In the excerpts, the Enlightenment is invoked in several distinct senses: as the source of a theory of discovered law, as the intellectual context of John Locke’s writings on property and labor, as the wellspring of the ideas that jump-started the Industrial Revolution, and as a moment of secularization that critics say left apocalyptic and millenarian patterns intact in Western thinking. No excerpt offers a general definition of the term; each treats it as background to a specific argument about law, economics, or political religion.
Discovered law and malum prohibitum
In a discussion of immigration and criminal justice reform, Alex Nowrasteh traced a distinction to what he called a founding idea in the Enlightenment, that laws need to be discovered rather than made. He said the laws most people respect, such as prohibitions on murder and theft, are similar across human civilization and time and are discovered, whereas laws restricting drug use, firearm ownership, or immigration are made by legislators, bureaucrats, and activists. He attributed law enforcement disasters to that difference Immigration Nation: Nowrasteh Sets it Straight Again (2015).
Bob Zadek restated the distinction in Latin terms, saying that in law it is called malum prohibitum and malum in se. He described malum in se as the category Nowrasteh had described—murder, rape, robbery, theft—which every society acknowledges as wrong, and malum prohibitum as wrong only because a legislative body decided an otherwise innocent or lawful act should be made unlawful. Zadek characterized such laws as unnatural impositions and as an attempt to legislate morality, which he said cannot be legislated, and to criminalize non-criminal behavior Immigration Nation: Nowrasteh Sets it Straight Again (2015).
Nowrasteh agreed and added that most of the problems with illegality, and most of the reason people do not respect the law as much as they used to, come from laws of that type, where there is no victim and the law is a creation of the legislature rather than a natural law Immigration Nation: Nowrasteh Sets it Straight Again (2015).
Locke, the fruits of labor, and the North Carolina Constitution
A 2022 episode on a food truck dispute turned on the words “fruits of their labor” in the North Carolina Constitution. Jessica Thompson said the idea of a right to the fruits of one’s own labor runs throughout John Locke’s works and his emphasis on property, and that North Carolina has a direct tie to that tradition: Locke was the author of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in 1669, when Carolina was still a colony. She said North Carolina has a rich classical liberal tradition connecting it to the Enlightenment through Locke Food Truck v. Farmville (2022).
Zadek framed the litigation as raising rights not asserted under the United States Constitution. Thompson said the federal Constitution should protect the right to earn a living, and that the Pacific Legal Foundation works to reinvigorate those federal protections, but that the Supreme Court has watered down constitutional protections for economic liberty and the right to earn a living, in a slow decline she dated to the New Deal. She said state constitutions can provide protections beyond the federal floor, and that the North Carolina Constitution explicitly states the right to earn the fruit of one’s labor, while many other state supreme courts have interpreted due process or law of the land clauses to protect a right to earn an honest living Food Truck v. Farmville (2022).
Thompson said enforcement under the fruits of their own labor clause has come in waves and decreased somewhat around the 1980s, but that before that there was rigorous enforcement in equal protection cases and in striking down laws as arbitrary interference with the fruits of their own labor. She cited opinions concerning ordinances banning massages from masseuses of the opposite sex, in which courts noted that massages were also given at the YMCA and at barbershops, and said that treating the same businesses differently violated the equal protection clause and the right to earn a living. She also mentioned photography and dry cleaners as areas of ordinary occupation that North Carolina courts have protected Food Truck v. Farmville (2022).
Enlightenment ideas and economic growth
In a 2019 episode, David Henderson placed the Enlightenment at the origin of the Industrial Revolution. He said that going back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment era, one of the things that jump-started it, gave people more rights, and limited government were the Enlightenment ideas of people like John Locke, Adam Smith, and David Hume, and that those ideas had real power. He extended the point to the late twentieth century, saying that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher identified Milton Friedman as one source of their views on freedom, and that ideas are powerful David Henderson on Trumponomics, Deficits, and Immigration (2019).
Henderson also discussed Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now, which he described as pointing to all the ways the world has gotten better. He said Johan Norberg wrote a book on the same theme, and that he and Julian Simon had written a book about 100 ways in which the world has gotten better roughly twenty years earlier. He said poverty worldwide has fallen, that income inequality has fallen when looked at across the world rather than just the United States, and that this is because the poor have gotten richer rather than the rich getting poorer. He added that disease has fallen and life expectancy has risen dramatically in Asia and somewhat in Africa David Henderson on Trumponomics, Deficits, and Immigration (2019).
Enlightenment, secularization, and millenarian politics
A 2019 episode on Hugo Chávez presented a critical account of the Enlightenment’s relationship to revolutionary politics. Clif Ross, described in the episode as a writer, poet, and film director and a former Bolivarian revolutionary who had abandoned revolutionary socialism, said the pattern goes back to what he called an apocalyptic utopian millenarian matrix, and that in Venezuela’s case one could substitute messianic for millenarian. He cited John Gray’s book Black Mass on the problem of the millenarian apocalyptic in Western thinking, which he said is so deeply embedded in our consciousness as to be practically impossible to disembed Hugo Chavez: Failed Messiah (2019).
Ross said the idea of the millennium and the apocalypse comes out of Christianity and the last book of the Bible, and has run as a theme through all of Western thinking. He said it became secularized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the West moved away from Christianity with the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, and that it remains a dominant strain. He distinguished a post-millennial Christian version, the idea of progress toward the kingdom of God, from a revolutionary version holding that a revolution will overthrow evil in the world, viewed as capitalism, and lead first to a socialist state and then gradually to communism—which he identified as Karl Marx’s version of the same idea Hugo Chavez: Failed Messiah (2019).
The power of ideas and the administrative state
In a 2019 episode, Randall Holcombe responded to Zadek’s question about whether democracy destroys itself by saying the long-term trend looks that way but that he remains optimistic, perhaps putting too much emphasis on the power of ideas. He returned to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment era, saying that the Enlightenment ideas of Locke, Smith, and Hume gave people more rights and limited government and had real power. He recalled teaching in the 1970s, a decade of wage and price controls, lines at gas pumps, rising inflation, and rising unemployment, and said the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions and the influence of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek made the 1980s look better, with the ideas of freedom appearing to win out through the end of the Cold War [[episodes/john_marini_on__unmasking_the_administrative_state|John Marini on Unmasking the Administrative State (2019)]].
Holcombe said that in the twenty-first century things have moved back toward eroding freedom, but that he is still confident in the power of ideas and that if people come to understand the value of liberty and the problems of mob rule, a reversal is possible, as happened in the 1980s [[episodes/john_marini_on__unmasking_the_administrative_state|John Marini on Unmasking the Administrative State (2019)]].
Across episodes
The excerpts show no single developing argument about the Enlightenment, but they do show the term recurring across five episodes in different roles. Nowrasteh and Zadek use it to ground a distinction between discovered and made law; Thompson and Zadek connect it to Locke and the fruits-of-labor clause in the North Carolina Constitution; Henderson and Holcombe treat Enlightenment ideas as the intellectual cause of the Industrial Revolution and of later free-market reform; and Ross treats the Enlightenment as the moment when apocalyptic and millenarian patterns were secularized rather than abandoned. The later treatments do not revise the earlier ones; each episode presses the term into a different dispute.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not define the Enlightenment as a historical period, give its dates, or identify its major figures beyond Locke, Smith, and Hume. They do not describe the content of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina beyond Locke’s authorship and its date, nor do they state what the food truck ordinance said or how the litigation ended. No excerpt states the outcome of any case discussed, and the excerpts break off before several speakers finish.