Diana M. Judd
A Language of Power
2
Warnings and accusations that Enlightenment reason and science would lead to
the dissolution, or even enslavement, of mankind in one way or another are hardly a
recent phenomenon. They are nearly as old as the Enlightenment itself, and often, though
by no means exclusively, tend to rest on cultural grounds. In 1789, Edmund Burke
reflected on the implications of the French revolution and declared that “the age of
chivalry is gone…; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever”.
1
Burke’s primary
argument revolved around what he perceived as the great loss of the bedrock of European
“manners and civilization,” which “for ages” had rested upon two principles which were
“indeed, the result of both combined: I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of
religion. The nobility and the clergy, the one by profession, the other by patronage, kept
learning in existence, even in the midst of arms and confusions, and whilst governments
were rather in their causes than formed.”
2
More than a century before Burke wrote these words, Bacon knew all too well
that it was the clergy’s monopoly on knowledge that kept learning from advancing
beyond the biblical, ecclesiastical and Aristotelian, and it was the nobility’s power that
kept political resistance an illegitimate, immoral and unethical act. The Whig statesman
was hardly alone in his views. If Burke was concerned with French Enlightenment ideas
polluting English virtues at the end of the eighteenth century, Joseph de Maistre was
concerned with the reverse. Declaring the work of Francis Bacon to be “false, vile and
corrupting,” Maistre lamented that the ideas of the English “charlatan” had become so
generally accepted and influential in France that he had succeeded in “pervert[ing] this
1
Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company,
1987.), p. 66
2
Ibid., p. 69.
Convention