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PARTISAN REVIEW
British Enlightenment
THE CREATION OF THE MODERN WORLD: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE
BRITISH ENLIGHTENMENT. By Roy Porter. W.W. Norton.
$35 .00 .
Roy PORTER IS A SEEMINGLY indefatigable historian who is primarily
known for his work in the history of medicine, but he has also written
books on English history. Two years after publishing both
London: A
Social History
and
The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History
of Humanity,
he has now weighed in with another ambitious book-a
social and intellectual history of eighteenth-century Britain entitled
The
Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlight–
enment.
The British title,
Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the
Modern World,
is more accurate. The notion that Porter's book offers
"the untold story" is misleading because in recent decades much has
been written about the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment, and many of these
works are cited by Porter himself in his seventy-seven-page bibliography.
Porter persuasively makes the case for the importance of the British
Enlightenment. (Some observers speak of separate Scottish and English
Enlightenments but Porter rightly argues that "to draw rigid distinctions
between the English and Scottish enlightened traditions" doesn't make
sense because "English and Scottish thinkers were in constant dialogue.")
Eighteenth-century Britain not only saw the rise of what came to be called
capitalism, it was also home to a number of thinkers who offered, as he
says, "a profound revaluation.. .in the understanding of economic activ–
ity itself." Those who revaluated economic activity include not only
Hume and Smith but also Addison, Mandeville, and Johnson.
Porter argues that postmodernist, Foucauldian readings of Enlighten–
ment thought are "wilfully lopsided." According to him, the postmod–
ernist view that under the guise of progress and reason the
Enlightenment's leading figures wanted to oppress and punish citizens in
order to control them is misguided. A more accurate estimate of British
Enlightenment thinkers comes from their contemporaries on the Conti–
nent. The leading French
philosophes-indeed
enlightened thinkers
throughout eighteenth-century Europe-praised Britain as the most
modern country in Europe . They admired its writers, especially Shaftes–
bury, Addison, Hume, and Richardson. They praised its free press, its
religious toleration, and its profusion of coffeehouses, which the Abbe
Prevost remarked are "the seats of English liberty" because there you
can "see a lord, or two, a baronet, a shoemaker, a tailor, a wine-mer-
