Underlying Structural Change. Gibbon, in The His-
tory of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(1776-88), Ch. 38, distinguished three levels of social
change: the technological improvements, the legal-
political-economic infrastructure, and the repre-
sentative achievements of culture. There was visible
change occurring in the first level throughout the pe-
riod. The scientific inventions, especially of the seven-
teenth century, found their practical application in an
increasing control of the forces of nature. The employ-
ment of new techniques and tools produced greater
efficiency in agriculture. The modes of industrial pro-
duction changed gradually from manufacture to
“machinofacture.” New roads and canals were con-
structed to carry the growing internal and foreign
trade. The improved communications opened up an
era of travel (including the Grand Tour) all over
Europe. The advances in navigation and the art of war
brought the continents of the earth within regular and
easy reach of one another, thus consummating the
previous great discoveries. These technological ad-
vances represented clearly “more and better” in
comparison with earlier times; there was visible a
well-defined progress which gave its imprint to a dis-
tinct stage of historical development or evolution. The
traditional organization of society proved to be
inadequate in the face of technological change. Small
agricultural holdings gave place to large-scale farming,
and surplus rural population converged on the towns.
Competition and the division of labor made the secu-
rity and rigidity of the guild system obsolete. The new
commercial ventures involved risk-taking by individ-
uals; but individual initiative, though unbounded in its
aspirations, found itself hemmed in by a network of
governmental regulations and inhibitions. Thus the
power of the state came to be felt as abuse and was
assailed by reform proposals and by rebellion.
Legal, fiscal, administrative, political, religious, and
educational reforms were put into practice, by parlia-
ment and private initiative in Britain and the small
republics, and elsewhere by enlightened despots like
Frederick the Great, Joseph II, Leopold II, and
Catherine. Many reform proposals, from the Abbé St.
Pierre to Bentham, remained only on paper. Where
the new aspirations were blocked (as, e.g., Turgot's
reform in 1776) rebellions resulted, and finally, the
French Revolution. While technological change
proceeded under its own momentum, the reform of
institutions involved human judgment and needed ac-
tion to give it direction. The desirability and possible
scope of reform posed questions which could not be
evaded.
The traditional class structure was being eroded in
the process. The circle of citizens with a say in public
affairs widened with the rise of the new bourgeoisie
and its growing affluence. The progressive levelling of
the distinctions of rank was visibly preparing the
ground for the polarization of the population into the
two classes of the rich, the employers, the exploiters
and the poor, the employed, the exploited. The new
middle class was imposing its values upon society, using
commerce and education as vehicles of social change.
In effect a new society came into being. Voltaire
observed it in London in 1734 (Lettres philosophiques,
Lettre X), and Hume, in his seminal essay “On National
Characters” in 1748, described England as “a mixture
of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. The people
in authority are composed of gentry and merchants.
All sects of religion are to be found among them; and
the great liberty which every man enjoys, allows him
to display the manners peculiar to him. Hence the
English, of any people in the universe, have the least
national character, unless this very singularity may pass
for such” (Hume, Essays Moral and Political [1741-42],
3rd ed. [1748], Essay XXI).
Alessandro Verri noted in 1766 that in London toler-
ance and civil liberties were a reality while in Paris
they remained philosophical ideas (quoted by Sergio
Romagnoli, ed., Il Caffè [reprint 1960], p. XLVI). On
the cultural plane, far-reaching structural changes
accompanied the rise of the new social order, affecting
the substance and teaching of scientific thought, of
religion, and of art. The man of letters and the artist
acquired a measure of freedom from court and clerical
patronage, and emerged as new professional groups.
The hold of clericalism lessened, and so did papal
domination following the widespread elimination of
the Jesuit order. Dissent was thriving in the new, less
hierarchical society; religion gained a new and
deepened meaning in various strata of society, from
philosophical deism and Rousseau's religion de Genève
to the popular revival movements of Pietism and
Methodism.
These currents were advanced by the development
of the printed media of communication which, like
other earlier inventions and discoveries, assumed only
now their full potential. A spate of printed material
sprang up, periodicals, encyclopedias, novels, histories,
newspapers as well as book clubs and circulating
libraries. Periodicals were numbered by the hundreds;
in 1776, the year of American independence and Adam
Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations, a daily average of 33,000 copies
of newspapers was sold in Britain; Voltaire's books
reached a sale of one and a half million copies within
seven years. Instant translations and personal contact
between authors of different nations effected a cosmo-
politanism far beyond that achieved in previous periods
by the common use of Latin and French. Steele's and
Addison's periodicals, The Tatler (1709-11) and The
Spectator (1711-12), exerted an epoch-making influ-
ence as models of truly civilized living; they were soon
imitated in Germany, France, and Italy. The
universities in general were not instrumental in foster-
ing change, largely because of their ties with the
established churches. Where these commitments were
loose, as in Scotland and Göttingen, they played a
leading role.
Intellectuals overcame their isolation by forming
circles and meeting in coffeehouses and, in France, in
salons. Thus the French philosophes combined in
producing the Enlightenment's central enterprise, the
Encyclopédie edited by Diderot and D'Alembert from
1751 onwards. The leading French authors, scientists,
architects, artists, from Voltaire to Rousseau, from
Buffon to Lamarck, took a hand in the enterprise.
Previously established encyclopedias, in particular
Louis Moreri's Grand dictionnaire historique (1674),
had devoted their space mainly to biographical,
genealogical, mythological, theological, geographical,
and military-historical entries. (Even Bayle's Diction-
naire historique et critique, 1695-97, though con-
temptuous of Moreri, did not break with the established
tradition.) By contrast, the Encyclopédie contained
systematic and analytical articles on “Man,” “Society,”
“Method,” “Nature,” as well as on the natural and
social sciences and the various handicrafts. Like all the
literature treated in this article, the Encyclopédie was
an avant-garde piece of writing, the contents of which
allow us to reconstruct a profile of the Enlightenment
as a movement. (Side by side with these productions,
the period witnessed the growth of a new cheap enter-
tainment literature as well as a greater diffusion of
writings in the old tradition, which aimed at the new
enlarged reading public. Although popular reading
habits and crowd behavior have come to fascinate some
modern historians, such publications are ignored here,
as they hardly contributed to the march of ideas, that
is, to the incivilimento due to man's creative liberty.)
