The Irish Enlightenment
I have a couple of times come across the idea of “The Irish Enlightenment”. What exactly was it? I’ve wondered this for quite some time.
In the early 18th century especially, there existed a cluster of thinkers in or from Ireland whose ideas seem important by modern standards: Francis Hutcheson, Richard Cantillon, Jonathan Swift, George Berkeley, and Edmund Burke probably rank first among them. William Petty, the early statistician, should maybe be mentioned as well.
These individuals don’t feature very prominently in contemporary Irish culture or Irish education: one rarely hears about Hutcheson or Cantillon. I think this is significantly because they didn’t accord with the Irish self-conception that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They are emphatically not Gaelic revival figures and fit awkwardly beneath the nationalist palimpsest. All except Cantillon are Protestant and many lived or worked in the UK. Trinity had a Berkeley library but “denamed” it in 2023. In school, the great Irish thinkers were from the late 18th and 19th centuries: Wolfe Tone, Daniel O’Connell, and Charles Parnell.
What can we say about these earlier Irish intellectuals?
Hutcheson was “probably the most influential and respected moral philosopher in America in the eighteenth century”, according to Norman Fiering. In Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, he introduced the concept of “unalienable rights”, with the collective right to resist oppressive government, which was used at Harvard as a textbook as early as the 1730s. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams were among his fans. In Inventing America, Garry Wills argues that these authors of the Declaration of Independence drew most of all on Hutcheson. He corresponded with David Hume and taught Adam Smith. While better known as a philosopher, he wrote extensively about economics: he emphasized the importance of private property and the division of labor. He repeatedly condemned slavery.
Richard Cantillon introduced was the first person to use “entrepreneur” in its modern sense. Reading his Essai, one is struck by the clarity of its thought and its modernity. In a sense, what is noteworthy is how little there is to say about it: it feels quite contemporary and basically correct. He prefigures Malthusian population reasoning and recognizes that risk and uncertainty are central forces in economics. By separating intrinsic value from market pricing, he adumbrates subjective valuation concepts later emphasized by the Austrians. His description of the emergent order arising from the decentralized market forces coordinating landowners, farmers, tradespeople, and workers sounds downright Hayekian. Schumpeter: “Cantillon was the first to make this circular flow concrete and explicit, to give us a bird’s-eye view of economic life.”
Swift is best known as an irascible satirist. However, he was principally a pamphleteer: a hectoring intellectual activist. In this he was remarkably prodigious. His complete works is a 19 volume collection. He saw that “Ireland is the poorest of all civilized countries in Europe, with every natural advantage to make it one of the richest”, and was preoccupied with practical questions pertaining to this goal. He successfully advocated for monetary reform (in Drapier’s Letters) and thought extensively about how to stimulate both manufacture and industry in Ireland as well as a culture conducive to prosperity. He spends a great deal of time on import substitution, the balance of trade, and the stimulation of manufacture. His views are very mercantilist by today’s standards, but always in service of the question: how to develop. He composed his own epitaph: he sought to be seen as “a strenuous champion of liberty.”
Berkeley is maybe the most directly economically-relevant and in my view the most underrated. Like Hutcheson, he’s best-known as a philosopher, but, in The Querist (1735), he writes what is probably the first work of development economics. It is composed in an unusual form – 895 questions, culminating in one ultimate question: “whose fault is it if poor Ireland still continues poor?” In this, he assesses that Ireland has little excuse. After describing a vision of prosperity, he asks “whether Ireland be not as well qualified for such a state as any nation under the sun?” Like Swift, he’s disgusted by vanity and indulgence. He has a sophisticated understanding of concepts like the velocity of money. Most of all, he sees culture and human capital as being as closely linked with economic development as more conventional trade, monetary, and fiscal matters, and, unusually for a work of economics, he spends a great deal of time on the former. The Irish, in his eyes, are indolent: we need to become more skilled and more industrious. In his emphasis on culture and human capital, his outlook reminds me of Park Chung-hee and Lee Kuan Yew. Perhaps even Deng Xiaoping.
Burke is usually considered a political thinker, but his economic writings are substantial and important. He advocated for free trade (leading to the removal of restrictions on the grain trade), denounced colonial extraction (particularly in India, with some influence), and made a powerful case for market pricing and laissez-faire policy in Thoughts and Details on Scarcity. In emphasizing the cultural and institutional foundations of markets, he anticipates arguments later made by Karl Polanyi.
(As an aside, in rereading Reflections on the Revolution in France, I was surprised at how unpersuasive I found it. Unlike Berkeley, he gives almost no attention to economic outcomes, and his implicit theory just can’t explain which ruptures and revolutions one should support. If we accept his arguments, how should we feel about the formation of the Irish state, the creation of UAE or Singapore, and the fall of the Soviet Union? I was left wondering why Reflections is the most famous of his works. Is it because of the somewhat clickbaity title?)
In surveying these thinkers, one is reminded that Ireland was an oppressed polity. Hutcheson, Burke, and Cantillon all did much of their work outside of Ireland; in publishing their work at home, Swift and Berkeley resorted to unusual forms (satire, rhetorical propositions) and, often, anonymity. (Both The Querist and Drapier’s Letters were first published without their names.)
How should we view the movement as a whole? Well, the timing is important: Cantillon published his Essai in 1755, Swift Drapier’s Letters in 1724, and Berkeley The Querist in 1735. It seems to me that, before 1750, the Irish thinkers have a strong claim to leading the world in the field of economics and to having collectively sketched out much of the core of the field in broadly correct terms. In Petty you have economic statistics; in Cantillon you have risk, market pricing, and much else; in Berkeley, you have a theory of national banking plus development economics; in Swift you have proto-monetarism. The claim is not that they figured everything out or were right on all points, but which other school or group could you rank ahead of them? Smith published Wealth of Nations in 1776 and The French physiocrats, who were very important, came later: Quesnay’s first piece wasn’t published until 1756.
Smith surely instigated economics as a proper discipline with his main work. The full title is An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which is a very “Irish school” framing. And, sure enough, Smith studied under Hutcheson in Glasgow (recalling that he was “the most acute, the most distinct, and the most philosophical of all my teachers”) and explicitly cites Cantillon. In his letters, he refers to Swift’s work. He owned a copy of The Querist. He was friends with Edmund Burke. None of this should detract from Smith’s own intellectual achievement, but the ties to the Irish Enlightenment are strikingly strong.
While the group may have influenced Smith and many others, part of what is striking about the Irish Enlightenment is how influential it wasn’t at home. Irish poverty endured for over 200 subsequent years of unwise and destructive governance. Much of this policy was obviously the fault of the British (and indeed deliberately so, as in the Penal Laws), but De Valera’s autarkic protectionism in the early days of the Irish Free State kept Ireland destitute as late as the 1960s, until a liberal turn was eventually instigated by Lemass and others.
Most of all, the Irish Enlightenment seems to me an instance of small group theory. I’m fond of the thought that between great man and structuralist theories of history there lies an intermediate position: the small group, a colocated cauldron for iconoclastic thinking, can as a collective pioneer a novel direction. The romantics in Jena, the founders of Silicon Valley, the musicians behind punk. Unsurprisingly, the early Irish thinkers are closely connected. Swift and Berkeley attended the same school and were good friends. Hutcheson and Berkeley debated publicly, while Burke’s work is clearly downstream of Hutcheson’s.
It highlights the importance of simply asking the right question. Berkeley did not comprehensively diagnose why Ireland was poor, or what to do, but he did realize that “what are we doing that makes us poor?” is the key lens.
There is probably something in it about the value of being an outsider. One gets the sense that Swift and Berkeley would have been less novel had they been absorbed into the English power structure.
The Irish Enlightenment certainly shows the fragility of good ideas and of auspicious movements. Ireland did not adopt their perspective, and inasmuch as their program was intended to remedy the plaintive Irish economic situation, it did not succeed on the kind of timeframe they would have hoped.
But for me it also shows the endurance of good ideas. Ireland itself may not have been particularly influenced, but Smith was, as were the American founding fathers, Voltaire, Kant, Hume, de Tocqueville, and, eventually, the Austrians and the free market movement. (Hayek repeatedly cites Burke as a model and wrote an introduction to a reprint of Cantillon.) In 1958, 223 years after The Querist, TK Whitaker published Economic Development, a landmark report that set forth an open and trade-led vision for Irish economic growth. The report was enacted by the Lemass government and set the foundations for Ireland’s economic boom over the subsequent decades. It's hard to precisely attribute Whitaker’s intellectual influences, but he describes West Germany’s social-market policies as a model (Walter Eucken, who led the Ordoliberal school in Germany, was alongside Hayek a founding attendee of the Mont Pelerin Society), and he was surely familiar with the work of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, established to promote liberal Austrian ideas. That is all to say, in a very roundabout way, the intellectual program catalyzed by the Irish Enlightenment thinkers in the early 1700s endured, and did, eventually, with a few century delay and no small number of digressions, lead to the remarkable melioration of Ireland’s economic circumstances.