Logo DBNL
De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 41 (2009)

De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 41

(2009)– [tijdschrift] Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

Equality and Inequality in the late Enlightenment
Jonathan Israel

By the 1770s and 1780s, the basic split in the Enlightenment between its two warring wings, moderate and radical, had become much more obvious to the reading public than it had been earlier. This was partly due to the polarizing effect in Europe and also in Ibero-America of the American Revolution with its rhetoric of human rights and representing the people and the growing impact of the pre-1789 incipient popular democratic tendencies welling up in several parts of Western Europe, especially Switzerland, the Netherlands and Britain. But it was partly due also to the internal logic of the intensifying philosophical and theological battle within the Enlightenment arena itself. In German-speaking countries it was especially the public feuding over Spinoza and his writings, the so-called Pantheismusstreit of the 1780s, that polarized intellectual opinion into radical, moderate and Counter-Enlightenment blocks.

But the political and intellectual impulses should by no means be thought of as separate phenomena. Revolutionary leaders in the 1780s and 1790s in Europe (before the Rousseauiste reaction against the ‘Revolution of reason’, under Robespierre) were mostly well aware that the new revolutionary awareness of universal rights and equality was mainly the product of what was then called la philosophie nouvelle or la philosophie moderne, in Germany die moderne Philosophie, and in England the ‘modern philosophy’, a term which by the 1790s carried a very strongly negative and pejorative meaning not only in churchmen's but in most people's minds. A second, lesser but still significant root of the new ideology of equality, democracy, and full freedom of expression was the only ally ‘modern philosophy’ ever found in the religious camp: namely, the distilled or what might be called the ‘philosophical’ variant of Socinianism that developed after 1760 into a doggedly egalitarian Unitarianism associated in Britain and America with Joseph Priestley and in Germany with Carl Friedrich Bahrdt.

Besides this increasingly open split within the Enlightenment between the moderate camp built on the Lockean-Newtonian tradition, or alternatively the Leibniz-Wolffian system, on the one hand, and la philosophie moderne, that is radical thought, on the other, there was the rising force of the Counter-Enlightenment. On the continent, radicals often responded to the growing impact of Counter-Enlightenment rhetoric and denunciation in Germany, Britain, France, and, in Holland, by scornfully contrasting what they liked to call the ‘superstition’ and ‘ignorance’ of their opponents with the uncompromising rationality and higher moral character they imputed to la philosophie moderne. ‘Superstition’ by the 1780s, in radical (including Priestleyan) parlance, meant not just pious deference to religious leaders, that is credulity in a theological sense, but also deference to kings and aristocrats, to tradition in a social and political sense. In contrast to the ‘modern philosophy’, the old classical republicanism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, very important in England and formative in generating the American Revolution though it was, remained aloof from the

new system of values. Indeed, it had practically nothing to do with this new universal republicanism of human rights which, indeed, in turn, was of little interest to most of the American Founding Fathers and their heirs, aside from Jefferson.

So insistent was the new ideology of universal human rights on ‘philosophy’ as the sole guide to truth, that it even on occasion presumed to refer to itself simply as ‘la philosophie’ for short. Hence, as Brissot observed, in 1782, the old republicanism still dominant in America, Britain and Switzerland cultivated its own traditions, not ‘philosophical principles’ which were the very life-blood of the new tendency and also concerned itself exclusively with the good of the patria alone ‘tandis que le voeu de la philosophie est de répandre la liberté par tout l'univers’.1 There had been all sorts of essentially conservative and reactionary republics in the past, noted Brissot, with special reference to the anti-democratic rhetoric of the oligarchic coup that toppled the democratic movement in Geneva, in 1782. None could doubt that the impact of classical republicanism remained significant. But, intellectually, this had practically nothing to do with the new republicanism of universal rights, equality and democracy as defined by ‘la philosophie moderne’, that is the Radical Enlightenment. ‘J'ai donc raison de dire’, concluded Brissot, ‘que l'esprit républicain [ie. that of the new universal republicanism] suit doublement à l'esprit philosophique’.2

‘L'esprit philosophique’ in its late eighteenth-century sense was indeed the heart of the matter. It may seem a novel, unfamiliar idea to many scholars today. But the fact is that without starting with the concept of Radical Enlightenment nothing at all can be understood about the late Enlightenment, the French Revolution or the wider trans-Atlantic revolutionary consciousness and rhetoric of the 1770s, 1780s and 1790s for the simple reason that in origin - and, more importantly perhaps, in its role in the minds of the revolutionary leadership - this revolutionary awareness was essentially a philosophical construct, and a highly complex one, deriving from a long and rich tradition of clandestine thought reaching all the way back to the late seventeenth century. Meanwhile, while it is certainly correct to say that the split between radical and moderate Enlightenment became clearer and more obviously unbridgeable in terms of warring political standpoints and conflicting philosophical ideas after 1770, it did not become any clearer, at least not before around 1790, in terms of seeing who the new guiding authors and architects of the post-1770 upsurge in revolutionary thinking and publicity were. If the d'Holbach circle in Paris and others with some knowledge of the European intellectual arena grasped that Spinoza, Bayle, Toland, Collins and a whole series of more recent authors ranging from Du Marsais to Boulanger formed the original back-bone of this radical tradition, very few, even among the best-informed, knew who were the key publicists and opinion-formers responsible for the suddenly and dramatically reinvigorated, accelerating and powerful post-1770 propagation of these ideas.

This sounds paradoxical. But it makes good sense once one appreciates the historical context and looks at the various intellectual currents and factors involved. Plainly, Rousseau's Contrat social was one of the ingredients that went into the mix making up the potent, world-transforming new ideology of equality and democracy. Yet, la philosophie moderne was not in its essence Rousseauiste. In its heavy stress on progress, rationality and the virtues of representative democracy, it was in fact profoundly un-Rousseaustic, as it was likewise in its universalism, unrelenting intellectualism, and insistence on ‘error’ and credulity as the source of all evil in the world and emphasis on l'esprit philosophique as the supreme guide, something Rousseau (since 1757) totally rejected. It was unRousseausiste furthermore in its call for full freedom of thought, minimal ecclesiastical authority and call for an unrestricted freedom of the press of the sort prevailing in France between 1789 and 1792.

If Rousseau was one ingredient, there was obviously a whole batch of others of which Mably was clearly one. In French-speaking countries, though, it was more especially Raynal's Histoire philosophique des deux Indes and the anonymously published Système de la nature which served to polarize opinion into openly opposed blocks in the 1770s and 1780s. During the French Revolution, it was frequently noted that the Histoire philosophique, a work originally published anonymously, in 1770, but, after 1774, generally attributed to Raynal, had been one of the chief agents defining and diffusing the new revolutionary awareness in France - and elsewhere - in the two decades before 1789. But only when Raynal himself (incomprehensibly to many) turned against the Revolution and when he was publicly denounced as a traitor to his own principles and an impostor, in 1791, was it publicly revealed that the revolutionary ideas so powerfully projected in the volumes of the Histoire had not been his in the first place. By the summer of 1791, it was realized, at least in France, that it was above all Diderot but also several others including Deleyre, La Grange - the latest translator of Lucretius - and d'Holbach who were responsible for the hardest-hitting parts of that best-selling work and especially the sections denouncing tyranny, oppression and the exploitation of the majority and containing its stirring call for world emancipation on the basis of freedom and equality.3

Equally, while several connoisseurs of such literature recognized from the outset that the no less path-breaking, best-selling and fiercely contested Système de la nature, also first published in 1770, and several other books closely related to it, were in some way the product of a group effort, very few were aware that d'Holbach was its principal author. Yet while hardly anyone knew who was responsible for this text, from the very first weeks of its appearance it had a sensational effect. Old and ill though he now was, the Système plainly had an energizing as well as disconcerting impact, for instance, on Voltaire. Writing to the Comte de Schomberg, on 5 October 1770, soon after the Système de la nature's public condemnation by the French royal, judicial and

ecclesiastical authorities along with six other radical texts, a deeply alarmed Voltaire observed that everyone of any social or intellectual consequence had already read the book and that in Paris the Système had had the profoundly unsettling as well as spectacular effect of dividing ‘tous les esprits’ down the middle as neatly as any minuet at Versailles.4 This was a mere eight months after the book's original publication.

With only one or two exceptions, all the many major and minor radical works of the 1770s and 1780s appeared either anonymously or under false attribution, the Système being attributed on its title-page to ‘Mirabaud’. If Helvétius' De l'Homme (1773), the most notable exception, appeared with his name stated undisguised on the title-page, this was only because it appeared by his own design, and that of his brilliant and heavily implicated wife, shortly after his death in a manner intended in part as a kind of posthumous revenge on the royalist, Catholic and tradition-bound society that had persecuted him.

The gap between moderate and Radical Enlightenment had always been unbridgeable in terms of format, publication and publicity techniques no less than in philosophy, science, social thought and politics more generally. What had changed was that before 1770 Radical Enlightenment was a hidden, underground threat. Now it had emerged as a public phenomenon and one, as many saw it, of frightening power and ubiquity and an obvious challenge to the existing social and political order as well as to religion. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that both the Counter-Enlightenment, a cultural movement rapidly gaining momentum in both Germany and France after 1770, and the now faltering moderate Enlightenment, turned their main energies after 1770 against, and focused most of their rhetoric on, fighting the radical challenge. Many leading figures of the moderate mainstream took the lead in denouncing what they saw as the rising threat of radical, democratic and egalitarian ideas. Voltaire spent the last few years of his life actively polemicizing against the materialism, proto-evolutionary biology, anti-monarchism and atheism of the Système and in high-lighting what he saw as the philosophical weaknesses in Spinoza's philosophy which he (correctly) saw as the root of the new challenge. Likewise, his ideological ally, Frederick the Great, with whom Voltaire exchanged many a letter on the subject of the Système and the danger it posed to the existing order, in the early 1770s took up his pen to fight the radical democratic upsurge, personally compiling two very indignant refutations, one rebutting the Système and the other the Essai sur les Préjugés (‘Londres’ [i.e. Amsterdam], 1770), another anonymously published and uncompromisingly radical and socially revolutionary work by d'Holbach and his team.

By the 1770s and 1780s, then, the radical philosophes were diffusing an entirely new form of revolutionary consciousness which in their minds, as the Histoire philosophique with its focus on the world outside Europe demonstrates with particular force, applied not to France alone, or any particular European country, but to the whole

world. All the world had long suffered under the sway of tyranny, oppression, and misery, buttressed by ignorance and credulity, according to the radical philosophes and their popularizers in Britain, America, France, the Netherlands and Germany, men such as Tom Paine, Joel Barlow, John Jebb, William Godwin (down to the early 1790s), Sieyes, Condorcet, Brissot, Mirabeau, Volney, Manuel, Marat, Cloots, Goroni, Paape, Cerisier, Vreede, Paulus, Forster, Bahrdt, Diez, Wedekind, Knoblauch, and Wilhelm Ludwig Wekhrlin,5 a widely-read south German Francophile materialist, neo-Spinozist and enemy of aristocracy who nurtured a particular dislike of the old oligarchic Swiss republics and the oligarchies ruling the German Imperial free cities. According to these men, all humanity required a revolution, intellectual to begin with, practical later, through which to emancipate itself. The last and most radical version of the Histoire philosophique, that of 1780, generalized with unprecedented and unrelenting emphasis Diderot's and d'Holbach's analysis of what was wrong with Europe and the wider world, generating for the first time in the history of humanity a world-wide call for a universal revolution, in India, Ibero-America and Africa no less than in Europe and North America, a summons which became the very emblem of philosophical modernity.

By the 1770s and 1780s, different radical writers were applying in varying degrees of detail the same basic formula forged over long years of clandestine effort by Diderot and d'Holbach to different geographical contexts. Thus, the young Volney, an uncompromisingly radical writer before as well as after 1789 and one who, later, figured among the leaders of the democratic movement in the revolutionary French National Assembly in 1789-91, a thinker highly critical of Montesquieu and positively scornful of the existing British constitution - like many French revolutionary leaders apart from Bergasse, Mounier and the pro-aristocratic faction led by Trophime-Gérard Lally-Tolendal (1751-1830) - applied la philosophie moderne with considerable originality to the Middle East where he spent three years learning Arabic in the mid 1780s. Volney held that apart from a few nomadic groups such as the Bedouin, Druze and Mesopotamian Turkmen, practically all the societies of the region and especially the sedentary population of the main cities and agricultural tracts had for centuries languished under a relentlessly oppressive alliance of religious and political despotism grounded on ignorance and ‘superstition’. Only a ‘grande revolution’, held Volney, could rescue the inhabitants of Syria and Egypt from the oppression, destitution, and hopelessly blind credulity and misery in which most of them - the nomadic peoples excepted - dwelt. In western Asia, he thought in 1787, this ‘grande revolution’ would begin via an armed revolt among the fiercely independent nomadic tribes of the Arabian desert.6 It was this concern with universal emancipation based on the principle of equality and total emancipation from religious authority and censorship, and insistence on reason as the herald and architect of this emancipation, indeed on ‘philosophie’ as the basis

of all genuine emancipation and improvement, that was the signature tune of the post-1770 Radical Enlightenment and what Paine and Barlow liked to call the ‘General Revolution’.

There were many very substantial differences between the new ideology of the Radical Enlightenment and the outlook of the American Revolution - and the tradition of classical republicanism - already prior to 1789. But the most important was the idea that equality and emancipation are impossible without completely changing the way of thinking of the common people. By whatever means this ‘General Revolution’ eventually began in the political sphere, the most vital step without which the right kind of political revolution, it seemed to the radical philosophes following Diderot, d'Holbach, Mably and Helvétius, was impossible, was to prepare the ground intellectually, that is make men everywhere aware of the havoc caused to human society and happiness by what they called despotism, priestcraft, ignorance, intolerance and superstition. This intellectual process, the diffusion of ‘l'esprit philosophique’, identified before 1789 as the crucial preparation, after 1789 was additionally recognized by the revolutionary leaders who dominated the pre-Robespierre stages of the Revolution, men like Brissot, Sieyes, Mirabeau, Condorcet, Bailly, Manuel, Cloots and Volney, as by far the most essential and important cause of the French Revolution. And in this they were again perfectly justified. For even if historians, for various reasons, some ideological, have been exceedingly slow to acknowledge it, the primary cause of the French Revolution defined as a turn towards a new world-view based on equality, individual freedom and democracy was and could only have been the pre-1789 upsurge of radical ideas.

The radical republican campaign could not hope to succeed like Voltaire's, Turgot's or Beccaria's Enlightenment by winning over monarchs and influential courtly advocates. To succeed in its goals Radical Enlightenment had no other recourse but to saturate the reading public with an astounding torrent of mostly still clandestine - except in France from 1788 - but increasingly widely propagated and in some cases (including both the Histoire philosophique and the Système) highly successful publications. Its only chance was to turn la philosophie moderne into the hard-hitting, effective ideology it became, and by thoroughly saturating the reading public with the new ideas, set in motion a general process rendering society more ‘enlightened’ and ultimately transforming the political framework of modern life. Only by pulverizing the reading public's formerly deferential and pious attitudes could Radical Enlightenment hope in the end to raise the general level of resentment against traditional social hierarchies and monarchy, undermine privilege, serfdom, slavery, and special interests, destroy ecclesiastical authority, ban religious discrimination, establish freedom of thought and expression, end the persecution of homosexuality and, at some future point, redirect the levers of government towards reforming the law and institutions, making society freer, more secure, and more equal for all.

To demolish such an edifice of oppression and prejudice as was profiled by the

Radical Enlightenment of the late Diderot, d'Holbach and Helvétius was, needless to say, a staggeringly vast undertaking. American developments were suggestive, though, of what such a ‘revolution of the mind’ might accomplish. European writers visiting America in the 1780s and 1790s, Brissot and Volney among them, noted that practically everyone in the new United States enjoyed at least a modicum of dignity and prosperity, as well as liberty, whereas in Europe most men and women eked out their whole lives in hardship and destitution. What this meant, held the radical enlighteners, was that most men led down-trodden and miserable lives wretched not through the natural course of things but owing to malicious exploitation and scheming by ‘aristocrats’, ‘priests’ and bankers as well as kings, and hence avoidably impoverished, dependent and oppressed. This, a truly disturbing and frightening picture if true, the moderate mainstream Enlightenment, of course, vehemently denied. For a divinely-ordained order can not be one that reduces most men to preventable degradation and penury. The entire Lockean-Newtonian tradition as well as the Leibniz-Wolffian stream in central and northern Europe and the stance of later moderate enlighteners like Voltaire and Turgot was firmly opposed to the radical perspective. Certainly, some men are rich and command while most have nothing and obey, granted Voltaire, while contesting the radical standpoint, in 1771; but this could not mean, he insisted, that they are unjustly exploited or wretched. Ranks, nobility and inequality of wealth are simply inherent in human life. The true philosopher accepts this. Most men must toil to live and while toiling have no time to be miserable or to think. Only when jolted out of their usual prejudices and beliefs do men become unhappy; and it is then that the real trouble starts. Consequently, urged Voltaire, the philosophes should not try to enlighten the majority but only the social and intellectual elite, a view with which his intellectual ally, Frederick the Great, wholeheartedly concurred.7

There can be no doubt that both the moderate mainstream and the Counter-Enlightenment retained the support of far larger numbers than the radical camp. Religious allegiance and the weight of tradition vastly outweighed ‘l'esprit philosophique’ when it came to how the man in the street thought. There was no difficulty at all in countries like Britain, America, Germany, Italy, Holland and Switzerland in getting the vast majority on the side of at least ‘moderation’ if not reaction. The world and everything in it were created by God; and the social order was divinely sanctioned. According to those powerfully infused with the ideas of Leibniz and Wolff in Germany, Scandinavia and Russia, God had ordered the world in the best way possible. But while the Counter-Enlightenment and the moderate Enlightenment easily swayed most people as well as their traditional leaders, both moderate Enlightenment after 1770 and the Counter-Enlightenment faced a much more arduous task when it came to the intellectually sophisticated. For it was (and is) next to impossible to make either the moderate Enlightenment or Counter-Enlightenment standpoints philosophically coherent or morally justifiable except by emasculating reason by means of a thorough-

going skepticism, like Hume, or else by resorting to a more complex intellectual procedure invalidating the application of reason to most metaphysical, moral and social issues. Hence it was no accident that the Kantian ‘revolution’ in philosophy occurred precisely in the 1780s; precisely when the public disputes about Spinoza and about materialism were at their height - or that the Kantians alone succeeded in producing an intellectually formidable and cogent defense against radical ideas. All the rest, as German conservative writers like Rehberg and Jacobi abundantly acknowledged - whether Voltaire's Newtonianism, Locke's empiricism, Montesquieu's relativism, or Leibniz-Wolffian optimism - were seen to be and were simply unable to withstand the force of Spinozism and neo-Spinozism in the shape of ‘la philosophie moderne’.

As a result of the Radical Enlightenment's superior intellectual cohesion, many of the intellectually more aware were by the 1770s inclined to concede the prime radical premise that the whole of existing society presented a scene of chronic disorder, degradation and deprivation and were increasingly concerned to know why and how to change this. What remedy can there possibly be, asked d'Holbach, in 1773, for ‘la dépravation générale des sociétés’ where so many powerful factors combine to perpetuate the prevailing disorder and misery? There is only one way to cure such a mountain of ills, abolish the whole corrupt system of rank, privilege and prejudice and replace it with a more equitable society; and there is only one way to undertake such a task, namely attack ‘error’ and proclaim ‘the truth’. ‘If error, as everything shows, is the exclusive source of all the evil on earth’, held d'Holbach, if men are only vicious, intolerant, oppressed and poor because they have totally wrong ideas about ‘their happiness’ and about everything else; then it can only be by fighting mistaken notions with courage and resolution, by showing men their true interests and proclaiming ‘des idées saines’ that society's ills can be tackled. When society's defects are structural and chiefly rooted in veneration for rank, faith, credulity, trust in authority and most of all ignorance then philosophy is not just the aptest but the only agent broad and powerful enough to precipitate a rapid, all-encompassing revolution.8

The revolutionary potential of la philosophie moderne had become obvious by the 1770s and so had the intellectual origins of the radical challenge. ‘They are sapping the foundations of society, protested Father Jamin, a leading French anti-philosophe, by representing loyal ‘subordination’ as a set of barbaric ancient rights, obedience as mere weakness, and authority as tyranny.9 All belief in supernatural beings and spirits, he protested, and therefore all supernatural authority and agency is eliminated by these philosophes modernes. ‘Tout est matière’, they contend, ‘avec Spinosa’.10 The principal agent of this, to the anti-philosophes seemingly obvious, coming revolution was, beyond any question, in their eyes too, the principles of the ‘nouveaux philosophes’, and here Jamin, Deschamps, Bergier, Marin, Chaudon, Feller, Nonnotte, Male-

ville and the other anti-philosophes were no less accurate in their assessment than the revolutionary leadership of 1789-92. The primary agent of revolution was a subversive intellectual tradition reaching back to Spinoza, although in the voluminous pre-1789 eighteenth-century literature attacking the thought of the radical philosophes, Bayle too is generally allocated a prominent place as a key inspirer, founding-father and progenitor of radical thought. Indeed, he was frequently deemed the most insidious figure of the radical tradition of all. Recognized as the first and most effective, after Spinoza, to urge a full toleration and freedom of thought, he was also the most relentless in separating morality wholly from theology, in undermining not just faith but anything that anyone believes on the basis of tradition or what other people believe with his scorching skepticism and witty explanations as to why the great majority of people believe things for which there is no credible basis whatever, and also the most insistent on basing morality and social theory on reason alone. Bayle, furthermore, was the thinker who first claimed that a society of atheists could be viable and, conceivably, more so than a Christian society, and the first who insisted that it was Spinoza who had produced the philosophically most coherent version of atheism.11

The principle of equality, arguably the most fundamental of all the principles of the Radical Enlightenment, was enshrined as one of its most essential features from the outset. In Spinoza, Bayle and the clandestine philosophical literature of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, the chief ground of moral and social theory is the principle that the happiness of every person, and hence their worldly interests, must be deemed equal. The comprehensive toleration of these philosophers, and uncompromising plea for freedom of expression and the press, was integrally linked to the idea that every person's desires, appetite, needs and opinions are and need to be recognized as being of equal weight and hence religiously and politically equivalent. There can be no question of dividing people into believers and non-believers. There is no greater presumption, they held, than to suppose that because one believes something not demonstrable by reason one possesses some kind of moral superiority over others. Unlike Locke who notably refuses this move, these thinkers abolish the distinction between an individual's theological status, or what Locke conceives as everyone's responsibility to save their soul, on the one hand, and, on the other, a man's civil status. Locke's much more traditional, restricted and theological conception of ‘equality’ was framed in such a way that it was entirely unable to undertake the wider, universalizing social and political role equality plays in radical thought. Indeed, Locke, as Diderot complains in the Histoire philosophique, deemed individuals ‘spiritually’ equal before Christ but not equal in civil status, a distinction the English philosopher explicitly uses in his justification of slavery.

Locke's restricted, dichotomous equality, distinguishing spiritual status from civil, also accommodated nobility and the instituting of new nobilities, as was noted in the

Histoire philosophique to be the case in his draft constitutions for the new English colony of the Carolinas. His was a doctrine resting on an assumed or implied philosophical dualism, distinguishing body from soul which, however, is abolished outright by Spinoza's solution to the mind/body problem - the one-substance doctrine. Both Spinoza's and Bayle's purely secular moral philosophy from which all theological notions are excluded and invalidated a priori depended crucially on the idea of reciprocity and equity in social relations and ultimately also in political relationships. Hence, we can say that the special status and functions of democracy as well as freedom of thought and freedom of the press in radical thought originated in large part as the logical accompaniment of a socially orientated system of moral philosophy and toleration anchored in equality. Spinoza was the first major philosopher in the history of philosophy to proclaim democracy the best form of government, but he did so on the grounds that the proper goal of the state is to safeguard not just the security of the individual and of society, as with Hobbes, but also the freedom, happiness, endeavors and interests of all.

But if equality as a moral and political principle was foundational from the beginning, only during the third quarter of the eighteenth century did Diderot, d'Holbach and their disciples, the conscious heirs of the radical writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, develop a comprehensive critique of social inequality. Clashing as it did with the mainstream Enlightenment's justification of social hierarchy and a society of orders, this then provoked a lively controversy about social and economic inequality which became pivotal to all intellectual discussion about society and politics from the 1760s onwards down to the present. Here was an intellectual encounter of paramount importance in modern history and one which accompanied, or rather tensely paralleled, the rise of economics. Classical, free-market economics emerged specifically from the bosom of the moderate, mainstream Enlightenment, and can rightly be pronounced one of its chief intellectual triumphs. But it encountered immediate suspicion and opposition from among the radical bloc.

In fact, in the economic sphere, no less than in moral theory and politics, we encounter a profound and irreconcilable divergence between the two enlightenments. Where Turgot and Adam Smith insisted on abstracting and isolating the laws of economics from their political and social context, Diderot and d'Holbach refused to detach the economic sphere from questions of landownership patterns, inherited privilege and inequality with the effect that the growing rift over free market economics quickly extended to virtually every aspect of social structure and rank. It is useless to think of improving men or society morally, maintained Diderot, Helvétius, and d'Holbach, as long as the material interests, and prejudices, of the strongest in society are organized in such a way, as d'Holbach put it, as to pervert both morality and society.12 The hereditary principle as it applies to land, high offices and wealth as well as rank, the radical enlighteners considered ruinous socially, morally, politically and culturally.

By reserving prestigious posts and the best rewards for those whose only qualification for enjoying them is their lineage and who have done nothing ‘useful’ for the state, sovereigns discourage the efforts on behalf of society of the other classes of citizen. It is education not lineage, affirmed Helvétius and d'Holbach, which produces persons suitable for high office and merit not birth which is the criterion for judging them.13 Just as it was the principle of equality, and the moral theory based on equity and reciprocity, that firmly rooted democracy in the moral and political philosophy of the Radical Enlightenment, so it was equality which grounded its entire social theory. La philosophie moderne sought, especially from around 1770 onwards, to undermine and vilify the principle of aristocracy and the idea that there are mercantile interests good for the state which are different from the interests of society as a whole. At the same time, Diderot, Helvétius and d'Holbach firmly disavowed any intention of leveling society in the sense of imposing full economic equality. Indeed, d'Holbach expressly warns against all doctrinaire, rigid zeal for economic equality as something inherently dangerous, liable to stifle freedom and destroy the republic.14 ‘A perfect equality between the members of a society’, ruled Helvétius, in 1773, ‘would be an injustice véritable.’15 After all, it is right that the most useful to society should be the best rewarded and also the most respected. Men are only altogether equal, held d'Holbach, in their moral obligation to be good and useful to other men, all groups being united in this, the moral law being ‘à tous également imposée’.16 Rather than seeking an absolute equality of possessions, incomes, and wealth, these thinkers aspired to demolish the existing hierarchy of social orders and rectify gross disproportion in the distribution of land and wealth, destroying all commercial and financial monopolies and ensuring a real freedom of trade and exchange guarded by equitable rules.

In the purely economic sphere, it seemed to them, equality and equity must mean something different from either the supremacy of free market forces, on the one hand, or communism, on the other. Free market forces in a structurally highly stratified society adorned with financial and commercial concessions and monopolies means an intensification of exploitation. At the same time, not everyone works equally hard, or is equally deserving, or contributes as much to society, as the most diligent, ingenious or benevolent. In Helvétius' De l'homme (1773), a text its author continually revised over many years whilst it remained unpublished, adjusting his arguments partly on the basis of conversations in the gatherings that regularly met at his house in his and his wife's regular salon, the pivotal idea of ‘a just equilibrium’ between the fortunes of the citizens emerged.17 Any and every just government should concern itself principally with the well-being of the greatest number, treating all as morally equal and equally deserving of the right to happiness.18 If men can never be equal in ability

and it is right that some should be better remunerated and rewarded by society than others, nature made all men equal in rights, desire for satisfaction and in wanting to be happy and in liberty. Acknowledging this, consequently, and attacking the gross disproportion of influence and property, affording the few vast leverage over the rest, must be the bedrock of any just and internally consistent political theory. Smith's free market capitalism was, in the eyes of the Radical Enlightenment, a highly defective theory.

The rules of the new secular morality divested of all theology are, have been and always will be exactly the same for all, rich and poor, European and non-European, black, white and yellow. Kings, nobles, merchants and laborers all being subject to the same morality, moral conduct must therefore always entail, held these thinkers, acknowledging other men's equal ‘rights’.19 Hence, while no immediate levelers of incomes and property, Helvétius, d'Holbach, and their many German disciples, men like Wekhrlin, Von Knoblauch, and Forster genuinely sought to combat social inequality and change the existing pattern of wealth, as well as demolish the division of society into ‘orders’.20 In the 1760s and 1770s, they did not yet summon mankind, unambiguously, as radical writers did in the early 1790s, to ‘exterminate the monster aristocracy’, as Paine puts it, ‘root and branch’;21 but the eventual elimination of social hierarchy, including nobility, was both presupposed by their ethical system and inherent in their utilitarian social theory.

The Radical Enlightenment, then, envisaged and aspired to forge a new kind of society and by the 1770s tended to think this conceivable only by means of what Paine and Barlow called a ‘General Revolution’. But since the ‘General Revolution’ they sought to engineer was not one of violence, killing and destruction, radical thought was doubly impelled to present itself as a war of ‘reason’, persuasion and re-education against crass ‘superstition’ and cruel oppression, hoping this would suffice for success. It was a dogma of the Radical Enlightenment that reason, and only reason, can raise man's dignity from the depths of degradation, error and ignorance.22 For a time, it seemed, indeed, that reason was gaining ground and monarchy, nobility and church power were crumbling under their astounding assault. It was not hard to see, held Paine, triumphantly, in 1791, ‘from the enlightened state of mankind, that hereditary governments are verging to their decline, and that revolutions on the broad basis of national sovereignty, and government by representation, are making their way in

Europe’; consequently, he added, ‘it would be an act of wisdom to anticipate their approach, and produce Revolutions by reason and accommodation, rather than commit them to the issue of convulsions’.23 Embracing revolution, while seeking to minimize disruption and violence, was a classic exhortation of the Radical Enlightenment.

However arduous the lesson, the different peoples of the world must learn to observe the rules of justice and equity towards each other and respect the rights of all. Exactly the same applies to the different social classes. D'Holbach was not an especially original philosopher; his ‘verbiage’, protested the Abbé Bergier, ‘is borrowed from Spinoza’.24 Yet, his materialist metaphysics, theory of mind and moral philosophy entailed a highly-developed political theory expressed in the Système de la nature and Essai sur les prejugés and then further developed in later works such as his La politique naturelle (1773), a work reissued later in 1773 and again in 1774 and 1790 which had a number of novel features.25 Here, as also in Diderot's contributions to the Histoire philosophique, Spinoza's anti-Hobbesian principle that the ‘natural right’ of Man in the state of nature carries over into the state of society and that there is no intrinsic gap between the status, and equal condition, of man in the state of nature and man in society, was carried further and refined in new ways, in particular being applied to the sphere of international relations and the campaign for a ‘perpetual peace’, an idea laughed at by Voltaire and Frederick but taken seriously by the radical fraternity.26 Harnessing the whole clandestine philosophical tradition stemming from Spinoza and running via Boulainvilliers, Fontenelle, Fréret, d'Argens, Du Marsais and Boulanger, to the radicals of the 1760s and 1770s, these authors forged a potent new ideology offering social theories anchored above all in the principle of equality, and propagated this ideology in publications, the book-historical data abundantly confirm, which achieved a truly astonishing success. Diffusing their ideas broadly in society was a process which accelerated further with the agitation immediately preceding the outbreak of the French Revolution, in 1787-89, in which Mirabeau, Sieyes, Brissot, Condorcet and Volney all figured prominently.

The astoundingly large number of different editions and translations, printed in Holland, Switzerland and England as well as France, that works like the Système de la nature, the Histoire philosophique, the Essai, the anonymous Le Bon-Sens du Curé Jean Meslier suivi de son Testament (‘Londres’ [Amsterdam, 1772) (again by d'Holbach) and De l'Homme went through, far outstripping Rousseau's Contrat social and indeed nearly everything else in sales, was such that the core ideas of la philosophie moderne penetrated everywhere and to all social categories from the court down to humblest hamlets. In 1770, the chancellor of the French judiciary, Antoine-Louis Séguier, in a réquisitoire

laid before the Parlement of Paris prior to the public burning of seven radical texts, including the Système and Fréret's Examen critique des Apologistes de la religion chrétienne, presented, as he was to do again several times subsequently,27 a remarkably gloomy appraisal of what he took to be France's fast deteriorating cultural and moral environment. The country was being inundated with the texts and ideas of a cabale philosophique and ‘cette secte impie et audacieuse’ by injecting its subversive ideas everywhere was undermining religion and government so effectively that it was swaying even some serving women, ordinary country cottagers and the laboring poor in the remotest parts of the realm, something the anti-philosophes in France had been complaining of uninterruptedly since the late 1750s. This Europe-wide deluge of subversive texts amounted, to use his exact word, to a ‘revolution’ in ideas and attitudes.

The principles propagated by ‘cette ligue criminelle’, urged Séguier, aspired to ‘destroy the close harmony’ prevailing between the social orders and which ‘has always existed between the Church's doctrines and the laws of the state’, something all the more insidious, he suggested, with remarkable prescience, because their arguments seem to their readers to tend ‘au Bonheur de l'humanité’.28 Nor did Séguier doubt the capacity of this ‘cabale philosophique’ to cause serious trouble and unrest: ‘le peuple étoit pauvre, mais consolé [...]; il est maintenant accablé de ses travaux et de ses doutes’: the people were poor but consoled by religion; now it is overwhelmed with its toil and its doubts.29 Poor men's attitudes, transformed by philosophy, he suggested, were bound to spell mounting discontent and disruption.

The radicals' justification for stirring up unrest was that the alleged ‘harmony’ which men like the avocat-general, Frederick, and Voltaire, supposed had formerly always been accepted without difficulty was actually a grotesque tableau of oppression, misery and destitution. Why should people not learn the truth? Diderot and d'Holbach and their disciples found the moral qualities of the peasantry estimable and their rising detestation of the seigneurs perfectly understandable, given their being perpetually scorned and oppressed by them and seeing their plots routinely ravaged by noblemen's hunting rights. Peasants become thieves, cheats and swindlers, held d'Holbach, in 1773, because the rich and powerful despise and mistreat them while hardly ever extending a helping hand.30 The way to ameliorate the general condition and the moral qualities of the peasantry, he urged, is to start by reforming the nobility and, in particular, by abolishing the unjust privileges, onerous usages, and feudal ‘rights’ that turned rural life into an unending misery for the poor.31

A truly enlightened moral philosophy, held the radical enlighteners, must unavoidably place the down-trodden and impoverished at the center of its world-view. Here, the radical tradition, and Diderot and d'Holbach in particular, sought to indict

almost the entire history of previous moral thought which seemed to them to turn its back precisely on this aspect and concern itself exclusively with the concerns and aspirations of the privileged and affluent. This negligence they considered the outcome of a cultural environment in which the common people are routinely viewed as a ‘vile rabble’ scarcely ‘made to reason or to learn’, whom aristocrats, large land-owners and merchants seemed to think must be ‘constantly duped and deceived so that they could oppress them with ease and impunity.’32 The object of the ‘General Revolution’ envisaged by Diderot and d'Holbach was precisely to end this by elevating equality to the position of supreme principle of human morality and organization; and by 1790 their efforts did indeed seem to be yielding this result.

Moderate Enlightenment failed in the 1770s and 1780s, in Britain, Holland, Ireland, Russia, Scandinavia, Austria and Germany no less than in France, and was everywhere seen to fail. Institutionalized inequality, held Diderot and d'Holbach undermines the political order and, by stimulating crime and misanthropy, the moral order as well. By 1789, moderate Enlightenment had not even been able to deliver a fully comprehensive religious toleration in countries like France, the Netherlands, Austria or Britain, let alone reduce the role of privilege in politics and society, stop church control of marriage and institute divorce, emancipate the serfs, end slavery in the Caribbean, Ibero-America and the United States, put a stop to the third-class citizenship of most of the Irish under British rule, or end the disabilities imposed on the Jews. This failure to remove the main sources of dissatisfaction was due not to lack of influence at the top or any shortage of moderate enlightened courtiers, aristocrats and royalists but resulted simply from the inherent inability of moderate mainstream concepts, and gradual reformism at the edges, to cope with the scale of the problems in hand. The Lockean-Newtonian tradition was totally incapable of producing a philosophy which could measure up to the seriousness and scale of the issues. Moderate thought was structurally incapable of accomplishing in the context of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the task major portions of society wanted philosophy and the state to achieve and this is why eventually it withered into the background completely. By 1789 control of events passed to the radical enlighteners, on the one side, and, equally important, on the other, to the out and out opponents of all Enlightenment, the ideologues of the Counter-Enlightenment. It was thus the moderate mainstream's general failure to solve urgent problems as much as anything that triggered both the ‘General Revolution’ following in the wake of the ‘Revolution of the Mind’, engineered by the Radical Enlightenment, and the simultaneous powerful resurgence throughout Europe of a new Counter-Enlightenment culture of faith, anti-intellectualism, mystery, and Rosicrucian-style reactionary thought and politics based

on unquestioning loyalism and rejection of all democratic and egalitarian principles.

Moderate mainstream Enlightenment, furthermore, was inherently incapable of appealing to the masses and guiding them in any direction. Whereas the Radical Enlightenment forged Mirabeau, Sieyes, Brissot, Volney, Condorcet, Manuel, Marat, Cloots and Bailly, the men who made the Revolution; Bergasse, Mounier and Lally-Tolendal had the support only of the liberal aristocracy and the clergy. In their fear of the French Revolution as it emerged from the debates of 1789, the scourge of monarchy, aristocracy, financiers and ecclesiastical power, royal governments from Britain to Russia and from Sweden to Spain undoubtedly sought to mobilize the common people in support of monarchy, aristocracy and ecclesiastical authority. But they quickly learnt that they could only do so by dropping the moderate Enlightenment and championing the goals of the Counter-Enlightenment. Beginning in England efforts to foment a strong popular reaction against ‘modern philosophy’ indeed proved highly effective. But it always worked by appealing to the reactionary instincts of the illiterate and semi-literate. The ‘Church and king’ party who, in the response to the meeting of a small group of democratic radicals to celebrate the principles of freedom and equality proclaimed by the French Revolution, burnt down Joseph Priestley's house in Birmingham, in July 1791, and would have killed him had friends not got him out in time, did so after local clergy accused him of ‘forming designs to overturn by violence the constitution of his country’ and with being ‘a blasphemer of his God’ and a ‘traitor to his king’.33 The ‘Church and king’ party and its equivalents in other lands eventually dominated the streets wherever the ‘General Revolution’ failed to gain control much as their spiritual descendants have continued to do, both within and beyond Europe, ever since. The ‘Church and king’ party, like the ‘Oranje boven!’ mobs and their equivalents elsewhere were not shy about showing what they thought of the ‘modern philosophy’. Burning Priestley's home was an eloquent testimony to their rabid anti-intellectualism as well as their zeal. ‘In the flames that gratified the bigotry of High Churchmen’, as one of Priestley's English sympathizers put it, ‘were consumed the most valuable apparatus for philosophical experiments that any private individual was ever possessed of, many manuscripts intended for publication, and a library of valuable books, the produce of many years selection.’34

Sources and Literature

Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier, Examen du Matérialisme ou Réfutation du Système de la Nature (2 vols. Paris 1771).
Gottfried Böhm, Ludwig Wekhrlin (1739-1792). Ein Publizistenleben des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Munich 1893).
J.P. Brissot de Warville, De la vérité ou Meditations sur les moyens de parvenir à la vérité dans toutes les connoissances humaines (Neuchâtel 1782).
Denis Diderot, Fragments échappés du portefeuille d'un philosophe in OEuvres complètes, vol. VI, J. Assézat (ed.) (Place and year of Print?).
[Samuel Heyward], High Church Politics: being a seasonable appeal to the friends of the British Constitution, against the Practices and Principles of High Churchmen (London 1792).
Claude-Adrien Helvétius, De l'homme. De ses facultés intellectuelles et de son éducation (1773; repr. 2 vols. Paris 1989).
Claude-Adrien Helvétius, De L'Esprit (Paris, 1758; repr. 1988).
[Paul-Henri, baron d'Thiry Holbach], Essai sur les Préjugés ou, De l'Influence des opinions sur les moeurs et sur le bonheur des hommes (‘Londres’ [Amsterdam] 1770).
Paul-Henri, Baron d'Thiry Holbach, Système social, ou principes naturels de la morale et de la politique (1773; repr. Paris 1994).
[Paul Thiery, Baron d'Holbach], Systême de la nature, ou Des Loix du monde physique et du monde moral (2 vols. ‘Londres’ [ie.Amsterdam] 1770).
[Paul-Henri, baron d'Thiry Holbach], La politique naturelle, ou discours sur les vrais principes du gouvernement (1773; repr. Paris 1998).
[Paul-Henri, baron d'Thiry Holbach], La morale universelle, ou, Les devoirs de l'homme fondés sur sa nature (3 vols. Amsterdam 1776).
D.M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment. The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York 2001).
Abbé André Morellet, Mémoires sur le dix-huitième siècle et sur la Révolution française (2 vols. Paris 1822).
Père Nicolas, Jamin, Pensées théologiques relatives aux erreurs du temps (1768) (Riom, 1798).
[Gabriel-Honoré de Mirabeau], Considérations sur l'ordre de Cincinnatus (‘Londres’ [Amsterdam?] 1784).
Pierre Naville, Paul Thiry d'Holbach et la philosophie scientifique au XVIIIe siècle (5th edn. Paris 1943),
B. de Negroni, Lectures interdites. Le travail des censeurs au XVIIIe siècle (1723-1774)( (Paris 1995).
Abbé Claude Adrien Nonnotte, Dictionnaire philosophique de la Religion (Liège-Brussels 1773).
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (1790) E. Foner (ed.), (New York 1985)
G.T. Raynal Demasqué, ou Lettres sur la vie et les ouvrages de cet écrivain (Paris 1791).
Jeroom Vercruysse, Réquisitoire sur lequel est intervenue l'Arrêt du Parlement du 18 Août 1770 qui condamne à être brûlés différens livres ou brochures (Paris 1971).
[Antoine-Louis Seguier], Bibliographie descriptive des écrits du Baron d'Holbach (Paris 1770).
François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Questions sur l'Encyclopédie par des amateurs (9 vols. n.p.
[Geneva?], 1770-1772).
Constantin-François Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte, pendant les années 1783, 1784, et 1785 (2 vols. Paris, 1787).
David Wootton, ‘Helvétius. From Radical Enlightenment to Revolution’, Political Theory 28 (2000), 307-36.

Vorige Volgende

Over dit hoofdstuk/artikel

auteurs