For the past several decades, historians from a number of different specialties have begun to explore the complexity of Enlightenment thought. These recent histories have explored how Enlightenment thinkers sought to replace hereditary monarchies with a new form of Republican governance in which social awards were given, not by those who happened to be born into noble families, but to those whose natural talents meant they were most worthy to receive them. In a perfectly free society we would still have inequitable distribution of resources because those with more talent would be free to rise to the top. The hereditary aristocracy would be replaced by a “natural aristocracy” in which inequality is an expected outcome of a free society.
Carson argues that the current historiography is missing a clear understanding of what the word "talent" meant for Enlightenment thinkers. What was "talent" and how did people acquire it? Because Republican ideology rejected the notion of a hereditary aristocracy, did that mean that all people were really born with equal talents? Where did people acquire these “talents”? In answering these questions, Carson argues persuasively that Enlightenment thinkers were inclined to write “certain speculations about human nature into the very heart of the republican project and to orient the emerging human sciences toward embracing those social formations most consonant with the developing notions of the republican citizen, the enlightened society, and the self-interested economic actor” (p. 84).
Carson gives us a close reading of how key Enlightenment figures—such
as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Godwin, Etienne-Bonnot de Condillac,
Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Jefferson, and Samuel
Adams—grappled with the very notion of talent, where it originated, and
its implications for a “natural inequality” in society. He shows
that, with the notable exception of Helvétius, few were ready to embrace
a pure egalitarian ethos, most thinkers embracing a language which was ambiguous
enough to “argue for greater political and social power and a means to
exclude whole groups of people from all but the most basic rights” (p.
103).
Carson skillfully weaves together the history of human sciences, political history,
and political theory. He shows that an understanding of the human sciences is
vital to any understanding of Enlightenment political thought, and in turn how
political thought is central to an understanding of the orientation of the sciences
toward human nature.