Two Concepts of Moderation in the Early Enlightenment

ABSTRACT

This essay proposes a bifurcation within the concept of moderation in early modern Europe. To draw this out it reconstructs an “encounter” between two citizens of the scholarly Republic of Letters in the years around 1700—Lodovico Antonio Muratori and Jean Le Clerc—and the concept of moderation each maintained. It proposes that the former maintained an ideal of moderation which was “hard” principally about self-regulation, while the latter maintained an ideal of moderation which was “soft” and principally about (religious) toleration. It then attaches this “encounter” to an analogous conflict between uses of moderation in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. It concludes by proposing that this bifurcation, while occurring within scholarly and theological debates, has enduring significance for our interpretation of the Enlightenment, and for the passage of political moderation into the modern world.

KEYWORDS:

• moderation
• Enlightenment
• Jean Le Clerc
• Lodovico Antonio Muratori

I

Unlike political philosophers, historians rarely acknowledge bifurcations within concepts. Perhaps this is because political philosophers often start, and often end, with the concept in question. An a priori unity to concepts is assumed; this unity can then be constructively pulled apart. The historian, by contrast, begins with documents, and ends with a narrative of change. Concerned with the situating of texts in contexts, a plurality of historical meanings associated with a single word is a natural state of affairs. For the historian, proposing a conceptual bifurcation seems a crude departure from the fleshier idiom of historicised discourse.

The archetypal political-philosophical demolition of naive conceptual unity is the case of liberty. In the years bridging the millennium a series of bifurcations were proposed within the concept of liberty. In revising Isaiah Berlin’s dichotomous concept of positive vs negative liberty, itself of course built upon Benjamin Constant’s distinction between ancient and modern modes, a third, “republican,” concept was proposed by Quentin Skinner.¹ A fourth followed, proposed by Horacio Spencer; and even a fifth by Rainer Forst.² Moving in the opposite direction, Eric Nelson cautioned that Berlin’s original distinction between negative and positive liberty “does not withstand scrutiny.”³ Nelson’s stance is not to have “insisted that there is only one ‘concept’ of liberty”; only that the positive/negative distinction is unhelpful. Nonetheless, his approach implies suspicion about unwarranted bifurcations. Unlike Spencer and Forst, Nelson is principally a historian, and, for all the political-theoretical tenor of his article, I would suggest, his caution is tied to his training—and with this, his commitment to a species of Wittgensteinian philosophy of language.⁴ This is also the case with Skinner, whose proposal of a “third concept,” appearing as a rhetorical foray into formal political theory, also acts as a validation of the principles of his intellectual history: that the history of a concept cannot be written in a unitary sense, but nor can strains of concepts be isolated, granted their own bounded histories, and endowed with normative force. Rather, he has suggested, “the concepts we have inherited—and the interpretations we place upon those concepts—are just frozen conflicts.”⁵ It is these discursive conflicts which the historian should reconstruct; and it is this reconstructive act which marks a path from intellectual history towards political philosophy.⁶

This essay proposes to apply this approach to the concept of moderation. It recovers two distinct uses of “moderation” within Europe’s intellectual culture at the turn of the eighteenth century. It then proposes that the conflict between them constitutes a concealed bifurcation—a “frozen conflict”—which persists within the meanings with which moderation is today conventionally endowed. Whereas the discursive variations within Skinner’s genealogy of liberty remain within a recognisably political domain, the conceptual archaeology of moderation suggested here contains a process of politicization. This places moderation’s conceptual evolution, or at least the treatment of it here, closer to the frame proposed by Reinhart Koselleck, whereby the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries —and his focus is in German-speaking Europe—oversaw the politicization (Politisierung), among other processes, of core concepts (Grundbegriffe).⁷ Turning to the conflict within moderation, and between “moderations,” circa 1700 is to grapple with a contested concept which awaits the abstraction which politicization implies.⁸

I will return to these themes in the Conclusion. To comprehensively recover moderations now lost, however, it is not enough to survey them from on high. Rather, it is necessary to descend into a given past and locate concepts in situ.

II

Between 1700 and 1703 a new edition of Saint Augustine’s collected works was printed, with the print mark Antwerpiae. This edition was modelled on the 1679–1700 Paris version, edited by the monks from the Benedictine congregation of St. Maur. This ‘Maurist’ Augustine had become the definitive edition: based on scrupulous study of early editions, it also cross-referenced with the three key sixteenth-century editions—of Johann Amerbach (Basle, 1490–1506), Desiderius Erasmus (Basle, 1528–9) and a collective of Leuven theologians (Antwerp, 1576–7). In combining and superseding these previous editions the Maurists raised to a new scholarly standard the body of thought which had fuelled theological discord in Europe since the fourteenth century, and earlier still.⁹ The fragmentation of Christendom since the sixteenth century was, in part at least, based upon a recognition of the plurality of theological stances on fundamental issues of grace and salvation, predestination and free will, which Augustine’s oeuvre could credibly accommodate.¹⁰

The Maurist Augustine proclaimed to play a neutralising function in the early modern use and abuse of Augustine’s theology. In practice it, too, became embroiled in controversy. While it claimed to mark an end to intra-Catholic disputes over Augustine, its Benedictine editors were accused of crypto-Jansenism, of framing Augustine as a defendant of efficacious grace.¹¹ In a sense, in spite of itself, the Maurist Augustine became another front in the theological tensions carving up Catholic Europe. The 1700–1703 “Antwerp” version, then, appears a commercially shrewd decision to reprint the new edition of a keenly contested Church Father.

The “Antwerp” edition contained, however, a sting in the tail. To the eleven volumes copied verbatim from the Maurist version is added a twelfth, an Appendix, dated 1703. This volume contains three texts related to Augustine’s criticism of Pelagius: a poem by Augustine’s disciple Saint Prosperus; a dissertation by the French Jesuit Jean Garnier on Pelagianism; and a complete edition of Pelagius’s own Commentarii in Epistolas Pauli. Following these is a copy of Erasmus’s 1529 letter to Alfonso Fonseca, the Archbishop of Toledo, which opens a lengthy section of “notae ad libros retractationum S. Augustini” by a Joannis Phereponus. These final Animadversiones take up most of the Appendix’s last two hundred pages in a volume-by-volume commentary, interspersed with extracts from commentaries by Erasmus, Enrico Noris, Jacob Sirmondi, Johann Vlimmer, Jean Luis Vives, Henry Dodwell and other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars on Augustine. Phereponus also writes the preface for the Appendix and has clearly assembled the volume as a whole.

Phereponus was a pseudonym for the Netherlands-based Swiss-born Remonstrant scholar-theologian Jean Le Clerc;¹² and the “Antwerp” Augustine was not printed in Catholic Antwerp but in Le Clerc’s adopted city, multi-confessional Amsterdam. Its production had there been overseen by Pieter Mortier, publisher-in-chief for the Huguenot diaspora in the Low Countries.

This authorial and editorial context explains the arguments held within the Appendix. Le Clerc’s collation of and additions to commentaries on Augustine has the clearly stated goal of challenging the fanaticism for the Saint which had riven the Christian world since the first decades of the sixteenth century. In assessing Augustine’s writings, it is crucial, argues Le Clerc in the praefatio, that he is treated like any other man (quasi de quovis alio homine ageremus), rather than as an oracle, or prophet. On these terms his work should be approached and judged without superstition, reverence or prejudice, but instead according to “correct reason, criticism and the clearest interpretation of Scripture.”¹³ When viewed in this clear-sighted way, it is obvious, argues Le Clerc, that Augustine innovated beyond the teachings of Scripture: immersed in pagan Greek philosophy, he sought Platonic solutions to the controversies of Christian theology.¹⁴ Not only did this innovation stem from Augustine’s conflation of pagan philosophy with Christian doctrine; it was also the result of his patchy knowledge of Holy Scripture, itself rooted in his inadequate philological skills. Immediately after his praefatio Le Clerc includes a letter from Erasmus to Johann Eck, making the case for his preference for the authority of Jerome over that of Augustine, on the basis that “Augustine did not know Greek.” This stunted his secular learning of Christian philosophy but, more fundamentally, and coupled with his ignorance of Hebrew, restricted his familiarity with different versions of scripture, and so his sensitivity to the Bible.

The Augustine that emerges from Le Clerc’s commentary is both an innovator (away from Scripture) and an imitator (of pagan philosophy), and ineloquent to boot: in the praefatio, discussing tome IX, “it is strange,” Le Clerc remarks, “that S. Augustine didn’t put himself to sleep, saying the same things over and over again.”¹⁵

III

Le Clerc’s assault on Augustine in the Appendix Augustiniana is coherent with the theological, scholarly and philosophical agenda to which the former committed his intellectual life. The Remonstrant strain of Protestantism to which Le Clerc subscribed eschewed reliance upon the authority of Tradition, of episodes within or the culmination of ecclesiastical history, or specific theological commentators for its curation of core doctrine.¹⁶ Whole swathes of theological controversies were considered to lie beyond the limits of reason, absent from or unproblematised in Scripture. Their intrusion within Christendom stemmed from the conflation of philosophy and theology, and constituted a force for division within Christianity, as well as an unwelcome distraction from an honest, Christian life. The abuse of Augustine was a specific case: The Remonstrant church split from mainstream Calvinism due to what it perceived as the latter’s dogmatic adoration of Augustine’s doctrine of grace. Good, “reasonable” theology, for Le Clerc, should start and end not with Augustine, but with a careful reading of Scripture, and a moral life lived according to its teaching.

This minimalist theology placed a premium upon philology: in part, because it was crucial that the tenets of Christianity could be “considered in its earliest sources, without mixing them with other human interpretations,” which meant rigorous Biblical criticism; and in part because, with Scripture insulated and set aside, the rest of ecclesiastical history and the history of theology was to be subjected to a critical, disenchanted analysis to prevent its overreach into the present.¹⁷ Le Clerc laid out the terms for this critical philology in his 1696 scholarly manifesto Ars critica, a treatise which reflected Le Clerc’s conflation of Cartesian and Lockean epistemology.¹⁸ On these terms, the Ars critica—cited repeatedly in Phereponus’s contributions to the Appendix Augustiniana—taught that philology serves to interpret the intended meanings of historical texts, rather to assess their historical truth.¹⁹ Le Clerc’s innovation was to overlay this epistemological imperative upon the collected insights of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century humanist criticism.²⁰ Secure in deference to the basic teaching of the New Testament, the rest of sacred history and theology, for Le Clerc, could be happily reduced to hermeneutics, a conflict between different perspectives and interpretations, none of which could hold authoritative sway over the formation of the present.

For Le Clerc, and other like-minded Protestants, the theology upon which this dissolution of extra-Scriptural religious authority turned relied on a kind of epistemic modesty, which aligned with a measured tolerationism among Protestants. We will return shortly to the ways in which this stance manifests itself as an explicit appeal to “moderation.” It’s important to recognise, though, that for other Christian scholars Le Clerc’s theoretical de-legitimisation of historical authority tout court (excepting Scripture itself), was anything but moderate. On the contrary, it appeared the very definition of theological recklessness and epistemic extremism. To unravel tradition entirely, as he proposed, was to open the door to the rule of arbitrariness enrobed as cool reason.

Le Clerc’s thinly veiled invective against Augustine in the Appendix Augustiniana inevitably incited a response. The English non-juror Robert Jenkin published, in 1707, a Defensio S. Augustini which was bluntly aimed at Joannis Perephoni in eius Opera Animadversiones, unmasking Phereponus as Le Clerc on the first page of the preface. Jenkin's work is a tight critique, but framed in the light of a broader based response to the challenge to Augustine’s authority in the late seventeenth century. This played out on both sides of the confessional divide. In 1702 the Catholic polemicist Jean Launoy’s La véritable tradition de l’église sur la prédestination et la grâce appeared, several years after Launoy’s death, which argued bluntly that Augustine’s doctrine on grace had no basis in scripture, was not present in the first, second or third centuries of the Church, and was a Platonic innovation.²¹ This received replies from the Dominican Jacques-Hyacinthe Serry (Divus Augustinus summus Praedestinationis et gratiae a calumnia vindicatus, 1704) and the Jesuit Gabriel Daniel (Défense de saint Augustin, 1704). Serry and Daniel were otherwise engaged in disputes with one another; they found common ground, however, in saving Augustine from Launoy.

Both of these disputes appear as confessionally bounded affairs. But Le Clerc foresaw that his Appendix would be received within Catholic Europe too: writing to Locke in 1702, he noted that his publisher had explicitly wanted to append his “notes on St. Augustin” to a new edition of Augustine’s opera omnia “to be able to sell the other tomes in Catholic countries.”²² This is indeed what took place, and it was in conscious dialogue with Le Clerc’s Appendix Augustiniana, as well as intra-Catholic debates, that Lodovico Antonio Muratori composed his De ingeniorum moderatione in religionis negotio. Muratori, having recently taken up his position as librarian to the Este family in Modena, had begun drafting the work as early as 1704, after receiving a copy of Le Clerc’s work from his friend Apostolo Zeno in Venice.²³ Upon reading Serry’s defence of Augustine, also sent by Zeno, Muratori was spurred on, and by March 1707 was completing the manuscript. Over these years, however, a work which was initially planned to serve as a “defence of Saint Augustine, criticised by Le Clerc” had developed a “more expansive argument.” Along with the Appendix and Serry’s Augustinus vindicatus Muratori had also received from Zeno Le Clerc’s Ars critica, and his work evolved into a critique of the principles of Le Clerc’s thought, as much as his specific criticism of Augustine.²⁴ Upon completion, and as implied in its name, the De ingeniorum moderatione in religionis negotio was now conceived as treating the moderation of reason in matters religious, or, as he wrote to a friend, “the rules and the checks that man must have in searching for and teaching the truth.”²⁵

When Muratori’s De ingeniorum moderatione was finally published in Paris in 1714, it retained a comprehensive discrediting of Le Clerc’s treatment of Augustine; stated in the Preface, and repeated throughout, this takes up a large part of the third of the work’s three books, where Augustine’s orthodoxy is asserted. The case against Le Clerc is folded into the broader agenda to codify the rules whereby the “moderation of the mind” might be best realised. In order to understand the kind of moderation for which Muratori is advocating, we need to follow his argument in his De ingeniorum moderatione and contextualise it in his wider oeuvre.

IV

Muratori’s De ingeniorum moderatione contains an explicit confessional agenda; it sets out the superiority of a Catholic model of ecclesiastical history, and pillories that exercised by Protestants.²⁶ When it comes to deciding matters of religious doctrine, Protestants like Le Clerc place a premium upon a direct interpretation of Scripture. For Muratori, this was a foolish approach (temeritatis & imprudentiae), because it inflates the interpretative capacities of human reason.²⁷ Even where the meaning of scripture seems self-evident, Muratori argued, its interpretation is complicated, and cannot be left to the individual: to do so would lead to interminable discord within Christendom, as had been the case since Luther. Protestant exegesis had opened a Pandora’s Box, which the Catholic model of criticism set forth by Muratori promises to reseal by prioritising concord in matters of core doctrine. This doesn’t wholly negate the capacity for ingenio—scholars should still turn to original texts and use their reason to interpret them. But their reading of theological works should be tempered with the authority of the Catholic Church, understood as a compound of the weight of Tradition, of venerated biblical commentaries, and, in the final instance, institutional force, all of which curbs an excessive rationalism. Before we search for the truth, in Muratori’s model, we must first establish its boundaries (inquirendae veritatis confinia).²⁸ This recognition of the limits of human reason, a retreat from open speculation about religionis negotio, is the basic moderation of intellectual enquiry proposed in Muratori’s treatise.²⁹

If this reads as an uncontroversial restatement of the Catholic Church’s authority, this was not how the De ingeniorum moderatione was received. Published in France, under a pseudonym, seven years after completion, it drew the attention of the Roman Index of Prohibited Books.³⁰ Muratori’s prescription of the realm of human enquiry to be ruled by ecclesiastical authority was narrow, covering only matters of core dogma resting upon revelation. Church authority did not dictate questions of ecclesiastical discipline, which were acknowledged to be contingent rather than absolute.³¹ Nor did it dictate matters of ecclesiastical history, as distinct from divine history.³² In matters of philosophy, science, literature, Muratori’s proposal was to curtail the reach of the Roman Church, to expand the space for the libertas ingeniorum.

In Muratori’s reading, these agendas are complementary, and not in tension; as he stated in the Preface, his agenda was to establish a “natural concord of free enquiry with Christian moderation.”³³ In specific matters of dogma this meant drawing a sharp line between the two. But more broadly it meant imbuing intellectual enquiry with the spirit of Christian moderation. The search for truth was not, for Muratori, a simple exercise in distilling truth from falsity; rather, it entailed wading through the realm of verisimilitude, the probable, and the half-true which humans inhabit. Given that we perceive the truth “through a glass darkly,” due to the infirmity of the human mind, we need to temper our reason with the spirit of moderation.³⁴

This basic epistemological stance insists upon modestia and caritas as key intellectual virtues; prudentia is to be the “guide and moderator” (dux et moderatrix) of scholarly enquiry.³⁵ Crucially, it also called for restraint on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities. Even when they are obliged to intervene, when religionis negotio are being mishandled, the authorities should do so justly, and without zeal.³⁶

Provoked by Le Clerc’s harsh treatment of Augustine, in the De ingeniorum moderatione Muratori was envisaging a Christian republic of letters, a self-governing civic realm animated by the spirit of moderation, cognizant of its own limits. This vision was further fleshed out in Muratori’s other early writings, which spanned the period between his initiating work on the De ingeniorum moderatione in 1704 and its publication in 1714. The case for a new infrastructure for scholarship was made in his 1703 Primi disegni della republica letteraria, while the underlying intellectual agenda found its fullest form in his Riflessioni sopra il buon gusto, first printed in 1708, then expanded in 1715. Good taste was the art of combining philosophy and erudition, of balancing reason and authority, of learning “to walk a middle path, and not descend into extremes.”³⁷ Postlapsarian man was a passionate being, inclined to self-love and prejudice. To seek the truth, to “conform ourselves to buon gusto,” it is necessary to “moderate the appetites that so often infest our will.”³⁸

Muratorian moderation, in these early works, sought to establish a self-regulating repubblica letteraria composed of self-regulating scholar-citizens, operating within a clearly defined structure of authority. In Muratori’s formulation buon gusto became the dominant rubric for cultural reformism in early eighteenth-century Italy.³⁹ The appeal to moderation it implied cohered with the term’s definition in the Italian dictionary of his day, the Vocabolario of the Florentine Accademia della crusca, where moderation is “to give rule to things” (dar regole, e temperamento alle cose).⁴⁰ It was this regulatory ambition which motivated Muratori’s entire intellectual agenda; as Raimondi has written, it constituted his “mental structure.”⁴¹

V

In 1699, as he worked on the Appendix Augustiniana, Le Clerc anonymously published a series of essays, collectively titled Parrhasiana, ou pensée diverses sur des matières de critique, d’histoire, de morale et de politique. The final essay in the collection is a biographic piece, “Des ouvrages de Mr. L. C,” which surveys Le Clerc’s intellectual development to 1699. At the very end of this essay he commits himself to continue “the search for truth … observing always those measures that Christian prudence demands.”⁴² “Who is left,” Le Clerc asks, “to speak and defend it [the truth]?”⁴³ Not those who don’t enquire after the truth because they don’t love it; nor those who are not sufficiently learned to seek it; and nor those who self-censor and dare not expose themselves—a category with which Le Clerc might have located “Enlightened Catholics” like Muratori. There is only one group, “a Christian Society … in Holland” who can be trusted to both pursue and speak of the truth. He is speaking, we assume, of advocates of Arminianism, with whom he associated. This group, Le Clerc continues, have come to be recognised by clear-minded Protestants and open-minded Catholics alike as “the interpreters of thoughts that they themselves dare not publish … the mouthpieces of truth and liberty, everywhere else oppressed.” From this society will flow “the fruits of the seeds of piety, of charity, and of all the Christian virtues.” Crucially, Le Clerc stresses, they are the source of the “Moderation which, bit by bit, is establishing itself among the most able Protestants.”⁴⁴

The “moderation” to which Le Clerc here appeals recurs at several other points in the Parrhasiana, as it does in the rest of his writings. What did it entail? Certainly, a commitment to epistemic self-restraint, to the moderation of the passions, and to harnessing the powers of reason while proceeding cautiously—modestly—in intellectual enquiry. It also implied a commitment to the Christian virtues of charity and prudence. In these senses, Le Clerc’s and Muratori’s moderation can be placed on a single plane; they were co-participants in a shared intellectual culture of measured, productive scepticism hardwired into the critical scholarship endorsed throughout the pan-European, Christian Republic of Letters.

Where Le Clerc and Muratori parted ways was on the fundamental association the former maintained between moderation and religious toleration.

As we have seen, the case for religious toleration (between protestants), for Le Clerc, was bound up with the principles of his biblical criticism. But it was a result of his observation and experience of religious persecution. The Netherlands, Le Clerc’s adopted home from the 1680s, had collected religious refugees from across Europe, most significantly France, which, since the Edicts of Nantes, had been overtly confessionalising itself. As Martin Mulsow has argued, Le Clerc’s ecumenical theology, as much as his biblical criticism, was a transferprodukt of this dynamic, inter-confessional environment.⁴⁵

Le Clerc’s tolerationist case for moderation can also be seen as a product of this loosely structured, mobile and internally heterogeneous network of religious reformers which stretched across North-West Europe in the late seventeenth century. It centred on Dutch Arminian scholar-theologians such as Le Clerc and Philip van Limborch, as well as avowed Socinians such as Samuel Crell. It reached across the Channel to the England of Gilbert Burnet, while strands filtered eastwards to the Pietist international centred on Halle in Saxony.⁴⁶ It also stretched south, to the Geneva of Jean Alphonse Turrettini. Turrettini’s 1719 Nubes testium pro moderato et pacific de rebus theologicis judicio, in advocating for the curation of a set of fundamental articles around which (protestant) Christians could cohere, assimilates the language of tolerationist moderation into an ideal of ecclesiological concord. The tenth chapter of the Nubes testium lays out twelve directives for establishing this concord: the ninth directive implores Christians to “practise everywhere, and to all people, moderation”;⁴⁷ the twelfth concludes with an ambition that “this seed of moderation and toleration will be irrigated by divine benediction, will grow happily, and produce sweet fruit.”⁴⁸ Turrettini’s correspondence with Le Clerc in the final years of the latter’s life indicates the closeness of their ecumenical ideals.⁴⁹

VI

The tolerationist moderation advocated for by Le Clerc, and here stated by Turrettini, was a theological and ecclesiological formation. Le Clerc and Turrettini were committed to spiritual reform through Christian learning. They saw this as the basis for a minimalist theology which could reconcile warring factions within Christendom. They expressed little direct interest in the secular political machinations of their day.

This is not the case for Muratori, for whom a sharp distinction between matters of faith and matters of politics made little sense. The concept of moderation played a central function within his later writings, where his earlier arguments for a cultural renaissance through scholarship were incorporated into a comprehensive agenda for religious, social and political reform.

From the early 1730s, after nearly two decades of dedicating himself to a series of large-scale historiographical projects, Muratori turned his attention to reviving the case for intellectual moderation made in De ingeniorum moderatione and his other early scholarly works, and turning it towards more political ends. This “turn” was in part a reaction to the resumption of military conflict on the Italian peninsula and the political chaos and social and economic malaise which ensued.⁵⁰ But it was also prompted by Muratori’s engagement, from the mid-to-late 1720s, with English thought—the philosophy of Locke, through a French translation of the Essay concerning Human Understanding, but also various works of Anglican, Arminian theology—by Thomas Burnet, William Wollaston, John Tillotson, and others.⁵¹ Muratori was concerned that both currents of thought—on the one hand, Lockean epistemology and metaphysics and, on the other, natural theology—amounted not only to heresy and philosophical error but also to a serious threat to societal concord. The reprinting of the De ingeniorum—in 1727, 1737, 1738 and 1741—punctuated and prefaced a body of work in which Muratori sought to codify, contra Anglican thought, the moral philosophical, liturgical, and epistemological norms which, in his view, could stabilise rather than undermine a harmonious, Christian society.

Throughout this body of work, the motif of Muratori’s regulatory conception of moderation recurs. In the 1735 Filosofia morale Muratori extended his model of the well-ordered self, moderating the natural inclination to self-love (amor proprio).⁵² The ethics of self-regulation were applied by Muratori in legal as well as ecclesiological contexts, in his Dei difetti della giurisprudenza (1741) and Della divozione regolata (1747) respectively. The latter of these works explicitly aimed at reducing the indulgence of superstition and fanaticism—at regulating devotion—by enforcing a reformed liturgy through the church hierarchy. The invectives against epistemic extremes in Muratori’s early writings were restated in his 1745 Delle forze dell’intendimento, an anti-Pyrrhonist tract that called for occupancy of a middle ground between scepticism and credulity, “between deficiency and excess.”⁵³ In chapter twenty-four of this work a “place between two extremes” is prescribed under the banner of moderazione, opposed to dogmatici and grouped with the commitment to “not search for things too much above us, that is, things too obscure for and superior to our reason and comprehension.”⁵⁴ What is needed is epistemic modesty: the regulation of the rational faculty to operate at the level appropriate to the limits of human reason, whereby “each of us must regulate his credence.”⁵⁵

Muratori’s most explicit transposition of moderation from a scholarly-philosophical into a political ideal can be seen in his final work, the closest we have to a Muratorian political treatise, Della pubblica felicità. Published in 1749, a year before his death, Muratori presents in the work a model for the well-governed state, which would accentuate the “the societal good, the public good, or rather, the public happiness,” and mitigate the natural human desire to pursue “our private goods, and our particular happiness.”⁵⁶ In its first chapters, Della pubblica felicità reads as direct advice to the ruler: the “improvement of the world” (miglioramento del mondo) is contingent upon the conduct and policy of the ruler, for whom, he writes in a chapter upon legislative duties, the “Glory of the prince is his moderation.”⁵⁷ The Prince’s responsibility is to safeguard the “public tranquillity” (pubblica tranquilità) to resolve conflicts as they inevitably arise. In Muratori’s model, the prince does so by abiding to a Christian moral philosophy to “always remind himself that he is patron, but also father, of the people” and to govern with “judiciousness, moderation and attention to the happiness of the greatest number of his subject.”⁵⁸ The Prince must achieve the “wise regulation” (saggia regolatezza) of his people, must “regulate the lives of mortals” by holding close the virtues of “Honesty, Moderation and ‘Cleanliness’ (Pulizia).”⁵⁹ In a different conjunction, the Prince is instructed to learn from historical examples “Clemency, Moderation, Courage in adversity, Modesty in Prosperity, the Love owed to subjects, and many other virtues.”⁶⁰

Muratori’s Della pubblica felicità is not, however, a rehashed Renaissance “mirror of princes” work. Published a year after Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws and composed by an engaged and well-read mind, it recognised the necessity of modern commercial society. In Muratori’s proposed political order, however, the benefits of commercial society must be tempered by Christian morality. The consumption of luxury is a necessity for economic prosperity; the sumptuary laws previously applied damaged trade. But because luxury is prone to corrupt and lead to excess, it must be remedied, “constricted with the force of moderation.” As elsewhere in Della pubblica felicità, the type of moderation Muratori implores is paternalistic in tenor: “if the people make ill-advised (pazzi) agreements, he (the prince) will have to amend them himself: The Prince must be a good father, preventing and correcting with authority the public blunders of his children.”⁶¹

VII

Tracking the politicisation of Muratori’s later thought invites a reflection upon the qualities that separated his regulatory ideal of moderation from the tolerationist ideal of Le Clerc, as well as the political afterlives of both. Here, I’d like to suggest, a hard/soft metaphor is helpful.⁶² Moderation, for Muratori, was “hard,” principally a force for regulation, both of the self and of society. Moderation was to be applied “from the centre,” and it took effect within an ultimately stable philosophical, religious, social and political universe, which it itself served to further stabilise, or moderate. For Le Clerc, by contrast, moderation was “soft,” an extension of epistemic and theological modesty tending towards measured tolerationism. Applied inter-subjectively, it found its relevance in an unstable philosophical, religious and social universe, structured by conjecture, conventicle and personal faith. Moderation was not a resource for secular or religious leaders to rule, nor principally an instrument with which to govern the self; rather, it was a resource to help individuals to navigate life within civil society.

It’s tempting to designate these differences to confessional divergences: a progressive, Protestant moderation juxtaposed against a conservative, Catholic form. There is something to this, but it is overly reductive. Or, at least, while the “soft” moderation proposed by Le Clerc was unpalatable to most Catholics, on the grounds that it implied religious heterodoxy and social instability, the “hard” moderation prized by Muratori was well-established within Protestant Europe. This can be appreciated by observing a similar bifurcation within moderation rising to the surface in Restoration England.

A political variation on Le Clerc’s “soft,” tolerationist ideal of moderation can be located in the writings of his correspondent John Locke. Locke’s case for “just and moderate government” in his Second Treatise was praised, though not wholly uncritically, by Le Clerc in a review published in his Bibliothèque universelle in 1690. Le Clerc lauded Locke’s middle path between the extremes of “those who raise with such strength the Power of Sovereigns such that their own position is no different from slaves” and “the others who, supporting the rights of the people, incite works which imagine that there is nothing wrong with throwing off the yoke of power all together.” Ultimately, in spite of some misgivings about its advocacy of political dissent, Le Clerc concluded that Locke’s via media is testament to his ability to have “treated with so much liberty, combined with moderation, this delicate subject.”⁶³

Although today widely recognised as a “moderate” thinker, Locke writes seldom of “moderation” in his published texts. Where he does, it is in direct relation to religious toleration. In the third exchange between Locke and Jonas Proast, concerning the former’s 1689 Epistola de tolerantia, Proast proposes to alleviate the severity of punishment for non-conformists, allowing only “moderate penalties to bring me to the Communion of the Church of God and to Conformity to the rules and orders of it.”⁶⁴ In response, Locke seizes upon Proast’s indistinct usage of “moderate” and accuses him of abusing the language of moderation. When, Locke argued, Proast suggests that “moderate penalties” should be applied, or that force should be “duly tempered” he is, in essence, allowing the magistrate to dictate the degree and form of moderation and temperance applied. This is, as Locke calls it, a “Magistrate’s Moderation,” contingent upon the inclination of the ruler.⁶⁵ In practice, he concludes, “by Moderate here, you mean nothing … moderate and convenient may, when you come to interpret them, signify what Punishments you please.”⁶⁶ Against the arbitrariness latent within Proast’s paternalistic model, Locke’s own blueprint for “just and moderate government” relied upon an institutional architecture to secure moderate rule, and civil society to secure a moderate populace.

Condemning Proast’s paternalistic “Rule of Moderation, which as I have shewn, is no Rule at all,” Locke does not articulate an alternative moderation.⁶⁷ By rebutting Proast’s “magistrate’s moderation,” however, Locke is framing in political terms a usage which was more properly at home within ecclesiological and theological debates in Restoration England. What I have above termed Le Clerc’s “soft” tolerationist ideal of moderation was an influential force in England from the mid-seventeenth century, invoked by non-conformists and so-called Latitudinarians.⁶⁸ In invoking moderation as central to models of religious toleration, these Churchmen were re-claiming the concept of moderation from figures within the Anglican establishment—such as Proast—for whom moderation was principally a “hard,” regulatory mechanism for ensuring conformity within a unified Church.⁶⁹

Conflict between these two moderations rumbled on through mid-to-late seventeenth-century England, before assuming centre stage after the Occasional Conformity crisis of 1702.⁷⁰ This pitched “High Church” defenders of the Anglican establishment against non-, or “occasional,” conformists: for the former, the moderation claimed by the latter was tantamount to indifference; for the latter, the moderation claimed by the former was repressive and, on their terms, immoderate.

The “battle over moderation” which ensued in English ecclesiastical politics over the next fifteen years was anatomized by the Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift. Writing in 1717 Swift observed the confusion which “ariseth from a mistaken meaning of the word moderation; a word which hath been much abused, and bandied about for several years past.”⁷¹ The two moderations, in Swift’s account, faced off against one another. The “soft” moderation of the dissenters and nonconformists amounted, as above stated, to indifference: it proclaimed to “put an end to our divisions, and to make a general union among Protestants,” but their interventions actually leading only to further division and disarray, and an accommodation of “fanatics.”⁷² The “hard” moderation of the Anglican establishment was a better mechanism for safeguarding orthodoxy, but it tended to be overly prescriptive, itself a source of conflicts between factions. In this contest between moderations, Swift bid that we “beware of the word, moderation,” while himself taking a mediating stance.⁷³ For Swift, “a man truly moderate is steady in the doctrine and discipline of the Church” even as he balances this with “a due Christian charity to all who dissent from it out of a principle of conscience; the freedom of which, he thinketh, ought to be fully all.”⁷⁴ Swift’s “man truly moderate” rhetorically straddles the “hard” and “soft” varieties of moderation, moderation-as-restraint and moderation-as-toleration. Through this manoeuvre, he works to mitigate the slide into factionalism in politics as in religion.⁷⁵

The confrontation between concepts of moderation in England at the dawn of the eighteenth century has been cast as an episode within the unfurling of “a quintessentially English quality of moderation” itself symptomatic of “a (specifically English) modernity.”⁷⁶ As we have seen, however, the terms of the debate, the rival modes of moderation, found parallels in other European contexts. Muratori himself can be seen as harbouring a species of civil, tolerationist moderation, playing out at an intermediary scale between the moderation of the self and the moderation of the state: the moderation of others, or the regulation of the self in relation to others. This features in his Filosofia morale and earlier in his 1715 Riflessioni:

Since we cannot reform the world in accordance with the laws of right reason, it is appropriate that right reason conforms itself to the world; suffering, pitying; and knowing how to live with those whom we must, so that we live together, and say of all men that which Tacitus says is necessary for Princes alone: Bonos voto expetere, qualescumque tolerare (I wish for the best, but endure whatever comes).⁷⁷

As for Swift, this appeal to tolerationist moderation is undergirded by Muratori’s ideal of charity, the amor del prossimo, expounded in his 1724 Della carità cristiana. Ultimately, however, this “softer” mode for interpersonal governance is subordinate to the “harder,” regulatory mode of moderation which pervades his Della pubblica felicità. In that work the quote from Tacitus—tolerance as endurance—recurs but with its original Tacitean meaning reinstated, not as endorsement for governing relations between men, but those between subjects and a prince.⁷⁸ If something like two concepts of moderation can be found elsewhere in eighteenth-century Europe, what was peculiar about the English case is that their tension was drawn to the surface. This could be viewed as a result of England’s ecclesiological constitution, or the relatively early emergence in England of party politics. Both gave saliency to the case for Swift’s ideal of “true moderation”—now framed as a compromise between moderations—in the mature eighteenth century.⁷⁹

VIII

As they survey the interface between intellectual culture and political thought in early eighteenth-century Europe, historians tend to start thinking about Enlightenment and looking for its emergence. They do so out of habit, but also because the presence of an Enlightenment promises to fold historical research into political philosophy.⁸⁰ To this end, a taxonomy of Enlightenments has been established, among which a “moderate” variant has been observed. This “moderate” enlightenment has mainly been defined negatively as the inversion of the “radical” enlightenment pursued most insistently by Jonathan Israel—effectively on the grounds that it sought to reconcile reason and revelation, modernity and tradition, in various formations.⁸¹ Little attention has been paid to the relationship between ideas of enlightenment and moderation. How might the two faces of moderation, “hard” and “soft,” proposed in this article be understood as tendencies within the Enlightenment?

In a recent article James Alexander has proposed a new tripartite taxonomy of Enlightenments, retaining Israel’s “radical” variant, and posing alongside it not a “moderate” counterpart but rather a “sceptical enlightenment,” modelled on that of John Robertson, and a “liberal enlightenment,” on that of J. G. A. Pocock.⁸² Here Alexander acknowledges that his second enlightenment, Robertson’s sceptical form, is in practice a “positive version” of “what Israel has called ‘Moderate Enlightenment’,” in so far as it is realist and pragmatic, promotes incremental worldly reform based on a posteriori reasoning, seeks compromise between reason and revelation while criticising superstition, and is stridently anti-, and then counter-revolutionary.⁸³ “Liberal enlightenment,” more clearly Alexander’s construct if modelled on Pocock’s work, differs from this in various ways, but principally in politics, where it seeks a secular, but post-Christian—in the sense that it is tacitly derivative from Christian morality, and more precisely Arminian theology—basis for civil order.

In a taxonomical sense, Alexander’s move is to discard the moderate enlightenment as conceptually nebulous and propose two alternative enlightenments which are more coherent. What I would like to suggest is that Alexander’s sceptical enlightenment—to which, representing a Catholic, conservative strain, we might reasonably wed the late Muratori, with his epistemology of productive doubt feeding into an agenda for incremental reform and societal betterment in this world—and his liberal enlightenment—of which, following Pocock, his archetypal representative is Le Clerc, principally for his attitude to history—might be usefully seen as two wings of a reconstituted moderate enlightenment. This moderate enlightenment need not be defined, as by Israel, in the negative, as insufficiently radical, but rather in substantive terms, for instance as “Enlightened moderation.” To use Alexander’s categories, “Liberal Enlighteners” like Le Clerc and Locke, and “Sceptical Enlighteners” like Muratori, but also, for instance, Montesquieu, shared a language of moderation—and all were inhabitants of Israel’s amorphous “moderate enlightenment.”⁸⁴ But the “moderations” to which they appeal varied, and signified manifestations of two distinct wings of an internally contested concept of moderation at work in eighteenth-century Europe.

This proposal has a bearing upon how we assess and interpret political moderation in the modern world. One agenda for self-identifying moderates—since it has been meaningful to use “moderate” as a recognisable political category—has been to articulate an approach to politics which brokers a compromise between “sceptical-conservative” and “progressive-liberal” ideologies.⁸⁵ In response to the advent of ideological polarisation, nineteenth-century moderates promoted a politics of the juste milieu, not necessarily of consensus, but of compromise, built atop a rejection of the binary choice between revolution or the ancien régime.⁸⁶ In the terms laid out in this article, this agenda is akin—though not directly analogous—to that proposed by Swift, accommodating both “hard” and “soft” categories of moderation, moderation-as-restraint and moderation-as-toleration. The exercise of political moderation in the modern age might be understood as an ongoing process of plastering over a fissure: not only, as moderates sometimes imagine, an ideological fissure within the political constitution of modernity, but a fissure within the modern concept of moderation itself.

It is the handling of this fissure that provides the tradition of political moderation with its funambulatory character: with both, for its exponents, its dynamism and, for its critics, its fuzziness. Becoming more familiar with the “frozen conflicts” within moderation—the residue of its complex past—offers a means to better refine our understanding of moderation as a political tradition, and to assess its value for the present.

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Funding

Research for this article received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research programme (project id: 842070).

Notes

^1. Skinner, “A Third Concept of Liberty.”

^2. Spencer, “Four Conceptions of Freedom”; Forst, “Political Liberty: Integrating Five Conceptions of Autonomy.”

^3. Nelson, “Liberty: One Concept Too Many,” 63.

^4. A position marked out in the introduction to Nelson’s The Greek Tradition, 18.

^5. Skinner, “Concepts Only Have Histories,” 1 (italics in the original).

^6. See Palonen, “History of Concepts.”

^7. Koselleck, “Richtlinien für das Lexikon politisch-sozialer Begriffe der Neuzeit,” 91–94.

^8. Working with Koselleck’s method but focusing on moderation in the ancien regime, ended by its adaptation in the eighteenth century. See Kuhfuß, “‘Moderation’”; On adapting Kuhfuß’ model, see Benrekassa, “‘Modéré’, ‘modération’, ‘modérantisme’.”

^9. It served to “fixe les limites de l’Augustin des doctes.” Quantin, “L’Augustine du XVIIe siècle,” 14.

^10. In addition to Quantin, “L’Augustine du XVIIe siècle,” see Backus, “The ‘Confessionalization’ of Augustine”; Visser, Reading Augustine in the Reformation.

^11. Volume 11 of the Maurist opera omnia opens with a “praefatio generalis,” penned by the senior Benedictine scholar Jean Mabillon. See Kriegel, “Le complot janséniste”; De Francheschi, “L’orthodoxie thomiste.”

^12. Le Clerc wrote to Locke on 13 January 1701 that he had begun work on “une édition des oeuvres de S. Augustin, dont il va paroitre une essai.” Le Clerc, Epistolario, 293.

^13. Le Clerc, Appendix augustiniana: “ex recta ratione, Grammaticaque ac cerissima Scripturae Interpretatione deducta. … Aegre serent, nimirum, nos de S. Augustino, de quo ferme quasi de oraculo quodam, non sine horrore religios, loqui solent, ita saepe egisse quasi de quovis alio homine ageremus” (praefatio, iii).

^14. On Augustine’s thought on free will, Le Clerc concludes: “sed haec ad Theologicas quaestiones non pertinent. Multa hic sunt quae Platonismum redolent” (Appendix Augustiniana, 555). Elsewhere, Augustine dealt with the Trinity under the influence of “Platonicae & Pythagoricae nugae” (600–602).

^15. Ibid., praefatio: “mirum tamen est S. Augustino taedium aut somnum non obrepisse, idem toties dicenti” (and similar remarks on 607).

^16. In general terms I lean upon Pitassi, Entre croire et savoir. Le Clerc’s assault on tradition rose to the fore in his 1685 exchange with Richard Simon, on which see Bernier, “Le problème de la tradition.”

^17. Le Clerc, Parrhasiana: “considérer dans ses premières sources, sans y mêler aucunes décisions humaines, ni aucunes explications de ce qu’on n’entend point” (341).

^18. Schuurman, “The Empiricist Logic of Ideas.”

^19. Le Clerc. Ars critica: “Haud magis quaeritur hıc quid verum sit, quid falsum, seu an id quod legimus veritati consentaneum sit, necne; sed tantum quı possimus intelligere quid sibi velint ii, quorum scripta legimus. Uno verbo, quaeritur vera dictorum sententia, non veritas eorum quae dicuntur” (3–4). Much has been made of Le Clerc’s hermeneutics, cleverly dubbed by J. G. A. Pocock as “proto-Skinnerian” in Barbarism and Religion, Vol. 5, 99.

^20. Collis, “Reading the Bible in the ‘Early Enlightenment’.”

^21. Launoy, La véritable tradition, 23–28.

^22. Le Clerc to John Locke, 10 February 1702: “pour pouvoir vendre les autres tomes en pais Catholiques” (Epistolario, 368–69).

^23. Muratori announces his initiation of the work in a letter to Antonio Magliabechi, 8 August 1704 (Carteggi con Mabillon… Maittaire, 411).

^24. Zeno to Muratori, 13 December 1704: “L’ars critica di Giovanni Le Clerc, dell’ultima edizione in tre tomi, qui si vende ordinariamente per venti lire. Se vi occorre, la uniro alle due copie dell’Augustinus vindicatus che non si sono ancora spedite” (Carteggi con Zacagni… Zurlini, 278).

^25. Muratori to Filippo del Torre, 25 March 1707, cited in Bertelli, Erudizione e storia, 389 note 63: “in quanti ai miei studi le diro in confidenza d’avere avanzata assai una mia opera, che servirà di difesa a S. Agostino criticato dal Clerc, e perche l’argomento mio è più vasto porterà forse per titlo De ingeniorum moderatione in Religionis negotio, dove tratterò de i diritti e de i freni che ha d’avere l’uomo in cercare, e insegnare la verità. Pensando io di parlare con una moderata liberta, dubito se potrò stampare il libro ovunque vorrò, e se v’abbia a mettere il mio nome. Percio la prego di tacere, e di credermi cattolicissimo perche tanto i cattholici, quanto gli eretici han bisogno di tale trattato.”

^26. Muratori, De ingeniorum moderatione in religionis negotio, 69–76.

^27. Ibid., 71.

^28. Ibid., Preface (unpaginated).

^29. Lehner, “De moderatione in Sacra Theologia.”

^30. On the misfortunes of the De ingeniorum moderatione, see Vismara, “Muratori ‘immoderato’.”

^31. Muratori, De ingeniorum moderatione, chap. 15.

^32. Ibid., chap. 16.

^33. Ibid., Preface: “ut honesta ineatur naturali ingeniorum libertati cum Christiana moderatione concordia.”

^34. Ibid., chaps. 6 and 7, e.g., “non ingenium, non rationem excludimus a perquirenda Religione vera, sed eorum suademus moderationem” (57).

^35. Ibid.: “prudentia tum affectuum tum virtutum omnium dux & moderatrix futura est” (14).

^36. This point is stressed by Raimondi in I lumi dell’erudizione: “moderazione vuol dire due cose per il Muratori. C’è una moderazione che bisogna esigere dagli ingegni nella ricerca della verità, ma esiste anche una moderazione della autorità nei confronti della ricerca” (91).

^37. Muratori, Riflessioni (1715): “c’insegna a camminar pel mezzo, e non discendere negli estremi” (66): A few pages later he adds: “il buon gusto c’insegna a contenerci nel mezzo. Nel mezzo sta la Verità, e la Giustizia” (68).

^38. Ibid.: “non potranno essi di meno di non moderare in questa parte gli Appetiti, che tanto possono essere al nostra volere infesti; E conformandosi col BUON GUSTO” (23).

^39. On this “giusto mezzo,” see Bragagnolo, ”Lodovico Antonio Muratori,” 68–69; The best general study of Muratori’s scholarly development remains Bertelli, Erudizione e storia, and in English, on his theology, the overview in Vismara, “Ludovico Muratori—Enlightenment in a Tridentine Mode.”

^40. A definition constant through the first edition (1612) to the fourth (1729–1738). http://www.lessicografia.it/ricerca_libera.jsp (accessed 17 March 2022).

^41. Raimondi, I lumi dell’erudizione: “la struttura mentale del Muratori” (120).

^42. Le Clerc, Parrhasiana: “la recherche de la Vérité… en observant toujours toutes les mesures, que la prudence Chrétienne demande” (441–42).

^43. Ibid.: “A qui laisseroit-on le soin de la dire, & de la défendre?”

^44. Ibid.: “les interprètes des pensées qu’ils n’osent eux-mêmes publier… comme les bouches de la Verité & de la Liberté, opprimées presque par tout ailleurs… des fruits des semences de piété, de charité, & de toutes les vertus Chrétiennes. … Modération, qui s’établit peu à peu dans les esprits des plus habiles d’entre les Protestans” (442–43).

^45. Mulsow, “The ‘New Socinians’.”

^46. For a useful panorama, see Campbell, The Religion of the Heart. This broader tolerationist movement is the subject of Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture.

^47. Turrettini, Nubes testium pro moderato, 55: “exerceatur ubique, atque apud omnes, par Moderatio.”

^48. Ibid.: “haec semina Moderationis & Tolerantiae, Divinae benedictionis rore irrigata, feliciter germinent, & suavissimos fructos proferant, ad Dei gloriam, Ecclesiae aedificationem & concordiam, & nostram ipsorum Salutem” (56–57).

^49. On the theological affinity between Le Clerc and Turrettini, see two articles by Klauber, “Between Protestant Orthodoxy and Rationalism” and “The Drive Towards Protestant Union.”

^50. This factor is stressed by Franco Venturi in his Settecento riformatore: da Muratori a Beccaria, 162–86.

^51. Vecchi, “La critica del Muratori al Locke”; Continisio, Il governo delle passioni, 70–91; Locke’s influence on Muratori is overstated by Ferrone, who reduces Muratori’s mature thought to a “rejection of Locke’s morality and its utilitarianism, rationalism and vision of a strongly secular society open to social conflicts.” Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment, 179.

^52. In Muratori’s Filosofia morale ‘moderazione’ is used recurrently between chaps. 28 and 40, with relation to “amor proprio” (chap. 28), the “appetito della conservazione dell’individuo” (chap. 33), and “appetito della Libertà e del Comando” (chap. 36), among others.

^53. Muratori: “fra il difetto e l’eccesso,” in Delle forze dell’intendimento, Preface.

^54. Ibid.: “non cercar cose più alte di noi, cioè troppo scure e superiori alla nostra Ragione e comprensione” (324).

^55. Ibid.: “ognun di noi dee regolare la sua credenza” (330–31).

^56. Muratori, Della pubblica felicità, Preface: “bene della società, del bene pubblico, o sia della pubblica felicità… nostro private bene, della nostra particolar felicità.”

^57. Ibid., “Gloria del principe è la moderazione” (65; my emphasis).

^58. Ibid., “sempre si ricordi d’essere Padrone, ma anche padre del popolo suo…. Saviezza, Moderazione ed Attenzione alla Felicità di un numero si grande di Sudditi” (11).

^59. Ibid., “ben regolare la vita de’ mortali. … Onestà, Moderazione e Pulizia” (44).

^60. Ibid., “la Clemenza, la Moderazione, il Coraggio nelle aversità, la Modestia nelle prosperità, l’Amore dovuto a i Sudditi, e tante altre Virtù” (85).

^61. Ibid., “costringendo colla forza alla moderazione…. il Popolo fa de i pazzi contratti, ne sa emendarsi da se stesso: il Principe dee farla da buon Padre, impedendo e correggendo coll’autorità i pubblici spropositi de’ suoi Figli” (144)—this within a chapter on “Luxury.”

^62. This hard/soft analogy, seemingly absent from political theory, has been proposed cautiously by scholars of content moderation in digital media: see, for instance, Gorwa, Binns, and Katzenbach, “Algorithmic Content Moderation,” 3.

^63. Le Clerc, Bibliothèque universelle et historique, vol. 19: “les uns [qui] élèvent si fort les droits des Puissances Souveraines, que la condition de leurs sujets n’est différente de celle des Esclaves” (559–60); and “les autres, en soutenant les droits des Peuples, donnent occasion aux brouillons de s’imager qu’il n’y a aucun mal à secouer les jougs des Puissances… traité avec autant de liberté, & de modération tout en semble d’un sujet si délicat” (591).

^64. Proast, A Third Letter Concerning Toleration, 22. On the Proast-Locke debate, see Tate, Liberty, Toleration and Equality.

^65. Locke, A Third Letter for Toleration, 132, 128.

^66. Ibid., 108.

^67. Ibid., 44.

^68. Variations of this include Penn, Perswasive to Moderation; before this Fowler, Principles and Practices; and between the two, Bolde, A Plea for Moderation. For a survey of tolerationist arguments in England and their opponents after 1660, see Goldie, “The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England.”

^69. Among the most explicit accounts was Puller, Moderation of the Church of England, after Hall, On Christian Moderation. A good account of a similar dynamic between rival concepts of moderation is recounted in Ahnert, The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, 66–70.

^70. This conflict has been exposed at length by Sirota, “The Occasional Conformity Controversy,” and in a broader context by Knights, “Occasional Conformity,” and by Lake, “Joseph Hall, Robert Skinner.” A chronologically longer, though somewhat idiosyncratic view, is in Shagan, The Rule of Moderation.

^71. Swift, “On Brotherly Love.”

^72. Swift elsewhere recognises this moderation to be “the modern sense of the word,” in “The Sentiments of a Church of England Man,” 399.

^73. Swift, “On Brotherly Love,” 469.

^74. Ibid., 470.

^75. Swift’s stance is close to that suggested—and adjudged to be normatively inadequate—by Shagan as “moderate toleration,” in The Rule of Moderation, 288–325.

^76. Ibid., 10, 340.

^77. Muratori, Riflessioni: “Da che noi non possiamo riformare il Mondo, secondo le leggi della retta Ragione, fa di mestiere che la retta Ragione si conformi al Mondo, soffrendo, compatendo; e saprendo convivere con chi bisogna, che noi conviviamo, e dicendo degli Uomini tutti all’occasioni cio, che Tacito disse più necessariamente de soli Principi: Bonos voto expetere, qualescumque tolerare” (139).

^78. Muratori, Pubblica felicità, 22–23.

^79. For instance, see Sorkin, “William Warburton’s ‘Heroic Moderation’.”

^80. A slide reflected upon in Robertson, “Enlightenment and Modernity.”

^81. As laid out concisely in Israel, Enlightenment Contested: “neither the historian nor the philosopher is likely to get very far with discussing ‘modernity’ unless he or she starts by differentiating Radical Enlightenment from conservative—or as it is called in this study—moderate mainstream Enlightenment. For the difference between reason alone and reason combined with faith and tradition was a ubiquitous and absolute difference” (11).

^82. Alexander, “Radical, Sceptical and Liberal Enlightenment.”

^83. Ibid., 267.

^84. On Montesquieu’s “regulatory” concept of moderation, see Benrekassa, “‘Modéré’, ‘modération’, ‘modérantisme’,” 10–15; see also Radasanu, “Montesquieu on Moderation, Monarchy and Reform,” taking issue with “liberal” interpretations of Montesquieu’s moderation; in this Special Issue, see Thomas Osborne, “Moderation as Government: Montesquieu and the Divisibility of Power.”

^85. I follow Condren here in viewing the shift between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as witnessing a “shift from clusters of well established metaphors in political discourse to a mutually defining set of dispositional labels [and] a significant realignment of terms, their associations and meanings,” within which “moderate” along with “radical” assumed something like its contemporary political-ideological meaning. Condren, “Radicals, Conservatives and Moderates,” 535.

^86. Ankersmit, “On the Origin, Nature and Future of Representative Democracy,” 91–101.