The week commencing 17 January 2022 was a bumper one for conferences at Newcastle University, with not one but two events organised by members of our Ideas and Beliefs research strand in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology. Both hosted excellent papers, and so, while it means a disruption to the series on British Republicans that I started in January, it seems appropriate to devote a blogpost to each conference.
Here, I will focus on 'What was Moderate about the Enlightenment? Moderation in Eighteenth-Century Europe', organised by Dr Nick Mithen - a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow currently based at Newcastle University. This conference grew out of Nick's research project Via Media Italica: The Scholar, the Jurist, the Priest: Moderation on the Italian Peninsula, 1700-1750. As the title of the conference indicates, the aim was to explore the complex relationship between moderation and enlightenment.
Of course, a conference on the theme of moderation inevitably sparks discussions over how that term should be understood. In this regard I was struck by the parallels between the difficulties that arise when applying the term 'moderation' to the eighteenth century and those surrounding early modern 'radicalism'. In the case of 'radicalism' a key issue is that the term was not coined until 1819, so it may be argued that it is anachronistic to apply it to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries since no-one engaged in politics at that time would have called themselves 'radicals'. By contrast, 'moderation' was a term used in the eighteenth century and several thinkers discussed at the conference did use it to describe themselves. In his keynote address, John Robertson provided examples of David Hume's use of the term. Yet, understanding what figures like Hume meant by it - or what we might mean by applying it to the period of the Enlightenment - remains a tricky issue. In part this is because, just like 'radicalism', 'moderation' is often understood in relative rather than absolute terms. As one contributor, Doron Avraham, asked explicitly - can we speak of a 'moderate ideology' or is moderation always just a middle way between two other positions?
This leads on to the question of whether we can describe specific individuals as 'moderate'. To return to Robertson's keynote, Hume might appear quintessentially 'moderate' on a range of issues and was explicit about the value of moderation in relation to party politics but it is difficult to understand either his religious views or his attitude to race in this way, making it problematic to regard him as a proponent of Enlightenment moderation. Damien Tricoire prompted similar arguments in relation to Denis Diderot. Diderot has often been presented as a 'radical' thinker, yet a convincing case was put for him being seen as a 'moderate', since he rarely questioned the existing political order of his society and was careful about what he said publicly. Working in the opposite direction, Carlos Perez Crespo challenged the idea that Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès's conception of sovereignty was an act of moderation, arguing - on the basis of a careful dissection of Sieyès's position - for his radicalism on this point. Other contributors provided examples of individuals who appeared moderate at one point in their careers, but not at others. For example, Niklas Vogt, the subject of Matthijs Lok's paper, constantly adjusted his position in response to changing political circumstances. As well as defining and redefining their position in relation to events, individuals might also do so in relation to others. Vera Fasshauer's paper on Johann Konrad Dippel's quarrel with the Halle Pietists demonstrated this very clearly. She ended her paper by raising the pertinent question of which position was more moderate - that of the Pietists who sought to avoid confrontation or that of the radicals who insisted on the toleration of different opinions? The question of what constitutes a 'moderate' position is a particularly difficult one to answer in the case of eighteenth-century women writers. Simply writing and publishing could be seen as a radical act for an eighteenth-century woman, but acknowledging this makes it difficult to distinguish between what we might think of as more clearly 'radical' writers and more 'conservative' ones. This is an issue that Geertje Bol is addressing directly in her work on Mary Astell and Catharine Macaulay, and her discussion of Astell's clever redefinition of moderation as 'zeal directed towards the proper (spiritual and moral) ends' was revealing in this regard.
Anna Letitia Barbauld by John Chapman after unknown artist. Stipple engraving. 1798. National Portrait Gallery, NPG D4457. Reproduced under a creative commons licence.
A number of papers presented the idea of moderation as a tempering tendency that might be applied to a range of different views. Thus Nicolai von Eggers presented the idea of the comte de Montlosier moderating the counter revolution, while Natasha Lomonossoff described Anna Barbauld's position as one of 'moderate radicalism'. Similarly, Elad Carmel began his paper by telling us that in an unsent letter to Hume, Robert Wallace had described himself as a 'moderate freethinker', while Mark McLean showed how Lord Hailes (Sir David Dalyrmple) combined the moderation of the Scottish Enlightenment with Christian orthodoxy.
All of this raises the question of how moderation was to be enacted and here too there was a range of interesting responses. For some of the authors discussed, it was a question of balance, whether through the mediating role of a particular group such as the nobility or whether through a careful institutional system of checks and balances. For others it was about identifying and following a middle way. As Matilda Amundsen Bergström showed, Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht sought a via media between Enlightenment thought and more traditional Swedish ideas. Similarly Anna Barbauld sought a middle way between stasis and revolution, and Robert Wallace attempted to navigate between those who rejected Christianity and those who rejected any investigation of religion.
Philip Doddridge by George Vertue after Andrea Soldi. Line engraving. 1751. National Portrait Gallery, NPG D2278. Reproduced under a creative commons licence.
A moderate position was often associated, as Shiru Lim reminded us, with the promotion of civility and the banishing of disagreeability, and also with the adoption of peaceful rather than violent means. Lim's own paper explored the role that theatre was seen to play by some in the moderation of the passions. Other papers placed emphasis on the dissemination and discussion of a range of ideas in the spirit, pace Anna Barbauld, of using persuasion rather than force and of convincing rather than imposing one's views on others. Pauls Daija's fascinating paper on the Baltic case, focused on the use of education for the purposes of moderation, with books being deliberately directed at Latvian peasants to prepare them for freedom. In this case there was some care taken over the type of material that was shared, with an emphasis on useful knowledge and civilising literature rather than overtly political works, but in other cases a more open policy was adopted. For example, Robert Strivens demonstrated that Philip Doddridge presented texts expressing a wide variety of opinions to his students, deliberately exposing them to writings that opposed his own views. Similarly, Doron Avraham mentioned a multilingual version of the New Testament produced by the Pietists, which was designed to meet the needs of all confessions within the German lands.
Portrait of Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht by an unknown artist. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.
The very notion of a multilingual Bible as an agent of moderation highlights the importance of genre and the role it could play in the process of moderation. This theme, which is close to my current interests, was also reflected in Bergström's discussion of Nordenflycht's writings. Her use of poetry to discuss philosophical matters may seem strange to twenty-first century eyes, but Bergström made clear that it was not unusual for Swedish writers at the time. However, the particular form Nordenflycht adopted in one of the texts discussed - with a first section consisting of questions addressed to a leading Swedish scholar and a second part offering replies - was particularly appropriate to the pursuit of a moderate line. Similarly as Marc Caplan demonstrated, Isaac Euchel's play Reb Henoch: Oder Woss tut me damit? deliberately used linguistic pluralism as a means of reflecting different viewpoints.
As is often the case with such discussions I came away less sure of what 'moderation' means in the context of the eighteenth century than I was at the start, but I was certainly more enlightened!