Thanks to the Scientific Revolution and Newton in particular, we have laws of nature as understood by science: gravity is universal. Newton’s considerable impact on the Enlightenment is undeniable, and Voltaire, a main torchbearer in France, was in England at the time of Newton’s funeral, whose passing was a national event, buried as he was inside Westminster Abbey. From the laws of nature and Newton’s clockwork universe, laws of society and those governing man – regarded as rational and self-determining - were inferred. The concept of progress was also developed during the Enlightenment from Bacon and Descartes’ earlier notion of man who was seen as having power over nature and as having the ability to shape his environment.
Even the nature of law itself was wedded to science and based on reason. We find it in Montesquieu, who writes near the beginning of The Spirit of the Laws (1748): “Law in general is human reason insofar as it governs all the peoples of the earth; and the political and civil laws of each nation should be only the particular cases to which reason is applied.”[1] Reasonable law is, of course, not arbitrary, but written and for all to see, hence the rise of the idea of constitutions.
An early instance of experimenting with written constitutional laws occurred at the middle of the 17th century – also the height of the Scientific Revolution, at least judging from Hobbes’ work on the mechanics of English politics post-Charles I as expressed in Leviathan (1651) - during Cromwell’s ill-fated Protectorate. This was a brief deviation from the much longer English tradition of an unwritten Constitution. The American Declaration of Independence (1776), with its Lockean objection to “a long train of abuses” as observed prior to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, is a document also inspired by the Interregnum of the English Civil Wars, yet an Enlightenment product, as well.[2] Similarly, the U.S. Constitution (1789), with its “separation of powers”, its framing of American self-governance, and supreme legal authority is an expression of Enlightenment reasoning.
However, with Trump we see the rise of the Anti-Enlightenment: racism, xenophobia, nationalism, populism, prejudice, abuses of power, and, of course, pronounced anti-science rhetoric made more evident by his appalling mishandling of the Coronavirus. The Revolutionary “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” of 1789, although French, was addressed to “man” – a quintessential Enlightenment notion, much like the Paris Climate Accord (2016) which speaks to the future of mankind. Any informed individual knows that Trump’s denial of climate change is anti-science and not based on the evidence or sound reasoning. But what we also need to realize is that his attacks on the American Constitution, his defence of a 17—year-old alleged killer of two Black Lives Matter protesters, and his chronic abuse of law in general – is, in effect, profoundly anti-scientific. With respect to this impeached President’s stance on “law”, Trump mind - from the perspective of Enlightenment reasoning - is wholly non-science, or rather nonsense, and consistently anti-scientific.
[1] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. and tr. Anne Cohler, Basia Miller and
Harold Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 8. (Book I, Ch.
3).
[2] John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 415. Second
Treatise, para. 225. See also Carl Lotus
Backer, The Declaration of Independence:
A Study in the History of Political Ideas (Bolton, ON: Amazon, 2017 [First
published by Harcourt, Bruce and Company in 1922.]), p. 98. Becker points out
that “The complete works of both Locke and Newton were at the Harvard library
at least as early as 1773. Locke’s works
were listed in the Princeton catalogue of 1760. As early as 1755 the Yale
library contained the works of Locke, Newton, and Descartes, besides two
popular expositions of the Newtonian philosophy.” (p. 42).
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