Historiography

Social conditions

It is fashionable these days to link intellectual movements with social conditions, political issues and even economic developments. But while one acknowledges the importance of these matters it is extraordinarily difficult to establish what the links could be. Economic determinism is altogether too naive a point of view. More sophisticated theories based on conceptions such as that of ‘ideology’ remain vague as to the nature of the relations that obtain between the various interacting factors from which an author's thoughts and their acceptance or rejection by his contemporaries spring. It is far from clear that the invention of doctrines on the one hand, and their reception on the other, are determined by the same influences. Yet it would be folly to ignore the fact that Locke was deeply involved in politics, or that Diderot and d'Alembert played an important part in the promulgation of middle-class values in pre-Revolutionary France. Nor should it be forgotten that Hume's history outraged both Catholics and Protestants; nor that Priestley's house was burnt by a Tory mob. But how all these matters flow together into the controversies about the limits of knowledge I am quite in despair to understand.

I began work on this chapter fully convinced that a strong case for an ‘externalist’ treatment was possible. But as the work proceeded I felt more and more inclined to submit to the judgement of Peter Gay, that one's vague sense of a relation between social conditions in England and France and the intellectual movements that accompanied them cannot be realized in detailed accounts of specific paths of influence from the one to the other.