, was achieved only partially and late. Some have even suggested that its ideas of human “improvement” may have had unintended bad consequences such as twentieth-century totalitarianism, racism, and colonialism.
Yet the debate has obscured the most hardy and irreversible effect of the Enlightenment: it made us rich. It is by now a cliché to note how much better twenty-first-century people live than even the kings of three centuries back. In thousands of large and small things, material life today is immeasurably better than ever before. Are we happier? Who knows? Are we more enlightened? Possibly. But are we healthier and more comfortable? Of course we are. And without sounding too cocky about how progressive history is, or too triumphalist about Western culture as the crowning achievement of human development (a view that a majority of historians label “whiggish”), I would like to suggest that what generated all this prosperity was the growth of certain ideas in the century after the British Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Somehow this important connection has slipped past the scores of historians who have written about the rise of the modern world and variations on that theme. Most economic historians have focused not on intellectual but on economic factors, crediting resources, prices, investment, empire, or commerce with triggering the Industrial Revolution, which then led to the period of sustained economic growth in which we still find ourselves. Even though attributing economic change purely to economic causes at the exclusion of ideas is part and parcel of historical materialism, a theory generally associated with Marxism, free-market economists have frequently done the same thing, describing the effects of ideology as “a grin without a cat.” One of the few who dissented was John Maynard Keynes, who noted in a famous passage that “the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.” There is no better example than the Enlightenment ideas that, I submit, created the prosperity that we enjoy today....
Read entire article at City Journal
Was the Enlightenment a Good Thing? At first blush, the question sounds almost sacrilegious. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment, after all, taught us to be democratic and to believe in human rights, tolerance, freedom of expression, and many other values that are still revered, if not always practiced, in modern societies. On the other hand, historians question whether the Enlightenment actually led to brotherhood and equality (it did not, of course), and even freedom, its third objective, was achieved only partially and late. Some have even suggested that its ideas of human “improvement” may have had unintended bad consequences such as twentieth-century totalitarianism, racism, and colonialism.
Yet the debate has obscured the most hardy and irreversible effect of the Enlightenment: it made us rich. It is by now a cliché to note how much better twenty-first-century people live than even the kings of three centuries back. In thousands of large and small things, material life today is immeasurably better than ever before. Are we happier? Who knows? Are we more enlightened? Possibly. But are we healthier and more comfortable? Of course we are. And without sounding too cocky about how progressive history is, or too triumphalist about Western culture as the crowning achievement of human development (a view that a majority of historians label “whiggish”), I would like to suggest that what generated all this prosperity was the growth of certain ideas in the century after the British Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Somehow this important connection has slipped past the scores of historians who have written about the rise of the modern world and variations on that theme. Most economic historians have focused not on intellectual but on economic factors, crediting resources, prices, investment, empire, or commerce with triggering the Industrial Revolution, which then led to the period of sustained economic growth in which we still find ourselves. Even though attributing economic change purely to economic causes at the exclusion of ideas is part and parcel of historical materialism, a theory generally associated with Marxism, free-market economists have frequently done the same thing, describing the effects of ideology as “a grin without a cat.” One of the few who dissented was John Maynard Keynes, who noted in a famous passage that “the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.” There is no better example than the Enlightenment ideas that, I submit, created the prosperity that we enjoy today....