There are probably few flat Earth devotees left in the world, but most of us are still at least one step behind modern science, grappling with the transition from Newton to Einstein at a time when many of Einstein's views have atrophied. In that sense we remain under the spell of the scientific mind of the 18th-century Enlightenment with its passion for rational inquiry, religious tolerance, political liberalism and universal human values. It has its failings and its critics, but no ideology since has matched it for curiosity, tolerance, optimism and egalitarianism. Traditionally it has been regarded as very much a continental affair with minimal British involvement. Certainly the English, in the form of Locke and Newton, created its basic tool set in the late 17th century, but only the occasional Scot - such as Adam Smith or David Hume - seemed eminent enough to rank alongside megastars such as Rousseau, Diderot or Voltaire, who dazzled 18th-century salons and reading societies.
However, Roy Porter rejects this marginalisation of British intellectuals and does it from a position of strength, having argued in some of his previous books against an overly Franco-centred reading of the Enlightenment. In a rather inelegant phrase, that would not have met with Voltaire's or Gibbon's approval, he asserts: "To speak of Enlightenment in Britain does not merely make sense; not to do so would be nonsense". Instead he calls for an acknowledgment of different national characteristics and makes the case for a distinctly British Enlightenment, with its own timing, tone and style. Its timing precedes that of the continental Enlightenment, starting around the 1660s with the Restoration monarchy and continuing into the early years of the 19th century. Its tone is distinctive because it operated within an advanced social and political environment. Britain, despite the reservations of conservative historians, had achieved most of the Enlightenment's "wish list" well before Voltaire exposed Locke's and Newton's ideas to a francophone audience in the 1730s. Enlightenment ideas circulated freely within a political and religious establishment which rejected them on the continent. They were championed in books and pamphlets, propagated through newspapers that were free of censorship after the collapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, and chattered about in coffee houses, taverns, and polite drawing rooms the length and breadth of the land.
This distinctly British Enlightenment reflected new moral values which fitted comfortably into the rapidly changing commercial society of the post-1660s and, although based on reason and science in much the same way as its later continental counterpart, assumed a very different shape. Its writers were part of a reforming establishment, and their interest lay less in ideological firestorms than in practical reform that was designed to generate progress. Porter traces their achievements with a lively style and in measured chapters, covering the growth of print culture, developments in science and psychology, attitudes towards nature, prejudices against women and a range of thematic issues. Their common goal was the pursuit of happiness on Earth in a cosmic vision which, far removed from the acid anticlericalism of the French philosophes, was very similar to the German model in its acceptance of a benign divinity who was the architect of a perfect universe. Within that harmonious universe, man - and this usually meant men to the exclusion of women - was a rational creature capable of making intelligent free choices that would lead to progress and improvement. Economic freedom would generate prosperity, educational freedom would encourage virtue, and penal reform would punish and rehabilitate, rather than dismember and destroy.
How easily this freedom could spill over into a sinister form of social control is illustrated in the ideas of Jeremy Bentham for new prison architecture, for Bentham wanted the buildings to be circular, with the central space given over to a panoramic inspection area that could be used to spy on prisoners for 24 hours a day. Yet these kinds of distortion were rare. Even slavery, one of the main motors of the economic growth behind Enlightenment optimism, was attacked for its inhumanity in a lively debate on the relative rights and values of non-European cultures. Animal rights, too, were defended by Samuel Johnson, although a certain Thomas Day realised their limits too late when a colt that he had carefully broken in with humanitarian care promptly bolted as soon as he took to the saddle and killed him.
Porter's case is persuasive enough to oblige 18th-century historians to revise their generalisations on the Enlightenment. He does not change the broad picture; neither does he modify the accepted view of Britain as being socially and politically in advance of its 18th-century neighbours, barring only the Dutch. Yet what he does do is to integrate the British story into the wider European picture and bring out the degree to which British thinkers were pragmatic and practical, rather than abstract. Certainly there were radicals, such as William Godwin, whose anarchism led to bitter denunciations of political authority, marriage and even orchestras, because they stifled individualism. Yet Godwin was far from the mainstream. Instead the practical orientation of British thought made it genuinely reforming and probably helps to explain its eclipse during the French Revolution. In the initial years after 1789 the British were probably the most enthusiastic supporters of the French National Assembly, and Tom Paine certainly the widest-read radical propagandist of the decade. Yet the patriotic backlash that followed the French declaration of war in 1793 quickly silenced reform agitation. In the same way as German intellectuals, but for very different reasons, British writers concluded that the French had bitten off more revolution than they could chew. Burke's windy rhetoric and the conservative paternalism of evangelicals such as Hannah Moore or William Wilberforce then prophesied that they would choke on it. They did not, and instead, in continental Europe as in Britain, Enlightenment ideas survived the Corsican imprint of Napoleon Bonaparte to inspire a wide spectrum of reform agendas in the 19th century.
Porter's title overstates the role of the British Enlightenment in the creation of the modern world, but he has written a stimulating book which will restore the role of Britain in the Enlightenment. What is more, he has written it in a style that is eminently readable, bubbling over with quotes and ideas, in the true spirit of the movement itself. Voltaire would have approved both of the style and the message, and there can be no higher praise than that.
Hugh Gough is Associate Professor of Modern History at University College Dublin.