Fighting for progress

It is very difficult to uncover accurate connections between ideas and events in history. A.C. Grayling is a philosopher and polemicist with a particular story to tell about the rise of freedom in the 17th century. In the introduction to his new book he writes:

I hope the sketches offered here will illustrate the claim that the 17th century is truly the moment that history changed course so profoundly that everything before it is another world, and that it and the times since are our world.

He replaces the conventional division of history into everything that happened before the birth of Christ and everything that has happened afterwards, with a new bifurcation: everything that happened when humans thought the world was the centre of the universe, and everything that has happened since.

England’s 17th century was a time of unprecedented constitutional crisis and regime change, which encompassed the civil war, the execution of Charles I, Oliver Cromwell’s rise to power as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, the restoration of Charles II, the short reign of James II, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that brought William of Orange and his wife Mary (the daughter of James II) to the throne. It was not until 1707 that England and Scotland joined their parliaments to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

It was also a century of European fighting, during which England engaged in the Dutch-Portuguese War (1602–61); the Anglo-Spanish War (1625–30); the Anglo-French War (1627–29); the Portuguese Restoration War (1640–68); the Irish Confederate Wars (1641–53); the First, Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars (1652–74); the Franco-Dutch War (1672–8) and the Nine Years War (1688–97).

Finally, it was a century of scientific advancement, including the discoveries of luminaries like Robert Boyle, William Harvey, Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton, harbingers of the modern world; an epoch of international correspondence networks of the kind maintained by the ‘intelligencier’ Samuel Hartlib, a Polish refugee; and a time of new learned societies, such as the
Royal Society, founded in London after the restoration to improve knowledge of the natural world.

Grayling asks: ‘How does one account for the coexistence of the flowering of genius alongside the attrition of such conflict?’ At the risk of sounding
Pollyannaish he twice evokes the old adage: ‘It’s an ill wind that blows no good.’