Three Deaths and Enlightenment Thought

Stephen Miller’s Three Deaths and Enlightenment Thought presents the reader with some curious juxtapositions. First, there is the odd pairing of two main themes—on the one hand, the preoccupation during the eighteenth century with deathbed scenes, and on the other hand, the problem of defining “the Enlightenment.” Second, there is the juxtaposition of three men who had widely publicized deaths in common, but little else—Hume, Johnson, Marat. On each of these themes and people Miller shows himself to be, in fact, quite a knowledgeable and often insightful historian of eighteenth-century thought. Yet the perplexing attempt to bring these elements together, joined by no clear argument, leaves the reader wondering what Miller is after.

“Why look at deathbed scenes to chart the currents of Enlightenment thought?” asks Miller in his preface: “Because an interest in deathbed scenes … was widespread in eighteenth-century Britain and France” (12). But this is not an answer to his own question; it is merely an observation. The “infidel” Hume died in a cheery performance of equanimity and acceptance, countering the orthodox legend that only godly people died in peace; reports suggest that Johnson, for all his godliness, died in agonies of fear that he seems to have cultivated as the mark of a good Christian; Marat died, no doubt, in a state of considerable surprise, a supplicant’s knife embedded in his chest, but this knife was cleanly removed in Jacques-Louis David’s luridly iconic portrayal of the revolutionary’s death. Does anything connect these famous scenes, besides a partly ideological, partly purulent, fashion for watching the facial expressions of dying men?

Miller’s barely articulated idea is this: Just as the Enlightenment has been termed a “project”—an ill-advised expression he lifts from John Gray—so modes of dying in that era could also be viewed as “projects.” Again, the train of Miller’s logic is confusing. He himself casts doubt in the preface and elsewhere on the very possibility of speaking of “the” Enlightenment. As he acknowledges, the wisdom of speaking of the eighteenth century as if it were a unified epoch (let alone a “project”) has been recently placed in much doubt, even during a time when belief that the West experienced an “Enlightenment” (while the East did not) continues to serve as a powerful tool in certain forms of political discourse. Contrary to the view that this epoch consistently disparaged religion and prejudice, for example, Miller himself correctly points out the numerous ways in which avatars of the supposedly anti-orthodox “Enlightenment” such as Smith, Gibbon and even Hume in fact supported the maintenance of Christian “superstition” for purposes of social stability. Even such progress-fixated radicals of the late century as Price and Priestley called themselves “Christians” and seemed to be inspired less by “reason” than by the millenarianism flowing from that quintessentially anti-rational testament, the Book of Revelation.

Given that eighteenth-century thought and culture form an intricate tapestry woven from both radical and conservative threads, can we still speak meaningfully of an “Enlightenment”? In other words, is this historical category—largely a German concept handed down from Kant to Hegel to Cassirer, and then adopted as a national theme in Cold War America—itself on its deathbed? Miller seems determined to keep this term on life-support, if only in a highly complicated and attenuated sense: He finally maintains that the idea of an “Enlightenment” is tenable insofar as all his subjects mostly disliked “enthusiasm,” debated about the merits of luxury, and disagreed strongly about human progress and perfectibility. But sharp disagreement about such common issues is nothing like a “project.” And if we cannot comfortably speak about a coherent “Enlightenment,” how can we regard natural death, that most unwilling of events, as a “project” of eighteenth-century people? Hume’s death perhaps just qualifies as a project, as he evidently wished to rise to one final philosophical point even in extremis. Johnson’s tortured last hours seem less an effort to promote Christianity than the dismal finale to a whole life devoted to making this event as miserable and terrifying as possible for himself. But calling the murder of Marat a “project” tips into absurdity: indeed, in the section entitled “Marat’s Deathbed Project,” Miller almost immediately admits that “Marat did not have a deathbed project” (123).

This very admission, oddly, divulges a certain honesty and clarity of mind evident elsewhere in the book. Three Deaths and Enlightenment Thought contains admirably knowledgeable and nuanced discussions about the varying views of Hume, Smith and Gibbon on the social consequences of religious skepticism, about Johnson’s fetishizing of religious fear as a measure of Christian humility, about varying ideas in the age about the dangers or benefits of “prejudice,” and about the curiously non-revolutionary careers of Marat and his hagiographer David before the revolution. Yet the reader often feels informed by sections of this book without any sense of what all the bits of information add up to: Accounts of the dying Hume, Johnson and Marat appear but then completely disappear from view, leaving the impression that they were merely arbitrary starting-points for Miller’s random peregrinations far beyond the last bedrooms of his subjects. Finally, therefore, how do we assess the apparent conceptual disorder of a book that, if flatly written, sometimes presents a genuinely lucid analysis of eighteenth-century ideologies?

My own research into the history of the concept of the “Enlightenment” has suggested to me that this category is itself never without ideological significance, for it has done some heavy political work. Nineteenth-century French historians like Tocqueville and Taine hated their own eighteenth century because it had apparently left a legacy of violence and disorder; twentieth-century German and American historians like Cassirer, Becker, and Torrey admired a highly reified notion of the “Enlightenment” because it served their own nationalistic objectives; the Scots have more recently celebrated the “Scottish Enlightenment” as part of a comparable national self-definition, while the English have historically shown very little interest in the “Enlightenment” which, ironically, others have credited them with engendering.

Stephen Miller’s stance in relation to the political-national significance of the Enlightenment holds special interest because he is evidently a man at home in highly-charged ideological environments. He is a former fellow of the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute, where Richard Pearle is now a fellow; he has collaborated in books with the neo-conservative doyen Irving Kristol; he is a contributing editor to the neo-conservative journal The Wilson Quarterly. Given that Three Deaths and Enlightenment Thought challenges a range of assumptions about the nature of that formative historical construct, “the Enlightenment,” what can we say about the ideological project of this book? This question poses special difficulties because Miller’s book seems, on first impression, so determinedly non-ideological—so anxious to be fair to the old-style conservative Burke (who nonetheless is branded with the charge of being a “Pétiniste” anti-Semite on evidence that would convict virtually every writer of the eighteenth century), so willing to consider radical figures like Paine, Priestley and Price as disruptive “enthusiasts,” though they were incandescent with pro-American zeal, so prepared to weigh the reasoning of men like Johnson who thought that Whiggish “patriotism” posed dangers in its extreme forms.

About the political direction of Three Deaths and Enlightenment Thought, therefore, I confess to uncertainty—though I find this question compelling, and am not without suspicions. It is interesting, for example, that the predominant theme of this book is certainly not deathbeds at all, but rather the general consistency of “Enlightenment” with religion and virtue. A certain school of historiography (that of Taine and the Victorian historian John Morley, for example, or even John Gay more recently) has associated the Enlightenment largely with a spirit of skepticism, the eagerness to subject all norms and conventions to the scalpel of reason. But American neo-conservative ideology, as described by spokesmen like Irving Kristol, insists on the essential harmony of a progressive historical attitude with a rigidly conservative moral agenda. In a cunning way, Stephen Miller’s disjointed book actually makes a case for this union of “Enlightenment” with tradition. He initially cast doubts on definitions of the Enlightenment only to reinvent it as a period devoted simultaneously to historical optimism and the maintenance of old norms, even “prejudice.”

In summary, a little speculative inference possibly rescues Three Deaths and Enlightenment Thought from the charge of disunity. Even the deathbed theme might be drawn into the implicit ideological orbit of the book. No scene would seem so laden with skeptical implications of life’s meaninglessness as the final gasps of a philosopher or visionary; yet even confronted by this last fading of significance into nullity, Miller wants us to discern an act of ultimate intention and affirmation—a crowning act that is simultaneously forward-looking and traditional. But the coherence of this book is hard to find, and the ostensible discovery of some semblance of unity leaves still further questions about the accuracy and wisdom of the author’s historical and ideological judgments.