Relativism in the British and French Enlightenment

Abstract: Long neglected, the history of relativism has been the topic of a number of surveys in recent years. These studies, however, have been ambivalent on whether relativism really existed in the eighteenth century. Following Isaiah Berlin’s contention that the eighteenth-century witnessed the emergence of pluralism rather than relativism, historians have concluded that the Enlightenment at best prefigured nineteenth-century developments in relativistic thinking. In response, this article argues that relativism was a recognizable thesis in eighteenth-century Britain and France. Its principles and consequences were frequently articulated, either to be rejected or defended, by a wide range of philosophers and imaginative authors, from Ralph Cudworth and Ann Radcliffe to Julien Offray de la Mettrie and Alberto Radicati. This neglected chapter in the history of relativism, I argue, matters for several strands in eighteenth-century studies, as it inflected Enlightenment reflections on aesthetic and moral values, human hierarchies, and cross-cultural relations.