V.

Liberal Individualism

At the heart of the Enlightenment’s social and political thought lies a profoundly radical individualism. Enlightenment philosophers proclaimed the individual as the creator of meaning, truth, and even reality. The Enlightenment’s political ideal set the individual free politically, intellectually, and economically. It demystified the political universe, as rational acts of consent replaced the magical power of thrones, scepters, and crowns. The individual (understood in the Enlightenment as male and property-owning) did not receive government and authority from a God who had given his secular sword to princes and magistrates to rule by divine right. Nor did the individual keep to his lower place in a divinely inspired hierarchy, in which kings and noblemen had been placed above him as society’s natural governors.

Government, Enlightenment theorists argued, was voluntarily established by free individuals through a willful act of contract. Individuals rationally agreed to limit their own freedom and to obey civil authority in exchange for public protection of their natural rights. Government’s purpose was to serve self-interest, to enable individuals to enjoy peacefully their rights to life, liberty, and property. It was not to serve the glory of God or dynasties—and certainly was not to dictate moral or religious truth.

The Enlightenment saw the individual as free in the intellectual and moral world as well. Governments should only be concerned with the worldly matters of life and property, not with immaterial things such as the salvation of souls. Public authority, be it secular or spiritual, was not to enforce unquestioned and absolute truths upon individuals. Matters of belief and moral conviction had to be reserved for the private realm, where each individual was free to believe as he wished. Public law no longer enforced God’s higher truths nor any ideal of the moral life; it merely kept order. Clerical or royal censorship and persecution of free individual minds was the lightning rod for contempt.