Social Forces and Enlightened Policies

Abstract

Enlightened ideas and attitudes, and the policies influenced by them, are commonly explained by twentieth-century historians as in some sense the product of social forces — perhaps as the result of pressure exerted from below by a class or classes or groups, perhaps as the outcome of less easily identified but more fundamental economic and social tendencies. To take a distinguished example, Albert Soboul, one of the most notable Marxist historians of the French Revolution, which he saw as the triumph of the bourgeoisie, was equally convinced that the Encyclopédie, the central text of the French Enlightenment, published between 1751 and 1765, should be regarded as a manifesto of the bourgeois spirit.¹ He conceived ‘enlightened absolutism’ as the characteristic product of those eastern European societies which experienced in the early modern period ‘the second enserfment’, that is, a strengthening of landlord domination over the peasantry.’ Other historians have explained enlightened absolutism as an effect or a concomitant of industrialisation — or of ‘proto-industrialisation’.