Thank you for this commentary. It has led me to pull down my copies of Hume, Smith, et al. (Burke I know by heart). Swift did say he wanted to "vex." But the purpose of vexation was revaluation. I recall being taught that the 18th century was a era of settled ideas, of equilibrium. Reading the works of that era, I never could justify that claim.
the american (ACLU) enlightenment includes both Jewish sanctuaries of LA and NY, and the Anglo Enlightenment includes all of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland (and Paris!)
Back in 1977, at St. Columba School in Delhi, we had 'Portrait of the Artist' as a set text for Eng Lit. An elderly Irish Christian Brother used to come in occasionally to take about Irish political history. From his point of view, the Ascendancy was the opposite of Enlightened. Petty had transformed Ireland for benefit of a rapacious, petit bourgeois, immigrant class. So long as it was the Catholic Gael who was being defrauded under colour of law, the Ascendancy were happy. But if any new swindler from England tried to use a royal warrant to extort money from the Emerald Isle, the parasitic invading class posed as native patriots. This was like the Boston Tea Party, where White people dressed up as Red Indians! The difference, of course, was that the Catholic Gael did not get demographically replaced. Still, there was an economic motive to the Great Famine though, no doubt, Catholics too bought up land at that time. It was like the Finnish famine- one where the middle class used a Malthusian method to achieve hegemony of a 'Classical Liberal' type.
Cantillon is the one Catholic among the bunch. The Cantillon effect is shrewd. The way in which new liquidity circulates has differential wealth effects because, au fond, the thing is corrupt to the core. A lot of what looks like 'Enlightenment' is actually, as an Irishman put it, the lighting of a match to reduce the stink of a fart. In other words, when it is your nose which tells you the true state of things. you may as well have your eyes fixed on the stars.
One final point. The School of Salamanca had influenced the older Catholic intelligentsia and thus, to some extent, the circulation of Protestant savants between Ireland & Scotland drew on that and other earlier Catholic traditions. In particular, the 'invisible hand' is the 'mysterious economy' of the Katechon which holds the Eschaton (the end of days) at bay. At a later point this reappears in Marxist eschatology as 'the final crisis'. No doubt, there were other channels of circulation of ideas but I would be interested to know more about that between Dublin and Glasgow.
Collison seems to be making a category error in his analysis. Most of the writers referenced here did not consider themselves ethnically Irish, and the 19th-century intellectuals referenced sought to differentiate themselves from these colonizer influences. It would be like framing Kipling and Thackeray and Hume as the Indian enlightenment. A fruitful grouping in some ways, but predicating their small group membership within a national as opposed to colonizer context perhaps misses more than it helps.
Thank you for this commentary. It has led me to pull down my copies of Hume, Smith, et al. (Burke I know by heart). Swift did say he wanted to "vex." But the purpose of vexation was revaluation. I recall being taught that the 18th century was a era of settled ideas, of equilibrium. Reading the works of that era, I never could justify that claim.
the american (ACLU) enlightenment includes both Jewish sanctuaries of LA and NY, and the Anglo Enlightenment includes all of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland (and Paris!)
Hello there Henry, you share great posts friend, I wanted to introduce myself, I’ve not been on Substack long!
Here is my latest article, it’s one I think you may enjoy:
https://open.substack.com/pub/jordannuttall/p/an-introduction-to-alchemy?r=4f55i2&utm_medium=ios
Back in 1977, at St. Columba School in Delhi, we had 'Portrait of the Artist' as a set text for Eng Lit. An elderly Irish Christian Brother used to come in occasionally to take about Irish political history. From his point of view, the Ascendancy was the opposite of Enlightened. Petty had transformed Ireland for benefit of a rapacious, petit bourgeois, immigrant class. So long as it was the Catholic Gael who was being defrauded under colour of law, the Ascendancy were happy. But if any new swindler from England tried to use a royal warrant to extort money from the Emerald Isle, the parasitic invading class posed as native patriots. This was like the Boston Tea Party, where White people dressed up as Red Indians! The difference, of course, was that the Catholic Gael did not get demographically replaced. Still, there was an economic motive to the Great Famine though, no doubt, Catholics too bought up land at that time. It was like the Finnish famine- one where the middle class used a Malthusian method to achieve hegemony of a 'Classical Liberal' type.
Cantillon is the one Catholic among the bunch. The Cantillon effect is shrewd. The way in which new liquidity circulates has differential wealth effects because, au fond, the thing is corrupt to the core. A lot of what looks like 'Enlightenment' is actually, as an Irishman put it, the lighting of a match to reduce the stink of a fart. In other words, when it is your nose which tells you the true state of things. you may as well have your eyes fixed on the stars.
One final point. The School of Salamanca had influenced the older Catholic intelligentsia and thus, to some extent, the circulation of Protestant savants between Ireland & Scotland drew on that and other earlier Catholic traditions. In particular, the 'invisible hand' is the 'mysterious economy' of the Katechon which holds the Eschaton (the end of days) at bay. At a later point this reappears in Marxist eschatology as 'the final crisis'. No doubt, there were other channels of circulation of ideas but I would be interested to know more about that between Dublin and Glasgow.
Collison seems to be making a category error in his analysis. Most of the writers referenced here did not consider themselves ethnically Irish, and the 19th-century intellectuals referenced sought to differentiate themselves from these colonizer influences. It would be like framing Kipling and Thackeray and Hume as the Indian enlightenment. A fruitful grouping in some ways, but predicating their small group membership within a national as opposed to colonizer context perhaps misses more than it helps.