Shaftesbury’s position opened up a terrain which was to comprise much of
philosophy throughout the century in Protestant societies, Britain and Ger-
many, where gradual secularization was taking place. Value theory became the
topic of conflicts and developments. Aesthetics, which had rarely been central
to philosophical interests before, now came into its own (Eagleton, 1990).
Aesthetics became metaphysics by other means, in the anti-metaphysical at-
mosphere of the Lockean movement. The Deist position was now so dominant
in the British intellectual world that attention shifted to controversies within
it. The Cherbury-Shaftesbury line of innate propensities became more and
more explicitly contrasted with the Lockean line of construction out of expe-
rience. In 1749 Hartley developed Locke’s empiricism into an explicit associa-
tionism in which ideas—including aesthetic ones—are selected for their intel-
lectual pleasures and pains. Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
converted Shaftesbury’s innate moral faculty into an associationist psychology
of pleasures and pains through the device of imagining oneself in the place of
other persons. In Shaftesbury’s generation the innate faculties of morality and
beauty had been a halfway house for the naturalistic basis of religion. By the
middle generation of the 1700s, both religion and its bases were being derived
from experience, paving the way for the radical Utilitarianism of Bentham at
the end of the century.
The Reversal of Alliances
In England, Deist universalism was a doctrine for transcending religious strife.
In France, when Deism emerged, it was part of a militant anti-religious move-
ment; and this in turn led to a new opposition, the first explicitly reactionary
anti-modernism. Why did the exhausting stalemate of religious warfare, and
the political side-switching which engineered the settlement, result in toleration
and Deism in England but militant atheism in France? Here we must look to
the outermost layer of social causality, the political lineups which structured
the networks of intellectual life.
In places where the centralizing monarchy became more powerful, the
independent aristocracy went into intellectual and religious as well as political
opposition. Wuthnow’s (1989) theory of the Enlightenment concerns essen-
tially this anti-religious front. His comparisons across European societies show
that Enlightenment intellectuals appeared where there was a combination of
conditions. First, expansion of state bureaucracy produced a patronage base
among civil servants, lawyers, and salons vying for prestige in the govern-
ment centers, who in turn became both a recruitment base for intellectuals
and a literate audience reading and publicizing their work. Second, divided
authority among independent judiciaries and representative parliaments fos-
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