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’.

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