"Sophisters, Economists, and Calculators"

"Chivalry" is the code-word (and was even then) for white Christian male dominance. Of course he is talking against the Enlightement as he feels personally threatened by everything it stands for: Reason, which leads to Equality.

>Hmm, sounds like a reference to the gang here at ScienceBlogs, no?

More like "blasphemers, scatologists and masturbators" .... No, wait. That's just us.

A big theme in Burke is unintended consequnces; perhaps he is talking about what Enlightenment has brought about after it has done its work. So if by Enlightenment you mean the triumph of instrumental reason or technical rationality, yes -- but that hardly fits the Enlightenment that e.g. Kant was part of. It fits Bentham, though, so I think Burke is talking about the ethos that the Enlightenment brought about, utilitarianism and its engineering mentality, the market economy with profit as the fungible measure of everything and the replacement of traditional human relations (which he remembers through an idyllic gauze) by the cash nexus and abstract rights deduced in newfangled charters. The way to do things was in question in the Enlightenemnt, and the answer that won out was that the best way was to get results, maximize the bottom line -- but by then the Enlightenment was ending. We had an ease and elegance, Burke thinks, when we didn't need to ask the why of our ways and institutions, and now when we expect them to deliver, produce, satisfy, we will be the less satisfied. Nietzsche wrote somewhere, "The human being does not seek pleasure -- the Englishman does," and so Hume's reason that is but the slave of the passions was to be put to work refashioning the whole inheritance of society to satisfy human wants. Utilitarianism begins with Hutcheson and breeds through Bentham and the Philosophical Radicals; it is perhaps the sunset of Enlightenment. I think Burke foresaw, as he foresaw "a man on horseback," the time coming when utilitarianism would become the common sense of the nineteenth century. He might have thought it the telos, the proper destination of Enlightenment, while we might think it the accidental ending-point.

So in other words, I'm right?

I think you're justified in keeping it in. Further down in the piece Burke is quoted as saying:

We have not (as I conceive) lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century, nor as yet have we subtilized ourselves into savages. We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress amongst us.

Rousseau and Voltaire were pretty clearly the vanguards of the Enlightenment, and would probably be the chief "sophisters, economists; and calculators" that Burke was talking about.

By the way, if you've ever been to Versaille, it's pretty excessive. Near the king's breakfast table is a five mile long landscaped garden where no one walked, just outside of Paris, just so the king could enjoy the view while he dined. And in every room are these gaudy displays of paintings (technically well done, but still gaudy), often depicting the king on his way into battle (yeah, right). And then these statues in front of the palace similarly has the king galloping off to war.

If you put together the warlike images and the gaudy display of wealth, and then remember that people were being taxed to death and going hungry and being sent off to war, and it's easy to see why the people and the king were not going to get along. (Let them eat cake!)

So the chivalry thing strikes me as thin. I think probably the National Review has been too busy smoking cigars and reading H. L. Mencken to really know what they're talking about. I wouldn't take them seriously.

(That said, I don't think Voltaire and company were all goodness and light either, but for different reasons and that's another conversation...)

Yes I feel he is talking about the enlightenment, (just my opinion) based on the text.

I have to comment on Versaille also - when I was there I suddenly understood the radicals much better, I never thought I would be thinking "off with their heads" but looking at room after room of silk walls, and extravagance after extravagance, I realized I am a product of that radicalism and even felt queasy looking at all that "mess". Loved the gardens though :-) It is a very nice tourist destination, a much better use than originally.

I don't know... the folks over at NR have a lot of experience in taking things out of context. They might know what they're talking about.

Given Burke's unwaivering support for the American Revolution, it would seem defensible to assert that he was not opposed to the Enlightenment, as such, and "Reflections on the Revolution in France" was directed mainly at the excesses of the Revolution in France.

But I think something more subtle was going on there and a likely present day analog can be seen in the story of David Horowitz, where a man's personal reaction to the horrors surrounding him colors his world view to the point that he completely renounces his earlier views. I tend to think that Winston Churchill's assessment, that Burke railed against tyranny,whether from the ancient aristocracy or the blood-thirsty mobs of the French Revolution, was too charitable.

As I read "Reflections on the Revolution in France" there is no qualification and no reference to the more successful experiment in America. A quick search of "Reflections" online shows that the only reference to America or Americans is a comparison of the French Revolutionists with American savages (and, yes he was referring to Native Americans). I am also unaware of any subsequent writings by Burke that continued to support the radical social experiment that was the new American nation. So, it would seem reasonable to assume that Burke had, by the time "Reflections" was published, turned his back on The Enlightenment.

That's just my opinion of course.

He foresaw "a man on horseback," the time coming when utilitarianism would become the common sense of the nineteenth century. He might have thought it the telos, the proper destination of Enlightenment, while we might think it the accidental ending-point.

That's an interesting way to put it. I liked an Isaiah Berlin essay I read recently called "The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities" where he called Voltaire basically a "positivist", and that we should rescue from obscurity figures like Voltaire's contemporary Giambattista Vico, one of the handful of Enlightenment thinkers to emphasize things other than ratiocination... Interestingly, Vico comes off sounding a bit like George Lakoff.

But I'm off topic. Yes, Burke did support the American colonists' attempt at self government, so his response to the Enlightenment wasn't a simple one. He is certainly laying down a marker against the philosophes in his Reflections ... but I'm not sure that Chris is right in saying that he's denouncing the Enlightenment as a whole.

I went back and read the context of Chris' mention of Burke in the RWOS. He says that there's a "tension" between the "dynamism of scientific inquiry" (carried out by "sophisters, economists; and calculators") and conservatism. This seems well supported. If you include the sentence prior to the one I quoted above, you get a definite tension:

Thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers. We have not (as I conceive) lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century, nor as yet have we subtilized ourselves into savages. We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire...

So it sounds like a tension. But is Burke's speech a categorical "denunciation of the Enlightenment" as a whole, as the RWOS asserts on page 5? Is Burke here denouncing, say, Isaac Newton? I'd say no. (However, judging from Wikipedia, there is some disagreement whether there is just an Enlightenment, or whether there are two ages, an Age of Reason and an Age of Enlightenment--perhaps with Newton living during the Age of Reason? I couldn't quite figure that out.)

Anyway, I'd say "tension" is warranted, but "denunciation" may be too categorical.

Yeah, I could have said that more clearly. What I was saying was that the French Enlightenment, the Enlightenment of the philosophes like Rousseau and Voltaire, is not the whole Enlightenment. It's a subset. So I don't think that Burke's denouncing these folks means that he's denouncing the Enlightenment as a whole. (Which I believe included Isaac Newton, who I'm sure Burke isn't denouncing.)

Note, however, that the philosophes were influencial within Enlightenment circles, and they did influence people in the States, such as Thomas Jefferson, who kept a bust of Voltaire at Monticello (at least for a time. His views changed, as I understand).

So, again, describing Burke's "tension" with the Enlightenment seems warranted, but using the word "denunciation" in relation to the whole Enlightenment seems too strong.

It's a topping and a floor wax.

You are certainly right that he rejects the Enlightenment in that passage. He says that "by this new conquering empire of light and reason . . . [a]ll the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, . . . which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary . . . are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion." - consequences which he clearly regards as bad.

Keiper is also correct that the passage is focused on the loss of chivalry. Chivalry is the "decent drapery of life" that "mitigated kings into companions and raised private men to be fellows with kings." But he wholly misses the point that the loss of chivalry is the reason that Burke rejected the Enlightenment (or the reason given in this passage). Burke here laments the death of chivalry, praises its (supposed) benefits, and then excoriates the Enlightenment for sweeping away the system that made chivalry both possible and necessary. It's obvious from this passage that he wishes the Enlightenment had never come, so that "the glory of Europe" (the monarchs and nobles) would still be around to be admired by himself and those like him.

Keiper is right that Burke's subject there is chivalry, but he does not seem to notice that that does not contradict your claim, and in fact is part of it.

I could have been clearer. I don't think "the age ... of sophisters, economists, and calculators" is that of les lumieres, neither les philosophes (Rousseau and Volataire had both died in 1778), nor the Physiocrats (the older Mirabeau was to die in 1791, the year after the publication of Burke's Reflections.) Bentham, Richard Price, and above all Joseph Priestley were more likely Burke's targets -- he was more afraid of what could happen on his side of the Channel than of events in France.
As for events in America, his understanding of them was famously conservative in the best sense, not Enlightened like Paine's: he saw the American colonists as Englishmen, whose hereditary liberties and prerogatives were being ignored by short-sighted Crown policy. It remains the standard conservative story of the American Revolution that Americans rose in defense of traditional, not abstract rights.
Burke trembled at the dawn of the sophisters, economists' and calculators' age. It may be useful to compare his lament in its early light with Marx and Engels's praises in its midmorning:

I: Bourgeois and Proletarians
...
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
...
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

(Communist Manifesto, 1848)

Marx, btw, admired Vico.

It's a topping and a floor wax.

There's a more recent SNL episode where Phil Hartman plays Frankenstein and constantly wanders around saying "fire bad", "bread good"!! Not everything is so binary like that.

The question is, if Newton is the "Father of the Enlightenment", as is often said, are you simplifying things to the point of distortion if you say that Burke is "denouncing the Enlightenment"--as in denouncing the foundations of science. I don't think he is. I think he is denouncing the French philosophes, which is different. Take a look at this Wikipedia article (for what Wikipedia is worth). It says that Burke is denouncing the "French Enlightenment intellectuals" not "the Enlightenment."

I think this is an important distinction. And I'm not the only one who thinks this way. Take a look at this essay by Isaiah Berlin. The Enlightenment that brought us the Scientific Revolution is qualitatively different than the Enlightenment that brought us the French Revolution. They're related, and perhaps they overlap in some sense, but they're still different.

Too funny. It's a small world. Over at Grist.com there's an interview with Rabbi Michael Lerner (editor of Tikkun magazine). He's not mentioning Voltaire by name, but he might as well be:

The anti-spiritual consciousness was first developed by the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, in its struggle against feudalism. It tried to undermine the feudal order by adopting a narrow form of empiricism: that which is real is that which can be verified through sense data. It was a powerful tool against the feudal order.

Interesting interview. He's not arguing against the Scientific Revolution at all, just that worldview taken to an extreme... (Sorry, slightly off topic. But then again, maybe not.)