In 1656, at the age of 23, Baruch Spinoza was literally excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam for his views on God, the law, and the soul. Members of that community were forbidden to associate or communicate with him. This happened even though Spinoza’s main discussion of religion, in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP), did not appear until 1670. Across Europe, religion was perhaps the predominant cultural force. Controversies abounded and intolerance was common, even, at times, in relatively tolerant countries such as the Netherlands. Within a given religious sect, conformity was often strictly enforced. In addition, during the early years of Spinoza’s life, the “30 Years War” was raging. That war began as a religious war, though by the end it became more of a war over religious affiliations than over religion itself. Religious affiliation was perhaps the most common basis for group identification in that era. In Spinoza’s case, during his lifetime he circulated among some of the more liberal and radical religious sects. He had, for example, a number of Mennonite friends, and that sect was an offshoot of the Anabaptist movement, which advocated a strong separation of church and state. No doubt their “radical” doctrines both attracted and subsequently influenced Spinoza—and also put him at odds with the establishment of both the Jewish and Christian communities in Amsterdam.

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Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689- 1755) was a member of the provincial French nobility, a jurist, a celebrated novelist, and arguably the decisive figure in inaugurating the key decades of the Enlightenment in the study of society. Earlier thinkers, including Spinoza, had drawn on new scientific ways of thinking to try to understand the human mind, the nature of reality, and the relationship between man and God. But the flourishing of political, social, and economic thought that we associate with the Enlightenment, with thinkers as varied as Rousseau, Smith, Hume, Kant, Beccaria, Ferguson, Madison, Jefferson, Paine, Wollstonecraft, and Condorcet, only got fully underway with the publication of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748).

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The traditional emphasis on unity in political thought we discussed in the previous chapter accompanied a distrust of commerce, with its division of labour, difference between buyers and sellers, class differences, specialization, and conflicts of interest. In Part IV of The Spirit of the Laws Montesquieu decisively rejects that vision, and develops what comes to be known as the doux commerce thesis: commerce and trade soften and polish what had been harsh, warlike, and barbaric values. They have transformed the modern world and drawn it together. Although they have also provided the occasion for new kinds of international injustices through imperialism and colonialism, they tend to encourage toleration, peace, and justice. Montesquieu’s doctrine of the separation of powers shaped constitutional thought in the United States and elsewhere. His general approach to legal reform and criminal justice, his support for constitutional moderation, and his opposition to despotism were crucial for subsequent liberal political thought. But his account of commerce was probably his most important, transformative contribution to the social thought of the era of Enlightenment and to the development of what became liberal social theory. By putting the development of commerce at the center of his account of the transformations in European politics, and by developing an account of trade and exchange that stressed their moral advantages, he paved the way for the intellectual revolutions of the next few decades that were associated with the Scottish Enlightenment. The Spirit of the Laws was a widely acknowledged source and influence for the ideas subsequently developed by such authors as David Hume, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith.

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Kant’s account of morality focuses on a person’s capacity to be the agent and owner of his own actions, not merely a conduit for social and psychological forces or influences over which he has little or no control. His discussion of this connection between morality and freedom centers on autonomy of the will. Because morality is connected with autonomy, and autonomy is connected with an individual’s ability to participate in the process of rational deliberation and choosing ends for himself, it appears as if an individual alone should be the sole determining factor in whether he becomes virtuous. But that is not the case.

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The Enlightenment as an intellectual movement is commonly taken to end with Kant. The early modern political and social world that Enlightenment thought arose out of and theorized about was disrupted and transformed by the American, Haitian, and, especially, French Revolutions. By the time self-conscious and self-identified liberal political thought and political parties coalesced in the era after the Napoleonic wars had ended, the problems faced in politics seemed very different. States became much more powerful and centralized under the force of wartime military competition. Religious persecution and censorship and the power of absolute kings faded by comparison with the rise of nationalism and worries about the kind of violent, mob rule seen in France during 1793 and 1794. A generalized commitment to constitutional government or republicanism gave way to complicated institutional questions about how much to democratize government, how quickly: how much of a society could take part in voting and elections at any given level of economic and educational development without risk of revolution.

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