Was there an Enlightenment in Ireland? Was there even a distinctively Irish Enlightenment? Few scholars have bothered even to pose this question. Historians of Ireland during the era of Protestant Ascendancy have tended to be all-rounders rather than specialists; their traditional preoccupations are constitutional clashes between London and Dublin, religious conflict, agrarian unrest and popular politicization. With few exceptions there has been no tradition of intellectual history, and little interest in the methodological debates associated with the rise of the “Cambridge school”.Footnote ¹ Most advances in our understanding of Irish philosophical writing have consequently originated outside Ireland's history departments. One by-product of recent work on the Scottish Enlightenment has been the rediscovery of the “Molesworth Circle” by two scholars engaged in a painstaking reconstruction of Francis Hutcheson's early career in Dublin.Footnote ² At the other end of the century, meanwhile, some of the most exciting and ambitious attempts to conceptualize the republicanism of the United Irishmen have come from a leading historian of revolutionary France, James Livesey.Footnote ³ His previous research on the “commercial republicanism” of Montesquieu, Adam Ferguson and Brissot has suggested a new framework for understanding Irish radicals such as Wolfe Tone, Thomas Addis Emmet and, in particular, Arthur O'Connor.

Anyone familiar with the rapidity, energy and eclecticism that distinguish Livesey's style will not be surprised to find in his latest book an imaginative recovery of “minor” writers combined with an audacious attempt to upset some of our most fundamental assumptions about the eighteenth century. Civil Society and Empire juxtaposes the brief efflorescence of Irish political economy in the 1720s and 1730s with the canonical works of the Scottish Enlightenment, and in so doing invites us to rethink the contours of the Enlightenment itself. A remarkable barrage of economic treatises appeared in Dublin during these decades, including Sir John Browne's Seasonable Remarks on Trade (1728), Thomas Prior's List of the Absentees of Ireland (1729) and Arthur Dobbs's Essay on the Trade and Improvement of Ireland (1729–31). The most impressive were Samuel Madden's “improvement” manifesto, Reflections and Resolutions for the Gentlemen of Ireland (1738) and Bishop Berkeley's Querist series (1735–7), with its innovative contribution to monetary theory.Footnote ⁴ The potential for interlocking studies of Dublin and Edinburgh has been apparent since Nicholas Phillipson's seminal interpretations of the Scottish Enlightenment. Phillipson has constructed a subtle picture of the provincial elites—gentry, mercantile and intellectual—who populated the rich club culture of Edinburgh and Glasgow, and sought to regenerate their country in the aftermath of Union by harnessing the political, economic and cultural energies of imperial Britain.Footnote ⁵ Ireland was relegated to the status of a “depending” kingdom by the Declaratory Act of 1720, which triggered a similar sense of political disorientation. As in Scotland, the experience of famine (most especially in 1728–9) stimulated an urgent preoccupation with agricultural and industrial improvement, which found institutional expression in the establishment of the Dublin Society in 1731. Connections and comparisons with neighbouring Scotland seem even more irresistible following the enthusiastic reception of John Robertson's The Case for Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760. Might Ireland fit Robertson's model of an intellectually coherent Enlightenment, emanating from the edges of Europe, committed to “understanding, and hence to advancing, the causes and conditions of human betterment in this world”?Footnote ⁶

Although indebted to Robertson and (more especially) Phillipson, the priorities and methods adopted in Civil Society and Empire are unexpectedly different. The contents of this extraordinarily wide-ranging book are not easy to summarize—or, indeed, to reconcile. Several of its chapters stand autonomously as complementary essays rather than structural supports. These include an analysis of the coffee house (actually focused on England) and an essay on the correspondence networks of the remarkable Blacks, a mercantile family whose members were scattered between Belfast, Glasgow and Bordeaux. Leaving aside for a moment the wider question of “civil society”, the most helpful starting point is the book's second chapter, “Improvement and the Discourse of Society in Eighteenth-Century Ireland”.Footnote ⁷ The nub of the argument is that the Dublin Society was “the site for the major debate on the nature of the post-revolutionary polity”, a debate in which a new vision of the Irish nation was formulated. The crucial catalyst for this development was the work of Charles Davenant, who provided a serious challenge to traditional conceptions of the kingdom of Ireland, and at the same time offered the materials to redefine the Irish nation in a “genuinely novel way” (59, 66). Istvan Hont has previously identified Davenant as a key figure in the analysis of international trade, and also highlighted his argument that the development of the Irish woollen trade represented a threat to England's markets and should therefore be prohibited.Footnote ⁸ Like the other topics considered in Livesey's book, most of them related to the increasing application of socio-economic categories in eighteenth-century thought, Davenant's impact on Ireland is crying out for systematic investigation.

Even more original is Livesey's account of the “rich discussions” (123) that preoccupied Irish Catholics between 1695, when the first penal laws were passed, and the pro-Catholic pamphlets written by Charles O'Conor in the 1750s. Irish-language scholars, most notably Breandán Ó Buachalla and Vincent Morley, have transformed our understanding of Ascendancy Ireland by retrieving the lost voices of some of those Irish men and women—no doubt a large majority—who rejected the Williamite settlement, but the activities and networks of those Catholics who sought a pragmatic accommodation with Hanoverian rule remain terra incognita. The problem of empire was of course experienced in radically different ways by the native Irish, who were excluded from Parliament and denied the right to vote on the grounds of their religion. Catholic writing of this era is nevertheless described by Livesey as assertive, sophisticated and complex (98, 107). In a strikingly novel, if rather elusive, move, he enlists these Irish Jacobites for his project of defining the “extra-political space of civil society” (156). They thus help to prepare the ground for the hero of Livesey's narrative, David Hume, who emerges in a chapter entitled “A Habitat for Hopeful Monsters”. As with previous scholars, most notably Phillipson, Livesey treats Hume's subversion of civic humanism and the ancient constitution as a specifically Scottish venture, an attempt to revise existing notions of virtue and liberty for a commercializing province of imperial Britain. But he endeavours to demonstrate that it was writing on Ireland—by Williamites and Jacobites alike—that formed the “vital background” to Hume's construction of a “new, civic ideal of Britishness” (159).

Let's examine these challenging propositions in more detail. It was a recurrent claim of Irish patriots that the legislative interference of the Westminster Parliament in their affairs reduced the inhabitants of Ireland to the condition of slaves, since they were bound by laws to which they had not consented.Footnote ⁹ This complaint was central to the foundational text of the Irish patriot tradition, Molyneux's Case of Ireland (1698): “The Right of being subject Only to such Laws to which Men give their own Consent, is so inherent to all Mankind, and founded on such Immutable Laws of Nature and Reason, that ‘tis not to be Alien'd, or Given up, by any Body of Men whatsover”. Charles Davenant countered this patriot rhetoric with a detailed examination of Molyneux's legal and historical arguments, and a devastating critique of the pretensions of Protestant Ascendancy, in which he emphasized the settlers’ dependence on English protection since the annexation of the kingdom of Ireland by Henry II:

It is regrettable that Livesey does not examine the complexities of Davenant's blistering attack, or the debate over Ireland's constitutional position which occasioned it, or indeed the stubborn fact that Molyneux's Case of Ireland (reprinted 1706, 1719, 1720, 1725, 1749, 1770, 1773, 1776 and 1782) remained the single most authoritative treatise on Irish affairs. Instead he seizes on the rather brief remark made by Davenant that the natural rights of a province or depending kingdom were not necessarily altered by its subordination to another legislative authority. Irishmen might possess civil liberty, in other words, even if they did not live in a free state. In Livesey's view—there is something of a conceptual jump here—Davenant thus offered the Protestant Irish a “novel definition of the nation as a productive, trading community” (67). And this process of redefinition—another leap of faith here—marked the genesis of the idea of “civil society” in Ireland and indeed beyond.

Civil society, Livesey believes, was thus forged in an encounter between the writings of Charles Davenant and the founders of the Dublin Society. The clear impression given is that opinion formers such as Arthur Dobbs, Thomas Prior and Samuel Madden were consciously grappling with Davenant's critique of Irish patriot ambitions, contained in his Essay upon the Probable Methods of Making the People Gainers in the Balance of Trade (1699). Footnotes are accordingly supplied, directing the inquisitive reader to the relevant passages of their works. A closer look at these sources does not in fact sustain the view that Irish improvers envisaged themselves in direct confrontation with Davenant, or that Davenant's “idea of a citizenry enjoying a plentitude of rights in a non-sovereign state” served as the “template” from which they developed “a workable idea of the community” (61). Arthur Dobbs certainly framed his Essay on the Trade and Improvement of Ireland as an attempt to overturn the prevailing view that Irish prosperity was detrimental to British interests, but this does not make his conclusion—or any other part of his treatise—“a peroration against Davenant” (61).Footnote ¹¹ At one point Dobbs accused Davenant of “Falsity” (67) but this was a specific allegation concerning the impact of the Irish linen trade on England rather than the more general “counter-argument” implied by Livesey.Footnote ¹² We are told that Henry Maxwell “deplored Davenant's identification of Irish dependency” (61), but the relevant passage of Maxwell's Reasons Offered for Erecting a Bank in Ireland refers to Davenant's Essay on Ways and Means rather than his Irish writings.Footnote ¹³ And when Thomas Prior and Sir John Browne cited Davenant (61) it was not his treatment of Ireland that interested them, but the statistics on England's global trade figures produced in his Discourses on the Plantation Trade.Footnote ¹⁴ Dubliners therefore engaged with Davenant as an established authority on political arithmetic, but there is little warrant for Livesey's assertion that the “acuity and insight of Davenant's definition of the Irish predicament absorbed Irish writers” (61).

A word-search of the relevant texts produced by Dobbs, Prior and Madden—admittedly an imperfect guide—reveals not one single reference to “civil society”.Footnote ¹⁵ The literature of Irish improvement ranged over such standard subjects as absenteeism, tillage, granaries, international trade, the dangers of luxury imports and currency reform; patriotic readers were urged to reclaim bogs, manure their fields and plant orchards. It is extravagant to suggest that the proponents of such practical improvements had consciously set out to “redescribe the life of a modern commercial empire in a way that would save their local traditions of civility” (3). Equally disconcerting is Livesey's neglect of texts which seem more relevant to his preoccupations. Another member of the Irish “school” of political economy, the Limerick merchant David Bindon, produced the first English translation of Jean-François Melon's Essai politique sur le commerce (1738), a key study of economic competition between commercial societies. This “golden book”, as John Robertson has shown, established the framework within which political economy emerged, in both Scotland and Naples.Footnote ¹⁶ The Dublin translation was launched with the support of 535 subscribers drawn from all three confessional blocs—Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter.

Difficulties accumulate as Livesey further develops his “improvement” theme. An analysis of Francis Hutcheson's conception of society as “fundamentally self-ordering and structured by free communication, not hierarchical control” (83), paves the way for Livesey's subsequent argument that Hume was indebted to Hutcheson's concentration on “society as the theatre of moral experience” (158). Unfortunately this rather abstract reading of Hutcheson is based on the “Letters of Hibernicus”, originally serialized in the Dublin Weekly Journal in 1725–6, and mostly written by James Arbuckle.Footnote ¹⁷ It is puzzling that someone so familiar with Hutcheson's intellectual biography should make such a basic error of attribution. As the main link between Ireland and the Scottish Enlightenment, Hutcheson is, after all, absolutely central to the story Livesey tells, while Arbuckle is increasingly recognized as a significant literary figure in his own right. In a later passage Livesey observes that Hutcheson's idea of society (recte Arbuckle's) is “cited, though inflected”, in Dobbs's writing (85). By this time the inquiring reader will have guessed that Livesey does not use the word “cite” in its literal sense. Dobbs makes no reference, direct or indirect, to Hutcheson's work (or to Arbuckle's for that matter).

In Chapter 2, “The Authority of the Defeated”, Livesey links the philosophical history of Charles O'Conor—still the most unjustly neglected figure in the intellectual life of eighteenth-century Ireland—to the writings of earlier Catholic polemicists. The most prominent of these self-confident controversialists, he observes, was the Dublin priest Cornelius Nary, who attacked the penal code in his Case of the Roman Catholics of Ireland (1724). It is worth pointing out that the publication history of this pamphlet is obscure, to say the least; the text is known only from its inclusion in much later works.Footnote ¹⁸ In any case, Nary's Case of the Roman Catholics of Ireland was practically the only substantial statement of the Catholic position published in Ireland between the 1690s and the 1750s. Irish Catholics supported and sheltered priests whose presence in Ireland was illegal and who remained committed, in theory at least, to the Stuart court in exile: there were consequently very good reasons for avoiding open discussion of their principles. Their public pronouncements were largely confined to a series of ephemeral handbills, never properly analysed, which argued that the modification of penal restrictions on Catholic landowners and leaseholders would help to lift Ireland out of economic depression.Footnote ¹⁹ Other sources, whether manuscript poems or works published on the Continent, suggest that Catholic political thought continued to operate within the framework set by Jacobite allegiance and Catholic confessionalism.Footnote ²⁰

Perhaps the most interesting body of Irish Jacobite writing, and a tantalizing indication of the potential vitality of that tradition, is the lengthy manuscript history of the Williamite revolution entitled “A Light to the Blind” dating from 1702–3, and an accompanying collection of addresses, statements and pamphlets by the same author, none of them published at the time. It seems possible that they were compiled by Colonel Nicholas Plunkett, a brother of the Earl of Fingall, who had access to an extensive family library, comprising around seven thousand titles, and links with the circle of English recusants who gathered at Somerset House in London, the former household of Catherine of Braganza, Catholic widow of Charles II. Not surprisingly, “A Light to the Blind” rejected the idea that subjects were ever entitled to oppose a lawful king; and the book contains a serious assault on the Whiggish versions of contract theory with references to the English constitutionalists Chamberlain and Bracton.Footnote ²¹ In a direct mirror image of the anti-popery endlessly peddled by Ascendancy propagandists, the author presented the English as innately disposed towards violence and rebellion against lawful authority, suffering from an apparently ineradicable disease in which racial weakness was exacerbated by religious error.Footnote ²²

Even more interestingly, Plunkett's loyalty to his king was equalled by his love of country, and he drew inspiration from the patriotic sacrifices of the ancients—Hebrew, Greek and Roman. Although he belonged to one of the most prominent old English families, Plunkett stressed the coalescence that had taken place between the Anglo-Norman and the Gael, rather as Geoffrey Keating had done in his Counter-Reformation work, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn. Following the conquest of Henry II, he explained, members of the two “nations” had intermarried so that “both Partyes became united as one People of the same Country and of the same Interest”.Footnote ²³ There was a pointed contrast between the medieval invaders and the later Elizabethan and Jacobean settlers, described as “British Cannibals”, who had torn down the churches and abbeys of Ireland.Footnote ²⁴ In a later work, “The Case of the Roman Catholicks of Ireland” (1710), Plunkett lamented the way in which his countrymen had been barred from all employments and deprived of all their lands, subverting the natural social hierarchy: “an ancient & noble Nation is thus enslaved for to support a mean Colony therein planted by the Regicide sword of Cromwel”.Footnote ²⁵ As befitted someone born in the turbulent 1640s, Plunkett's attitudes and values hovered uneasily between the seventeenth century and the eighteenth. Although he protested about the violation of the Treaty of Limerick, Plunkett was certainly not a proponent of religious toleration, as is made clear not only by his shrill attacks on Calvin, Luther and Knox, but by his wholehearted approval of Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the controversial “dragonnades” policy that had led to the forced conversion of so many of his people.Footnote ²⁶ He also despised the Camisards, the Protestant insurgents who had taken up arms in the Cévennes region and who had been brutally crushed in 1703–4. “Some People are so stubborn”, he commented, “that nothing will humble Them, till They are broken into shivers”.Footnote ²⁷

The example of Plunkett does not readily support Livesey's view that defeated Jacobites were driven “to create arguments of accommodation and compromise, arguments that laid the ground for plural versions of social inclusion and alternative ideas of community” and that amounted to a reconceived “sphere of civil life” (112). It is true that an early treatise by the same author, written around 1698, considered a range of social and economic issues, but the dominant theoretical problems that feature in Plunkett's three-volume manuscript history, and in his twenty-eight shorter tracts, revolved around dynastic legitimacy and the dangers of Protestant heresy.Footnote ²⁸

Unfortunately, the relaxed approach to textual authority described above can be found in later chapters of the book too. “A Habitat for Hopeful Monsters”, the chapter in which Livesey aims to demonstrate that Hume “unified the provincial languages of commercial experience in the British Empire” (158), is particularly confused. At this point Francis Hutcheson is carelessly presented as the best known of a group of thinkers who addressed the Irish question (159). Hutcheson's impact on the “science of man” was acknowledged by Hume himself, and by many scholars since, but the context was the application of the experimental method to moral philosophy. Hutcheson never mentioned Ireland in his writings. And while his Glasgow lectures included an innovative analysis of trade, his view of political society was rooted in “a somewhat old-fashioned form of radical Whig political thinking”.Footnote ²⁹ Elsewhere in this chapter, the simple fact that Hume made notes on Dobbs's Essay on the Trade and Improvement of Ireland emboldens Livesey to claim that “Irish political economy” was “integral” to his early thought and that what we know of his early reading reveals a “consistent engagement” with the “literature of political economy centred on Ireland” (159). The surviving record of Hume's reading does not really bear out this conclusion. Thirty-seven authors are listed, the majority of whom are French or Dutch; Arthur Dobbs is the only one that deals with Ireland. Of 239 “memoranda” noted by Hume only three discuss Ireland: these are very brief jottings on its population (1.7 million), its corn imports and its linen exports.Footnote ³⁰ It thus seems unlikely that writing on Ireland was “a vital background to Hume's eventual construction of a new, civic ideal of Britishness” (159).

The impression of implausibility created by Livesey's treatment of Irish economic writing is exacerbated by his determination to make a larger argument about contemporary discussions of “civil society” with reference to the democratic revolutions in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe or of regime change in Iraq. A brisk survey of post-1989 debates, touching on Ernest Gellner, John Gray, Vaclav Havel, John Ehrenberg, Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor, among others, brings Livesey to admit that the concept of civil society is “fragmentary, complicated, and possibly even incoherent”. In the same paragraph, he nevertheless proceeds to state his central thesis, that this concept was “fashioned”, “invented”, and “coin(ed)” by the provincial elites of Scotland and Ireland as a reaction to the consolidation of imperial power at Westminster. Its function was either to compensate the citizens of Edinburgh and Dublin for the loss of national independence, or to provide new ways of limiting central authority.Footnote ³¹ What is more, the strengths and weaknesses of the notion, as revealed in current discussions of transitional democracies, can be traced to its origins in the margins of the first British Empire. The obvious instability of the term “civil society” does not inhibit Livesey's assumption that Jacobite exiles, Presbyterian clergymen and Catholic mystics were all talking about the same thing as recent commentators on Iraq or Poland or Korea. “The idea of civil society”, he concludes, “of a set of self-governing plural social networks that hedge in sovereign power and set the terms for its exercise, was the hope of Scottish and Irish elites faced with the power of the British Empire and retains meanings inherited from that context” (7).

The slippery, elusive quality of “civil society”, acknowledged by Livesey, combines awkwardly with the self-assurance with which he identifies its provenance. Moreover, Livesey never mentions the simple, striking fact that none of the writers considered in his book used the term “civil society” in its modern sense. The majority of them do not seem to have used it at all. We read that the concept of civil society was “articulated” within the language of natural jurisprudence (14), that it became “one of the master categories” of the mid-century Atlantic world (10), that it was “generated” by the intellectual elites of the mercantile and manufacturing towns of Scotland and Ireland (20). At various points civil society features as an “idea”, a “concept”, a “vision”, an “idiom”, a “language”, a “discourse”, an “ideal”, a “point of view” and a “master category”, before it we learn that it “vanished” (215) in the early nineteenth century. In the final chapter it functions as the basis of Burke's conservatism and as the animating principle of Wollstonecraft's radicalism (194–8). The obvious implication is that the inhabitants of eighteenth-century Belfast used the term in the same way as those of twenty-first-century Baghdad, but this is simply not true.

The Hegelian or Tocquevillean understanding of “civil society” did not exist in the eighteenth century. The term was then used commonly to refer to the condition of human beings in politically organized communities, as opposed to the state of nature that had apparently existed before the formation of recognizable governments in Europe and that still survived, or so it was believed, among native Americans. This meaning is obviously opposed to the current use of the phrase to denote the network of associations through which citizens in the West allegedly organize and express themselves, free from state control—or, as Livesey puts it, “extra-political space”. The long entry for “civil” in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary accordingly begins, “Relating to the community; political; relating to the city or government”.Footnote ³² This is how the United Irishman Arthur O'Connor used the word, when he asserted that the French Revolution was part of a wider “revolution in civil society throughout Europe” (180).Footnote ³³ If “civil” was primarily to be contrasted with natural (i.e. barbarous), it had a common secondary meaning as an alternative to “ecclesiastical”. Europeans were organized into churches as well as states, and so the “civil magistrate” indicated not merely government in general but temporal authority. The sharp disjunction between pre- and post-Hegelian meanings is a well-established feature of the secondary literature, but here, as elsewhere, Livesey makes no attempt to reconcile his position with an established body of conflicting opinion.Footnote ³⁴

Perhaps the criticisms I have offered above may sound excessively literal or pedantic in character. Does it really actually matter, you might wonder, that Livesey's thesis is sometimes crudely disconnected from his source material? The methodological coordinates recognized by most scholars working in this field are, of course, those of the Cambridge school, whose members have so invaluably enriched our knowledge and understanding of the past. It is Quentin Skinner's well-known position that the job of the intellectual historian is to attempt to “recover the concepts (our ancestors) possessed, the distinctions they drew and the chains of reasoning they followed in their attempts to make sense of their world”.Footnote ³⁵ One sometimes hears that there is something stuffy or even elitest about this kind of work, and that may be one reason why Livesey announces his departure from the Cambridge school, remarking airily that his own understanding of context is “far more material and contingent” than that of Pocock, Skinner or Dunn (21). Frustratingly, however, he never defines the connections between civil society as concept, as terminology and as lived experience. Nor does he explain how clusters of ideas are transmitted or related one to another. Sometimes traditions of thought whirl around dizzily, generating creative “models” or useful “categories” but never attaching themselves to a primary text.Footnote ³⁶ The upshot of this baggier methodology is that Anglican clergymen engaged in the reformation of manners campaign get lumped together with Catholic priests committed to Tridentine standards as joint facilitators of a vaguely defined national identity. If civil society includes Williamites and Jacobites, Burkeans and Paineites, precisely where lies its explanatory force?

Is there a better way forward? Is there an alternative framework for analysing the extensive range of pamphlets and treatises unearthed in Civil Society and Empire? To begin with, we badly need a comprehensive account of Irish economic literature between the impressive landmarks of William Petty's Political Anatomy (1691) and Berkeley's Querist (1735–7) which might identify its distinctive themes.Footnote ³⁷ The debate on the causes of and remedies for Irish laziness is one curious example. It would also help to recall that Enlightenment writing was an intellectual enterprise. The obvious question posed by Livesey's material, surely, is the stark contrast between the low-voltage advocates of Irish improvement and the intellectual powerhouse of Scotland. Madden, Prior and Dobbs were not original or powerful thinkers; an interest in agricultural and commercial improvement does not put them in the same class as Hume, Smith, Ferguson, Kames or Robertson. Although they practised political arithmetic they cannot be claimed as pioneers of the new science of political economy, defined in the fuller sense as “a more complex, and more ideological, enterprise aimed at establishing the moral, political, cultural, and economic conditions of life in advancing commercial societies”.Footnote ³⁸ Although they grappled with the devastating social and economic problems faced by Ireland in the early decades of the eighteenth century, they lacked a broader analytical framework for doing so. How can this disparity be explained?

A satisfactory answer would entail an examination of the institutional structures of Irish Enlightenment. Unlike Scotland, which retained its distinctive ecclesiastical and legal systems, Ireland's church establishment and courts of law were extensions of England's, and consequently vulnerable to predators from across the water. One of these interlopers, Francis Hutchinson, bishop of Down and Conor, wrote important books on Irish antiquities and on witchcraft, but most were second-rate figures. Conversely, the wealthiest Irish families shipped their sons off to Oxford or Cambridge. We lack an up-to-date history of Trinity College, which might reveal why it missed the academic reforms and civic involvements that characterized Edinburgh and Glasgow. Irish barristers were required to enrol at the London Inns of Court, and the absence of a medical faculty forced physicians to train overseas. The vibrancy and openness of London life sucked talented Irishmen, such as Edmund Burke and his many Irish associates, into journalism, theatre, painting, medicine and, of course, politics.

A different approach might begin by recalling how the term “civil society” was actually deployed during the eighteenth century. Locke's Two Treatises makes the pivotal argument that absolute monarchy was not compatible with civil society, since the latter only came into existence when a body of men decided to set up “a known Authority, to which every one of that Society may Appeal upon any Injury received” (Second Treatise, §90). His objective, of course, was to drive a polemical wedge between forms of legitimate government (“political” or “civil” society) and mere coercion. Although Locke's immediate target was the generation of high-church clergymen who “would flatter princes with an Opinion, that they have a Divine Right to absolute Power” (First Treatise, §3), his theory also threatened to delegitimize other types of social organization. David Armitage's recent discovery that Locke was composing Chapter V of the Second Treatise, “Of Property”, while he was making extensive alterations to the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina has reinvigorated the well-established “colonial” reading of the Two Treatises.Footnote ³⁹ Locke believed that there was no civil society among the “wild Indians” mostly because they had “no Government at all”, their kings being merely “Generals of their Armies” (Second Treatise, §§102, 108), but perhaps also on the socio-economic grounds that Native Americans were reputedly a pre-agricultural people, with no settled family structures, subsisting on fruit and venison, and apparently ignorant of the invention of money (Second Treatise, §§26, 41, 43, 48, 49, 65).

The defenders of Protestant Ascendancy did not use Locke to justify the dispossession of the native Irish, but they were committed to celebrating and completing the triumph of English law and manners over Gaelic inheritance customs and social structures. In a 1739 survey of County Mayo, carried out for what became the Physico-Historical Society, James Cuffe rejoiced that the Williamite revolution had broken Catholic Ireland, resulting in “the establishment of civil society, security of property and a long peace, from where arts and science are derived, trade flourishes and countries before occupied with rude and barbarous inhabitants become civilised and improved.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The Physico-Historical Society (1745–52), devoted to surveying the natural history, geography and antiquities of the island, was an offshoot of the Dublin Society, and membership of the two bodies overlapped significantly. Its researchers consistently linked the spread of the linen manufacture and a modern communications network with the decline of the Irish language and the increase of the Protestant population.Footnote ⁴¹ On his Mayo estate Cuffe sponsored a settlement of Protestant linen weavers from Ulster and promoted a Charter School nearby; this blend of economic modernization and evangelism was typical. Petty had once attempted to attract English settlers who “do delight in improvement and husbandry” to the remote lands he acquired in south Kerry.Footnote ⁴² Decades later Samuel Madden urged southern landlords to settle colonies of Presbyterian weavers on their estates.Footnote ⁴³ The cult of improvement promoted by the Physico-Historical Society did not replace older sectarian or colonial categories of thought, as Livesey suggests, so much as intersect with them.

The unresolved tension that resulted is revealed most interestingly in Berkeley's Querist (1735–7), the culmination of Ireland's early attempts at political economy. Livesey doesn't mention the Querist, although Berkeley was the most prominent intellectual figure actually resident (some of the time at least) in Ireland. Unlike his Irish contemporaries, moreover, Berkeley actually engaged with social issues on a theoretical level. His essay “The Bond of Society” (1713) argued that humans were innately sociable, drawn together by a principle of attraction analogous to Newton's theory of gravity. Social interaction could thus be analysed by reference to natural science rather than religion.Footnote ⁴⁴ In his Irish writings, too, Berkeley moved from confessional politics to social reform. To borrow John Robertson's phrase, he was willing to advocate “betterment in this world, without regard for the existence or non-existence of the next”.Footnote ⁴⁵ Like his associates in the Dublin Society, Berkeley was convinced that any scheme for “the Welfare of this Nation” ought to encompass “the whole Inhabitants”.Footnote ⁴⁶ Like other members of the Irish school, he was prepared to question traditional colonial prejudices concerning the laziness of the Irish natives. Parliament should be less concerned with international trade, he suggested, than with stimulating industrious habits among the common Irish by creating the desire to consume beef and wear shoes. Yet the bishop's enlightened patriotism was cramped by his reluctance or inability to challenge the deep religious and ethnic divisions that structured Irish political and social life. Ultimately Berkeley could not make up his mind whether the “remarkable Antipathy to Labour” that he observed among the natives resulted from the “Heaviness” of the climate or from their Spanish or Scythian blood.Footnote ⁴⁷

Finally, the religious flipside of the term “civil society” deserves some consideration. In a controversial sermon on religious toleration preached before the House of Commons in 1725, Edward Synge expounded the standard Lockean line that the magistrate, as “Head of the Civil Society”, ought not to tolerate opinions that were potentially destructive of the social order.Footnote ⁴⁸ First among these, of course, was the alleged power of the Pope to depose secular rulers. On this ground, significantly, the partisans of Reformation overlapped with the philosophical historians of the Enlightenment. J. G. A. Pocock has described the “enlightened narrative” common to Giannone, Voltaire, Hume and Robertson, which traced the emergence of modern Europe, as feudalism gave way to commerce, martial virtue to polite manners, and civil society freed itself from the claims of ecclesiastical authority. For Voltaire, as for the defenders of the Irish penal code, religious fanaticism was identified with the centuries-old claim by Rome to exercise civil jurisdiction.Footnote ⁴⁹

This was the ideological climate in which the antiquarian and pamphleteer Charles O'Conor began his campaign for what would eventually be called Catholic emancipation. O'Conor's remarkable Case of the Roman-Catholics (1755), girded with references to Voltaire, Montesquieu and Warburton, set out to separate the spiritual authority of Rome from its historic ambitions to temporal sovereignty. But he also called for a history of the “Inquisitions and Persecutions” carried out by all denominations, from the establishment of Christianity to the eighteenth century, which would reveal to the ordinary reader “the Secret of most ecclesiastical Dissentions and of their Effects on Civil Society”.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the 1720s, 1750s and 1760s, unfortunately, successive attempts to formalize an accommodation between moderate Catholics and the Hanoverian regime foundered, partly because the Catholic Church refused to countenance a public renunciation of the deposing power. Caught between the reflex hostility of the Protestant establishment and the desire of the church hierarchy to maintain its monopoly over Catholic utterances, Charles O'Conor found himself in an impossible position. Nothing indicates more clearly both the intellectual potential of Ireland's Enlightenment and the reasons for its ultimate frustration. Like so many other subjects touched upon in Civil Society and Empire, O'Conor's ambitions to repackage Catholicism as a civil religion are genuinely deserving of serious examination. Livesey is to be congratulated for bringing such texts to the attention of a wider audience. But this achievement is purchased at a high price, for his enthusiasm, breadth of reference and capacity for dramatic storylines have too often crowded out the mundane responsibilities of both conceptual precision and patient contextualization.