The Enlightenment and Its Shadows

First published 1990 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

© 1990 Peter Hulme and Ludmilla lordanova for editorial material and their own contributions; all other contributions © 1990 the respective contributors Typeset by Scarborough Typesetting Services Printed in Great Britain by T. 1. Press, Padstow, Cornwall All rights reserved. No part of this book may be repn'nted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The Enlightenment and its shadows. 1. European culture, history I Hulme, Peter, 1948- D. lordanova, L. 1. (Ludmilla I.) 940 ISBN 0-415-04231-3 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The Enlightenment and its shadows / edited by Peter Hulme and Ludmilla lordanova. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-415-04231-3 1. Europe - Intellectual life - 18th century. 2. Enlightenment. 3. Civilization, Modem 18th century. I Hulme, Peter. D. lordanova, L. 1. 89-24176 CB411.E55 1990 CIP 940.2'53 - dc20

Illustrations

1 Genoese map of the world (1457). 2 Dutch map of the world (Joan Blaeu 1648). 3 BenoIt-Louis Prevost, frontispiece to the Encyclopedie (1772); after an original drawing by Charles-Nicholas Cochin II (1764). 4 The tree of knowledge from the Encyclopedie (detail). 5 Wood-engraving illustrating South American Indians (1505). 6 Title-page of Francis Bacon, Novum organum (1620). 7 J. M. Moreau, Ie jeune, engraved illustration for Rousseau's La Decouverte du nouveau monde, from vol. VIII of the 1774-6 edition of the Oeuvres Completes. 8 Sixteenth-century map of EI Dorado (from L. Hulsius, Travels 1599). British Library. 9 The Universe according to Ptolemy, from Andreas Cellarius, Harmonia Macrocosmica (1660). 10 Louis XIV as Apollo in the Ballet du Roy des Festes du Bacchus (1651), by an unknown artist. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. 11 Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Calendrier republicain (Republican Calendar) (1794). Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. 12 Antoine Watteau, Les Fetes venitiennes (ca. 1718). National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. 13 Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat (1793). Musees Royeaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. 14 The First Seal of the Republic (1792). Archives Nationales, Paris. 15 The Goddess of Liberty at the Festival of Reason (November 1793). Reproduced from Revolutions de Paris, no. 215. 16 Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, The Republic, with Liberty, Equality and Fraternity (ca. 1792). Private collection.

6 6 13 14 19 21

40 44 51 61 87 125 128 130 131 133

viii Illustrations 17 Auguste Barr, The Second Seal of the Republic (1848). Archives Nationales, Paris. 18 The Statue of Liberty (1886). Aerial view photograph by Jack Boucher. Reproduced by courtesy of the US Department of the Interior, National Park Service. 19 Eugene Delacroix, Liberty at the Barricades (1830). Louvre, Paris. 20 Anonymous, Le Calculateur patriote (The Patriotic Calculator) (1789). Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. Jacques-Louis Copia, Droits de l'homme et du citoyen (Rights of Jl;Jarz 21 and of the Citizen) (ca. 1793), after Alexandre-Evariste Fragonard. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. 22 Anonymous, Declaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen (Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen) (1793). Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. 23 James Gillray, Un Petit Souper, ala parisienne; - or - A Family of Sans-Culotts Refreshing, after the Fatigues of the Day (1792). The British Library. 24 Anonymous, L'Heureuse Etoile (The Lucky Star) (1802). Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.

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1

Introduction PETER HULME AND LUDMILLA JORDANOVA

In a very dark Chamber, at a round Hole, about one third Part of an Inch broad, made in the Shut of a Window, I placed a Glass Prism, whereby the Beam of the Sun's Light, which came in at the Hole, might be refracted upwards toward the opposite Wall of the Chamber, and there form a colour'd Image of the Sun. (Newton, Opticks [17031, book 1, part 1) The Enlightenment was a self-conscious intellectual movement that discussed its own origins and characteristics with passion. Two texts of particular importance which illustrate this are Jean d'Alembert's preliminary discourse to the Encyclopedie (1751) and Immanuel Kant's 1784 essay 'What is Enlightenment?'. D'Alembert recounts a now familiar story in which the Enlightenment is intensifying that 'light of reason', first lit in Greece, which had been 'rekindled' in the fourteenth century after almost a millenium of darkness (in Diderot 1967: 1-41); Kant defines Enlightenment as 'man's emergence from self-incurred immaturity' (Kant 1970: 54; cf. O'Neill, this volume). The frequency with which these two analogies recur serves to define the self-image of the period, although, like all analogies, each has a troubling ambiguity. These two texts can also stand, briefly, for the very different kinds of address encompassed by the Enlightenment. The Encyclopedie, as its name suggests, attempted to speak of the totality of human knowledge. In his preliminary discourse, d'Alembert, a renowned mathematician, emphasizes in high-minded fashion the progressive nature of human knowledge; although the Encyclopedie itself is also full of scurrilously satirical comments on contemporary life. Kant's short, surprising, yet philosophically elegant and precise essay 'What is Enlightenment?' is unexpectedly the more political of the two texts, since he argues, quite directly, that Enlightenment thinking can be fully realized only in the public sphere - of which he offers an original and provocative definition. Yet encyclopaedia and essay are linked by that 'single style of thinking' which Peter Gay sees as connecting a whole 'family of intellectuals' (Gay 1967-70: 1, xii), an extended family that spanned several generations and that had branches in various European and, eventually, American countries. Certainly in the eighteenth

2 Peter Hulme and Ludmilla Jordanova century there was a constant interchange of visits: Voltaire and Rousseau came to England, a strean1 of philosophes, including Hume and Gibbon, visited Voltaire at Ferney. Learned societies burgeoned with their international links and corresponding members. And if the French branch of the family seemed dominant, then full homage was paid to the trio of English 'pioneers': Bacon, Newton, and Locke. But since the Enlightenment was, in many of its aspects, also highly self-critical, it was inevitable that, even as its identity emerged, it was subverted. There can be no more powerful exemplification of this point than the writings of Denis Diderot, who could be solemn and didactic, excited by science, moved by the moral potential of art, yet, at the same time, playful, mischievous, and completely sceptical about settled notions of human nature. There have been basically two approaches to the inevitable questions of definition and periodization. The first is more exclusive; its origins lie in the period immediately after the French Revolution, and it views the Enlightenment as consisting of a group of more or less likeminded individuals, writing mainly in France in the period between the death of Louis XIV (1715) and the onset of the Revolution (1789). The dominant figures are seen as Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau. In this narrow definition the Enlightenment is viewed as a revolutionary movement of ideas that culminated in the events of 1789-94. Standard works also periodize the history· of Europe in this way. In France these boundaries are emphasized through such series as Peuples et Civilisations, whose two volumes entitled Le Sieele des Lumieres deal with the periods 1715-50 and 1750-89 (Soboul et al. 1977). The same periodization is then found in the Norton history, which includes Tradition and Progress, 1715-1789 (Woloch 1982), and in the Pelican Guides to European Literature, which include an 'Age of Enlightenment' running from 1715 to 1789 (Grimsley 1979). Histories of the Enlightenment itself tend to follow suit: Norman Hampson's The Enlightenment (1968) is divided into two parts, 1715-40 and 1740-89, while the chronology in Lester Crocker's anthology, The Age of Enlightenment (1969) is slightly longer, framed by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) and the guillotining of Louis XVI (1793). Even leaving aside the flexibility of these conventions, there is a serious problem with this approach. Although the term 'Enlightenment' was quickly adopted asa general historical period, the use of political events to mark the beginning and end of a predominantly intellectual and cultural movement is bound to be not only arbitrary - as all such 'marks' are -but also tendentious. In particular, a dating which ends the Enlightenment in 1793 or 1794 strongly implies that the multiple strands of the Enlightenment culminate in the single event of 'the Terror'. It is easy and tempting to use such political markers because they are discrete events and because we can see (or think we see) the links between political ideas and their effects. In fact we know very little about how ideas move, either across or within societies. Since it seems likely that their passage is often halting and uneven, it is, to say the least, problematic to mark the end of a movement that was essentially concerned with ideas by invoking a political event. Furthermore, there is consider-

Introduction 3 able evidence to suggest that, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, some of the most ferocious critics of the Enlightenment were, none the less, deeply indebted to it. Their interpretation of the Enlightenment (see Jordanova, this volume) is not necessarily wrong, but it is important to historicize such interpretations, forcing them to argue on the evidence rather than accepting them on the basis of the founding gesture of periodization itself. At the beginning of this century Gustave Lanson and his students began to broaden the understanding of the Enlightenment in decisive ways, studying its 'origins' in the seventeenth and even sixteenth centuries; paying attention to the importance of English writers such as Bacon, Newton, and Locke; and stressing the continuity of its 'philosophical spirit' into the twentieth century (for an account, see Wade 1971: 3-57). The most influential of Lanson's pupils was Paul Hazard, whose crucial works - published in 1935 and 1946 - effectively defined the modern, 'broader' notion of the Enlightenment. His most important moves, which are now widely accepted, were to establish the beginnings of the Enlightenment proper in the seventeenth century; to clarify the contrast between the 'stability' of the classical ideal and the intrinsically 'restless' character of Enlightenment thinking; to realize the genuinely European nature of the phenomenon of the Enlightenment, with due weight given to its Scottish, English, and German components; and - in some ways 1110st crucial of a11- to argue for the importance to the Enlightenment of the way of thinking introduced by Descartes (against the previous argument that the substance of Descartes' thought had been soon rejected so that he was not a significant precursor). This is how Hazard puts it: The pineal gland, in which he deemed the soul was lodged; those robots or mechanical animals insensible alike to pain and pleasure, the plein; the whirlpools; the physics, and even the metaphysics, of Descartes had fallen by the wayside. What, then, of essential significance survived? His spirit; his method - a lasting acquisition, that - his rules for guiding the operations of the mind, so simple, yet withal so powerful, that even if they did not illuminate the whole domain of truth, they at all events caused some of the shadows to recede. (Hazard 1973: 158) Light was a central metaphor for knowledge long before the Enlightenment, but at that period it took on new vitality. The cosmology of Copernicus and Galileo had established the sun at the centre of the universe, and its light had become the subject - in Newton's Opticks (published 1703) - of the greatest scientific investigations of the seventeenth century. In Newton's work the laws of light seemed to have been laid bare, yet still in devout fashion. Even Alexander Pope, often an acerbic commentator on scientific developments, could see such understanding as part of God's plan: 'Nature, and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night.! God said Let Newton Be! and All was Lighf (Epitaph, intended for Sir Isaac Newton 1730). Consequently, there was a whole epistemology behind the use of images of 'light' in the eighteenth century, one that was boosted by the belief that all knowledge came

4 Peter Hulme and Ludmilla Jordanova from the senses and that vision was queen among the senses, with observation at the heart of the acquisition of solid knowledge of the world. Enlightenment was less a state than a process of simultaneous unveiling and observation. To look well and carefully sufficient light is required, and looking in this way was deemed the only route to secure knowledge, although even a priori knowledge could be analogised to vision as the product of inner light. It was against this background that Diderot's prospectus for the Encyclopedie spoke of 'the general enlightenment which has spread throughout society' Des lumieres generales qui se sont repandues dans la societe] (Diderot 1967: 34). The eighteenth century was commonly referred to by the enlighteners as their century, 'Ie siecle des lumieres', and the German term Aufkliirung was common by the 1780s - although its translation as 'Enlightenment' only came into English usage in the nineteenth century. Dispute over the significance of the Enlightenment has remained at the heart of much twentieth-century intellectual debate. One of the most sophisticated and involuted condemnations of the Enlightenment, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, was written between 1944 and 1945 by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. This critique 'from the left' has proved an important reference point in the contemporary debate between two increasingly entrenched positions: a 'poststructuralism' which, in its various forms, is indebted to the anti-Enlightenment views associated with Friedrich Nietzsche; and a standpoint within Marxist 'critical theory' defended by Jurgen Habermas as a 'completion' rather than rejection of the Enlightenment project. Since Adorno and Horkheimer are themselves key figures in critical theory, Habermas's discussion of the Dialectic of Enlightenment is of special importance (Habermas 1987: chapter V), as too is the fascinating but tragically incomplete dialogue between Habermas and the late Michel Foucault, which was enjoined precisely over Kant's 'What is Enlightenment?' essay (Foucault 1984, 1986; Habermas 1986). Similar complexities can be observed elsewhere on the political spectrum. The calculations of reason have traditionally been rejected by an English conservatism drawing its language from Burke's reflections on the French Revolution. More recently, elements of the self-styled 'New Right' have associated themselves with a liberalism that supposedly has its roots in Adam Smith and David Hume. A 'New Enlightenment' has even been proclaimed, speaking in the name of 'reason' against what it sees as the transient intellectual fashions of the 'new relativism' (cf. Graham and Clarke 1986; and - for a French parallel- Bruckner 1986). The point here is not to intervene in those complex debates, but to indicate in brief compass that the major issues of our intellectual life today are still implicated, for better or worse, in the shadows cast by the multifaceted enterprise of the Enlightenment project.

If you were to trace onto a map the principal orbits of the Enlightenment writers and their books, traversing the places where their books were written, published and read, you would find that the writers clustered into a ,!?~~~~~I_g~~g!'!PJ1Lc~1

Introduction 5 area: the north and west of France, the low countries, the north-east of Germany, Switzerland, the south of England, the south of Scotland, northern Italy, and that the readership would stretch to the rest of western Europe with a few outposts in eastern Europe and within populations of European descent outside Europe, especially in north and south America. In that sense the Enlightenment was very much a European phenomenon (see Porter and Teich 1981). The map in Figure 1 was drawn in 1457, 200 years before the beginning of the Enlightenment; the map in Figure 2 in 1648, six years after the death of Galileo and two years before the death of Descartes, in other words right at the beginning of the Enlightenment period. Several very broad but important generalizations are illustrated by these maps. To begin with, the maps show the extent of the changes that had taken place in conceptions of the world in the two centuries prior to the Enlightenment. In 1457 Europe's knowledge of the rest of the world was very limited. There is a notional Africa, and a large area to the right that approximates to Asia. But there is no Indian peninsula, no Australia., and - perhaps most important of all- no America, not even a space into which America could fit. By the 1640s the changes are dramatic. This map is at least recognizably of our world. Africa has approximately the right shape, Asia has more definition, and America is very definitely there, in fact occupying almost exactly half of the map. There is no natural division between west and east, so the vertical line on the in the circumstances probably not second map is simply an assertion unreasonable - that the central axis of the northern European world in 1648 lies in the Atlantic (see Davis 1973). America, which was not there at all 200 years previously, is, on the 1648 map, now too big, almost overshadowing the 'old' world to its east. It would be difficult to underestimate the shock to the European intellectual system of that 'discovery' of America, a new world with a whole new fauna and flora and, above all, a human population that was undreamt of by classical antiquity and of which no mention was made in the Bible. The philosophical implications of the existence of America were by the 1640s still in the early stages of their incorporation into the European world-picture. The other striking feature of the 1648 map is that Australia is not there at all: instead there is a massive southern continent running right along the bottom of the map, which is presumed to exist. It says on the map TERRA AUSTRALIS NONDUM COGNITA, the land of the south not yet known. The bringing into knowledge of this 'land of the south' - or, as it turned out, a multitude of islands of the south - was to dominate debates on the state of nature during the second half of the eighteenth century. The 'discovery' of these various 'new worlds' also gave the Enlightenment a metaphor that could be applied far beyond its immediate geographical meaning. Above all it evoked the nature of scientific advance, for which images of marching into new territories, taming what one found there, and giving a coherent account of fresh terrain were especially apt (see Figure 6). Atlases could be collections of maps, but they were also diagrams and illustrations of that other 'terra nondum cognita', the human body.

6 Peter Hulme and Ludmilla Jordanova

Figures 1 and 2 The mid-seventeenth century marks a shift in the balance of European power

from the Mediterranean to northern Europe. Power lies where maps are produced: the top map (1457) was drawn in Genoa, the bottom one (1648) in Amsterdam. It was the northern European countries which were undergoing during those years in the middle of the seventeenth century what we now recognize as the early stages of the development of capitalism, and those countries which now took a decisive initiative in colonial ventures.

Introduction 7 But the second map is also in some respects misleading. Because the shapes are more or less what we expect them to be, we might presume more knowledge than actually existed in the middle of the seventeenth century. 'Discovery', up until the end of the Enlightenment period, generally meant voyages of discovery often linked with trading ventures. So the outlines were known, but not what they contained: the vast expanse of North America had been little travelled by Europeans in 1650, and was not that much better known in 1800. The interior of sub-Saharan Africa was absolutely crucial to the European economies throughout the eighteenth century because it was this area that supplied the black slaves who worked the plantations along the eastern seaboard of continental America. But the slavetraders bought the slaves on the Atlantic coast: Europeans had little knowledge of the complex societies of the interior until the nineteenth century. In some ways most mysterious of all was China and the Far East, still known mainly through the reports of earlier travellers such as Marco Polo. Africa was unknown and despised: China was unknown and admired as the single ancient civilization that had survived into the modern age, respected both for its polity and its aesthetics. Until the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century when Europe was to force its way into China, Europeans would be obliged to trade on Chinese terms, buying Chinese goods made for export at a handful of approved ports on the Chinese coasts. At this stage the only Europeans allowed a closer knowledge of Chinese society were a few Jesuit missionaries (see, for example, Spence 1984). The Enlightenment's self-consciousness was to some extent a geographical consciousness based on the distinctiveness of the part of the world that came to be called 'Europe'. Even the 1648 map shows that the only line separating Europe from the continent of Asia (of which Europe is in fact a peninsula) must have been, as it still is, an ideological line. In the seventeenth century Europe - or more precisely certain people living on the north-west of that landmass - began to define themselves as different in significant respects from the rest of the world. That difference was represented by positing an imaginary continent with a somewhat flexible eastern boundary. Christendom had furnished the banner for the early voyages of discovery. Widespread scepticism about religious institutions, and especially about the temporal power of Rome, weakened the valency of that idea at least in intellectual circles. A geographical self-definition such as 'European' implied identification with secular and progressive values: Gibbon called Europe 'one great republic' (Gibbon 1896-1900: IV, 163). At key moments in the Discourse on Method and the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, both Descartes and Rousseau contrast the worthlessness of 'the book' with the need to investigate 'the world', by which they understood both the world of nature and the world of the self. From a perceived European'centre' writers began to speculate about the 'peripheral' parts of the world. In that sense Descartes' references to the Chinese and the Cannibals inaugurate an important Enlightenment tradition (see Hulme, this volume). This is the 'comparative project' of the Enlightenment, one of its most fundamental methodologies. It was at this

8 Peter Hulme and Ludmilla lordanova time that writers began to compare their own societies with a variety of contemporary and past societies. For example, an influential exponent of early comparative sociology was Montesquieu, whose Spirit of the Laws (1748) shows how extended comparisons could assist the development of abstract analyses of political, social and economic conditions. The same author's Persian Letters (1721) reveals how the comparative perspective could be turned to subversive ends when cast in a fictional form. Enlightenment writers themselves were not great travellers: even Descartes and Rousseau, probably the r110st peripatetic, limited their travel to Europe. But they were voracious readers. Their footnotes are packed with references to the travel writers of the day, many of them missionaries whose own writings are then1selves worthy of consideration as Enlightenment texts, amongst the founding documents of the later disciplines of anthropology and sociology. They also sent their fictional heroes round the world, some - like Robinson Crusoe and Candide - travelling within the realms of the known world, others -like Gulliver - exploring the edges of that world as a way of dramatizing the crucial questions of the age concerning the nature of human nature. Most important of the collections of travel books for the Enlightenment is the Abbe Prevost's Histoire generale des voyages, a series begun in 1746. This originally purported to be merely a translation of the great English collections of Hakluyt, Purchas, and Churchill; but soon revealed itself as a much more ambitious project whose aim was to give an account of the manners, customs, religions, government, arts, sciences, commerce and manufactures of all the nations of the earth. It was, in its own way, the historical counterpart of the Encyclopedie with which it ran almost in parallel. The philosophical reflection on the nature of political society was often carried out via contrasts between European institutions and the supposed 'state of nature' witnessed by these European travellers to the new worlds of America and, later, the South Seas. Some of the principal works of writers like Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Ferguson, and Diderot draw on accounts of these travellers in ways both important for their status as key texts of the Enlightenment, and revealing of their implication with the whole process of European exploration and colonization of the nonEuropean world. There were classical precedents for such comparisons in as much as the nature of 'civilized' society had, for the Greeks, been defined by contrast with, for example, the Scythians (see Hartog 1988). But in place of the Hesiodic 'races' or Ovidian 'ages' - which always told of a 'fall' (as too did the Christian schema), the characteristic Enlightenment philosophy of history was the idea of 'progress', initially from 'savagery' to 'civilization', but then through the stages of a more complex developmental model based on distinctions between hunting, pastoralism, and agriculture. Gradually the Biblical narrative was replaced by historical hypotheses of the kind produced by Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origins ofInequality (see Bernstein,

Introduction 9 this volume) in which the species moved, by a series of almost imperceptible shifts, from the original state of nature through to the social and political complexity of eighteenth-century Europe. Eventually a different kind of map became possible in which all the stages of mankind's 'development' could be visible at a glance: the history of the world could be superimposed upon its geography. At the end of the eighteenth century Edmund Burke wrote: we possess at this time very great advantages towards the knowledge of human Nature. We need no longer go to History to trace it in all its stages and periods. History from its comparative youth, is but a poor instructour.... But now the Great Map of Mankind is unrolld at once; and there is no state or Gradation of barbarism, and no mode of refinement which we have not at the same instant under our View. The very different Civility of Europe and of China; The barbarism of Persia and Abyssinia. The erratick manners of Tartary, and of arabia. The Savage State of North America, and of New Zealand. (Burke 1961: 351; cf. Marshall and Williams 1982) The intense and prolonged reflection of Enlightenment writers on the differences and similarities between various peoples was part of their engagement with the physical world as a whole. People mapped natural variety with unprecedented vigour in the eighteenth century - often thinking of themselves as perfect Baconians when they did so. And since natural historians had to find ways of bringing coherence to their voluminous observations and collections, the Enlightenment saw the heyday of taxonomy. To name, label, describe, examine, and indeed possess natural objects became a powerful urge. It was not just that more was known about the natural world, but that the world itself was coming to be thought about in completely new ways. The crucial issue was history. No one had ever thought that the world lacked a past, but it was believed for many centuries that this past was relatively short, and known primarily through the Bible. During the Enlightenment, fossil· evidence in particular acted as a spur to savants to produce plausible accounts of how what were clearly biological relics got to where they were found, and took the forms that they did. It was evident that the majority of fossils had close affinities with living forms, and also that they diverged from those living forms in certain significant respects. A theological explanation was possible through the notion of special creations: God has created new species at various points in the past, and has also allowed some species to become extinct. The only alternative hypothesis entails organic change - the idea that, over long periods of time, living things changed their basic characteristics. This possibility was first entertained in a serious way by eighteenth-century savants, who were fascinated by the relationships between past and present organisms, and among living species across the globe. Here too the comparative method was central, and it found expression in one of the scientific disciplines that flourished during the Enlightenment - comparative anatomy. By comparing skulls and skeletons of different vertebrates, including humans, anatomists built up pictures of the graduations

10 Peter Hulme and Ludmilla lordanova between what they thought of as 'species' and 'races'. Here the comparative method linked what we now call the natural and the social sciences. In comparative anatomy, the study of nature embraced human beings and animals; it treated what we would think of as questions of race and gender in the same way as natural historical questions. Nature was all-embracing, but still ambivalent. It included the earth, plants, animals, and human beings. Nature held authority - it was the lawful system instituted by God. As such, it could be treated as a paradigm, especially of ethical and moral values. Hence, nature was idealized. Enlightenment writers were prone to personify nature as woman, especially as a generous mother. But, for the restless spirits of the period, nature could also display other qualities - it could be wild, unpredictable, destructive, anarchic, subversive. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 was often invoked as an example of nature's less benign side. To a degree, then, incompatible views of nature developed, although there were people, of whom Diderot is the pre-eminent example, who managed, if not to reconcile them, at least to hold disparate points of view simultaneously. Diderot could, for example, invoke nature as a comfortable moral and aesthetic norm, and yet allow the title character in his dialogue Rameau's Nephew to pour scorn on the idea of nature as any kind of norm. There was much debate about the place of America in this natural world. In the famous phrase of John Locke, 'in the beginning all the world was America' (Locke 1965: 343). But in the eighteenth century the French naturalist Buffon argued that all the mammals of America were smaller and the indigenous people weaker than those of the other continents, a point elaborated at great length in two tirades written by the Dutchman Cornelius de Pauw. De Pauw, who had never set foot in America, was commissioned to write the article on it for the 1776 supplement to the Encyclopedie. Raynal's History of the Two Indies (1770 and reprinted thirty-seven times by 1820) was similarly scathing about the degenerate Indians; and the descendants of European emigrants were commonly supposed to suffer similar degeneration, both physical and moral. The War of Independence that led to the foundation of the USA put an end to this view and tended in its stead to encourage the Enlightenment metaphor by which the 'old' (and corrupt) world of Europe was ready to pass the torch of progress across the Atlantic: a new version of the translatio imperii given concrete form in France's famous gift to its sister Republic of the statue entitled Liberty Enlightening the World (see Iversen, this volume). During the eighteenth century America was replaced as a testing ground for Enlightenment ideas of the natural by the islands of the South Seas. Two travellers sufficiently important to be considered by their contemporaries as Enlightenment heroes were Louis Antoine de Bougainville and James Cook, explorers of the Pacific in the 1760s and 1770s. Both Bougainville and Cook gave accounts of one particular island that had fascinated them - Tahiti, which has had a special place in the European imagination ever since. Tahiti was described as a kind of paradise: its

Introduction 11 climate was perfect, a plentiful supply of food seemed to fall from the trees, nobody seemed to do any work, everyone seemed to live in peace and harmony, and - what impressed the Europeans most of all - there seemed to be a complete absence of sexual taboos. The Europeans also brought back a number of Tahitians. Most of them found the climate difficult to cope with and soon died, but in the 1770s one of these Tahitians, called Omai, was a great social success in London, and had his portrait painted several times, most famously by Sir Joshua Reynolds. At the same time, in France, Denis Diderot was writing what he called a 'supplement' to Bougainville's account of his visit to Tahiti. Diderot used this work to make some of his most trenchant remarks about nature and freedom: The life of savages is so simple, and our societies are such complicated machines! The Tahitian is so close to the origin of the world, while the European is close to its old age. The contrast between them and us is greater than the difference between a newborn baby and a doddering old man. They understand absolutely nothing about our manners or our laws, and they are bound to see in them nothing but shackles disguised in a hundred different ways. Those shackles could only provoke the indignation and scorn of creatures in whom the most profound feeling is a love of liberty. . . How far we have departed from nature and happiness! Yet nature's sovereignty cannot be destroyed; it will persist in spite of all the obstacles raised in its way. Men may write as much as they like on tablets of bronze - to borrow the saying of Marcus Aurelius - that it is criminal to rub two intestines together voluptuously - the human heart will only be torn between the threats contained in the inscription and the violence of its own impulses. (Diderot 1956: 194, 233-4) This Tahiti was obviously a figment of Europe's imagination, and could not survive extended contact. This was not, as the Europeans had thought, an island in the 'state of nature'. For one thing, Tahiti had a political system. When Omai was taken back his main concern was to overthrow some enemies whom he accused of usurping his territory; so the picture of his return to Tahiti has him dressed rather ludicrously in European armour. South Sea hospitality also had its limits and there were violent incidents. The murder of Captain Cook himself on Hawaii in 1779 during his third voyage to the South Seas was instrumental in undermining the stereotype of the 'noble savage' (see Sahlins 1987). But the image of Tahiti as paradise lingered. In 1789 the most famous mutiny in English naval history took place in the South Seas on board HMS Bounty, when the authority of Captain Bligh was challenged by a group of sailors led by Fletcher Christian. The cry of the mutineers was 'Huzza for Tahiti'. Tahiti signified for them the opposite of naval discipline and authoritarian government. As Bligh later said about the mutineers: 'They imagined it in their power to fix themselves in the midst of plenty, on one of the finest islands in the world, where they need not labour, and

12 Peter Hulme and Ludmilla lordanova where the allurements of dissipation are beyond any thing that can be conceived' (quoted in Marshall and Williams 1982: 291). Many Enlightenment writers saw themselves as metaphorical 'travellers', concerned - as real travellers must be - with first-hand experience, scepticism towards written authorities, and the production of knowledge acquired in a rigorously empirical way. This is one facet of the current of radical individualism that has been deemed central to the Enlightenment (Lukes 1973). Conventional figures of this tradition are the political subject armed with rights to property and the autobiographical subject of Rousseau's Confessions. But the period has even stronger and more ambivalent images of such individualism: Descartes in his 'oven', Robinson Crusoe alone and fearful on his Caribbean island, Emile 'alone in the midst of human society', the 'wild boy' studied by Itard and, finally, Victor Frankenstein at work in his corpse-strewn laboratory. Just as we see Descartes as initiating a way of thinking that was central to the Enlightenment project, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein reveals its bankruptcy by the early nineteenth century. Frankenstein himself, like his creator, was a child of the Enlightenment, but he took his passion for the mastery of nature too far, and hence became not a benevolent scientific father, but an egotistical, irresponsible meddler with delusions of grandeur. The monster is more than out of control, he is totally unviable because his repulsive appearance, the consequences of Frankenstein's hubristic attempts to create a human being, make him an outcast. Early nineteenth-century Europeans had seen Napoleon's failed attempts to master vast territories and construct empires; they remained frightened of chaos and revolution, and became sceptical of the power of reason to bring the necessary degree of coherence to human society. Many people lost confidence in or rejected Enlightenment traditions. Yet, the major movements of ideas in the nineteenth century, such as positivism, retained and developed many of its key commitments. The Enlightenment's shadows have played a complex role in nineteenth and twentieth century society, but by the early nineteenth century the easy confidence and optimism that were so integral a part of the Enlightenment proper had evaporated. For nearly twenty years now all students in the humanities at the University of Essex (and many in the social sciences) have taken a course in their first year called 'The Enlightenment'. The fifty lectures on the course each year are given by members of all seven departments in the School of Comparative Studies - Art History and Theory, Government, History, Language and Linguistics, Literature, Philosophy, and Sociology. The approach taken is determinedly interdisciplinary and many students go on to take joint degrees in two of the component disciplines. This book draws upon expertise and enthusiasms developed in teaching that course: the editors and contributors are all members of the School of Comparative Studies.

Introduction 13

Figure 3 Benoit-Louis Prevost, frontispiece to the Encyclopedie (1772); after an original drawing by Charles-Nicholas Cochin II (1764). There is a detailed explanation of the figures in the Encyclopedie, but Diderot's gloss on Cochin's drawing captures the essence: We see at the top Truth between Reason and Imagination: Reason tries to lift her veil; Imagination prepares to adorn her. Below this group, a crowd of speculative philosophers; lower, a number of artists. The philosophers have their eyes fastened on Truth; proud Metaphysics tries to divine her presence rather than see her. Theology turns her back and waits for light from on high. (Diderot 1967: viii)

14 Peter Hulme and Ludmilla Jordanova

Figure 4 The tree of knowledge. 'This detail of the tree of knowledge from the EncyclopMie depicts some of its classifications. As outlined by d'Alembert, understanding in the system of human knowledge falls into three categories: memory, imagination, and reason. Under memory he placed history (both natural history and sacred history), as well as the arts, trades, and manufacturing. Imagination led to poetry, sacred and profane. The central core was reason, where general metaphysics and the "science of God" led to philosophy, the "science of man", and the "science of nature". The science of man embraced ethics and logic, while that of nature led to mathematics and also to "physics", as seen at the lower left. Mathematics was either pure (for instance, arithmetic and geometry) or mixed (comprising mechanics, astronomy, optics, and other branches of ordinary physics). "Particular physics" embraced philology, physical astronomy (and astrology), meteorology, cosmology, botany, zoology, mineralogy, and chemistry. The other branches can be traced on the tree in a similar fashion.' (Cohen 1980: 269).

Introduction 15 The eleven essays that follow present original research on some of the topics covered by the Essex lecture programme. In at least one respect the essays follow a pedagogical imperative of the Essex course: they focus on the written texts of the Enlightenment rather than retailing a more general history of ideas. And neither are the essays addressed to specialists; rather they aim to engage a more general readership interested in approaching the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from a conlparative and interdisciplinary perspective. The book does not offer a conventional 'introduction' to the Enlightenment: no attempt is made at coverage of all issues and writers. None the less, the introduction and the editorial passages linking the individual essays convey a general sense of many of the main lines of Enlightenment thinking and the first and last essays offer comments on the 'beginning' and 'end' of the Enlightenment. Although there is no single 'Essex approach' and, indeed, the essays vary widely in their address to the themes, the project has been discussed in detail by all the contributors and the essays read and discussed in draft. The Enlightenment and its Shadows is a collective project. There is no particular line or orthodoxy but, we hope, a style of thinking that owes something to a critical reflection on the legacy of the Enlightenment. A NOTE ON CONVENTIONS References are by means of the author/date system, with a consolidated bibliography at the end of the volume. A run of references may exclude the author/date after the first mention. Translations of foreign texts into English have been used throughout, with the original quoted where appropriate. We have followed Peter Gay's example in using 'philosophe' as an f.:nglish word (Gay 1967-70: II, xv), and have extended the convention to include 'savant'.

2 The spontaneous hand of nature: savagery, colonialism, and the Enlightenment PETER HULME

EDITORS' INTRODUCTION Geoffroy Atkinson's book on the 'new horizons' of the French Renaissance (1955) lists 550 geographical works, treating of all parts of the world, that appeared between 1480 and 1610. Writers like Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) and Rene Descartes (1596-1650) had plenty of evidence of the diversity of customs and manners. Their respective discussions of the significance of this diversity provide the starting point for Peter Hulme's essay. Descartes was educated by the Jesuits, and it was the Jesuit missionaries who were responsible for the most impressive body of ethnographic material produced in this period, sending back massive reports, some of which were edited and rewritten in France and published as The Jesuit Relations (Thwaites 1896-1901). There were Jesuits working among the Chinese and the Cannibals (to use Descartes' examples quoted at the beginning of this essay), although they were perhaps best known for their missions in Paraguay, mercilessly satirized by Voltaire, another Jesuit pupil, in his Candide (1759) - the subject of the following paper. The wealth of ethnographic writing published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fuelled all speculation, however purportedly 'hypothetical', about the nature of human beings and human social and political organizations. John Locke, whose Two Treatises of Government (1690) is the eventual focus of Hulme's essay, refers constantly to this growing body of material, much of which he owned (Harrison and Laslett 1971). Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the most avowedly speculative of the philosophical historians, would in 1755 rest his case on extensive quotations from such books, none more important than the Dominican father JeanBaptiste du Tertre's General History of the Caribbean Islands Inhabited by the French (1667). Such Enlightenment speculation about 'savagery' has generally been studied from within the framework of the history of ideas. The two major contexts of

The spontaneous hand of nature 17 discussion have been the 'state of nature' debate in the earlier part of the period (where 'savagery' is the absence of 'civilization'), and the later development of a 'stages' theory of history in which 'savagery' assumes the kind of defining characteristics that mark its use by, for example, Adam Ferguson (with the original dualism expanded by the introduction of the median stage 'barbarism') or Lewis Henry Morgan in the mid-nineteenth century (with 'savagery' and 'barbarism' each further subdivided into upper, Iniddle, and lower forms). A primary aim of this essay is to reinstate the Enlightenment discussion of 'savagery' into a colonial history, looking, at least briefly, at the practice associated with these ideas and trying to see just how they formed part of an extended ideological justification for colonial appropriation of non-European territories, particularly in the Americas. No major Enlightenment figure had direct experience of the colonies but several, foremost amongst them John Locke, worked closely with the private and state bodies which were responsible for formulating the colonial policies of European countries during the period.

2

from college days I had learnt that one can imagine nothing so strange and incredible but has been said by some philosopher; and since then, while travelling, I have realised that those whose opinions are quite opposed to ours are not, for all that, without exception barbarians and savages; many of them enjoy as good a share of reason as we do, or better. Again, I considered how a given man with a given mind develops otherwise among Frenchmen or Germans than he would ifhe had always lived among Chinese or Cannibals; how, again, even in the fashion of dress, the very thing that we liked ten years ago... seems to us at present extravagant and ridiculous. Thus it is by custom and example that we are persuaded, much more than by any certain knowledge; at the same time, a majority of votes is worthless as a proof, in regard to truths that are even a little difficult of discovery; for it is much more likely that one man should have hit upon them for himself than that a whole nation should. Accordingly I could choose nobody whose opinions I thought preferable to other men's; and I was as it were forced to become my own guide. (Descartes 1970: 18-19; translation adapted) A phenomenon as complex as the Enlightenment could have no single beginning but, if the matter were pressed, a claim might be staked for these words of Descartes, published in 1637: they certainly manifest that selfless commitment to truth which has always been such an important part of the self-image of the Enlightenment and they mark, in dramatic fashion, the emergence of an individual and uncompromised project from the plethora of mere example and custom. Descartes forced to become his own guide is a graphic image of temporary loss, assuaged by the knowledge that the authorial subject has emerged from the dark forest of intellectual confusion and is dramatizing in retrospect the quest in which he is inscribed as solitary hero. The cultural geography of the passage obviously owes much to the 'age of discovery' in which France was just beginning to participate: Descartes' mental

The spontaneous hand of nature 19

Figure 5 One of the earliest purported illustrations of the inhabitants of the Americas, this wood-engraving, probably produced in Germany, circulated through Europe in the early sixteenth century. It was accompanied by this account, probably culled from the reports based on the letters of Amerigo Vespucci: This figure represents to us the people and island which have been discovered by the Christian King of Portugal or by his subjects. The people are thus naked, handsome, brown, well shaped in body, their hands, necks, arms, private parts, feet of men and women are a little covered with feathers. The men also have many precious stones in their faces and breasts. No one also has anything, but all things are in common. And the men have as wives those who please them, be they mothers, sisters or friends, therein make they no distinction. They also fight with each other. They also eat each other even those who are slain, and hang the flesh of them in the smoke. They become a hundred and fifty years old. And have no government. (Eames 1922: 756) The negatives are a commonplace of classical primitivist writing; and the tone is neutral in the sense that there is no moral outrage (as with later Puritan accounts) and no obvious satirical or even polemical stance adopted. The reference to anthropophagy was a defining characteristic of representations of America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Robinson Crusoe and Candide are just two of many fictional figures who have to confront American cannibals.

universe contains Chinese and Cannibals as well as Frenchmen and Germans. The mapping here is straightforward enough: Frenchmen and Germans constitute the European centre with the Chinese and Cannibals at the eastern and western extremes of the periphery. For Europe China had represented an ideal of oriental civilization ever since the time of Marco Polo. The West Indian Cannibals - whose

20 Peter Hulme name was given to the area they inhabited as 'Caribbean' - had, from the earliest reports of the New World, occupied the opposite end of that spectrum, their purported anthropophagy so fitting them for the role of archetypal savages that 'cannibalism' soon came to displace the classical word. Yet if a cultural spectrum is implicit, the Cannibals remain, for Descartes, within the pale. They are a nation, Cannibals rather than cannibals; and so the 'given man', the universal subject of Descartes' sentence, can be as easily imagined developing his 'given mind' among the Cannibals as amongst the Germans. The presumption of a common humanity underlies differences of custom and opinion, however severe. From a philosophical point of view, Descartes is usually considered to have been writing within a tradition of sceptical humanism associated with the essayist Michel de Montaigne, which he would - in the course of the Discourse on Method - turn against itself in what has so often been seen as the founding gesture of modern thought. But culturally he also draws on Montaigne in this passage, following the Ciceronian axiom about philosophy, which had been earlier quoted in Montaigne's Apologie de Raymond Sebond ('Nothing may be spoken so absurdly, but that it is spoken by some of the philosophers' (i928: II, 256)) with a paraphrase of Montaigne's own famous axiom that 'chacun appelle barbarie ce qui n'est pas de son usage' ('men call that barbarism which is not common to them'), made in the course of his remarkable essay 'Of the Caniballes' (1928: I, 219). Yet the general thrust of Descartes' paragraph eventually breaks away from such relativism. A different language begins to emerge, in which 'truths' are 'discovered' like new lands, in which the model for the scientist is that of the new explorer sailing beyond the boundaries of the old world of tired shibboleths, across 'strange seas of Thought, alone' (in Wordsworth's later words about Newton) towards the brave world of new knowledges. No voyager sailed the strange seas of the Atlantic or Pacific literally alone, but the metaphor best suits Christopher Columbus, perforce his own guide across the Atlantic and thereby the unspoken model for Descartes' solitary quest in search of a new-found land of certainties in which to sink the foundations of a new city of knowledge. A geographical revolution had indeed preceded and in many ways provided a language for the revolution in thought that constituted the Enlightenment. At around the time that Descartes began his European travels, Francis Bacon published the first outline of his Great Instauration (1620), the most confident statement of the new science. Like Descartes after him, Bacon begins by rejecting what he calls the 'enchantments of antiquity and authority' which have 'so bound up men's powers that they have been made impotent (like persons bewitched) to accompany with the nature of things' (Bacon 1960: 81). The book, traditional symbol of knowledge and authority, is denigrated for its 'endless repetitions' (83). The spell of the library is to be broken through the example of the voyagers: Nor must it go for nothing that by the distant voyages and travels which have beconle frequent in our times many things in nature have been laid open and dis-

The spontaneous hand of nature 21

Figure 6 The classical world had at its centre the Mediterranean sea, the world of Ulysses'

travels, whose western limits were marked by the straits of Gibraltar. Hercules was one of the few to go beyond those limits, and on his return he set up the Pillars of Hercules, usually identified with the rocks of Ceuta and Gibraltar. In the early fourteenth century Dante, in a remarkable variation on the classical story, had Ulysses tell of how he died after persuading his sailors to set a course directly west beyond the Pillars: 'Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance I Your mettle was not made; you were made men, I To follow after knowledge and excellence' (Dante 1949: 236). In this tradition, Bacon's title page shows a ship passing through the Pillars, symbolically breaking clear of the restraints of Old World knowledge.

22 Peter Hulme covered which may let in new light upon philosophy. And surely it would be disgraceful if, while the regions of the material globe - that is, of the earth, of the sea, and of the stars - have been in our times laid widely open and revealed, the intellectual globe should remain shut up within the narrow limits of old discoveries. (81) For this new challenge the existing guides are puzzled and worthless. The ancients were, after all, limited to coasting the shores of the old continent or crossing inland seas like the Mediterranean. Just as the mariner's needle provided a new guide across the .ocean, so a new scientific method will lead out of the 'woods of experience' into 'the open ground of axioms' (12-13; 80). The analogy is perhaps clearest in the book's opening statement, its frontispiece showing the pillars of Hercules bravely traversed by a new Columbus (Figure 6). Some of the earliest accounts of the inhabitants of America had been written from within that same humanist tradition that Descartes was to subvert. Peter Martyr, the Italian humanist resident in Spain at the time of Columbus's return from the Caribbean, disseminated much information about the New World in his letters and other writings, some of which were translated into English by Richard Eden in 1555 as The Decades of the newe worlde. Peter Martyr's first frame of reference was classical: So that if we shall not be ashamed to confesse the truthe, they seem to lyve in the goulden worlde of the which owlde wryters speake so much; wherin luen lyved simplye and innocentlye without inforcement of lawes, without quarrelling ludges and libelles, contente onely to satisfie nature, without further vexation for knowlege of thinges to come. (Eden 1885: 71; cf. Levin 1972) This vision of the simplicity and innocence of the Golden Age drew its essential elements from the opening book of Ovid's JVletamorphoses, not accidentally the very first book translated into English in America, by George Sandys, treasurer of the Virginia Company at the time of the Jamestown settlement in the early seventeenth century: The Golden Age was first; which uncompeld, And without rule, in Faith and Truth exceld. As then, there was no punishment, nor feare; Nor threatning Laws in brasse prescribed were; Nor suppliant crouching pris'ners shooke to see Their angry ludge: but all was safe and free.... (Sandys 1640: 2) But this humanist ideal of a Golden Age uncorrupted by old world vices was applied

The spontaneous hand of nature 23 to America only from the libraries of Europe: it was a perspective whose soft tones required the distancing provided as readily by the Atlantic as by the centuries separating Europe from its pre-history. Such a view might have proved compatible with initial Indian hospitality and with the desire of would-be colonists to raise support for their ventures - so Philip Amadas and George Barlow, who captained Raleigh's expedition to Virginia (as Raleigh called it) in 1584, had described the inhabitants as 'people most gentle, loving, and faithfull, voide of all guile and treason, and such as live after the manner of the golden age' (Amadas and Barlow 1903-5: 305). But this utopian vision did not long survive the complexities of American topography: colonists' demands for land grew more extensive and more violent, exhausting native hospitality and eventually provoking reprisals. Fortunately the 'age without rule' was capable of a different gloss, even from within the Metamorphoses itself, as in Sandys' commentary on the decidedly inhospitable Cyclops: Now the Cyclops (as formerly said) were a salvage people given to spoyle and robbery; unsociable amongst themselves, and inhumane to strangers: And no marvell; when lawlesse, and subject to no government, the bond of society; which gives to every man his owne, suppressing vice, and advancing vertue, the two maine columnes of a Common-wealth, without which it can have no supportance. Besides man is a political and sociable creature: they therefore are to be numbred among beasts who renounce society, whereby they are destitute of lawes, the ordination of civility. (Sandys 1640: 263) The turning-point for English commentators on this matter was undoubtedly March 1622 when a concerted effort by the Powhatan confederacy under the leadership of the formidable Opechancanough narrowly failed to extirpate the English colony at Jamestown. After this event the attitudes and practices of the settlers themselves remained necessarily pragmatic with regard to contact with the native population; but the 'massacre' - as it was called in England - provided a different and in some ways more powerful impulse to the colonizing process. The dangers could no longer be elided but, since the natives were seen by their action to have relinquished any conceivable natural rights they might have had to the land, the potential rewards for colonial enterprise were now much greater, or at least the difficulties in justifying the rewards less considerable. Samuel Purchas, chief ideologist of the Virginia Company, drew out the consequences in his essay 'Virginia's Verger' published in 1625: But when Virginia was violently ravished by her owne ruder Natives, yea her Virgin cheekes dyed with the bloud of three Colonies . . . the stupid Earth seemes distempered with such bloudy potions and cries that shee is ready to spue out her inhabitants. (Purchas 1905-7: 229)

24 Peter Hulme The initial separation of land from inhabitants in the bestowal of the name Virginia pays handsome dividends here. Not only can the 'virgin' land be savagely raped by its own natives, but the blood thereby spilt onto its cheeks is that of the English colonies themselves, which are, in the process, identified with the Virginia that has been ravished. The Indians became satisfactorily 'unnatural Naturalls', forfeiting any rights they may have had under natural law. In other words the 'massacre' has performed a miraculous reversal by which the settlers have become the natural inhabitants - identified with the land and the original inhabitants have been discursively 'spewed out' by their own territories. An even more immediate reaction came in the sermon addressed by John Donne at 8t Paul's to the members of the Virginia Company on 13 November 1622, soon after news of the 'massacre' had reached London. Donne took as his text Acts 1.8: 'But yee shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you, and yee shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.' He proceeded to speak not only of the Company's missionary duties, but also of the difficulties of gaining riches in that uttermost part of the earth: 'though you see not your money, though you see not your men, though a Flood, a Flood of bloud have broken in upon them, be not discouraged' (Donne 1959: 271). Among Donne's audience that day was Thomas Hobbes. His 'warre of every man against every man' expounded in Leviathan (1651) comes complete with American references: 'savage people in many places of America' who 'live at this day in that brutish manner'. This pitiless account of the state of nature was not uninfluenced, it might be speculated, by the events of 1622, given Hobbes' own involvement, through Cavendish, his patron, with the affairs of the Virginia Company (1968: 187-8; cf. Malcolm 1981). Montaigne - in keeping with the satirical strand of classical humanism - had, so to speak, brought the cannibals home in one way: at the end of his essay the Tupis are allowed to offer, through Montaigne's admittedly faulty memory, their own damning comments on European society, notably the contrast they make between some men 'full gorged with all sort of commodities' and others who 'bare with need and povertie, begged at their gate' (Montaigne 1928: I, 229). In some ways Hobbes brought 'savagery' home even more tellingly. The savagery of the state of nature is exemplified in Hobbes' writings 'in this present age' by American societies; but currently 'civil and flourishing' nations 'have been in former ages ... fierce, shortlived, poor, nasty, and deprived of all that pleasure and beauty of life, which peace and society are wont to bring with them' (1972: 118). And what they have been, they can become again, very easily. In his 'Tripos' Hobbes lists the benefits of civilization, only to conclude with the question: 'all of which supposed away, what do we differ from the wildest of Indians?' (1840: 72). The 'savages' hold a mirror up to the 'reality' of our human nature; they show a frightening image of a society bereft of those attributes which make it civilized. The traditional negatives of the classical Golden Age - in the resonant French phrase 'sans foi, ni loi, ni roi' (without faith

The spontaneous hand of nature 25 nor law nor king) - are accepted by Hobbes as an accurate description of life in the state of nature; but that state is judged to produce nothing less than 'continuall feare, and the danger of violent death' (1968: 186). At least part of the obloquy heaped upon Hobbes' work is to be explained by the way in which the abstract notion of human corruption thereby takes on a living form so that the 'savage' Americans become for the first time identical in their deepest nature with their European antagonists. In this way savagery is lodged disconcertingly close to the crust of civilization: America is allowed to provide a glimpse into the heart of darkness (Ashcraft 1972: 162). John Locke's argument in the second of his Two Treatises of Government (1690) might seem equally distant from both these traditions, the humanist and the Hobbesian. The 'Golden Age' does feature once in its pages as that time 'before vain Ambition, and amor sceleratus habendi, evil Concupiscence, had corrupted Mens minds into a Mistake of true Power and Honour' (Locke 1965: 387), but Locke's state of nature is as far removed from a land of milk and honey as it is from Hobbes' world of perpetual strife. It is rather a realm of positive achievements sustained in accordance with the Law of Nature, a state of perfect freedom and equality. The only one of the traditional negatives that applies to Locke's state of nature is 'without a common Superior on Earth' (321). And only the danger of the state of nature becoming a state of war explains the eventual acceptance of an ultimate earthly authority 'from which relief can be had by appeal' (323). This danger arises from the failure of a minority of human beings to conduct themselves according to natural law. References to America might seem to bring Locke closer to Hobbes' chilling universalism: after all, 'in the beginning all the World was America' (343). But in Europe those beginnings were long ago and Europeans - or at least some Europeans - were separated from their American cousins by more than the Atlantic. On closer inspection Locke's famous aphorism inserts an historical wedge of some size between the two continents. The implied relationship between Europe and America becomes apparent on that metaphorical map of the world unrolled a century later by Edmund Burke as the very map of mankind's history with all stages and periods of savagery and civility instantly under our view in different parts of that world (quoted above, p.9). The language of development, here coming into being as an Enlightenment theory of history, is still very much with us, allowing our one world to be read through a metaphor of maturation in which some are - when not 'children' - always junior to the European standard. Locke's argument in the Second Treatise can be seen in general terms as a radical attack on absolutism and its accompanying privileges, the most important of which is the control of land. The target of the book is, then, the practice of the unproductive land-owning aristocracy of seventeenth-century England. In the last analysis the book's complex argument, with its play of limitations and justifications, defends the principle of the enclosure of common land into private property and the

26 Peter Hulme accumulation of capital that results from a commitment to the improvement of that land. But private accumulation can, according to Locke, only be justified if its accumulation accrues - eventually - to the public good. Locke's approach is to formulate what one critic has described as 'a statement of universal principle ... completely independent of historical example' (Laslett 1965: 91). In other words, an elaborate hypothesis is constructed based upon extrapolations from a supposed original condition, conventionally called the 'state of nature'; with key terms such as 'property' and 'labour' complexly and abstractly discussed, independent of any particular case that may be cited. Awhole series of readings of the Second Treatise has sought to uncover the revolutionary context in which Locke wrote the work (most recently Ashcraft 1986). Nevertheless the argument itself proceeds determinedly in the direction of general principles couched in the language of natural law. For these reasons the book is often seen as one of the founding texts of modern political philosophy. However, despite the movement towards universal principles, most of the crucial steps in Locke's argument actually depend on references to America. Locke begins by affirming (on Biblical authority) that the state of nature is a state of equality with the earth given to mankind in common (Locke 1965: 309), and the taking of private property from the common stock only therefore warranted 'at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others' (329). Seventeenth-century England could hardly be thought capable of supplying 'enough, and as good' to those without land, but this threatening limitation is overcome through a form of colonial calculus whereby private improvement of land has far-reaching public benefits: To which let me add, that he who appropriates land to himself by his labour, does not lessen but increase the common stock of mankind. For the provisions serving to the support of humane life, produced by one acre of inclosed and cultivated land, are (to speak much within compasse) ten times more, than those, which are yeilded by an acre of Land, of an equal richnesse, lyeing wast in common. And therefor he, that incloses Land and has a greater plenty of the conveniencys of life from ten acres, than he could have from an hundred left to Nature, may truly be said, to give ninety acres to Mankind. For his labour now supplys him with provisions out of ten acres, which were but the product of an hundred lying in common. I have here rated the improved land very low in making its product but as ten to one, when it is much nearer an hundred to one. For I aske whether in the wild woods and uncultivated wast of America left to Nature, without any improvement, tillage or husbandry, a thousand acres will yeild the needy and wretched inhabitants as many conveniencies of life as ten acres of equally fertile land doe in Devonshire where they are well cultivated. (336) The equality existing under the state of nature was never likely to survive Locke's hypothetical reconstruction of the development of political society, but the result-

The spontaneous hand of nature 27 ant inequalities could still be defended if it were claimed that ev~n the worst-off would have benefited - an argument that has become one of the planks of economic liberalism. The Second Treatise takes the worst case to be a day-labourer forced to sell his only property - his labour - in return for sufficient wages to keep him and his family alive. If the day-labourer were to question the improvement in his condition over what it had been in the state of nature when land was held in common, Locke's answer would again point across the Atlantic: There cannot be a clearer demonstration of any thing, than several Nations of the Americans are of this, who are rich in Land, and poor in all the Comforts of Life; whom Nature having furnished as liberally as any other people, with the materials of Plenty, i.e. a fruitful Soil, apt to produce in abundance, what might serve for food, rayment, and delight; yet for want of improving it by labour, have not one hundredth part of the Conveniences we enjoy: And a King of a large fruitful Territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day Labourer in England. (338-9) If the best-off of the Indians is worse off than the worst-off of the English labourers, then Locke's extrapolations from natural law are vindicated. These issues were in no sense abstract in late. seventeenth-century England, the age of enclosure and changing property relations, and of widespread apprehension about the threat from the so-called 'masterless' men. And there is no doubt that the thrust of Locke's argument is towards the defence of a system in which the least well-off can be seen to have benefited from the 'improvements' accruing from a more 'rational' use of land. However, neither can these references to America be without intended substance as is sometimes argued, since the edifice of Locke's argument would fall without the comparison between Indian king and English labourer. (Indeed, the simplest, though infrequently made, challenge to Locke's argument is to say that, with respect to the inconveniences of being an Indian chief, he was ill-informed.) A stronger case could even be made for the American references. To use the example of Devonshire - a peripheral and relatively barren county which had become productive during the sixteenth century through careful husbandry (Wood 1984: 60)as a case of productivity with which to contrast the 'wast of America', demonstrates that the process of improvement as understood by Locke was to all intents and purposes complete in England; leaving the thrust of the argument to apply to the American continent. In the second version of the colonial calculus - in which the proportion of productivity due to labour becomes 99/100ths (Locke 1965: 338) tobacco and sugar, the classic crops of tropical colonialism, weigh at least equally in the example \vith wheat and barley. There is also circumstantial evidence for thinking that Locke's references to America are unlikely to be trivial. Locke himself had intimate connections with the developing project of colonial expansion, especially in North America and the West

28 Peter Hulme Indies. Shaftesbury, his patron and employer, was an active participant in this project - part-owner of slave-ships, leading member of the Committee for Trade and of the board of Lords Proprietors of Carolina; so much the progressive capitalist that his biographer speaks of him being regarded as 'a representative of the rising new capitalistic forces in society' (Haley 1968: 227), and Maurice Cranston says that he 'might almost have been invented by Marx' (1957: 107). Locke worked as secretary for these bodies, was involved in framing the Fundamental Constitutions for the new territory of Carolina, and invested capital in the Royal African Company and the Bahama Adventurers, a merchant company set up by Shaftesbury in 1673. In that year he also became secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations, which emphasized English interests in tropical and sub-tropical colonies. And in 1697 he wrote about the continuing problems of Virginia for the Board of Trade, discussing the need for land reform (Ashcraft 1969). Indeed the argument of the Second Treatise is implicated with that panoply of natural law theory (mainly Roman in origin) with which European occupation of American land was being justified. In his 1622 sermon, Donne had rooted the 'power' of his text from Acts in the law of nations by which 'if the inhabitants doe not in some measure fill the Land, so as the Land may bring foorth her increase for the use of men', then the land 'becomes theirs that wil possesse it' (Donne 1959: 274). This argument, known as the vacuum domicilium, ·was much elaborated over the course of the seventeenth century, but its point was simple enough. As one European writer put it, with brutal succinctness: 'we rather than they being the prime occupants, and they only Sojourners in the land' (Peter Heylyn, quoted in Berkhofer 1978: 31). During the sixteenth century the key questions for colonial discourse had concerned sovereignty and jurisdiction: Spanish and Portuguese colonists were principally interested in the extraction of natural resources and therefore with controlling the labour-power that made this possible. In the seventeenth century, for the English in North America and the Caribbean, and particularly for the Puritans in New England, the crucial questions involved the exclusive control of land on which to grow their crops: the 'wilderness' had to be reduced through improvement in a move that was both spiritual and physical. As John Winthrop put it in his General Considerations for the Plantation in New-England (i629): the whole earth is the Lord's garden, and he hath given it to the sons of Adam to be tilled and improved by them. Why then should we stand starving here for the places of habitation, (many men spending as much labor and cost to recover or keep sometimes an acre or two of lands as would procure him many many hundreds of acres, as good or better, in another place,) and in the mean time suffer whole countries, as profitable for the use of man, to lie waste without any improvement. (quoted in Pearce 1988: 21; cf. Eisinger 1948; Washburn 1959; Jennings 1976) This is very much Locke's language too:

The spontaneous hand of nature 29 God gave the World to Men in Common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest Conveniences of Life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the Industrious and Rational, (and Labour was to be his Title to it;) not to the Fancy or Covetousness of the Quarrelsom and Contentious. (Locke 1965: 333) There is a labour theory of value here, which Locke goes on to articulate, but also something close to a theory of humanity, since the industry of those who appropriate land to themselves by their .labour and, consequently, through pursuing their private interests contribute to the public good, also thereby demonstrates (or even gains) their chosenness. The implicit reasoning is Puritan, even Calvinist: 'Work was a test for which men must volunteer; their failure to volunteer was evidence that they had not been called' (Waltzer 1966: 218). Those who did not 'volunteer', the quarrelsome and contentious, or even simply the idle, were at best ignoring God's intentions, at worst failing to demonstrate their rationality and, therefore, since human beings are essentially rational, failing to demonstrate their humanity. So, for Locke, a central distinction within humanity has been established between those who recognize their reason ('writ in the Hearts of all Mankind' (315)) and make use of it, and those who do not. By contrast, the theory of labour is universal, for the simple reason that nobody can eat without, according to Locke's definition, employing their labour. The example is again American: God, who hath given the World to Men in common, hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of Life, and convenience. The Earth, and all that is therein, is given to Men for the Support and Comfort of their being. And though all the Fruits it naturally produces, and Beasts it feeds, belong to Mankind in common, as they are produced by the spontaneous hand of Nature; and no body has originally a private Dominion, exclusive of the rest of Mankind, in any of them, as they are thus in their natural state: yet being given for the use of Men, there must of necessity be a means to appropriate them some way or other before they can be of any use, or at all beneficial to any particular Man. The Fruit, or Venison, which nourishes the wild Indian, who knows no Inclosure, and is still a Tenant in common, must be his, and so his, i.e. a part of him, that another can no longer have any right to it, before it can do him any good for the support of his Life. (328) Logically, one might suppose that the deployment of the 'reason' given by God to men was responsible for all food production through the development of hunting, pastoralism, and agriculture. But, instead, Locke introduces a further distinction whereby originally - and still in certain kinds of society - food is provided 'by the

30 Peter Hulme spontaneous hand of Nature'; and appropriation out of this 'hand' is the first sign of how 'labour' intervenes in the process. Even the wild Indian - who still lives in a situation where land is held in common - makes a possession of what is to be his food by mixing his labour with it, even if that only involves picking the fruit off the branch. The Indian has used his labour - but not in the productive process, and so without, according to Locke, showing any exercise of reason. What holds this argument together is the intervention of that 'spontaneous hand of Nature', which enables Locke to separate the concepts of labour and reason. Without the spontaneous hand of nature there would be no explanation of how those who had not yet demonstrated their rationality had managed to survive with some degree of success. It is this idea of spontaneous food provision - prior to the exercise of reason - that underwrites the exclusivity of Locke's central category of fully rational human beings. And, incidentally to his argument, explains away, at least within the purview of colonial discourse, the presence in America of cultivated crops such as maize and tobacco refined over many centuries in Mesoamerica, along the Atlantic seaboard and throughout the Caribbean islands, long before Columbus 'discovered' them and brought them back to Europe. So according to Locke humanity is defined by reason, and the exercise of reason demonstrated by improvement of land. The existence of food is not in itself sufficient proof of 'culture': labour sometimes merely 'collects' what nature has provided. Therefore the central division for Locke lies between those who 'improve' and those who merely'collect': only the former are fully rational and therefore fully human. The argument from spontaneity is necessary to explain how the 'not fully rational' can manage to eat: it is this trope that excludes native American agriculture from consideration, and even from recognition. As if in response to the significance of its references to America, Locke's Second Treatise was soon drawn upon to support one of the most extensive and sophisticated of the Puritan justifications for appropriation of Indian land, John Bulkley's long preface to Roger Wolcott's highly political Poetical Meditations, aimed at the group of European colonists called the 'native rights men' after their insistence on buying land from the Indians on the grounds that they did fully own it (Bulkley 1725; cf. Dunn 1969). Bulkley quotes extensively from the Second Treatise, making particular play of Locke's theory of labour, for which he finds support in Genesis: And to this voice of the Law of ~Jature, viz. that Labour in this State shall be the beginning of Property, seems well to agree the voice of God Himself in the Gift or Grant he made of the Earth, the Creatures & productions of it to Mankind, Gen. I. 28. - Where we find that Cultivating and Subduing the Earth, and having Dominion are joyned together: thereby assuring us that as in that Gift he then made of it in common to, men, he did not design it should serve to their benefit & comfort only by its spontaneous Productions, but that it was his will that by Art and Industry in Subduing and Cultivating of it they should draw still more from

The spontaneous hand of nature 31 it, so that this should be their Title to it at least during the continuance of that State of Nature, & till by positive Constitutions of their own, the matter of Property should be otherwise Determined and Settled. (Bulkley 1725: xxv-xxvi) But his second use of that Lockian phrase about the 'spontaneous' provisions of nature makes explicit the literary reference that lies behind the trope: Their way of Living the Poet well describes when accounting for the Golden Age, he tells us of Men then.... And men themselves contented were with plain & simple Food, That on the Earth of natures gift, without their Travel stood, Did live by Respis, Hipps & Haws, by Cornets, Plums & Cherries By Sloes and Apples, Nuts and Pears & Loathsome Bramble berries, And by the Acorns dropt on ground from loves broad tree in field. Certain 'tis Nature the main Materials of their Subsistence without any Art or Labour of theirs; they had but little more to do than to Catch or Gather what they had provided for them. And during this State of things among any Societies of Men, of what Consideration or Value can Land be to them, especially when these spontaneous Provisions of Nature in all Places are in such Abundance that there is no danger of Want, and all means of Communication or Trade with other parts of the World, together with the Use ofMoney, among themselves, (which things might impair their Stock of Provisions and give a Value to them over and above what their own Necessities did) are wholly wanting, as we all know was the case with the Aborigines of the Country? (Bulkley 1725: xxxvii-xxxviii, quoting Arthur Golding's 1563 translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses) Bulkley's enthusiastic explication of Locke highlights a peculiarity about the spontaneous hand of nature which had remained invisible in Locke's exposition. What supports the crucial distinction between universal labour and the more restricted exercise of reason amongst humanity is precisely the humanist language of the Golden Age from which Locke - paradigm of the modern political philosopher - is supposedly so distant. As Ovid has it, here in Sandys' translation, at that time: The yet-free Earth did of her own accord (Vntorne with ploughs) all sorts of fruit afford; and its denizens contented themselves 'with Natures un-enforced food' (Sandys 1640: 2). 'Own accord' and 'un-enforced' are both synonyms for 'spontaneous'; 'sponte sua' is Ovid's second phrase describing the Golden Age - 'uncompeld' in Sandys' translation.

32 Peter Hulme Ovid's 'golden age' is a time of abundance and bounty, part of a narrative of loss that was central to classical (and particularly Roman) self-definitions. That narrative has a long, discontinuous history. It had provided a frame of reference for the humanism of Peter Martyr and Montaigne; it is an ingredient in Diderot's Enlightenment story of the noble Tahitian savage; and it would still, in the next century, be visible in Karl Marx's theory of primitive communism. But the abundance and bounty of a lost Golden Age can have no part to play in a political philosophy based on justifying the rational use of land previously allowed to lie waste. For Locke, bounty has only ever resulted from improvements in food production. Where land has not been improved the inhabitants reliant on the provisions of nature - are 'needy and wretched' (Locke 1965: 336). Or, as he elsewhere has it, if it were not for the practical knowledge of some men in the past, 'we should spend all our time to make a scanty provision for a poor and miserable life', such as that of the inhabitants of the West Indies, who are 'scarce able to subsist' (Ashcraft 1987: 148 n. 3). Bulkley's gloss on 'spontaneous' ('in such Abundance that there is no danger of Wanf) reflects its Ovidian provenance and, indeed, his perception of the realities of Indian culture, but at the same time it serves to undermine the Lockian argument in whose service it is advanced; because if there is 'no danger of Want', there is significantly less advantage to be gained through economies of scale in agriculture and therefore - to put the argument only in its weakest form significantly more difficulty in justifying the accumulation of land into a few hands. The trope of spontaneity itself is a necessary component of Locke's argument, drawn from the repertory of contemporary colonial discourse to hold apart 'labour' and 'reason': but its Ovidian connotations work counter to the picture of deprivation against which the promise of greater 'Conveniences' finds its justification. It took Adam Smith, nearly a hundred years later, to clarify Locke's position for him in a paraphrase on the very first page of The Wealth ofNations which equates the 'civilized and thriving' nations with their technological superiority over 'the savage nations'. In the former the produce of the whole labour of the society is so great, that all are often abundantly supplied, and a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniences of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire. (Smith 1838: 1) Here 'labour' and 'reason' are unproblematically universal: it is just that the level of skills is very different in 'savage' and 'civilized' societies. The argument now has a satisfying circularity to it, its confident generalizations purged of the contradictions associated with the Ovidian reference to spontaneity. In The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, C. B. Macpherson demonstrated the importance of what he called the 'differential rationality' by which Locke's theory naturalized the economic differences between the propertied and propertyless (Macpherson 1962: 222-47). In that case, though, reason can in prin-

The spontaneous hand of nature 33 ciple be exercised by all; it is force of circumstance - the absence of available land that prevents the landless majority demonstrating their use of reason by making land productive: unless they plant in those 'in-land, vacant places of America' (Locke 1965: 335). The Indians' lack of displayed reason is - though of less importance to seventeenth-century England - a more serious matter within the terms established by the Second Treatise, since in America the opportunity to 'improve' the land has, according to Locke, gone begging. The Indians' failure to 'volunteer' for labour is consequently a more serious indictment than that levelled at the English labouring poor. After all, reason teaches all 'who will but consult it' (311). Failure to consult reason is clearly in the American case a moral failure in no way mitigated by circumstances. It was only towards the end of the 'age of the Enlightenment' that a scientific racism came to secure the distinctions between different groups of human beings. For Locke - as for Descartes before him - the monogenetic tradition of Christian thought guaranteed the essential unity of the human species, even unto the uttermost part of the earth. But Locke's differential rationality with respect to cultural production, held in place by that trope of the spontaneous hand of nature, still contained within it a powerful set of consequences: the penalty for failing to see reason could be severe. The earth produces fruits and feeds beasts (328). If the Indian merely collects what is provided 'spontaneously' then it is not easy to see how he differs from the beasts that are similarly provided for; except of course that as a human being he is guilty of ignoring the law of nature that is incumbent upon humans but not on animals (see Locke 1958: 188). Here - in an almost Hobbesian way - the boundary between animal and human is distinctly permeable. Certainly those who can be seen as 'having renounced Reason' (Locke 1965: 314) by shedding blood, or even those who have revealed an 'enmity' towards a man of reason, may, under Locke's fiercesome gloss on the law of nature, 'be treated as Beasts of Prey, those dangerous and noxious Creatures', destroyed 'for the same Reason, that he may kill a Wolf or a Lyon' (319-20). This is not the war of all against all, but the war of the righteous against those they perceive as attacking them: the language in which all colonial wars against native Americans have been justified.

There are different narratives available to explain the presence of that 'spontaneous hand of Nature' in the Second Treatise. According to one story it would be an unfortunate 'survival' from the language of classical humanism, with Locke seen as a transitional figure in a gradual movement towards that 'purer' language of calculation only fully articulated in The Wealth of Nations. Such stories of the progressive shedding of earlier rhetorical encumbrances sit comfortably with the Enlightenment's self-image. The story told here has had a different accent: on the implication of two discourses, the political and the colonial, both with their foundations in theories of natural law, but here articulated around a single nodal pointA

34 Peter Hulme the need to deny the existence of American Indian agriculture. The 'Enlightenment' argument of the Second Treatise is shadowed by that unconscious denial which serves to tether Locke's reasoning to historical and ideological circumstances beyond its conscious control. NOTES Relevant work on Locke (not already cited) would include Ashcraft 1968; Batz 1974; Lebovics 1986; Slavin 1976.

For the larger context of colonialism and Enlightenment see: Bitterli 1989; Duchet 1971; Dudley and Novak 1972; Franklin 1979; Hodgen 1971; Hulme 1986; Meek 1976; Solomon 1987; White 1972. For opportunities to discuss earlier versions of this essay, I would like to thank David Murray, Simon Barker, Valerie Fraser, and Anthony Pagden; and for her comments, Gesa Mackenthun.

3 Candide and native America GORDON BROTHERSTON

EDITORS' INTRODUCTION In 1578 Jean de Lery, a Calvinist minister, published an account of his year's stay (in 1556-7) amongst the Tupinamba of Brazil, inaugurating the modern tradition of ethnography that doubles as social criticism. Lery's account of the Tupinamba is scrupulous enough for Claude Levi-Strauss to refer to it as a 'masterpiece of anthropological literature' (1976: 102), yet it is inevitably coloured by the events of the intervening twenty years -which included the Saint Bartholomew Day's massacre of Protestants by French Catholics in 1572. For Lery the cannibalism of the Tupi is more understandable than the symbolic cannibalism of European usurers, and he reminds his readers how Catholic murderers had eaten Protestant hearts on the day of that infamous massacre. As a genuine traveller, Lery had the authority to make these kinds of comparisons, although he puts the strongest words into the mouth of an old Tupi man who is made to cross-question Lery with impressive skill about the reasons for the Europeans' presence in America. Even Montaigne (see above p. 24) allowed the last words of his essay to one of the Tupi he had interviewed in Rouen. The balance between ethnographic description and philosophical dialogue was a delicate one~ The Baron de Lahontan had travelled extensively in North America, yet his dialogue with the Huron Adario (published in 1703) is clearly a fictional representation of opposing viewpoints, a form brought to perfection later in the century by Denis Diderot - in Rameau's Nephew (written 1776-84) and in the Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville (written 1772), which contains a fictional conversation between a French chaplain and a Tahitian called Orou, one of the most impressive examples of what has been called 'the savage critic' (Pagden 1983). Voltaire's Candide (1759) is a philosophical tale with no particular ethnographic pretensions, yet it is illuminated by setting it in the context of Lery and Lahontan, especially since Gordon Brotherston's essay restores a true sense of the centrality of

36 Gordon Brotherston the American utopia at the heart of Voltaire's story. Despite his one venture into the genre, which has a 'savage from Guiana' as the spokesman for common sense, Voltaire remained suspicious of the enthusiasm for savagery evinced by many of his fellow philosophes, so Cacambo - Candide's Amerindian guide - is not the true equivalent of Adario or Orou. None the less, Voltaire had a keen eye for examples of European infamy abroad, as with the Surinamese slave system anatomized in Candide; or at home, as in the torture and execution of the Protestant Jean Calas for the supposed ritual killing of his son, a verdict Voltaire was instrumental in having overturned. So 'the fourth part of our universe', as Voltaire himself called it, .could certainly provide a space in which to interrogate the prejudices and fixed ideas of eighteenth-century Europe. Of all Enlightenment writers Voltaire (1694-1778) had the most varied and extensive output. Poet, playwright, historian, satirist, author of the influential Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais (1733), his greatest literary success came with his contes (especially Candide, one of the best-sellers of the period), small fictional crucibles in which Voltaire managed to precipitate almost all the important moral questions of his day, in marked contrast to the more discursive style of Rousseau and Diderot.

3

rrhe most celebrated of Voltaire's contes, Candide ou I'Optimisme [1759-61] has generally been read as what it announces itself to be, that is a satire of certain currents in Enlightenment thought, in particular the supposedly Leibnitzian doctrine of 'all is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds'. In line with this, more attention has on the whole been paid to the wit and sheer pace of the work than to such other literary qualities as structure or even character. It is after all commonplace to account for the eponymous hero and above all his philosophizing mentor Pangloss in the satirist's terms of cartoon or cardboard figure. Thrown out of the Westphalian paradise he shared with his first love Cunegonde he is literally propelled from one disaster to the next as he pursues her through half the known world, before finally coming to some kind of rest at the very end, in his Ottoman estate. Hence, references to the work as a 'relentless, unrelated torrent of mishaps' or 'the extraordinary and impossible piling up of events' (Auerbach 1953: 360, Thacker 1968: 12). If however we recover no more than a rudimentary feel for the landscape of Candide, for its progress through a mappable world, then the narrative comes readily to support a notion of structure, and indeed of definite stages in the hero's character development. For, as the text ceaselessly reminds us, we begin in a garden in north-west Europe, travel west to the New World and back again to the Old, to end up in another garden in south-east Europe. Each of these three parts of Candide's journey occupies more or less a third of the 33-chapter text. Occupying the central third in this scheme, the New World is distinguished by the fact that Candide sails there not pursuing but together with Cunegonde and confident that America may actually prove to be the much-invoked 'best of all possible worlds' ('It is certainly the new world that is the best of possible universes' ,. (Voltaire 1961: 35)). Moreover, before he goes there Candide is the passive object of abuse; after he comes back, his problems are more those of boredom and disillusion. In EI Dorado, at the half-way point or hinge ofthe American journey, which is also that of

38 Gordon Brotherston the journey overall, the relationship between hero and environment is turned on its head, so that he thinks of exploiting others rather than being simply or 'candidly' exploited by them. To this degree, and however unlikely the notion may at first seem, Candide in fact resembles such notorious 'americanos' of the period as Robinson Crusoe; that is, he is a European whose critical life-experience is profiting from America. For both heroes suffer shipwreck and vicissitude, encounter cannibals and other Amerindians of dubious human status, entrust themselves to Providence and get rich thanks to the Americas, and marry and end up with their own little estates back in the Old World. Far from being fortuitous, the parallel points us to an order of Americanism in the Enlightenment which has not always received from us the critical attention it deserves; it invokes a particular sense of that Fourth World of planetary history which Columbus added to the previous three. Voltaire announced his Americanism early on, in Alzire ou les americains (1736), a work which Chinard (1913: 236-8) signalled as one of the first American tragedies to appear in France. By taking themes popularized in the Indes galantes of Fuselier and Rameau and by making spoken drama of them, Voltaire here anticipated such New World monuments of the period as Marmontel's Les Incas (1777); but at no point does he effectively go beyond the parameters of his main source, Destruccion de las Indias (1552) by the Spanish historian and polemicist Fray Bartolome de las Casas. Then, at the other end of his writing career, in the 1760s, he approached America again, in contes like Candide (1759-61) and its sequel L'Ingenu (1767). This last tells how the candid hero with his Huron background sacrifices his freedom and his principles in order to come to terms with the corrupt society of metropolitan France. Between these terms, America preoccupied Voltaire in his vast Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations, begun in the 1740s, published in 1765 and then again complete with its 'Introduction' in 1769. In particular, this Introduction serves as a useful guide to the contes, in proposing 'the fourth part of our universe' as a fundamentally other term of comparison, the like of which no previous part could provide. From the Essai, too, we can trace how Voltaire grew in ethnographical awareness, despite his abiding hostility to Lafitau; author of the epoch-making Moeurs des sauvages americains (1724), Lafitau was also a Jesuit (Brumfitt 1966: 265). In Candide, the hero's local experience of native America falls, like the text as a whole, into three main stages. Geographically these correspond to a movement from the lowlands of South America into the highlands and back again, as we are taken successively to the Guarani missions, the mountain fastness of EI Dorado, and the estuaries of the Guianas. Historically, the intermediary remoteness of EI Dorado, the outpost in time of the Andean Inca and Chibcha, corresponds to the fact that it never belonged to the lowland realm of La France Antarctique which gave Montaigne so much food for thought, and of which French Guiana is a tiny remnant today. By turns these three stages of the narrative make their ideological points. The

Candide and native America 39 supposed sexual and (no surprise) eating habits of the 'savage' are used negatively to shore up received notions of the 'human'; a working socialism is doubted in principle in just the location where there has been most evidence for it historically; and when finally the question of human rights is raised it is not at all for the benefit of America's first settlers and native population but because of the imposed economy of African slaves. Of course, much of this is presented by Voltaire in the terms of satire and joke. It remains for us to say, at the expense of what and of whom. Over the three stages of his South American journey, Candide comes face to face \-vith a variety of characters who are indigenous to their place, that is, who are native Americans. And he does so in the company of a newly acquired man-servant, Cacambo, who is also a native, or at least three out offour parts of him are. Acitizen of Tucuman, a town in the north of what is now Argentina, and in the south of what was the Inca empire, Cacambo speaks Quechua, the language of that empire which continues to be spoken in northern Argentina today. He can also converse in Guarani which, with Tupi, once constituted the major language group of lowland South America and provided the basis of the lingua geral of Brazil. As a companion he is far more useful than Pangloss, not least because he knows how to talk the local language and hence smooths the path for his employer and defuses the parlous situations through which the narrative leads him. The constant presence of Cacambo, as a skilled guide and intermediary, means that Candide's experience of South America is doubly filtered from the start, not just by his own preconceptions but by the particular origins and formation of his guide. This filtering, a fine token of Voltaire's encyclopaedism, openly sets Candide apart in that line of individualist European explorers of America, stretching from the conquistador to the US pioneer, which, in writing out infrastructure, prefers direct interface between the I and the supposed unknown. In itself it argues for Voltaire's own greater faith in social interplay than in some concept of pure nature. In this respect it is significant that the need for a Cacambo becomes evident at the precise moment when Candide leaves European urban society for the first time. As Candide under threat of death dithers about whetber to quit Buenos Aires and abandon Cunegonde to the clutches of the imperious colonial governor Fernando d'lbaraa y Figueroa y Mascarenes y Lampoudos y Souza, Cacambo is suddenly as it were discovered and brought into the action (being said in retrospect to have travelled with them all from Cadiz): it is he who then finds the means for his master to flee into the American wilds. During the first stage of his journey, travelling north from Buenos Aires, Candide meets the Guarani who still make up the majority of Paraguay's population today. In French literature, these people had a long pedigree as 'savages' before Voltaire, one which is implicitly referred to in Candide. In addition to the then topical question of the Jesuit missions we have Voltaire's contribution to a long-standing French debate about South America and its inhabitants. Not long after Fran~ois I's invention of La France Antarctique, the Tupi-Guarani appeared in Montaigne's essay 'Of

40 Gordon Brotherston

Figure 7 1. M. Moreau. Ie jeune, engraved illustration for Rousseau's La Decouverte du nouveau monde (The Discovery of the New World). Rousseau wrote this opera libretto between 1739 and 1741. American themes were popular with Enlightenment writers: Rousseau. typically. went back to the original encounter, although this early work reads like an apologia for European colonialism. As they land on the island of Guanahan the Spaniards sing: 'Let us triumph, let us triumph on land and wave. I Let us give Laws to the Universe. I Through our daring we have, this day. discovered a new world. I It is made to bear our shackles.' Columbus is impressed by the courage of the Caribbean cacique, who is allowed to keep his throne. The cacique, equally impressed by the dignity and generosity of Columbus, volunteers to become a Spanish subject. Both sides join to sing the final chorus: 'Let us spread throughout the universe lOur treasure and our bounty. I Let us unite through our Alliance I Two worlds separated by the abyss of the seas.' For the text of the libretto. see Rousseau 1959-69. II: 810-41 (ef. Rex 1987: 94-8).

Candide and native America 41 the Caniballes', which was designed to refute the racism of Christian missionaries like Yves d'Evreux, and which praises their bravery and their anacreontic taste in poetry (Brotherston 1979: 48-50). In Voltaire's narrative, dealings with the Guarani fall into two sequences, and focus on those who had been incorporated into the Jesuit missions and then on those who had not. With the former a certain sympathy is shown, on the straight argument of social injustice: that the reverend fathers exploited the Indians for all they were worth. Claims that the missions represented communist bliss, paradise on this earth, are shown to be priestly hypocrisy. While the masters live in the most .splendid luxury, surrounded by colonnades and trellises alive with rare and brilliant birds, the Indian peasants labour in poverty and under the strictest surveillance. Exercising a devilish power over their native hordes, the reverend fathers aspire to rule a kingdom of their own, choosing a certain Nanguiru as the titular monarch: indeed it was just these developments which provided the reason for Candide's coming to America, as a captain in the army sent to crush the missions. In the first instance, this account of Guarani servitude corresponds more to hatred of the Jesuits than to sympathy with the natives, with people encountered in their own place and time. Evident from such details as there being not a word said about the certainly worse rapacity of the slavers who roamed the region, armed and backed by liberal financiers in Europe, this general attitude towards the Guarani is corroborated when we pass on to those members of the nation who have succeeded in retaining some polity and territory of their own. For now that we go beyond the frontier fence of the missions, even the human nature of these creatures is thrown into question, by the depiction of both their sexual and their table manners (the title of chapter 16 is 'What Happened to the Two Travelers with Two Girls, Two Monkeys, and the Savages Called Oreillons'(48)). The women, it is suggested, take monkeys as lovers and, full of natural sentiment and compassion, even cry over them when they are killed, by Candide. As for the men, they are the ones honoured with the lead role as cannibals, devourers of their own species, the dread would-be eaters of human flesh, in this case Candide's. Now both these aspects of 'wild' or untamed Guarani life carry a message that can be readily decoded in terms of the history of Western ideas./The monkey business has normally been understood as a dig at Rousseau and at contemporary arguments based on the 'natural' affections of savages who characteristically were American. In addition, like the cooking-pot into which Candide was to be put, it can be said to echo an exactly eighteenth-century concern with species definition and genetic taxomony, as the Biblical guarantee for man's image began to lose all coherence; in Voltaire, this concern is evidenced elsewhere, in his remarks in the Essai about an Egyptian woman stated by Herodotus to have behaved just as Candide feared the Guarani maidens would. The particular frisson of the cooking-pot of the would-be cannibals (which term, of course, derives etymologically from the American Carib) is perhaps best understood in terms of Christian philosophy and the centrality of the words 'take, eat, this is my flesh ...', a possibility anticipated with horror by early missionaries in America.

42 Gordon Brotherston What remains less clear is how these Guarani monkey-lovers and man-eaters fit into Voltaire's overall satire. They obviously constitute a disillusion for Candide who not so long ago had been sailing to the New World with a Rousseau-esque faith in the likely virtues of its inhabitants, or at least the belief that he was going somewhere else. Yet we are somehow made to feel that this is not the main point, that we ought to have suspected all along that native Americanism of such naivety was bound to be misplaced anyway. And Voltaire's main prop in getting such a view across is the great mediator Cacambo, who here truly comes into his own. Knowing something of the local 'jargon', that is to say Guarani rather than Quechua, Cacambo is able to save Candide's life by appealing to his captors. He appeals specifically to their reason and innate sense of justice, a principle apparently extended here even to the proto-society of the Guarani with its strange manners and different taboos. Then later he explains sardonically to Candide that after all monkeys are one quarter human just as he is one quarter Spanish; and that anthropophagy, being less of a moral problem than murder, should not be divorced from such practical questions as food supply. There is here a veiled irreverence, that effectively takes to new lengths Voltaire's satire of the received morality of Christendom, no less than of Rousseau's faith in purely natural man. At the same time, and as if by sleight of hand, writer and reader are thereby neatly enabled to circumvent the heavier ideological charge implicit in the image of the Guarani. For as quasi-animals these people can no more than roam their 'roadless' land devoid of territorial rights, a point of no less significance in the history of European colonialism than Queen Isabel of Spain's device of dispossessing unwanted American natives by categorizing them as cannibals (on this, see Hulme 1986: 13-44). Yet while Cacambo's world-view doubtless draws on his particular experience as an American, he is made to deny any commitment to his place of origin. No sooner have they escaped from the unsettling company and conversation of the Guarani than Cacambo urges Candide to return to Europe, since 'this hemisphere is no better than the other' (52). In other words, and as if prophylactically before Candide has the chance to acquire further experience of the New World, Voltaire raises the prospect of difference only to withdraw it. These possible dimensions of the text become more sharply defined in Candide's subsequent experience of America, among the descendants of the Inca, whose empire extended throughout most of the Andean highlands at the time of the European invasion. The Inca or EI Dorado sequence in chapters 17 and 18 stands out from the narrative as a whole on several counts. It is the one point where the travellers can be felt to leave the actual landscape, and where the human society they encounter has decidedly fantastic features; and for this reason it has been customarily excised from· geography and assigned to the realm of the fairy-tale. Against this, it should be recalled that right up to Voltaire's day EI Dorado was still being confidently placed on maps, usually in the unsubdued and mysterious common watershed of the Amazon and the Orinoco first explored from the outside

Candide and native America 43 forty years later, by Alexander von Humboldt; and that a direct historical link was perceived between this place and the gold-working populations who inhabited the Andes under Inca rule (Swan 1958: 271-81; Hemming 1978). Moreover, the very notion of later Inca history was one that had considerable resonance for the Enlightenment, and that found military and political expression not just in Tupac Amaru II'S great rising in 1780 but in rhetoric like that of the English Prime Minister Pitt, who in all seriousness proposed the restoration of the Inca monarchy to his fellow parliamentarians. Hence, there was in Voltaire's day at least a notional context for the very old man (172 years of age) who actually remembers how he and fellow Inca fled to the mountain fastness of El Dorado to save what they could of their culture from European greed. In any case what Candide learns about the basic economics of El Dorado, its system of roads, public hostelries, metal working, impeccably tilled fields, and thriving flocks, accords quite well with what can be known about the Inca state from sources that were available to Voltaire, like the Comentanos reales (1617) of Garcilaso de la Vega, previously drawn on in Alzire (known as El Inca, Garcilaso was the son of an Inca princess). Voltaire even picks out, as Marmontel does in Les Incas, the characteristics of actual Inca hymns, that they thank rather than implore, and by invoking the sun as enlightenment vindicate what the Essai calls the 'budding reason' of the Peruvians. Again, he effectively draws attention to the uniqueness of Inca pastoralism within native America, by transforming Inca llamas into very large sheep that travel at immense speed pulling coaches behind them; a possible allusion to Montaigne's other Americanist essay, on coaches, this exaggerated detail of Inca life likewise appears in the Essai. In terms of Candide's own progress or development as a character, the El Dorado chapters stand out of course because here, for the first and only time in the story, evil becomes something not external and environmental, imposed as in the blow of aggression, disease, or upper-class boredom, but internal and psychic, the result of inner prompting and intimate nature. There is nothing wrong with this society of native Americans who hold fast to pre-Hispanic ways. Indeed it exudes the very virtues, of justice, pleasure, and intelligence, that Voltaire spent his life extolling and fighting for. On the planetary scale, and in that initially Enlightenment view of the world 'from China to Peru', it epitomizes a continent whose wealth eclipses that of Asia, Europe, and Africa put together, and whose excellence France and Europe are no match for. For once Candide and Cacambo manage to be termed 'happy'; and they are even said to recognize that they may after all have found the 'best of all possible worlds', the Optimist dream which in principle the narrative is dedicated to satirizing. As Candide says, with the advantage of hindsight: 'Certainly if all is well it is in Eldorado and not in the rest of the world' (63). Yet perversely the pair decide to leave: 'The two happy men resolved to be so no longer' (58). Candide's reasons for going are a murky mixture of imagined yearning for Cunegonde and the desire, incisively diagnosed by Pascal and Rousseau (Cassirer 1951: 135-61), to shine and boast and be seen to be rich among those he

44 Gordon Brotherston -~"

-~OA ole/ DORADO,. -~-

..=

---...

.

Figure 8 Sixteenth-century map of El Dorado.

had left behind; which amounts to a synthesis of medieval plus nascent bourgeois patterns of self-delusion appropriate to Candide's condition as a European. Only later at the end of the tale, in a privately-owned garden rather than as the citizen of an entire state, and at the old Asian or eastern end of Europe rather than in the new western World, will he finally break through that delusion in order to settle, in the sense of resign himself. But what about Cacambo? For Cacambo, in addition to all the good experienced and rejected by Candide, finding El Dorado is like coming home. There, everyone speaks his mother tongue: 'Cacambo ... heard them speaking Peruvian; it was his mother tongue' (54); and they embody a history and ways of behaviour otherwise distorted or suppressed under European rule in America. However, the local understanding which had served to distinguish him from Candide when among the Guarani now entirely vanishes. Apart from the fact that he speaks Quechua, in every response and reaction to El Dorado he becomes indistinguishable from his master: there is the same surprise, the same faux pas, the same radical ignorance. And finally he is just as keen to leave. By giving this particular twist to Cacambo's character, and by giving El Dorado its fairy-tale gloss, Voltaire appears to be making quite sure that no one should confuse his philosophy with the order of Americanism found in such predecessors as Montaigne; and that Europe should remain the only serious arena and term of reference in philosophical debate.

Candide and native America 45 This reading of the American chapters in Candide is amply confirmed by what happens during the last part of the hero's journey. For after stating his binary version of bestial Guarani versus utopian Quechua, Voltaire appears to exhaust whatever interest he may have had in the original inhabitants of the New World. From now on the natives vanish from the landscape altogether, as Candide and Cacambo descend the rivers towards the Guyanas and the northwest coast of South America. Exactly the same thing happens in the Essai, when Voltaire for once chooses to focus specifically on 'America', as opposed to use it sporadically as ammunition in his polemics. Ignoring the 'high' civilizations of the Incas and the . Mexicans,and contradicting what he has previously said about how intelligently the American 'savages' provide for themselves, how deeply they feel for the land made theirs through the presence of their ancestors' bones, and how fiercely they defend their freedom, he ends up telling us testily that America was never populous, has land that was socially inimical and poison-producing, and that 'nature had given the Americans a far less industrious spirit than it had the men of the Old World' (in fact, as Levi-Strauss has pointed out, the record of Americans as generators of food and in turning poisons to good use is unrivalled in human history: see Brotherston 1986). Sparse and lazy, such people could never be expected to hold the attention of a sophisticated European for long. To be exact, in Candide the Indians do not so much vanish as are displaced by another people, the Africans brought to work as sugar slaves. Significantly, the enemy and the source of evil now become again easier to identify. As the pair of travellers listen to the African who has been atrociously abused by Vanderdendur, the whole abhorrent system of European-run oppression is exposed to the reader, in the terms of political and economic oppression applied to the Jesuit missions but here taken to far greater lengths. It is as if Voltaire here gathers all the indignation which might have been (but never was) previously expressed on behalf of the true native Americans of the piece, whose suffering and expropriation began with Columbus and continues today, on a continental scale unparalleled in the history of the planet. In short, Voltaire discovers his Americanism in Black rather than Indian, setting a pattern for such literary successors as Rene Chateaubriand, who though he began Les Natchez as a passionate defence of Lousiana Indians massacred by the French in 1730, soon preferred the African as term of reference, or James Fenimore Cooper, whose Oak Openings actually suggests that oppressed US blacks should be recompensed with Indian land (Brotherston 1985). As Jack Forbes has intimated in his masterful Black Africans andNative Americans (1988), the underlying reason for all this cannot be divorced from the fact that over the centuries the history of Blacks in America has fitted more readily than that of the Indians into western capitalism's scheme of economy and hence morality. In this analysis of Voltaire's Candide, the argument has been made that, once due attention is paid to the location of the narrative, much clearer insight may be gained into the 'character' of the eponymous hero, especially in his relationship with Cacambo. Not just that, but the New World gains in clarity as a notional alternative

46 Gordon Brotherston to the Old, in political and even economic terms. To this extent, the narrative may be said to possess a latent Americanism which critics have taken little notice of. Within this geographical dimension, however, strict limits are imposed: far more explicit in the self-contradictory ethnography of the Essai sur les moeurs, these curtail from the start any notion of the great American Indian revolution taken up in the twentieth century by such writers as D. H. Lawrence and Antonin Artaud. An indispensable means of setting the limits is provided by Candide's guide to America, Cacambo, who both is and is not a child of his continent and culture. Chief among the consequent effects is the psychic displacement of outrage, in matters of territorial displacement and genocide, from the native American victim to the African. In short, rather than functioning as the prime dream which our science is only now beginning to decipher, for Voltaire the fourth world signifies at best only in addition.

4 Music in the Enlightenment JOE ALLARD

EDITORS' INTRODUCTION This paper, in its focus on the early Enlightenment, illustrates a number of important themes that recur throughout the book. It reveals, for example, how music was both embedded in its historical context and intellectually bound to areas such as natural philosophy, mathematics, literature, theology and so on. Understanding this makes it easier to see how changes in musical theory and practice could be so similar to changes in other fields. In fact, Joe Allard's claim goes far further than this. There were, he shows, certain core issues that united aesthetics, natural philosophy and music. The relationships between reason and the passions, between mind and body, between ancients and moderns, between texts and other forms of communication were all central to the lively debates about music in seventeenth-century Europe. The centrality of mathematics for music and the pervasiveness of the macrocosm/microcosm analogy signal the persistence of a shared intellectual framework. Nor should the history of music during the Enlightenment be divorced from its social setting. Music was a field where patronage wgs essential, and, in seventeenthcentury France the art of patronage was practised above all by the state. Louis XIV and his chief ministers, especially Colbert, were keen on state-run academies. These created, perpetuated and rewarded the elites of many fields, they ensured their indebtedness to the crown and they harnessed the interests of elites to those of the state. It is hardly surprising then to find that questions of national identity, indeed of national style, occupied the minds of musicians and politicians in both seventeenthand eighteenth-century France. Nowhere was this more evident than in the case of opera, where the distinctive qualities of the French and Italian languages were as much an issue as musical styles. Music was also entertainment as well as an intellectual and political activity. As such its effects on listeners were a matter of some moment. Thus we can see how

48 Joe Allard music could raise ethical and moral issues. As a result, certain general features of the Enlightenment are pointed up. The concern with the effect of the arts generally, music could raise ethical and moral issues. As a result, certain general features of the Enlightenment are pointed up. The concern with the effect of the arts generally, and especially the theatre, was characteristic of much eighteenth-century thought. One reason is that a movement of ideas that strives to create a new and more rational order has to address the question of social cohesion and social control. In the more mature Enlightenment these questions become more pressing as the corruption and depravity of ancien regimes was increasingly evident. The culmination of all this occurred in the French Revolution, as Margaret Iversen's paper in this volume reveals. The comparison with her paper is also apt because musical theory and art theory shared some important features. In both cases, for example, the relationship with the written language was debated. Indeed, it was because words were so much a part of both music and art that moral and ethical matters could be raised so directly. It is surely significant that in one of the greatest of all Enlightenment texts, Rameau's Nephew, Diderot subversively mixes debates about music, manners, and morality, all of which serve to advance his challenging interrogation of the nature of human identity.

4

It was in seventeenth-century France that all the foundations for Enlightenment music practice, theory, and commentary were laid. The century between the 1580s and 1680s witnessed some of the most revolutionary alterations in musical perception that have ever occurred and these correspond to changes in most other areas of western thought. Although it is probably a popular notio,n that the essence of Enlightenment music can be heard in Mozart, especially, at the end of the eighteenth century, the first real pinnacle, at least of early Enlightenment music, is in the orchestra and operas of Jean Baptiste Lully. In the 1670s and 1680s he produced a series of lyrical tragedies (tragedies-lyriques) which combined the new seventeenthcentury harmonic tonality - the basis of what we call Baroque - new types of song, and elements of both French and Italian styles of music. These works were greeted as great triumphs of 'modern' music, and sound, finally, the death knell of the musical humanist venture of recovering ancient music. They are the endorsement of the modern style of music that would find its final fulfilment in the eighteenth century in the work of J. S. Bach.

HARMONY OF THE SPHERES Until the Enlightenment - and since antiquity - music had had the elevated status of one of the Quadrivium. Its credentials \vere impeccable with such theorists as Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Chrysostum, Augustine and Ficino, and such practitioners as Orpheus, David, Amphion, Timotheus and St Cecilia. Repeated and commented upon time and again over these years was a canon of stories celebrating extravagant claims of music's powerful effects upon all of creation from angels (St Cecilia) to emperors (Alexander and Timotheus) to animals and trees (Orpheus) to stones (Amphion). Wedded to this was an unbroken tradition of theosophic metaphysical music theory.

50 Joe Allard Fundamental to all of these notions was the Ptolemaic universe in which the earth was in the centre of a series of ever-larger crystalline spheres. To these were attached the moon, sun, planets, and fixed stars. They were intelligences for the ancients; angels for such as Dante and Ficino. Finally, beyond all, was the creator, for Plato; or God, for the Christians. Everything above the earth was fixed, eternal, perfect - and harmonious. Musica Mundana was not simply a metaphor, but a conviction that the entire universe was in a state of constant and powerful rllusic. Here, alas, in this sub-lunar realm of corruption and mutability we cannot hear it. In Lorenzo's words from The Merchant of Venice: How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here will we sit and let the sounds of music Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night Become the touches of sweet harmony. Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold. There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins; Such harmony is in immortal souls, But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. (V.i. 54-65)

Although our 'vesture of decay' renders the harmony of the spheres inaudible to us in this world, thinkers chronologically as far apart as Pythagoras and the young Marin Mersenne doubted neither the profound power of music nor the possibility that we might be able to imitate, in our own terms, on our own instruments, the universal harmony. And with almost incalculable results morally, politically, and socially. What happened to these traditional and quite beautiful theories is that the universe collapsed at the end of the sixteenth century. The element of fire was quite put out. The observation, research, and conjectures of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler undermined the principal suppositions and tenets of universal organization and, consequently, everything which was based upon it. My comments are hyperbolic, of course. Such changes in philosophy, science, and the arts are always more complex and more gradual; and those who contribute to such changes can seldom be conscious of large-scale, retrospectively perceived shifts of this nature. The fact remains, however, that the early decades of the seventeenth century, the beginnings of what we call the Enlightenment, saw profound changes in musical theory and practice that correspond with revolutionary changes in other realms of thought and action. The central early Enlightenment thinker about music was humanist and natural philosopher Marin Mersenne. He stood at the crossroads between sixteenth-century

Music in the Enlightenment 51

Figure 9 The universe according to Ptolemy. Ptolemaic cosmology from the Harmonia Macrocosmica of Andreas Cellarius, 1660.

metaphysical musical humanism, to which he gave his blessing in Celebrated Questions About Genesis of 1623, and the gradual acceptance of mechanistic principles, which are increasingly obvious in his correspondence with Descartes, and clearly manifest in his Universal Harmony of 1636. By 1640 hehad rejected metaphysical musical humanism entirely and described the actions and effects of music upon us in terms of empirical principles inspired by Descartes. In the Questions Mersenne described with praise the beliefs and activities of the Academie de Poesie et de Musique, granted a royal charter by Charles IX in 1570. Led by Jean Antoine de Baif and Joachim Thibault de Courville, the group was dedicated to the musical humanist goal of the recovery of ancient music and, with it, the powerful ethical and physical effects described by commentators since antiquity. Writing half a century later, Mersenne could see the hopes and goals of these early academicians clearly - and with sympathy; but he also increasingly came to see the impracticalities, indeed impossibilities, of their pursuit. Baif and Thibault accepted

52 Joe Allard the traditional view that music was a crucial part of the encyclopaedia of knowledge; that is, all of our knowledge considered as an integrally related unity. THE HUMANIST QUEST The members of BaWs Academie, in Mersenne's words, 'did not wish to bring in a new kind of music, unless you call that new when something is restored to wholeness, but wished to recover those effects, which, as we read, were once produced by the Greeks.... For they hoped to exhilarate the depressed spirit, to reduce the over-elated spirit to modesty, and to stir themselves to other feelings by their own music.' The result of recovering ancient Greek music would be to 'drive barbarism from Gaul' and to form 'the manners of youth to everything honourable'. This high moral aim of the Academie had a political side for Charles IX, whose monarchy was threatened by imminent religious civil war. In his Letters Patent for the Academie, the king expressed his awareness of the opinions of many great personages, both ancient legislators and philosophers ... that it is of great importance for the morals of the citizens of a town that the music current and used in the country should be retained under certain laws, for the minds of most men are formed and their behaviour influenced by its character, so that where music is disordered, there morals are also depraved, and where it is well ordered, there men are well disciplined morally. (Yates 1947: 56,64, 78-9) The ideas which inspired the French humanists were ultimately Platonic, although they were tinctured by a Neoplatonism that came to them from Marsilio Ficino, via Pontus de Tyard, who, like Baif, was a member of the ?leiade and, through his knowledge of Ficino, the main spokesman for Platonism and the effects of ancient music in later sixteenth-century France. Four principal assumptions underlay the musical humanist movement. First, proper musical effects were thought to result from the correct relationship between the elements of vocal music: poetry, rhythm, and mode. In France only was dance added to the list. It was believed that it was the subject of the text and the words, with their innate rhythms, that were of prime importance and that dictated the creation of melody and dance. Second, it was felt that man-made music gained its power because the text of the verse spoke directly to the mind, and the rhythm and harmony echoed, or reproduced the harmony of the spheres. Deriving from the same source as the universe, man was a microcosmic image of it. In its most perfect form, music imitated not only the macrocosm but could lead the listener to God. Third, the music created here might form a channel between our own harmony and that of the universe because of fundamental relationships between microcosm and macrocosm. Fourth, since music is potentially so powerful, it is necessary to control its composition and use. Music could be a useful tool for the security of the state. Proof of this was taken to be Plato's description of Egypt in The Laws as a society in

Music in the Enlightenment 53 which music was strictly regulated, and which had known stability for ten thousand years. It was in the interest of the state not just to cultivate music, but to legislate to control it. The three main avenues of research were into the identification of the ancient modes, into vvays to subordinate the music to the verse, and into the character and creation of proper rhythm. Everyone felt that the proper mode, and its accurate employment, were part of the motive force behind any ethical effect. And because the stories had been told for so long and repeated so often, the effect was not necessarily a single nor simple thing. Agood literary example of the sophistication of modal theory is from the 1660s. In Paradise Lost John Milton has Satan's fallen host move towards Pandemonium: In perfect Phalanx to the Dorian mood Of Flutes and soft Recorders; such as rais'd To highth of noblest temper Hero's old Arming to Battel, and in stead of rage Deliberat valour breath'd, firm and unmov'd With dread of death to flight or foul retreat; Nor wanting power to mitigate and swage With solemn touches, troubl'd thoughts, and chase Anguish and doubt and fear and sorrow and pain From mortal or immortal minds. Thus they Breathing united force with fixed thought Mov'd on in silence to soft Pipes that charmd Thir painful steps ore the burnt soile.... (Book I, 550-62) The problem was the proper identification of each ecclesiastical Renaissance mode with its ancient namesake. European opinion was divided: the mode that some believed to be the Dorian was held by others to be the Phrygian, and so on through the modal series. This was a worry because very particular effects were associated with each mode. The danger in error was that if one were to compose a work in the Dorian mode, intending to lead the listener to serene understanding and good citizenship, one might, by mistaking the mode and composing in the Phrygian, arouse warlike and active emotions. The endeavour to subordinate music to verse considered both the expression of the sense of the words and the audibility of the text. The sense of the word always took precedence over more purely musical concerns. This clearly suggests certain values the humanists attached to artistic expression. Their desire was to make music more significant. Pure music, often called 'harmony', was thought to be meaningless; hence the almost universal rejection of sixteenth-century polyphony, which sacrificed verbal meaning to musical sound. The word was the mirror of reason. It could produce significant sound and affect the mind. In this way music becomes a philosophical discipline, rather than an artform for the senses. The only

54 Joe Allard

way music could reach the mind was to imitate the spoken word, to become inseparably attached to language. All innovation would be for nothing, though, if the listener could not make out the words. The dense contrapuntal polyphony of the earlier sixteenth century was anathema, but what to replace it with presented the choice of a single voice with instrumental accompaniment in counterpoint, monody, or homophony. The more purist of the humanists in both France and Italy (Galileo's father was one of these) argued for either the first or second of these as genuinely classical, using a cornbination of ancient sources and a priori reasoning. Everyone agreed that homophony was a modern development. It was on this issue in particular that the great Ancients and Moderns debate of the Enlightenment would focus. Most theorists, and virtually all composers, felt that modern music's exploitation of the possibilities of harmony, even if excessive in the madrigal, was a good thing. They wanted to retain elements of modern harmony, but to reform music for greater audibility of the text. The answer was the homophonic style in which three or four voices could sing different melodies and create pleasing harmonic intervallic relationships but, sounding simultaneously, preserve the integrity of the word. To achieve this, strict rhythmic control was necessary. One of the main efforts of Baif and his colleagues was the search for ways to use rhythm as a means to subordinate music to words. It was through rhythm in particular, they felt, that 'meaning and sound, poetry and music, came together in perfect rapport to work the wonders reported of Amphion, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Timotheus and others. And both poets and musicians thought that it would be through a reformed rhythm that modern music would re-unite sense and sound in order to achieve again the ancient wonders (Mace 1964: 261). In spite of this conviction about the potential power of rhythm, there is surprisingly little detailed discussion about which rhythmic pattern might produce which emotion. One explanation for this silence is the enormity of such a classifying task. To categorize and systematize the rhythmic ethos of each surviving Greek and Latin poem was too vast and complex a job. Another, more helpful answer is that the humanists imagined that the source of all musical effects, both rhythmic and harmonic, resided in number. Hence rhythmic proportions were to be found in the reason rather than in the passions. The same mathematical proportions that produced 'harmony' formed the rational basis of rhythm. In Questions Mersenne discussed metric feet as though they were harmonic intervals. Accordingly the word, like the music, has harmonic proportions. The musician could best achieve his goal of. retrieving ancient ethical effects by re-fusing the proportions inherent in the verse to the proportions of the music. Music successfully composed according to this theory would restore the balance between body and soul, and bring good proportion into the listener's life.

Music in the Enlightenment 55 DESCARTES AND MERSENNE Mersenne maintained his enthusiasm for music throughout his life, including his belief that good music is beneficial to the individual, and that its study ought to be included in academic pursuits. By the 1630s, however, he had decided that musical rhythms correspond to the passions and have little to do with reason. The rational order of effects, central to Renaissance humanism, was abandoned in favour of a study of relations between poetic and musical rhythms and the passions. Between 1629 and 1635 when his Harmonic Questions About the Nature of Sounds appeared, Mersenne was in regular correspondence with Descartes, who had published his youthful Musical Compendium in 1618. The Compendium itself is little more than an ordinary music handbook, much of the theory derived from the Venetian composer and writer Zarlino. However, through his other comments about music, and his ofher works of philosophy, Descartes played an important role in the development of Enlightenment ideas about music. He never produced a complete aesthetic because he believed an internal union between art, history, and philosophy was impossible. Any attempt at a valid system would prove futile. It is possible, however, to piece together a reasonably clear picture of his musical ideas. He felt, first of all, that music had the same qualities as mathematics. The most beautiful music was clear and direct. The simpler the ratios between tones, the more consonant the sound. Aesthetic truth resided in our rational faculties. Beauty resulted from proportion, regularity and symmetry. The most perfect music was the 'truest' (in terms of mathematical perfection). Musical 'truth' was founded in, and judged by, the reason. Judgement about the 'truth' of music might be the business of reason, but music's immediate effect was on the passions. In The Passions of the Soul, the body is described as a machine which responds to the forces of animal spirits upon the pineal gland. The passions and their expressions are like physical reflexes, responding immediately and necessarily to changes in the body. The richness and variety of the passions reside in this immediateness. One important function of music was to give us a pleasurable leisure, an elevated form of amusement. From the inescapable physical passions, stimulated by rhythms, he moved to intellectual passions which can produce intellectual joy - one of the highest forms of our existence. Without this progression from physical passion to intellectual passion and joy, life would be arid and banal. Descartes' theory of the soul's passions was of paramount importance to seventeenth-century music theory and commentary. His other ideas about music were much more fluid and were a good example of the intellectual ferment during the early decades of the century. Throughout his correspondence with Mersenne, he altered or abandoned certain principles he had put forward earlier. For example, he thought, early on, that consonance of sound was the most beautiful because mathematically the simplest. Later, however, he admitted to Mersenne that dissonance might give just as much pleasure. The agreeableness of a musical sound is a matter

56 Joe Allard for the listener's taste; it is subjective. His early view that there might exist universally determinable standards goes by the board. He had also thought, at first, that it might be possible to find correspondence between the passions and particular musical intervals or rhythms, but arrived, finally, at the conclusion that 'it is impossible to determine by any precise method a rapport between acoustic phenomena and phenomena of the mind' (Racek 1930: 297). Like Descartes, Mersenne became less and less interested in the ancients and humanist concerns and, in his later work, came to view the effects of music as result·ing from a relationship between rhythm and human passions. Throughout his Universal Harmony one can detect disillusion with his old faith in the ancients accompanied by an increasing approval of modern music. In the 'Second Book of String Instruments' he discusses a humanist question related to tuning methods described by Ptolemy. He suggests that the reader have confidence in modern methods 'so that the too great respect borne by some of us for the ashes of the Greeks may not throw us into a perpetual distrust of our proficiency and in despair at arriving at as great a perfection of harmony as that which they practised' (Mersenne 1957: 99). In the 'Sixth Book of the Organ' he discusses the question of adding extra keys to the manual in order to capture the entire range of temperament. Although he had said in Questions that the state ought to legislate about musical matters, he seems now to question if music can have such a vast effect: if the observance of the laws should depend on the intervals of music, and if they were to cause the changing of habit and good customs, as it seems the ancients believed, one would have reason to doubt whether it would be expedient or whether it be pern1itted to add some new keys to the organ keyboards, since we read that they banished those who would add new strings to instruments. But experience has not yet shown that this augmentation of strings or keys would be prejudicial to the state or to its mores.... (Mersenne 1636:' III, heading to Proposition XII, my translation) In addition to this new tendency to flavour his readings of classical sources with a few grains of salt, we find discussions of musical rhythm that demonstrate his acceptance of Descartes' theory of the effects of music on the passions. As a priest, Mersenne's aim in his work remained predominantly moral throughout his career, but now he hoped to achieve his goal of religious awakening through a music that, via rhythmic modulation, appealed to the passions, rather than, as he had felt, addressed the reason by modal or harmonic means. In the 'Embellissment' to the 'Second Book of Chants' he included a section concerned with musical accent, which raises questions about the effect of rhythm on the passions. He states that 'each passion and affection of the soul has its proper accent.' Unlike the humanist conception of rhythm, which was mathematically exact and related to reason's awareness of proportion, the rhythm discussed by Mersenne imitates the actual shape of particular passions. The passions respond mechanically and immediately. By 1640 Mersenne can be seen to have abandoned almost entirely all his human-

Music in the Enlightenment 57 ist beliefs about music and to have adopted an aesthetic that was subjective and mechanistic, which looked to music to offer man a little pleasure in a life certain to be tinged with bitterness. In November of that year he defined the role of music to the Dutch poet Constantin Huygens as 'particularly and principally to charm the spirit and the ear, and to help us pass life with a little sweetness amidst the troubles we will encounter.' In reference to the wonderful effects of ancient music he admitted that 'it is difficult to be persuaded of them in the absence of experience of them.' Ancient music probably did not really excite anger or other strong emotions, but was used, as modern music ought to be, to 'refresh the spirit of the listeners, and perhaps lead them to devotion'. The role of music is to lighten somewhat our burden in life, to lead us gently towards devotion, to please us with its harmonies and rhythms. Music exists to 'charmer l'esprit et l'oreille' (Mersenne 1932-72: X, 236-49). ITALIAN AND FRENCH PRACTICE In practical terms the early seventeenth century saw a revolution and a birth. The revolution was a sea-change in the conception of musical space from traditional modality, which was often densely polyphonic, to new harmonic notions that made practical use of the tonic-dominant relationship in the triad and was homophonic and contrapuntal. The birth was of opera. Its creation was directly related to the research of Florentine humanists in their search for an effective declamatory style of singing. The new recitative style was first heard in Jacopo Peri's La Dafne in 1597. His aim, simply, was to reproduce a musical play in the Greek manner as he understood it from traditional sources such as Aristotle. Peri's L'Euridice was performed in Florence in 1600 to celebrate the marriage of Marie de Medici to Henry IV, whence influential reports of this novel form of noble entertainment reached France. From then until the 1660s French monarchs and their ministers, most notably Mazarin, tried with little success to Italianize French culture. They were frustrated largely because of the wide gulf between French and Italian styles of music, and because of a strong bias toward ballet in French court entertainments that would hold sway for two-thirds of the century. Passion, emotional expressiveness, and melody characterized Italian music; rhythm and rational subtlety characterized French. The Italian composer carefully developed his melody which was then lavishly embellished by the performer. Opera provided many opportunities for the expression of violent emotions; a criticism often levelled in France was of unnecessary extravagance. French music, on the contrary, was soft and undemonstrative. Rhythmic subtlety was of most importance. The best song was simple, direct, and graceful; it should please and divert. The exaggerated liveliness of Italian singing, especially when done by the freakish castrati, seemed shocking and crude to the French. Throughout the century there were efforts made to reconcile the two, as when Mersenne enjoined French composers to adopt Italian elements of style to give

58 Joe Allard more buoyancy to their soft, understated air de cour. Such pleas met with increasingly little success, and finally with hostility, socially and politically, as Colbert generated nationalistic fervour at the expense of foreigners in general after 1662. Like Richelieu before him, Mazarin saw the political capital in keeping potentially bored and dangerous aristocrats engaged with large-scale performances of ballet and opera to divert attention from his plots and intrigues. Until his death in 1661 he brought a series of large-scale Italian operas to France. In 1645, for example, Sacrati's Finta Pazza was successfully staged. The success, however, was from neither the music nor the singing of the castrati, but from the fabulous and intricate ·stage machinery designed by Torelli. Time and again Mazarin's lavishly expensive productions were popular for the wrong reasons. His final bid to shore up the Italian faction was a performance of Cavalli's Ercole Amante staged in 1662 to celebrate the marriage of Louis XIV and the Infanta Maria Teresa. Agreat success, ironically it sounded the death knell for Italian opera in France. Inserted between the songs and acts of the six-hour marathon were huge ballets composed and choreographed by Italian-born Jean Baptiste Lully. Ballet had always been closer to the French heart than opera, and the court accepted Ercole Amante as an enormous ballet with dramatic interludes. Mazarin had died in 1661, and so missed this reversal. Colbert, his successor, set out to nationalize French taste; his ambition was towards a genuinely French opera. The man who turned the trick was Lully, who had come to France, at fourteen, in 1646. He entered the service of the young Louis XIV in 1652, then rose inexorably in musical prestige, first as violinist, then as composer, choreographer, and conductor. By 1661 he was superintendent of all the king's music. He ran the king's orchestra like a tyrant until it became the envy of Europe and prototype for all future orchestras. Until 1672 he devoted his energies and innovative orchestral techniques to ballet alone. From the 1650s until the 1680s he produced ballets with Benserade. In 1663 he began his collaboration with Moliere in their new comedieballet. A sensitive political animal, Lully became more closely associated with the French faction in the cultural struggle of the 1660s, although before that, both because of birth and style, he had been associated with the Italian. Even though as late as 1670 he had believed opera impossible to compose inthe French language, it was at his hands, in a subtle fusion of certain Italian and certain French stylistic characteristics, that the immensely popular and influential tragedie-lyrique was first created in 1673. In certain ways this evolved through the idiom of comedie-ballet which Moliere saw as a way to extend the appeal of his plays and to bring ballet closer to dramatic unification. Moliere and Corneille wrote the plots; Lully composed the music and, with Quinault, wrote the lyrics. Through this experience Lully developed the French recitative by Italianizing the air de cour from the ballet. It became more passionate and less rhythmically restricted. His disciplined orchestra was perfect for the rhythmic French style. The songs and choruses of the ballet, however, leaned toward the expressive Italian bel canto. Lully was, in fact, not the first to compose

Music in the Enlightenment 59 opera in French. Robert Cambert and Pierre Perrin had been given a royal charter in 1669 to develop French opera in the newly opened Academie Royale de Musique. Their Pomone was performed in 1671. The ~cademie, however, was disastrously mismanaged and, always one with an eye to the main chance, Lully managed to manipulate a new royal charter to himself in 1672. From then, with Quinault as his usual librettist, he produced a series of tragedies-lyriques, beginning with Cadmus et Hermione in 1673 and continuing at the rate of one a year until 1686. The plots provided by Quinault were consciously in the manner of Corneille and Racine, masters of French tragic classicism. Unlike Italian opera in which a sometimes incoherent and badly organized plot provided an excuse for exuberant arias, the opera of Lully and Quinault depended largely on drama, to which music and dance were added. Quinault was criticized for corrupting the classical formulae of Racine and Corneille by allowing the intervention of ballets and arias, as well as the arrival of gods in machines, but his aim was to maintain simplicity, clarity, and logic. One of the most important elements of both verse and music, and their conjunction, was the rhythm. Like Baif a century before, and Mersenne more recently, Lully was concerned with the lucid projection of the text. Quinault employed Alexandrian couplets of classical tragedy, and copied, as far as possible, the metres, as well. Lully was careful that his musical rhythms conformed with the rhythms of the words. The regulation of rhythms and verse reversed the Italian practice of allowing the singer to regulate the rhythm as he gave most attention to the curve of the melody. Lully used a number of different forms to give colour and variety to his operas. He used large choruses, often juxtaposing large and small choruses to create an antiphonal effect. Lully and his operas are of paramount importance to French seventeenth-century music. In his tragedie-lyrique he had created a style that would dominate French music well into the eighteenth century. The response to his operas was also profoundly important to later writings about music.

TRIUMPH OF THE MODERNS Although there was no music theorist of Mersenne's stature until Rameau began to write in the early eighteenth century, the glories of Louis XIV, of French Classicism, and of Colbert's academies, and the power and popularity of Jean Baptiste Lully's tragedie-lyrique provoked what might be seen as a new genre of music theory - a developed criticism and history. New developments in all the arts produced amateurs and litterateurs who made it their business to keep up with developments. These men wrote commentaries during the 1670s and 1680s that resurrected and popularized older artistic doctrines; in music this was, especially, the language of Neoplatonically-conceived music effects. Language notwithstanding, however, each commentator was a modern and a mechanist. Their general belief was that the function of music was to celebrate and to divert.

60 Joe Allard During the final quarter of the seventeenth century it became the popular notion that Lully had succeeded with his tragedie-lyrique where the musical humanists had failed; that is, he had created a form of musical theatre that captured the effects attributed to the music of the ancients. Although he was not thought to have rediscovered the precise forms and practices of the Greeks, he had discovered a formula through which music, words, rhythm, and dance could be unified with the effect of causing changes in man's behaviour. Since it was generally believed that Lully had succeeded in the old quest for effects, the bulk of the new commentary was devoted to considering the similarities and differences between the musical and balletic practice of the ancients and that of seventeenth-century France. Through these works runs the belief that the Middle Ages were finished, that modernity was triumphant, and that France was a direct and successful descendant of the glory of Alexander's Greece. Of course, developments in all the arts during these years served the political and utilitarian purpose of glorifying the king. The operas of Lully, like the painting by Le Brun, broadcast the image of Louis as the apotheosis of ancient emperor and god. The show and splendour of the productions at the Academie Royale de Musique, like the grand fresco cycles by Le Brun at Versailles, or the entire output of the Gobelins factory, continued at full speed during war and peace with the intention of demonstrating France's inexhaustible wealth. Many of Louis' cultural efforts were consciously intended to divert a potentially bored and dangerous nobility from whom he and Colbert had taken more and more power since the early 1660s. By the 1680s Inany nobles, almost completely stripped of real power, did find delight and diversion through art: dilettantes and amateurs abounded and engaged in the variety of cultural debates about Ancients and Moderns, about the general French superiority to the Italian in most things, about the importance of Line versus Colour, and about the relative ranking of Poussin and Rubens. A few brief examples should suffice to show how the commentators inspired their almost entirely modern and self-congratulatory writing with at least an atmosphere of earlier humanist and metaphysical doctrines. Quinault, Lully's main librettist, and Pure, wrote a history of noble spectacles, which emphasized the political and social utility of performances like ballet. Their basic assumption about the effects of such performance was the metaphysical one that rhythm and melody imitated the harmony of the spheres. Rather than dwell on theory, however, Quinault and Pure traced the development of pageants, chariot races, and so on, to show how such spectacles helped the state: how they increased popular admiration for the ruler, honoured the gods, and diverted a potentially dangerous nobility. They ~iscovered the roots of seventeenth-century French entertainments in classical models, and felt that the political and social functions were the same, but that the modern French had surpassed the ancients. An article in Extraordinaire Mercure Galant in July 1680 discussed the dance in conceptions drawn almost equally from Neoplatonic and mechanist sources. Dance was said to be the oldest of artforms, dating from the creation and deriving from the

Music in the Enlightenment 61

Figure 10 Louis XIV as Apollo, in Ballet du Roy des Festes de Bacchus (1651). Drawing by an unknown artist, watercolour with highlights of gold and silver.

62 Joe Allard harmonious movement of the universe. The rulers of France are compared to those of antiquity in that both recognized the 'utility [of the dance] was necessary to public welfare and preservation of their states.' Nobles received instruction in dance to develop such necessary refinements as good posture, graceful movement, and generally elevated actions. These refinements were meant to make them better warriors. The remainder of the definition of the dance demonstrates contemporary concern with the passions: the dance is described as a 'certain disposition of the body which, by its proportional movements and postures, following the sound of instruments or the voice, is animated and is led to the cadence, and which, according to numbers, the modes and the measures of the art, imitates and expresses the passions of the soul and the actions of the body' (quoted by Isherwood 1973: 38). Charles Perrault, champion of the moderns, discussed music in his Ancient and Modem Parallels in 1688. The effect of modern music was manifold: 'In Music the beautiful sound and the precision of the voice charm the ear, the gay or languishing rhythms of the same voice, according to the different passions expressed, touch the heart, and the harmony of the different parts which are blended with order and admirable economy are a pleasure to the reason' (Perrault 1964: 213-14, my translation). Modern music is superior to ancient for Perrault because the moderns had perfect harmony, which allowed them, through music, to reach man's passions and heart, and, through them, his reason: With all its pomp and ravishing' attire Music today is lacking any rival. This gorgeous art, divine, with marvels sweet, Is not content to charm the ear alone, Not just the heart by its expression's moved But at its pleasure all the passions, too: And last - and best - through beauty that's supreme Reason itself - the highest - feels the charm. (Perrault 1964: 18, my translation) Although there is an aura of mystery in this verse that is reminiscent of the metaphysical explanations of music's power, the description of its effect is purely mechanistic. A final, and usefully comprehensive, example of the popularity of metaphysical theories of music and dance wedded to modern ones is drawn from Moliere's The Bourgeois Gentleman, a comedie-ballet he produced in 1670 with music and choreography by Lully. In an early passage M. Jourdain talks with his Music and Dancing Masters and is, of course, gulled by them:

Music Master:

Well, there is something in philosophy, but music, sir, music Dancing Master: And dancing, music and dancing, what more can one need? Music Master: There's nothing so valuable in the life of the nation as music.

Music in the Enlightenment 63 Dancing Master: Music Master: Dancing Master: Music Master:

And nothing so necessary to mankind as dancing. Without music - the country couldn't go on. Without dancing - one can achieve nothing at all. All the disorders, all the wars, that we see in the world today, come from not learning music. Dancing Master: All the troubles of mankind, all the miseries which make up history, the blunders of politicians, the failures of great captains - they all come from not having learned dancing. M. Jourdain: How d'ye make that out? Music Master: What is war but discord among nations? M Jourdain: True. Music Master: If all men studied music wouldn't it be a means of bringing them to harmony and universal peace? M. Jourdain: That seems sound enough. (Moliere 1953: I, ii) The fact that such musical conceptions could be used in a satiric comedy is an indication that the audience, at least, was familiar enough with the theories to laugh at anyone really taking them seriously. M. Jourdain's wide-eyed credulity indicates just how fully such older musical ideas had permeated the intelligentsia, and how sceptical of metaphysical explanations of pleasure they had become. With the exception of paying lip-service to older theories of music's effects, all such commentaries, at base, seem to hold that the real function of music', beyond the rather vague ones of serving the state and producing good soldiers, was to please and divert the listener, and that the route of such pleasure was through an effect on the passions. The older belief that the function of music was to effect profound moral change, which underlay the research of the humanists, and formed the philosophic core of Mersenne's Questions, had been fully superseded by the Enlightenment belief that the arts found their chief function in giving man, considered in mechanistic terms, some diversion and pleasure during the course of his life.

CONCLUSION Even though our common inclination is to locate 'Enlightenment' music at the end of the eighteenth century, this essay has been concerned to make clear the deep significance of seventeenth-century developments in all aspects of the art. Indeed, the music of Haydn and Mozart announces a radical break from the tradition of Lully, Rameau, and Bach. Mozart, and his younger contemporary Beethoven, are if anything the harbinger and the fulfilment of early Romanticism, and exploit, following Haydn's lead, the potentials in a quite different harmonic space than Bach's. Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven all explore the universe of harmonic tonality that is

64 Joe Allard vertical in emphasis, growing from the triad, and expressive, emotive, finally hysterical in the nineteenth century. This style has come to be called 'Classical', which is yet another unfortunate use of the word. Bach and his predecessors inhabited a space that, although harmonic (and in structure especially fully exploiting the tonicdominant tonal centres), was linear and contrapuntal, and clearly rational and contemplative in effect. However, to quibble over the greater importance of Bach or Mozart to music in the Enlightenment is to miss the crucial point that most reasonably popular Western music since then grows, directly or indirectly, from roots in the later sixteenth century. It is in the early decades of the seventeenth century that links with the past are broken, that belief in ancient (indeed any) authority is discarded, that knowledge splinters, and that 'modernity' finally wins the argument. There is a telling irony in the musical discourse of the encylopedistes in the mideighteenth century. Central to their aesthetic is the notion that instrumental music that does not intentionally set out to imitate, to 'paint' something, is nonsense. Both d'Alembert and Rousseau interpret M. de Fontenelle's famous remark 'Sonate, que me veux-tu?' ('Sonata, what do you want of me?') as a cry of frustration from a reasonable man who had tried, and failed, to understand what pure music has to offer. They all conclude that it offers nothing - it is noise. In the absence of obvious imitation, music is sent to the back of the artistic queue. It can help other arts; it can ornament language in song or movement in dance. But in itself it is nothing. This might be seen as an example of the weakness of eighteenth-century rationality. Commentators attempt to legislate opinion. Good sense and good taste are defined, however, by people who lack sympathy with, or understanding of their subject matter. That d'Alembert could take such a position about instrumental music within a year of Bach's death is, from a musician's point of view, foolish. Similarly Diderot's attack on Rameau in Rameau's Nephew purports to be criticism of his music when, in fact, it is much more to do with politics and taste. However, one result of 'enlightenment' is an infinite multiplication of points of view. In the absence of any authority or belief, any idea or position can be maintained and defended no matter how absurd or dangerous. The most significant result of developments in the seventeenth century is the fracturing of the Western mind. Once this occurs - and becomes manifest in the academic movement throughout Europe and North America - there is, among other things, a proliferation of arena for debate. Later seventeenth-century Paris saw the birth of a new class of commentator - people like Perrault, who are delighted to weigh into arguments with enthusiasm about tenets of 'modern' taste. What musicians are doing at a practical level becomes subject to their judgement. This split between practice and chatter is the hallmark of what it means to be modern. Of course, the great irony of modernism is that it has no past that it can view with anything other than embarrassment or contempt. The modern lives

Music in the Enlightenment 65 strenuously in the present and for the future, unaware that, in that pose, he or she is already past.

NOTE Further reading includes Anthony 1973, Descartes 1897-1913, Maniates 1969, and'Valker 1942.

5 Difficult difference: Rousseau's fictions of identity JAY BERNSTEIN

EDITORS' INTRODUCTION Thinkers of the Enlightenment identified themselves and their times with novelty. They were quite self-conscious about being 'modern'. But they certainly did not agree about what being modern involved, nor whether this was a good thing. Often 'luxury' was the theme through which ambivalence about modernity was explored. When we want to examine this ambivalence more closely, we customarily turn to Rousseau. It is now much more fully appreciated that Rousseau did not in fact advocate a return to a past golden age, as Jay Bernstein's paper makes clear. ; Rousseau used history for a quite particular purpose - it facilitated his thought experiments about what was 'natural' and what was 'original' in the human condition, and, Bernstein reminds us, these two terms do not denote the same thing. Rousseau's interest in the transformations human beings may have undergone alerts us to the significance of change for his thought as a whole. Rousseau is an important figure in the Enlightenment for many reasons, but here it is his energetic enquiries into the nature of nature that are especially striking. Rousseau had a dynamic view of nature; human characteristics can become natural.. ized. Thus, although his rhetoric polarizes nature and society, especially in the Second Discourse, it is in fact the complex interplay between them that preoccupies him. Nowhere is this more evident than in Rousseau's treatment of relations between the sexes. Many scholars have seen his ideas on this subject as exceptionally influential in the second half of the eighteenth century. This is hard to prove, and it seems likely that his direct influence has been exaggerated. But the seriousness of his engagement with gender and its political implications cannot be doubted, providing ample grist for scholars' mills without any need to overstate his influence. Bernstein explores some of the complexities of Rousseau's ideas about male-female relations through the idea of fiction. He points to Rousseau's concern with identity and difference. The latter leads him to see the sexes as complementary

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in their attributes, while he is intensely conscious of what Bernstein evocatively calls 'erotic strife'. Emile explores this theme in the final part, where Emile marries, but his wife strays from the straight and narrow path of chaste behaviour that Rousseau prescribed for married women. These themes are linked to Rousseau's treatment of one of the most important concepts of the Enlightenment, that of the citizen. Rousseau envisages the ideal citizen as male, although the stability of the body politic also rests on women's virtue, indeed on women's virtue being publicly visible. By the time of the French Revolution the word 'citizen' was dense with meaning: this single term could evoke an entire political vision, yet at the same time remain ambiguous and contested. It is surely significant that a recent, and highly controversial, book about the French Revolution is entitled, simply, Citizens (Schama 1989). Many commentators have linked Rousseau's writings directly with the Revolution. The actual historical relationship between them is now recognized as exceedingly complex. Bernstein criticizes Hannah Arendt's influential account of this relationship, and then builds on his criticisms to show how we should understand the relationship between particular interests and the general will. The point here is Rousseau's constant concern with changing human nature for political ends. Hence his related concern with education, with the mechanisms whereby human nature is fashioned. Put this way we can appreciate the sense of process that informs Rousseau's thought. For Bernstein we must understand Rousseau's writings as 'fiction'. By this he means nothing pejorative, but seeks to refer us to the rhetorical power of those writings, to their capacity to tell plausible stories that exemplify an ideal political order. Rousseau's writings, with their blend of what we would call stories, philosophy, speculative anthropology, and political theory, opened up important conceptual spaces. But at the same time, their force rendered aspects of them mythic, so that Rousseau cast exceptionally dark shadows. His legacy is a complex, multifaceted one, but it is all the more important because of the subtlety of his ideas and writings. NOTE In chapter 5 the following abbreviations are employed: SO = .second Discourse (Rousseau 1964); E = Emile (Rousseau 1979); SC = The Social Contract (Rousseau 1950).

5

There can be no more vigilant and persistent a critic of enlightened modernity than Rousseau. In his first critical essay, A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1751), he offers a genealogical unmasking of the Enlightenment's praise and defence of science and learning: Astronomy was born from superstition; eloquence from ambition, hate, flattery, and falsehood; geometry from avarice, physics from vain curiosity; all, even moral philosophy, from human pride. Thus the sciences and arts owe their birth to our vices; we would be less doubtful of their advantages if they owed it to our virtues. (Rousseau 1964: 48) For Rousseau the arts and sciences are premised on luxury and engender a sublime indifference to moral and political well-being. Rousseau is not opposed to science and learning as such, but their present status is bound up with, and an affirmation of, a world of vice and inequality. The advancement of the sciences and arts has brought about the disappearance of virtue. Of course, it would be an outrageous exaggeration to blame the wholesale corruption of virtue in modernity on the advancements of learning; far more plausible is the claim that they became entangled in a history in which the apparent good they make possible was continually subjected to forces that turned them against their own best possibilities. This is to concede, against the Enlightenment, that there is no intrinsic rational goodness in the advancement of learning. Rousseau's philosophical project, which first reached maturity in his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations ofInequality Among Men (1755), commonly called the Second Discourse, is an historical and theoretical analysis of the corruption of virtue in modernity and a survey of the possibilities for its being restored. At the centre of this enterprise is a reiterated attack on the unsocial sociability of individuals in the modern, liberal state; individuals who 'no longer have a hold on one another except by force and self-interest' (E: 321).

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In the Second Discourse Rousseau offers an historical account of the origin of inequality that turns on not projecting back into the state of nature extant psychological dispositions and attitudes, as is done in the works of Hobbes and Locke; they 'spoke about savage man and they describe civil man' (SO: 102). Egoism and instrumental rationality, which together generate the idea of persons as each seeking to maximize their individual happiness, are products of historical development, not natural attributes of persons. The Second Discourse presents the genesis of these attributes as belonging to the 'natural' or ideal type history of the species. As such, Rousseau's account of the development of the soul or psyche must be regarded as less an empirical history of the origins of inequality than an ideal history, a phenomenology of mind, the terms of which are both items of history and analytic and/or theoretical categories through which concrete history can be explained and analysed (on this Hegelian conception, see Gillespie 1984: 1-28). Only on the assumption that this is what Rousseau is doing can we understand his claim that the state of nature, taken as representing man's prehistoric endowments, what is original to our species,· is a state 'which no longer exists, which perhaps never existed, which probably never will exist'; and, hence, the investigation of which can commence 'by setting all the facts aside, for they do not affect the question' (SO: 93, 103). Rousseau's state of nature is not an ideal state of affairs, in the sense of a state of affairs to be sought after and returned to, since in it human beings lack the social and conventional characteristics that are partially constitutive of them as human beings as they are now found in the world. Nor, then, does the state of nature instantiate all our psychological attributes, as is presupposed in empiricist accounts of it. Not everything that is 'natural' to our species is original to it; much of what is intrinsic to us is acquired in history. Rousseau's state of nature marks that moment just prior to the onset of conventionally structured social existence - an existence in which transformation and development become constitutive features of species life. If the state of nature is ideal in any sense, and it is, it is logically and conceptually ideal, like a frictionless surface; Rousseau can thus use it as a standard of measurement, as a critical vantage point from which historical society can be comprehended. Its moral authority as an ideal state of affairs is its neutrality, its being beyond good and evil. Good and evil are moral qualities that adhere to human beings only as fully socialized beings (SO: 128). In the state of nature, human beings are solitary creatures, concerned only with their own self-preservation; they are neither envious nor contemptuous of others because the linguistic terms and routine exchanges between individuals that underlie envy, contempt, hatred, pride, love, honour, and the like do not yet exist. As pure natural beings these individuals are self-sufficient, independent, and peaceful. In order for individuals to oppose their interests to those of others, and thus have grounds for strife with others, those others must be reckoned with as routine objects of concern; and this requires the existence of cognitive and practical forms - like reason, property relations, and the division of labour - binding each individual to its

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relevant others. No such forms can be attributed to individuals in the state of nature. Only slowly do people begin to draw together and seek one another's emotional and practical support; only slowly do language and reason appear; only under the pressure and movement of these occurrences does 'civil man' begin to appear. The two central terms of analysis which give this history its critical edge are amour-de-soi and amour-propre. Amour-de-soi or self-love is not equivalent to egoism, pride, or conceit. Originally it involves only simple, unmediated concern for oneself; as such it is best regarded as a form or version of what is usually regarded under the title of the drive for self-preservation. In its first appearance amour-de-soi motivates individuals to action without reflection and deliberation. Reflection, which leads to the weighing and comparing of competing goods, and deliberation, which designs means to ends and draws future goods into present consideration, involve the comparing and linking of ideas, which in turn requires the use of reason and language, neither of which is possessed by savage man. Savage man, the animal that will become civil man, regards 'himself as the sole spectator to observe him, and as the sole judge of his own merit' (SD: 222). For these reasons amour-de-soi is a different passion from amour-propre, which is 'only a relative sentiment, artificial and born in society, [and] which inclines each individual to have a greater esteem for himself than for anyone else' (SD: 222). A good from the perspective of amourde-soi is good for the self irrespective of whether others have or do not have it (or its converse), and irrespective of whether others acknowledge or fail to acknowledge an individual's possession or entitlement to it. Amour-de-soi is taught the nature of these goods through experience; amour-de-soi encourages self-sufficiency and the acknowledgement of natural necessity. As a consequence, for Rousseau amour-desoi, even outside the state of nature, remains a constant norm of action which, when directed by reason and modified by compassion, 'produces humanity and virtue' (SD: 222). The book that best teaches the lessons of amour-de-soi, the first which Rousseau gives to his Everyman, Emile, is Robinson Crusoe (E: 184-8). None the less, the normative authority and motivation provided by amour-de-soi becomes corrupted, repressed, and forgotten when amour-propre comes on the scene. No term within Rousseau's corpus is as difficult to analyse and translate as amour-propre. The usual translations of amour-propre as either 'vanity' or 'egoism' generate a paradox for Rousseau's thinking that is not indigenous to it. Amourpropre certainly marks the way in which individuals gather their practical selfunderstanding and self-identity through the views that others have of them; with the onset of amour-propre self-esteem and self-worth, and their opposites, are mediated through others. Further, in Rousseau's view amour-propre does incline each individual to have a greater esteem for himself than for anyone else; and that inclination has not been resisted throughout history. Amour-propre, then, accounts for the unsocial sociability of individuals in modern states; and it is the psychological precipitates of amour-propre, taken as natural endowments, that govern the actions of 'natural man' in the writings of Hobbes and Locke.

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But amour-propre cannot be vanity, egoism, or pride, for were that the case the corrupt and unequal society of the present as described by Rousseau would be unsurpassable; the sociality constitutive of being in society and history would be essentially unsocial; self-worth would be not only always mediated through others but always competitive as well, so that any individual's good would require another's non-possession of that good. If social life were necessarily corrupting of natural virtue, then while amour-de-soi might be brought forward in order to moderate amour-propre, the pernicious effects of that latter passion would remain constant and irremovable elements of social life. Ifthis were so, then the theoretical gain over Hobbes and Locke accomplished by separating amour-de-soi from amour-propre and aligning the latter passion with egoism would be insubstantial; the individualism of their approaches would have been overcome but the consequences of that perspective would remain. In Emile (1762), however, Rousseau makes perfectly clear that amour-propre is not essentially corrupting, and that the passions of envy and contempt, shame and pride that are precipitates of it, to which it inclines, are not intrinsic characteristics. In itself amour-propre is 'good and useful', and 'naturally neutral'; it 'becomes good or bad only by the application made of it and the relations given to it' (E: 92). Rousseau continues this passage by saying that he will not confront Emile with others until his reason is sufficiently developed to allow him to control it. Such a controlling reason was not in place at the historical onset of amour-propre; after a brief moment when conjugal and paternal love dominate, their natural correlates, jealousy, and possessiveness, make their appearance: 'By dint of seeing one another, they can no longer do without seeing one another again. A tender and gentle sentiment is gradually introduced into the soul and at the least obstacle becomes impetuous fury. Jealousy awakens with love; discord triumphs, and the gentlest of the passions receives sacrifices of human blood' (SO: 148-9). It is in this setting of inflamed passions and erotic competitiveness that amour-propre first makes an emphatic appearance. Individuals, gathered together, begin to compare one another's looks and abilities; they begin, insensibly, to seek public esteem and to gather their self-esteem through public acknowledgement of their worth. Natural difference became social worth: that was the 'first step toward inequality and, at the same time, toward vice' (SO: 149). In itself amour-propre is nothing but our being-for-others, it is the form 'our innate concern to be well and do well in and for ourselves takes ... as and when we have regard to ourselves in our standing and place with other people engaged in transactions with them' (Dent 1988: 56). Amour-propre is our desire and claim to recognition by others, one we cannot avoid in so far as we are social beings. Although I shall leave amour-propre untranslated, if pressed I would translate it as simply 'self-consciousness', for its closest analogue within philosophy is Hegel's concept of self-consciousness (amour-de-soi is an analogue of Hegel's conception of 'sentiment of self). Amour-propre is Hegelian self-consciousness in that it specifies the social mediations and relational elements involved in achieving a full awareness

72 Jay Bernstein of oneself. Further, Rousseau's dialectic of dependency, with its contrasting terms of vanity and contempt, shame and envy, anticipates and maps easily onto Hegel's dialectic of master and slave (Hegel 1977: 110-19; cf. Bernstein 1984a). In identifying amour-propre with self-consciousness, the social, and ultimately political, character of the human psyche for Rousseau is implied. Inequality is a product of deformed arnour-propre. And if it is correct to place the onset of amour-propre in a context of erotic strife, and if one recalls Rousseau's acceptance of Locke's axiom that where there is no property, there is no injury (SO: 150), and his insistence that the true founder of civil society was the first person to fence off a plot of ground and say 'this is mine' and find others simple enough to believe him (SO: 141-2), then for Rousseau historical society, inequality, and the degeneration of the species all properly begin with the taking and making of women as property. Women are the 'first' property because erotic strife underwrites the original appearance of amour-propre. For Rousseau the historical dialectic of n1aster and slave, and the historical dialectic of male and female are coterminous (on Rousseau's anticipation of Freud, see Pateman 1988). Once amour-propre is thus introduced, and the possession of women has given men the germ of the idea of property through the affective entanglements of desire and jealousy, then the demise of the state of nature is preordained: the division of labour increases dependency and enjoins the domination of seeming over being; metallurgy and agriculture intensify mutual dependency and the reign of deformed amour-propre until, finally, the introduction of property and positive law come to spell the end of natural existence. The formation of states, a process which turns the right of the stronger into positive right and transforms natural liberty into legal servitude, is coextensive with this last stage of development. This is the state of affairs to which all of Rousseau's writings address themselves: How can the deformation of amour-propre be undone? For Rousseau the establishment of civil liberty and the regeneration of equality presupposes the generation of forms of amour-propre to which the malevolent secondary elaborations of it - pride and contempt, shame and envy - cannot adhere; Are benign forms of amour-propre possible? And what is meant by 'possible' in this context? Is it real, historical possibility that is at issue here; or are we only concerned with logical possibilities, possible worlds in which things might be different? In this question, apart from any answers that might be given to it, lies the central tension in Rousseau's thought. There can be little doubt that Rousseau perceived the society in which he dwelled as so morally corrupt as to make it unsuitable for political regeneration. In this sense, we might say, Rousseau perceived a massive historical blockage cutting off existing society from a more virtuous successor: contemporary society lacked the internal potentialities that would allow it to progress. Alternatively, however, the very terms and literary genres in which Rousseau elaborates the possibility of benign amourpropre raise the concern that the difficulty, the aporia in question, might be as much conceptual as historical, that the very structure of Roussea'u's thought doubles the historical blockage with a conceptual blockage. And while it may well

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be the case that Rousseau's, and our, predicament does involve an overlapping of an historical difficulty with a conceptual difficulty, we need none the less to interrogate Rousseau's tense running together of these difficulties. Rousseau elaborates his original state of nature as one which no longer exists, which perhaps never existed, and which probably never will exist; might not the same be said for the ideal state Rousseau outlines in The Social Contract (1762)? Are not both the state of nature and the ideal state fictions? Is not the virtuous family of Julie, or the New Eloise (1761) designedly a fiction? Is not the self created in Rousseau's Confessions (written 1765) a fiction? Fictionality is for Rousseau the consequence of historical failure; in Emile he states: If I have said what must be done, I have said what I ought to have said. It makes very little difference to me if I have written a romance. A fair romance it is indeed, the romance of human nature. If it is to be found only in this writing, is that my fault? This ought to be the history of my species. You who deprave it, it is you who make a romance of my book. (E: 416) Is it Rousseau who fails us, converting historical contingency into logical necessity? Is it his articulation of our problem that prohibits our conceiving of moral progress? Or is it we who have failed Rousseau, who have made his books into fictions, romances, through our depravity? In the space that both connects and separates these two possibilities is lodged the question of political thought and the possibility of political philosophy. The status of fiction in Rousseau's thought is the place where political philosophy and historical reality meet and repulse one another.

Amour-propre is the relating of self and other, identity and difference. Property relations concern what is mine and thine, what belongs to me and is different from you, and hence is equally a relating of self and other, of identity and difference. There is an intimate connection between amour-propre's affective, relational constitution of self-regard, self-consciousness, property relations, and the logic of identity and difference. If there is a conceptual aporia involved in the way in which Rousseau articulates the former, it is derived from the way in which his anthropology and social philosophy are directed by the latter: the logic of identity and difference presses Rousseau's thought into a fictional stance that tendentially turns his immanent critique of modernity into an external critique, his diagnosis of the historical blockage of modernity into a conceptual blockage. To get a better idea of what maybe at issue here let us look again at the Second Discourse. As we have already seen, Rousseau locates the downfall of the species at the moment where deformed amour-propre represses amour-de-soi. If amour-propre were treated as equivalent to vanity, then it would follow straightaway that Rousseau's logic of disintegration was equivalent to the displacement of the simple, unmediated self-identity provided by amour-de-soiby the comparative and reflective

74 Jay Bernstein self-understanding derived from amour-propre. Such a view does receive some support from the rest of Rousseau's argument. The analytic underpinning of the Second Discourse appears to have a tidy and simple dualistic structure. In the first stage of the state of nature, human beings are governed by amour-de-soi, which is moderated in individuals' relations to others by pith?! pity or compassion. Compassion is a 'pure movement of nature prior to all reflection' (SD: 131); through compassion we 'identify' with the suffering of others, we put ourselves in their place (SD: 132). Compassion 'carries us without reflection to the aid of those we see suffer; in the state of nature, it takes the place of laws, morals, and virtue' (SD: 133). For Rousseau, compassion is the true ground of the possibility of virtue, since without it we would lack any but prudential grounds for taking up a moral point of view; but, according to Rousseau, all prudential arguments for moral rules stop short of specifying why I should be virtuous. All they demonstrate is that, optimally, all benefit and none lose from the general adoption of moral rules; but this only shows that it would be a good thing if such rules were generally adopted, and not that I should adopt such rules. My interest will be served best if there are such rules and I can 'free-ride' on their acceptance while continuing to act in ways which disregard their requirements. This is one of Rousseau's central arguments against Hobbes (see Connolly 1988: 54f1). The combination of (deformed) amour-propre and reason is as near fatal to the claims of compassion as it is to the urgings of amour-de-soi. While compassion was obscure and strong in savage man, it has become developed but weak in civilized man; consciousness of difference insistently interrupts our natural capacity for identifying with the sufferings of others, our spontaneous repugnance at the sight of suffering. Now it is evident that this identification must have been infinitely closer in the state of nature than in the state of reasoning. Reason engenders vanity and reflection fortifies it; reason turns man back upon himself, it separates him from all that bothers and afflicts him. Philosophy isolates him; because of it he says in secret, at the sight of a suffering man: perish if you will, I am safe. (SD: 132) Reason engenders and reflection fortifies the psychological precipitates of amourpropre; such a movement weakens the urgings of compassion and represses the natural wisdom of amour-de-soi. Since savage men knew neither vanity, nor consideration, nor esteem, nor contempt; and lacked the slightest notion of 'thine and mine' together with any idea of justice, 'they regarded the violences they might suffer as harm easy to redress and not as an insult which must be punished' (SD: 133-4). In all this Rousseau does appear to make identity a condition of and equivalent to independence" equality and virtue; and to make difference in all its forms the condition for and equivalent to dependence, inequality and vice. Were this to be really the case, then Rousseau's pessimism would be a priori in status, and virtue a property only of ideal, ~ctive states of affairs.

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As we have already seen, however, it is only deformed amour-propre that is vicious; and conversely, I now want to suggest, compassion is an essentially social passion, which does not necessarily lack a reflective dimension. For Rousseau, it is our weakness, vulnerability, and non-self-sufficiency that make us social and sociable beings. 'Every attachment,' Rousseau contends, 'is a sign of insufficiency.' As Rousseau continues this thought the ambiguity of his position emerges: If each of us had not need of others, he would hardly think of uniting himself with them. Thus from our very infirmity is born our frail happiness. A truly happy being is a solitary being. God alone enjoys an absolute happiness. But who among us has the idea of it? If some imperfect being could suffice unto himself, what would he enjoy according to us? He would be alone; he would be miserable. I do not conceive how someone who needs nothing can love anything. I do not conceive how someone who loves nothing can be happy. (E: 221) Only a perfectly self-sufficient being could be absolutely happy. Perfect selfsufficiency and absolute happiness are the logical quintessence of amour-de-soi; God exemplifies Rousseau's identitarian logic. However, we are not self-sufficient; our neediness opens us up to the possibility of loving others, a possibility which is a condition for human happiness. Difference is redeemed in love. Hence, either if God is happy we cannot be, or if we can be happy God cannot. 'Frail happiness' appears to be logically anomalous; hence, the alternative conception of happiness implied by the logic of identity comes to hover over and disequilibriate the valencies of finite happiness. Whatever the effects of this disequilibrium, Rousseau perceives us as essentially non-self-sufficient, essentially needy, and hence as essentially drawn into relations with others. Compassion is the affection through which we most feel our identity and common humanity. This thesis is doubly underwritten. First, by the natural logic of the imagination whereby the sight of the suffering other leads us to put ourselves in his place, while the sight of the happy other leads us to want to occupy his place, so displacing him. Imaginative perception tends to lead to compassion at the sight of suffering, and envy at the sight of happiness. Secondly, this logic of the imagination is underwritten by the human condition itself; we are not naturally all 'kings, or lords, or courtiers, or rich men'; rather we are all 'born naked and poor; all are subject to the miseries of life, to sorrows, ills, needs, and pains of every kind ... [and we] are all condemned to death.' This is the human lot, 'what truly belongs to man' (E: 222). Unlike the almost animal version of compassion given in the Second Discourse, in Emile Rousseau accords compassion a fundamentally reflective aspect: the pleasure of compassion derives from our awareness that we are not in the place of the sufferer, even if we could be. Further, our ability to assist a sufferer confirms our freedom and power, while simultaneously underlining our virtuous disposition.

76 Jay Bernstein Virtue is literally its own reward for Rousseau; the pleasures of compassion are both reflective and reflexive. Of course, Emile is a romance, a fiction, because the conditions under which Emile is allowed to keep an appropriate amour-de-soi, to develop an undeformed amour-propre, and permitted to develop a sense of compassIon not drowned by reason and envy, are themselves a fiction, an abstraction from the ordinary processes of education and maturation. The possibility of Emile coming to have a virtuous character is conditioned by his tutor's protection of him from knowledge of other wills in early childhood (something he could not be relieved from were he to have siblings or classmates), from the world of wealth and power, from the sight of woman in puberty, and so forth. The artifice of Emile (the book) is coextensive with the artifice of Emile's (the character) tutor's arrangements, whereby he should not engage any portion of the world actively, cognitively, or affectively until such time as he has the capacity to resist the deforming and vice-engendering features which that portion of the world of experience presents to his development. The artifice of narrative construction and the artifice of pedagogical planning and practice are matched and superimposed upon one another in order to create and construct the virtuous citizen who is Emile. Emile's development is an ideal moral development, in accordance with the logic of Rousseau's moral psychology rather than in accordance with the typical dictates of experience. In this way Emile can become the model, ideal citizen; his personal education is simultaneously a political education. The 'romance' of Emile, however, is a romance because of our historical predicament; it seems natural to conclude that the ideal education of Emile is a surrogate for what would be our political education, a political education that the sway of deformed amour-propre forecloses. Perhaps this is too harsh on Rousseau; perhaps it would be better to say that under conditions of severe historical blockage, under conditions in which the very idea of political education, the idea of a formative politics, is ruled out by the reduction of the state to a means of securing private ends, perhaps under these conditions the only kind of political education possible is through fiction; perhaps we need to say that Rousseau intended Emile's fictional education to be our political education. Since the idea of fiction is an interruption in the historical order, for the truly political to appear only as what it is not, the concept ofthe political would have to have a different range of signification for Rousseau than it does for liberal political philosophers. For them the political world specifies a set of instrumental arrangements, and political philosophy intends the rational legitimation of goods sustainable only through the construction of a political state. But what if the very idea of the political possesses an ineliminable pedagogical and educative component? If political life was, ideally, constructive of the character of citizens, then narrative construction, which had the appearance of a 'romance', would in reality be political education under conditions where political education was historically occluded from the state. And from this it would follow that the meaning of fiction and romance could not be settled a priori, that what it was to be a fiction

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would be a function of the historical situation in which narratives were produced and introduced; and equally it would follow that the genres of philosophy, above all political philosophy, would have to be relativized to their historical and political contexts in accordance with their own idea of the political (see Bernstein 1984b). To indict Rousseau for lapsing into fiction or engaging in utopian constructions misses, I am suggesting, Rousseau's indictment of our conception of politics and fiction, our political reduction of his writing to romance. But this would follow only if political education were intrinsic to the idea of the political, if the very possibility of a political world involved the structured education of the passions. If this were so, then not only Emile, but all Rousseau's writings, all his fictions, would have to be regarded in a different, more political light: the fiction of an ideal politics would hence become the politics of fiction, and that latter coextensive with political philosophy in its uniquely modern sense. Rousseau makes it unequivocally clear at the commencement of Emile that his goal is the education of man into a citizen. This will be a difficult teaching for us moderns since it fundamentally contradicts our standing, liberal conception of the correct relation between the individual and the state. Natural man is entirely for himself. He is numerical unity, the abolute whole which is relative only to itself or its kind. Civil man is only a fractional unity dependent on the denominator; his value is determined by his relation to the whole, which is only the social body. Good social institutions are those that best know how to denature man, to take his absolute existence from him in order to give him a relative one and transport the I into the common unity, with the result that each individual believes himself no longer one but a part of the unity and no longer feels except within the whole. (E: 39-40) Good social institutions, and by extension good political institutions, are ones that best denature man, that is, ones that constitute not only the social being of individuals but equally and explicitly their conception of themselves, their selfconsciousnesses as beings belonging to a particular community. Good social institutions are explicitly educative in character; and seek to effect the constitutive affective and reflective self-understanding of the beings who inhabit them. Interests, the very stuff of political debate, negotiation, and conflict, are thereby formed. Only when formed so as not to be in essential conflict, only when formed so that citizens do not perceive their most fundamental interests as conflicting with those of their fellows, is a good state possible. Such a state does not now exist. Indeed, because of the present lack and impossibility of 'public instruction', Rousseau believes that the two words 'fatherland' and 'citizen' should be effaced from modern languages. The harshness of this teaching is brought out in Rousseau's illustrations; for example, of the Spartan woman who had five sons in the army awaiting news of the

78 Jay Bernstein battle. A Helot arrives, and trembling she asks him for news. He tells the woman her five sons have been killed. She replies: '''Base slave, did I ask you that?" "We won the victory." The mother runs to the temple and gives thanks to the gods' (E: 40). Rousseau's vision echoes Machiavelli, who praised the Florentine patriots who dared to defy the Pope, showing thus 'how much higher they placed their city than their souls'; - a thought reiterated by Machiavelli at the end of his life when he wrote 'I love my native city more than my own soul' (quoted in Arendt 1973: 286). To love one's city more than one's immortal soul, to love the world more than one's immortal salvation, specifies perfectly the gap separating absolute individual interest, as represented by the Christian conception of the soul, and political love and solidarity. Rousseau regards the Christian conception of the soul as making'all good polity impossible' (SC: 4, VIII; 132). The worst of all possible states of affairs is one in which the individual's loyalties to self and state, to the civil order and the sentiments of nature, are divided. Such a person, 'floating between his inclinations and his duties', never either 'a man or a citizen', will be good 'neither for himself nor for others'. This is the man of the present day: 'A Frenchman, an Englishman, a bourgeois. He will be nothing' (E: 40). Nota bene, that what we take to be constitutive of our general predicament as moral beings, the very conditions of morality and moral life, namely, the conflict between duties and inclinations, is for Rousseau a historically constructed state with no natural, metaphysical or ontological backing. And further, that the conflict between bourgeois and citizen that makes us 'nothing' repeats and deepens the earlier jurisdictional conflict between church and state. Christianity heightens deformed amour-propre into a theological principle. Amour-propre is now so deformed that the teleological enterprise governing Emile's education, namely his political education from man to citizen, must be construed aporetically since the term 'citizen' is not truly applicable to the inhabitants of modern states. In modernity the two kingdoms have become entrenched in the heart of modern man in the conflict between particular wills and the general will, particular interests and the general interest. In contemporary society we are familiar with the idea that unity of the state or nation is actuated and made manifest when it is threatened by an external enemy; only in the presence of a foreign enemy can such a thing as the nation one and indivisible come to pass. As Hannah Arendt argues, Rousseau's feat was to discover a unifying principle within the nation itself that would be valid for domestic politics as well. This enemy existed within the breast of each citizen, namely, in his particular will and interest; the point of the matter was that this hidden particular enemy could rise to the rank of a common enemy - unifying the nation from within - if one only added up all particular wills and interests. The common enemy within the nation is the sum total of the particular interests of all citizens. (Arendt 1973: 78) Arendt goes on to press this thought by drawing attention to a footnote in The

Difficult difference: Rousseau's fictions of identity 79

Social Contract where Rousseau states that the agreement of all interests is formed by opposition to that of each. He continues: 'If there were no different interests, the common interest would be barely felt, as it would encounter no obstacle; all would go on of its own accord, and politics would cease to be an art' (SC: II, iii; 27). This certainly appears to underline Arendt's thesis making the totality of particular interests the common enemy; and to contradict the view that the conflict between particular and general is a merely historically conditioned state of affairs. However, such a view makes the concept of particular interest too homogeneous and univocal. In the footnote following the one just cited, Rousseau quotes Machiavelli to the effect that some divisions are harmful to a republic and some advantageous. Those that stir up sects and parties are harmful; those that do neither of these things are advantageous. Evidently, bourgeois particular interests, as generally conceived, are of the sort that stir up sects and parties. On the other hand, to conceive of divisions that do not entail a conflict of interest in the modern sense is to conceive of a plurality where the fact of separateness permits and encourages individuals to take opposing, differing, positions on the general interest. The concept of particular interest is equivocal between interests of the particular opposing the general, and interests of the general made from a particular position or outlook. When Rousseau states, just where he is conceding the place of particular interests, that 'there should be no partial society within the State, and that each citizen should think only his own thoughts' (SC: II, iii; 27), he is clearly recommending the latter conception of particular interest. The division between the two concepts of particular interest inscribes the pedagogical and educative task facing the Rousseauian legislator. His task is not to generate a general will from the conflicting particular interests of present-day bourgeois; the accomplishment of that task would be the sacrifice and submerging of the individual in the collective. In fact, it is difficult to imagine what such a state of affairs would look like that did not end up equating, quite illegitimately, the general will with some constructed and delimited version of the totality of particular wills. And this reduction could occur if there were a reducing, dissolving element. Poverty is such an element; it conspires to make each one's particular interest the same as everyone else's particular interest; the general will hence becoming the unification of the people through a mutual acknowledgemenfof their shared situation. Such a unification makes not a people, w~ere the separateness of persons is respected, but a mass. Hannah Arendt reads and misreads Rousseau in just this way. For her, the French Revolution, culminating in the Terror, is an historical exemplification of the identification of particular interests with bourgeois interests; and if one accedes to the view that The Social Contract was central to the emergence and unfolding of the Revolution, then the Terror would actually be the fulfilment of Rousseau's doctrine (Arendt 1973: 76-81, 88-91). The task of the Rousseauian legislator, however, is to make a people of the aggregate; and this task should now be construed not as imposing a general will, but rather as generating the conditions under which a general will can become

80 Jay Bernstein manifest. This task is just the task outlined in Emile; the legislator must be capable of changing human nature, of transforming each individual, who is by himself a complete and solitary whole, into part of a great whole from which he in a manner receives his life and b~ing; of altering man's constitution for the purpose of strengthening it; and of substituting a partial and moral existence for the physical and independent existence nature has conferred on us all. He must, in a word, take away from man his own resources and give him instead new ones alien to him, and incapable of being made use of without the help of other men. (SC: II, vii; 38) The task of the legislator is one of political education; it is the denaturing of individuals in order to provide them with a second nature that is wholly social. Now the paradoxical situation faced by the legislator is exactly parallel to the one faced by Rousseau as political thinker: since good laws impose severe privations (for some) when viewed from the perspective of existing particular interests, then the conditions which would make the rationality of those laws perceptible are just the ones they are attempting to institute. Good laws generate and promote conditions under which the goodness of such laws can become manifest. Hence, from the perspective of the legislator, good laws require that the effect become the cause: 'the social spirit, which should be created by these institutions, would have to preside over their very foundation; and men would have to be before the law what they would become by means of the law' (SC: II, vii; 40). The historical blockage of the present is but an extreme manifestation of the situation facing any founding legislator. Rousseau's philosophical and political practice is the one he insists legislators must use: the generating of an authoritative fiction. Because the legislator cannot appeal to either force or reason, the former because its effects are self-defeating and the latter because it is not available, he must appeal to an authority of a different order, one 'capable of constraining without violence and persuading without convincing'. To persuade without convincing is the work of rhetoric; if the persuasion is to constrain, then that rhetoric must appeal to an authority above that of the legislator himself: such a thing is a fiction. Traditionally, legislators credit 'gods with their own wisdom' (SC: II, vii; 40) in order to accomplish this end; Rousseau's philosophical genres, his natural history, the novel of education et al., are surrogates for the gods. They are the fictions that are to raise his legislative activity to authority, persuading without convincing and constraining without violence. Although Rousseau appears in The Social Contract to be interested in theoretical doctrines, the general will, the particular will, the forms of government, and so on, in the same way as great legislators appear to be concerning themselves with particular regulations, in reality he concerns himself 'in secret' with the 'keystone' of .any just state, manners and morals as these are conveyed and circulate in 'public opinion' (SC: II, xii; 53). Only a fiction can accomplish the work of transforming public opinion in a manner that would make a just state possible.

Difficult difference: Rousseau's fictions of identity 81

Alas, this historical conception of the relations among history, politics, and fiction cannot be the final word since there remains good cause still to perceive Rousseau's fictions as consequences of a logical rather than an historical demand. And, to repeat, the logical demand derives from the problem of difference. In order to gain a vantage point on this issue, let us return to the status of women in Rousseau. Nowadays Rousseau is often criticized for painting a picture of the ideal woman that matches, almost perfectly, the idealizing distortions of the dominating male tradition: a woman is to be defined by her roles as wife and mother; these require that she be 'modest, attentive, reserved, and that she give evidence of her virtue to the eyes of others as well as to her own conscience' (E: 361). Women must not only act virtuously, as should men, but they must as well be recognized as so doing, unlike men who can better brave public judgement. Indeed, generally, women are for Rousseau the visible manifestation, the icon of public virtue; like the beautiful work that is a symbol of the morally good, the moral beauty of woman is a symbol of the public good. This is why opinion, which is the grave of virtue among men, is its throne among women (E: 364-5). In his analysis of women Rousseau throughout wants to insist on their difference from men, and to reveal how that difference gives them strengths and virtues not available to men. However deplorable Rousseau's patriarchial attitudes, what is damning for his thought generally is that while he insists on sexual difference, he does so in a manner that ends up discounting the differences between men and women as differences that might divide them or render them incapable of achieving perfect unity: 'All the faculties common to the two sexes are not equally distributed between them; but taken together, they balance out' (E: 363). The balancing out of the difference between the sexes is the making of each difference a partial element which, when drawn into relation with the corresponding element from the opposite sex, is made whole. Sexual difference is sublated in the ideal unity of men and women in their assigned roles within the family and the state; the harmonious affections of the ideal family anticipating the harmonious unity of the ideal state. In this way difference becomes an anticipation of non-difference, as part becomes the anticipation of whole. This anticipation of organic unity, a strong concepJion of unity trumping the weak unity of a public sphere in which each enters with his own conception of what the general will should be, reappears in Rousseau's contention that the general will is indestructible. When the social bond weakens, particular interests begin to make themselves felt and oppose themselves to the common interest. Eventually, 'when in every heart the social bond is broken', the meanest interests lay claim to the sacred name of the 'public good'. Does it follow, then, that the generaI will has been exterminated or corrupted? 'Not at all: it is always constant, unalterable, and pure' (SC: IV, i; 103), just like the ideal woman described in Emile (see Connolly 1988: 63). To think of the general will as the equivalent of the patriarchical description of the virtuous woman is not to deny that a great deal of what is at issue in Rousseau's conception of the general will is the attempt fonnally to define a con-

82 Jay Bemstein ception of willing the general or public good compatible with the preservation of individual autonomy and self-determination. To discuss that issue in full would take us far afield. What needs highlighting here is the evident work of idealizing, fictionmaking, present in Rousseau's unitary descriptions of both the virtuous woman and the general will. In both cases serious difference is written out of Rousseau's account to such an extent that, despite himself, Rousseau comes to think of the ideal state as a spontaneous good, an automatic coordination of the individual and the collective; a unity so spontaneous and automatic that the ideal state would require 'very few laws'; and when new ones were required their necessity would be 'universally seen' such that 'the first man to propose them merely says what all have already felt' (SC: IV, i; 102). Under these conditions the art of politics would disappear, virtue replacing the coordinating activity of legislation. The ideal political order would hence become the suppression of the political, and hence the suppression of the question of difference. The obvious conclusion to be drawn from this analysis is that the only way we can satisfy our conception of difference, one that acknowledges the need and necessity for the art of politics, is to accede to the conception of particular interest in its bourgeois sense. But if we go down that path, then we end up negating every aspect of Rousseau's analysis of modernity, legitimating its inequalities and corruptions with a force equal to Rousseau's critical diagnosis of them. Such a reversal is incompatible with the undeniable logical force of Rousseau's critical activity. How then are we to understand our situation, a situation in which we appear to be required to take a stand for or against Rousseau? What the foregoing analysis reveals is that we, and Rousseau, lack an adequate conception of the difference between particular interest in its bourgeois sense and particular interest in a sense that acknowledges separateness but does not reify individual needs and desires into permanent claims against the public good. Serious difference always appears to reduce to bourgeois self-interest, and the general will always appears to congeal into a unifying power opposed to any particularity. The former view legitimates bourgeois self-interest and hence the liberal state, while the latter view images a utopian suppression of political life like that imaged by the Marxian dictum 'From each according to their ability, to each according to the need.' Is not political philosophy for us now precisely a thinking that refuses this eitherl or? And is not the motive of Rousseau's writing the inscriptIon of a space that accedes neither to the liberal legitimation of the present order nor to the utopian suppression of political life as a whole? We do not possess a full account of difference adequate to the demand that it not be one which would lead to the stirring up of sects and parties. But this failure is neither logical (conceptual) nor historical. On the contrary, the logical critique of Rousseau is just the one that would force us into legitimating the liberal order; while the perception of Rousseau as confronting a contingent historical blockage ends up with a utopian suppression of difference, blaming the conflict of interests on the economic arrangements undergirding the

Difficult difference: Rousseau's fictions of identity 83

liberal state. Both liberal and Marxian analyses share the identification of particular interest and bourgeois interest. Whatever the real or apparent lapses in his thought, Rousseau's entwinement of political education and the writing of fiction was meant to identify the place and possibility of political thought. If fiction marks and limits political life as it now is, so separating it from itself, then the demand that would consign Rousseau's writing to either a logical or a historical fiction amounts to the refusal to engage in political thought; a refusal that is equally the refusal to be educated, to be denatured and reformed, through the strenuous activity of reading. We cannot read Rousseau from either where we are or where we think we ought to be, for both where we are, the world of bourgeois particular interests, and where we ought to be, the fully unified world of a virtuous general will, abstract from the aporia of political life: to love one's city more than oneself.

NOTE This paper is an encapsulation of some of the ideas presented to students in the first year Enlightenment course at the University of Essex over the past dozen years or so. In putting them together for this occasion I have not gone back to the numerous secondary sources that aided my first readings of Rousseau, although I am sure much of what I learned from those sources is present in the above pages. The following works certainly influenced my thinking: Charvet 1974, Masters 1969, Shklar 1969, and Starobinski 1988. If there is a sub-text to this essay, it involves the attempt to think differently about the issues of identity and difference in Rousseau that are formulated by Jacques Derrida 1975.

6 Mercier's Enlightenment utopia: progress and social ideals SIMON COLLIER

EDITORS' INTRODUCTION Anumber of the essays in this book take up the question of how exactly to conceive the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. LouisSebastien Mercier, a minor but, Simon Collier suggests, entirely typical Enlightenment philosophe, had no doubt about the directness of the connection: as shown by the title of his book on Rousseau; 'considered as one of the first authors of the French Revolution'. Mercier's own earlier contribution to Enlightenment thought had been as a dramatic theorist of rabidly anti-classicist tendencies and as author of the utopian fiction, L'An 2440 (1771), here given one of its very few serious assessments. In 1516 Thomas More's Utopia gave its name to a literary genre. The classical world had produced versions of the ideal society - most famously Plato's Republic and many variants on the traveller's tale, realistic or openly fictional (Lucian was More's favourite author). Europe's 'discovery of America' in 1492 seems to have revived this genre of imaginative constructions. More's Utopia was one of the earliest pieces of writing to base itself on the news of the new world that circulated slowly through Europe in the early sixteenth century, principally in editions (some forged) of the works of the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci. More's supposed informant about Utopia, Raphael Hythlodaeus, had supposedly been left behind during Vespucci's final voyage to America. More's Utopia is therefore a new world society, though it owes its existence to a conqueror from outside, Utopos, and is itself a colonizing country of some ruthlessness. Significantly, it is also an island, Utopos having inaugurated the space for his social experiment by cutting a channel through the fifteen-mile isthmus that had previously connected Utopia with the mainland. The connection between utopia and island has remained close through the Enlightennlent and into the twentieth century: Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1626) is a significant example from the

Mercier's Enlightenment utopia: progress and social ideals 85 English prelude to the Enlightenment, Aldous Huxley's Island (1962) the most obvious modern version. These alternative worlds, connected with ours only through the suspicious figure of the traveller (embodied for the Enlightenment by Swift's Gulliver) can offer warnings or stimulus, but always with the security given by distance, operating therefore in those 'imaginary spaces' in which even Descartes conducted his revolutionary thinking. So Mercier's L'An 2440 marks a quite crucial turning point in the conception of the perfect society, now located in the future rather than elsewhere, in other words as a goal towards which our society can progress (the key word, as Collier sho\AJs) no longer, in fact, literally a utopia at all, since the place will be here. The corpus of Mercier's work is located very firmly in that 'here', the Paris in which he lived and worked. In the multi-volumed Le Tableau de Paris Mercier set out to record every aspect of what he knew to be the doomed civilization of corrupt Parisian society (Mercier 1781-8; cf. Rex 1987: 167-8). After the Revolution he tried to chronicle the changes in Le Nouveau Paris (Mercier [1797]; cf. Hampson 1983: 263-70). L'An 2440, though written first, is therefore the final panel of an ambitious Parisian triptych representing past, present, and future. Ironically the Revolution itself, highly conscious of questions of time, took an even more radical step than anything Mercier had envisaged. The Revolutionary Calendar aimed 'to structure and name time anew' (see Brotherston 1982). But for Napoleon, L'An 2440 would have become L'An DCXLVIII.

6

Alas! is public happiness to be no more than a vain dream? Must our wishes and our efforts forever remain ineffective? Let us reject this fatal idea, for it strikes deadly cold into all sensitive souls. Louis-Sebastien Mercier, CAn 2440 (1786), Postscript The relationship of the Enlightenment to utopian writing has sometimes been thought problematic. For Lewis Mumford, for instance, there is 'a gap in the utopian tradition between the seventeenth century and the nineteenth' (Mumford 1962: 113). An excellent recent discussion of the utopian genre claims that the tradition as such was 'increasingly marginal to the main intellectual developments of the age' (Kumar 1987: 37). The most magisterial modern survey of the Enlightenment (Gay 1967-70) ignores the theme completely. It has to be agreed that the eighteenth century did not produce a 'classic' utopia in the manner of More, Bacon, or Campanella earlier on, or Bellamy, Morris, or Wells nearer our own time. It is also true that none of the major Enlightenment figures chose to use the utopian form to articulate social ideals, and that the Encyclopedie contains no article on Utopia. One reason for this, it has often been suggested, is that the Enlightenment's strong predilection for specific, concrete reforms and reform campaigns (Gay 1967-70: 11,398-447) was at odds with the sort of comprehensive vision of radical social reorganization implicit (or often implicit) in the utopian form. David Hume's attitude may perhaps be taken as representative. Though quite prepared to sketch the outline for an ideal constitution and even to put in a good word for Harrington's Oceana (in the essay 'Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth'), he pointedly emphasizes that real·life reforms should preferably be undertaken 'by such gentle alterations and innovations as may not give too great a disturbance to society' (Hume 1963: 500). Despite this consideration, there was undoubtedly a sizeable undergrowth of utopian or semi-utopian writing in the eighteenth century (Manuel and Manuel

Mercier's Enlightenment utopia: progress and social ideals 87

Figure 11 'This print represents the republican calendar of Year III (22 September 1794-22 September 1795) and shows the changes in the names of the months that reflect the agricultural emphasis decreed by the Law of 24 November 1795.... From the "great book of nature" Philosophy dictates the principles of the new calendar to her attentive genius. At her side are the book of morals and the triangle of equality resting on a base, the inscription of which proclaims the unity and indivisibility of the French Republic. Supported by the laws of nature, the new calendar is thus shown to be based upon rational principles and the civic virtues espoused by the revolutionary government' (Cuno 1988: 227-8).

88 Simon Collier 1979: 430-5; Rose 1987), some of it partly subsumed by the literature of fantasy, adventure, or pornography, some of it directly or indirectly critical of ancien regime abuses and anomalies, which were indeed often a target for imaginative literature in general (Mornet 1967: 251-8). Fpr much of the eighteenth century, utopian writing conformed to the model invented (we have to say invented, since all precedents are dubious) by Thomas More in 1515-16. More's utopia, it will be recalled, was located on a remote island, but definitely in More's own time. Inaccessibility and contemporaneity were thus the hallmarks of most subsequent utopias. It is precisely in terms of this original model that the impact of the Enlightenment was most decisive, largely owing to the emergence of the idea of progress. It is not necessary here to discuss the ways in which this all-important concept gradually (and somewhat tentatively) entered the Enlightenment (Gay 1967-70: II, 84-125; Bury 1955: 127-216; Pollard 1971: 31-103), especially the later Enlightenment. What is more interesting for our purposes is to note that the symptoms of its arrival included a new fashion for speculating about the future, often in optimistic terms. One of the first known texts to embody this was an anonymous English novel, The Reign ofGeorge It], 1900-1925 (1763), a power-fantasy showing a future British empire repelling a Russian invasion and dominating Europe. Round about 1770, too, the abbe Galiani, that popular philosophe, planned (though did not write) a novel portraying the twentieth century. Speculative forecasts (halffanciful, half-serious) can be found scattered throughout the literature of the period. Well-known English examples include Horace Walpole's aside that travellers from Peru might some day gaze on the ruins of St Paul's Cathedral (Walpole 1937-83: XXIV, 62), and Gibbon's surmise that there would be observatories in the interior of Russia and North America by the twenty-third century (Gibbon 1896-1900: IV, 434). In retrospect it might seem obvious that this futuristic trend would fairly quickly colour utopian literature, that the setting for utopia would undergo a time-shift. The vital step was first taken by Louis-Sebastien Mercier (1740-1814) in his anonymously published L'An deux mille quatre cent quarante, reve s'il en fut jamais (Amsterdam 1771), the first utopia to be located in the future. Quite what impelled Mercier to write it we do not know, but it marked the most significant change in the utopian form since the sixteenth century, and its implications were profound for subsequent utopian writing, not to mention twentiethcentury dystopian writing and science fiction. It is not the purpose of this essay to claim Mercier as a major figure of the Enlightenment. He was none the less very well known in the 1770s and 1780s as a tireless (in fact rather compulsive) homme de lettres of enlightened ideas. His most famous work, Le tableau de Paris (6 volumes, 1781-8), is a rich account of Parisian society still frequently mined by historians. But Mercier, a man of modest bourgeois background, also wrote essays, poems, and novels, and was especially prolific as a dramatist, enjoying a particular influence in Germany. His dramatic theory rejected classical models and favoured the kind of drame bourgeois which Diderot had espoused, though Mercier took it further (Majewski 1971: 159-86). The coming of

Mercier's Enlightenment utopia: progress and social ideals 89 the Revolution gave him new roles as journalist and legislator. As a politician, Mercier was ineffective but courageous, opposing the rising Jacobin dictatorship'You are ignorance personified!' he once shouted at Robespierre (Monselet 1857: I, 71). Not surprisingly he found himself in prison in 1793-4, and might have been guillotined had it not been for Robespierre's fall. His initial admiration for Napoleon did not survive into the Consulate and Empire. By now the 'very funny, witty old man' Tom Paine described in 1801 (Aldridge 1959: 266) was becoming famous for his contrariness and eccentricity. Welcoming the prospect of the Bourbon restoration, Mercier died while Napoleon was on his way to Elba. Mercier regarded himself as a fervent disciple of Rousseau, whose acquaintance he made after 1770 (Beclard 1903: 76-82). He was not an uncritical disciple, however, and by no means deserved the nickname - Ie singe de Jean-Jacques, 'JeanJacques' ape' - given him in the later 1790s. The two-volume treatise Mercier wrote to acclaim his hero as the supreme precursor of the Revolution (Mercier 1791), takes issue with Rousseau's political theory at several points, and misrepresents it at others. Nor was Mercier much influenced by Rousseau's distaste for the city and admiration for 'savage' man. What seems to have impressed him most was Rousseau's general democratic attitude, his sincerity and sensitivity - 'No philosophe ever wrote closer to mankind ...; no writer ever made so serious a concern of our happiness' (Mercier 1791: I, 20). L'An 2440 was Mercier's first success as a writer. The book was banned in France, by the Holy Office, and throughout the Sr anish empire. It inspired a crop of imitations and itself had at least a dozen further editions (several pirated) during the author's lifetime, after which it was not fully reprinted again until the 1970s (Bordeaux, 1971; Paris, 1977; Geneva 1979 (facsimile of the edition of 1799)). An English translation soon appeared, with the date in the title altered to 2500 'for the sake of a round number', as the translator put it, ignoring that for Mercier 2440 was a very round number, his 700th birthday. In 1786 Mercier published a second version of the book, simply expanding the number of chapters from forty-four to eighty-two and adding innumerable footnotes: these offer a running commentary on the main text. The best modern editor ofL'An 2440, Raymond Trousson, plausibly claims this amplification of the book 'ended up by killing it' (Mercier 1971: 73). The additional matter, which includes a gratuitously anti-Semitic chapter (ch. 79), does not greatly enhance the utopia. There are at least two good reasons for taking a closer look at this book. In histories of the utopian genre, it is more often mentioned (albeit honourably) than discussed, and it clearly possesses an intrinsic interest as the first futuristic utopia. More important than this, for our purposes, is the fact thatL'An 2440 is an Enlightenment utopia - one might even say the classic Enlightenment utopia. Adiscussion of its main features gives us an unusual portrayal of Enlightenment social ideals as adumbrated in this fantasized form. As with most utopias, the plot of L'An 2440 does not amount to very much. The basic device, much imitated by writers since Mercier's time, is that of the 'sleeper

90 Simon Collier awakening' in this case, the Narrator has retired to bed after a conversation with an English visitor to Paris who has denounced the horrors of modern urban life: squalor, traffic congestion, 'the horrible disproportion of fortunes' (Mercier 1772: 1,11). The Narrator awakes to discover that he has become immensely old. From an inscription in the street he learns that he is now in 'the year of grace 2440'. Some twenty-fifth century Parisians greet him politely, showing n~ surprise that he comes from the eighteenth century. They escort him to a tailor's, where he is clothed in the very simple, rational attire - 'a sort of vest covered with a cloak' (I, 22) - now apparently in universal use. After this, the Narrator is simply given an extended tour of Paris. Mercier adopts the very conventional utopian scheme of visitor-and-guide; the various guides thus tell the Narrator all he wants to know about the twenty-fifth century. Forty-one (or in the 1786 version, seventy-nine) chapters later, he decides to visit Versailles. He finds a heavily symbolic scene of 'ruins, gaping walls and mutilated statues' (II, 246). An extremely old man is sitting disconsolately among the wreckage. He turns out to be King Louis XIV. But before he can interrogate the monarch, the Narrator is bitten by an adder. At this point both the dream and the book come to a very abrupt end. The Narrator's first impressions of the twenty-fifth century are obviously of the enormously improved state of Paris. The city now has 'grand and beautiful streets ... built in straight lines' (I, 16-17); at night these are brilliantly illuminated, and, most astonishing of all, are not thronged with prostitutes. The scene in the streets is anin1ated but very orderly. The horse-drawn carriages (mostly carrying goods) observe a rule of the road by keeping to the right. The street porters carry only moderate weights. There are no luxury coaches to be seen. 'The nobles of our day', the Narrator is told, 'use their legs, and therefore have more money and less of the gout' (I, 29). Just a few coaches are allowed, for elderly magistrates or public servants, but should one of these injure a pedestrian (Mercier writes with feeling; in real life he was knocked down three times) the owner has to supply the injured party with a carriage for the rest of his life - a democratic modification of the deodand principle (which in England disappeared only in 1846). Rather disappointingly, perhaps, the physical fabric of twenty-fifth century Paris is mostly described in generalities - regular streets, open squares, etc. Our overall impression is of an eighteenth-century Paris tidied up, cleaned, rationalized. Thus a fountain of clear water now stands at every street corner. Private houses are spacious and airy; most rooftops have potted flowers and trellises, giving the city (as seen from above) the appearance of un vaste jardin (Mercier 1971: 114), a vast garden. The Louvre (still unfinished in 1771) has been completed, but is used as a residence for artists, not as a palace. The Bastille has been demolished and replaced by a Temple of Clemency. The oldest bridge in Paris, the Pont Neuf, has been renamed the Pont Henri IV - Mercier shared the French Enlightenment's admiration for Ie bon roi. Beyond such material changes, an immense transformation has come over society. All noble privileges have been suppressed: Mercier's obvious pleasure in

Mercier's Enlightenment utopia: progress and social ideals 91 recounting this is heavily reinforced in the 1786 version (Mercier 1787: III, 98-103). There are still differences of wealth and status, but these derive from merit and service alone. Complete social levelling is regarded in the twenty-fifth century as impossible: 'extreme equality would necessarily produce extreme confusion' (III, 71). The general atmosphere, however, is definitely egalitarian. Servants dine with their masters; peasants are regarded as honourable. Moreover wealth carries social obligations: it is now used to promote scientific experiments or to build 'majestic edifices' for public use. Since there are no taverns in Paris any more, the richest citizens keep open house for strangers or the needy. Obviously this system might be abused; monitors are on hand to investigate, and habitual free-loaders are assigned work or even banished from the city. The position of women has also changed for the better. On this score Mercier has little interest in the sexual experimentation favoured by other utopian writers, such as his great friend Restif de la Bretonne. His vision is one of rational domesticity. Women in 2440 no longer do strenuous jobs (such as street portering) and now devote themselves to the upbringing of their children, not least their early religious instruction. Coquettishness is unknown; women improve their minds. Our wives are what were those of the ancient Gauls, sincere and amiable companions, whom we respect and consult on all occasions.... Our women are wives and mothers, and from these two virtues all others are derived. They would dishonour themselves were they to daub their faces with paint, or stuff their heads with snuff ..., if they were to sit up all night or sing licentious songs, or practise the least indecency with men. (Mercier 1772: I, 254-61) Dowries are unknown in 2440. Marriages are love-matches. Divorce, about which there is an extended discussion in the 1786 version (Mercier 1787: III, 13-20), is permitted, rather in the manner of ancient Rome, but is not much used. Family life appears to be natural and unforced, though wives and children are still rather deferential to the masters of households. The economic basis of twenty-fifth century society is only lightly sketched. Property is still mostly private. Paris obviously contains the fulLrange of crafts and manufactures which a man from 1770 would expect to find; there is, perhaps, a general implication that these have become more sophisticated. Hours of work are much reduced. The countryside is peopled by free peasants (feudal obligations having presumably lapsed), who live a more or less idyllic existence, their numerous 'intervals of repose' being filled with 'sports or rural dances' (Mercier 1772: I, 182). On his way to Versailles, the Narrator drops in on the funeral of a peasant, a model of reason and virtue to judge from the funeral oration (ch. 43/69) - a piece of writing which Herder thought did honour to the human race (Mercier 1971: 67). Trade within France has been liberalized: the vision here is broadly physiocratic. Public granaries (this is rather less physiocratic) even out the grain-supply; there is no inflation.

92 Simon Collier Mercier plainly could not make up his mind about how to handle foreign trade in his utopia. In the 1771 version of L'An 2440 it is limited to no more than 'an exchange of superfluities' between France and the New World, certain commodities like coffee, tea and snuff being banned altogether as poisons (Mercier 1772: II, 185). Overseas trade is strongly disapproved of as (and here we come to one of Mercier's key ideas) a principal cause of luxury. Luxury distorts a truly sound economy; it has therefore been phased out through sumptuary legislation. Thus diamonds in the world of 2440 are dumped into the sea. The 1786 version (without the earlier text being altered in any way) allows a much larger role for foreign trade - we are told of vast fleets distributing French goods to a suitably grateful world (Mercier 1787: II, 201-4) - and even for luxury which, provided that it is not ostentatious or excessive, can be justified on economic grounds. In any case, the emotion of envy is unknown in the world of 2440, since wealth is always used rationally. Rationality certainly strikes the keynote in this utopia. The twenty-fifth century citizen 'attends to the voice of nature only, subject to the law of reason, and reason directs him to happiness' (Mercier 1772: II, 168). Nature is thus a fundamental reference-point, a key term throughout the book. 'The laws of nature are all around us,' adds Mercier in the 1786 version, 'and it is the tumult of the world that prevents us from understanding their lessons' (Mercier, 1787: 11,211). It might be remarked here that Mercier's use of nature as a master-concept reflects the early rather than the later Enlightenment. It does not take into account the tensions and ambiguities of the concept being explored by other writers at the time L'An 2440 appeared (Pilkington 1986). However rational and natural people may have become, some sort of political structure is necessary. This is not an anarchist utopia. The political theories of twenty-fifth-century France are explained succinctly in the 1771 version (ch.36) and more lengthily and vacuously in the 1786 version (Mercier 1787: II, 205-17; III, 70-5) by a professor of politics - professors of politics have evidently not changed much in six centuries. They are liberal, constitutional, and moderate, with a strong emphasis on freedom of thought and expression, for 'the liberty of the press is the true measure of the liberty of the people' (Mercier 1772: I, 60). Forms of government are unimportant in themselves; what matters is that all political systems 'should be based on natural law' (Mercier 1787: II, 211). Since monarchy is 'a necessary part in a well-ordered government, above all when the population is numerous' (III, 182), France in 2440 still has a king - called Louis XXXIV in the 1786 version (II, 223) - but he no longer dazzles his people with Versailles-style grandeur, and he retires at seventy. His audience chamber is open to the public once every week; his throne is a plain chair (albeit of ivory) and his uniform an olive branch and a blue cloak. Indeed, the monarch often walks the streets, for he 'loves to observe that natural equality which ought to reign among men' (Mercier 1772: I, 30). Absolutism, of course, is a thing of the past: Louis XXXIV is a constitutional monarch, governing with the help of a Senate and accountable to the Estates General, which meets every two years. No precise electoral mechanisms are mentioned. The provinces of France enjoy a degree of autonomy. The system of

Mercier's Enlightenment utopia: progress and social ideals 93 taxation is uniform and simple: there is a 2 per cent income tax, from which the less well-off are exempt, supplemented by voluntary contributions (very frequent) from the better-off. The laws in 2440 are mild, humane, and efficiently enforced. A kind of police force settles disputes among the citizens and reports to the magistrates. Lawyers (often excluded altogether from utopias) are incorruptible and act purely as counsel for the defence. Not even utopia, of course, is entirely crime-free. Convicted criminals are exposed for a time in fetters and then sent to labour on public works projects. Three convictions mean banishment from France. Capital punishment (now by firing squad) is optional: a condemned man can choose to live on, in public disgrace. By a happy coincidence, the Narrator witnesses the first execution in thirty years. It is an awesome ceremony (attended by the whole Senate) in which the murderer, having chosen death rather than disgrace, is formally forgiven by society before being shot. While the institutions of 2440 are both rational and 'natural', they do not keep the utopia going by themselves. As the Narrator bluntly suggests to his guides, 'if faut une religion' (Mercier 1971: 172), 'there must be a religion'. This would have seemed self-evident to most of Mercier's readers. However enlightened they were, many philosophes were nervous about discarding religion as an element in social stability (Gay 1967-70: II, 517-28). Mercier, an emotional deist in the manner of Rousseau's Savoyard vicar, is far more interested in this than he is in the economic or even social details of his fantasy-world. The twenty-fifth century has naturally abandoned Christianity. Deism is now the official religion of France and by implication everywhere else, for even the Pope, we learn, nowadays spends his time refining 'a code of rational and affecting morality', and has recently published a Catechism of Human Reason (Mercier 1772: II, 231). The twenty-fifth-century hierarchy is fairly informal. It consists of a 'prelate', who goes around on foot just like the king, and priests - 'wise, experienced and friends to toleration' (I, 123) who sound very like modern social workers. There are even a few deist 'saints': these typically volunteer for jobs such as street-cleaning or fire-fighting, 'animated by the grand and sublime idea of being useful members of society' (I, 126). Over the entrance of the main deist temple in Paris is inscribed a verse which effectively encapsulates twenty-fifth-century theology:

'Loin de rien decider sur cet Etre Supreme, Gardons, en l'adorant, un silence profond; Sa nature est immense, et l'esprit s'y confond, Pour savoir ce qu'il est, il faut etre lui-meme. (I, 130) Far from deciding anything about this Supreme Being Let us adore him in profound silence; His nature is immense, and astounds our spirits. To know what he is, one would have to be him.

94 Simon Collier The great dome surmounting the temple is made of glass, thus enabling worshippers to reflect on God and nature, dark clouds symbolizing life's disagreeable moments, thunderstorms revealing the· power of the divinity, and so on. Mercier also gives us the full text of the daily prayer offered in the temple, part of which runs as follows: thy goodness is equal to thy power; all things declare it, but above all our own hearts. If some transient evils here afflict us, it is doubtless because they are inevitable.... Thou hast deigned to speak to us by the voice of nature only. (1, 138) Certain rituals reinforce this natural religion. First communion, for instance, consists of a youngster being taken to an observatory and made to look through both a telescope and a microscope, so as to 'behold the God of the universe, who reveals himself ... in the midst of his works'. Funerals in 2440 tend to be rather upbeat occasions, since death is clearly a part of nature. Certain beliefs about the afterlife are retained in the twenty-fifth century: it is held that souls are successively reincarnated on different planets, gradually ascending towards final perfection. For inferior spirits, a downward movement is possible: a bad king, for instance, might be reborn as a mole (I, 44). Mercier himself considered this 'system' of metempsychosis to be much better than Pythagoras' and it must be said here that his interest in the spiritual and the supernatural was a strong one (Majewski 1971: 25-77). Mercier was fiercely anti-materialist. For all his anticlericalism he is not someone we would place in the company of La Mettrie, Helvetius, d'Holbach or (let us not forget the northern giant who outshone them all) David Hume. The deist civic religion is more or less universal, and it is a testimony to Mercier's democratic impulse that he makes it so: there is no suggestion of one religion for the elite, one for the masses. Persistent atheism incurs banishment in 2440. Normally, though, atheists are first offered 'an assiduous course of experimental physics' (Mercier 1772: I, 260), which seems to cure all but the most recalcitrant. As in many utopias, the question of education is given a thorough airing in L 'An 2440. The standard elementary-level textbook is now the Encylopedie - '0 what a flight you must have taken towards the higher sciences!' exclaims the Narrator when told this (I, 66). Algebra and physics loom large in the secondary syllabus; modern (but certainly not dead) languages are sometimes taught, but history is not, for 'history is the disgrace of humanity, every page being crowded with crimes and follies' (I, 73). Un tissu de crimes et folies - did Gibbon half-remember this when devising his own more famous phrase? (He had a copy of L'An 2440 in his library.) Very similar principles underlie higher education. The Sorbonne, which now teaches only in French, eschews theology, a pointless subject, and history, a dangerous subject, and concentrates on disc'iplines 'useful to humanity' astronomy, for instance, and medicine. Here we must note that something like a wholesale transformation of medicine has taken place. The Hotel Dieu, Paris's old central hospital, no longer exists; some twenty new hospitals are dotted round the

Mercier's Enlightenment utopia: progress and social ideals 95 city's perimeter; there is also a hospital for inoculation, the merits of which were being hotly debated at the time Mercier was writing. Most astonishing of all, people in 2440 now go to hospital not to die but to be cured (I, 47). The medical profession, no longer venal or status-conscious, goes in for scientific diagnosis. It has been discovered that all 'disorders ... proceed from the coagulation of the blood and humours' (I, 83). (The English translator was a doctor, and added a footnote here, explaining that this was 'not strictly true'.) Preventive medicine also flourishes in the twenty-fifth century: The hygiena especially is so clearly investigated, that each one is able to take care of his own health. We do not depend entirely on the physician, however skillful soever he may be.... Temperance, moreover, that true restorative and conservative elixir, contributes to form bodies healthful and vigorous, and that contain minds pure and strong as their blood. (I, 86) The pronounced aversion to history shown in twenty-fifth-century educational policy is very deliberate. To a large extent the utopia has tried to censor those aspects of the past that might disturb the tranquil present - not altogether successfully, the reader may feel, since the Narrator's guides seem amazingly well informed about the shortcomings of the eighteenth century. At some point in the past an enormous bonfire of discreditable literature has been staged: 'nothing leads the mind further astray than bad books,' the royal librarian explains. 'What remained for us to do but to rebuild the structure of human knowledge?' - reedifier l'edifice des connaissances humaines (Mercier 1971: 248). The books that remain occupy no more than a small cabinet. Among classical authors, Herodotus, Sappho, Aristophanes, and Lucretius have been consigned to the flames; Ovid survives in a censored version, as does Horace; Tacitus is accessible only by special permit. English writers have mostly escaped the bonfire, except for a few 'sceptical philosophers' (unnamed). But much of French literature has gone up in smoke: Descartes, Fenelon and the abbe de Saint Pierre are still there, but only a selection from Voltaire, for, while Voltaire had 'the first ... of the virtues, the love of humanity', he also wrote 'insipid and gross reflections against Jean-Jacques Rousseau' (Mercier 1772: II, 28). Rousseau's works, of course, have survived the holocaust in their entirety. Although the classics of the past may have been fierily censored in this way, a high stress is placed on creativity in 2440. Practically every citizen is a writer. The French Academy, located in an idyllic rural park on Montmartre, is open to all comers. Just occasionally, however, writers incur public censure by expressing 'dangerous principles such as are inconsistent with sound morality, that universal morality which speaks to the heart' (I, 58). Such writers are obliged to wear black masks, which can only be removed when they have mended their ways with the help of two citizens assigned the task of moral rectification. All the arts in 2440 tend to embody correct social principles. When the Narrator goes to the theatre, the play

96 Simon Collier he sees is based on the Calas affair, the affair Voltaire had taken up so forcefully in the early 1760s. Painting, for its part, is 'only employed to inspire sentiments of virtue' (II, 93); certainly the examples described by the Narrator are heavily didactic. Likewise sculpture: the most impressive piece seen by the Narrator is a huge monument to Humanity, with statues personifying the European nations in suitably penitential attitudes: France, on her knees, implored pardon for the horrible night of St Bartholomew, for the cruel Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and for the persecution of those noble sages that sprang from her bosom ... Germany saw with horror the history of her ... frantic theologic rage ... Spain, still more criminal than her sisters, groaned at the thought of having covered the new continent with thirty-five million carcasses.... The figure of Spain was composed of a marble veined with blood; and those frightful streaks are as indelible as the memory of her crimes. (I, 167-9) The focus of L'An 2440, as we have seen, is Paris. Mercier devotes relatively little space to the world beyond, but there clearly is a world beyond. In the 1771 version, war has more or less disappeared. Should it recur, France would rely on sending her enemy 'pestiferous works' of theology (normally kept under lock and key) as her psychological ultimate weapon. In 1786 Mercier was slightly less eirenic: he allows France a small army of 40,000, though tells us that periods of peace now often last for more than a century (Mercier 1787: 111,119-21). Relations between France and England, however, are permanently amicable: Our learning and arts unite us in a communication equally advantageous. The English ... have improved the French, who abound in levity; and we Frenchmen have dissipated surprisingly the melancholy humour of the English. (Mercier 1772: I, 109) Here the English translator has seriously modified Mercier's sense: in the original it is les Anglaises and nos Franr;aises who are the active agents of this mutual character-modification. Further afield, in the American continent, there has been a vast revolutionary upheaval, led by a black slave - a statue of this liberator stands in Paris - and resulting in two independent empires (one of them ruled by a restored Aztec dynasty) covering North and South America. It is interesting to remember here that the abbe Raynal's great book on European imperialism, which also speculates that there might some day be a black Spartacus in the Caribbean (Raynal 1776: III, 465-6), was published at much the same time as L'An 2440. Mercier offers few details of the American upheaval, though we learn that Pennsylvania continues to flourish, under the benign influence of the Quakers. The Narrator discovers these things by glancing at some newspapers in an episode towards the end of the book. We learn from these that in Spain, for instance, the name Dominic (that of the

Mercier's Enlightenment utopia: progress and social ideals 97 founder of the odious Inquisition) has become prohibited and that Philip II is to be struck off the list of Spanish kings. In Paraguay, the expulsion of the Jesuits (673 years earlier) has recently been commemorated. China now uses French as a second language, and has adopted a western-style alphabet. The Japanese, who have just issued a translation of Montesquieu, have now given up ritual suicide, since this is clearly irrational. States like Russia, Poland, and Turkey (a republic) now enjoy liberal forms of government. England is more or less the leading nation in Europe. London has grown in size by no less than three times. The English continue to bask in 'the ancient glory of having offered to their neighbours the example of that form of government which becomes men jealous of their rights and happiness' (II, 235). As usual, Mercier could not resist adding a few more details about this future world when he prepared the 1786 version of his book. We learn here that France exercises a beneficent imperialism over Greece and Egypt, that Portugal is now part of England, that Africa (with a good deal of French help) is completely civilized, and .that Europeans have refrained from conquering India. There is no international language as such in the twenty-fifth century, but certain languages are used worldwide for specialized purposes: German for science, English for poetry and history, French for politics and novel-writing, etc. There is one clear implication that can be drawn from these scattered hints. Utopia is not confined to Paris or even to France. The Enlightenment has prevailed everywhere by the twenty-fifth century; the world as a whole is now reorganized along utopian lines. It seems arguable that Mercier, in addition to being the first author to locate utopia in the future, is also the first to make the whole planet its setting. Such, in the thematic outline, is Mercier's view of the future. It has at least two general features that can do with further elaboration. The first thing that a late twentieth-century eye notices about L 'An 2440 is the unadventurousness of its technological speculations. In so far as it is described at all, the technology of the twentyfifth century is not much of an advance on that of the eighteenth. Great canals, artificial waterfalls, towers on mountain-tops, flexible glass, improvements in lifting gear - none of these things suggests a striking breakthrough in applied science. More imaginatively, perhaps, Mercier visualizes a kind of sound-reproduction device, but it does not resemble the gramophone invented just over a century after he wrote. A few additional forecasts appear in the 1786 version: a long-distance signalling system is mentioned, and the Narrator sees a large balloon or airship ('une machine immense') descend into a city square, having carried eight mandarins from China in just over a week (Mercier 1787: II, 189). This latter idea was only too obviously an 'update' inspired by the Montgolfiers' exploits, about which Mercier had been enthusiastic. In general, Mercier's technological imagination was not very developed. It is not quite enough to say that he was inevitabty constrained by his pre-industrial world. Other writers of the period were able to intuit technological progress in more ambitious ways. Indeed, the glimpses of scientific potential in L 'An 2440 are much less comprehensive than those in Bacon's New Atlantis.

98 Simon Collier Too much should not be made of this. Daring scientific prophecy is not in any sense obligatory in the utopian genre, nor in fact all that common. (H. G. Wells' A ]\lodem Utopia, for instance, is much less exciting in this respect than his imaginative fiction.) Mercier's cautiousness in these matters does not mean that the idea of progress as such is any the less implicit in L'An 2440. Conventional as the utopia is in many ways, it is distinctly innovative on this score. To take the most obvious point: to locate utopia in a Paris shifted into the future, rather than on a remote island, could not have been done at all without recourse to some such concept. Moreover, unlike its predecessors, this is not a static, fixed utopia; it is not a place where history has stopped; it has its own in-built dynamism. As the Narrator is told, Our century will be surpassed, beyond any doubt. . . . The more we become enlightened, the more we realize how much more there remains to be done. ... Where does the perfectibility of man stop, when he is armed with geometry, chemical knowledge and the mechanical arts? (Mercier 1787: II, 231-3, my emphasis) Progress is thus definitely incorporated into the utopian scheme. Mercier is less satisfactory in identifying the mechanisms of progress, though again this is not strictly necessary for the utopian form. How has France actually achieved its admirable twenty-fifth-century condition? Whatever may have happened across the Atlantic, there has certainly been no French Revolution. At one point, it is true, Mercier makes an aside abo~t the 'horrid remedy' of civil war, inevitable in states that are sunk in stupor (Mercier 1772: II, 119). Daniel Mornet has seen this as the clearest of all the calls for revolution prior to 1789 (Mornet 1967: 239). But Mercier makes the remark in a footnote, and could as easily have been looking backwards as forwards. All that the Narrator is told, when he inquires into the process of change in France, is that sometime in the past a 'philosophic prince' restored all power to the Estates General. No date (or even century) is given for this event, but, as the Narrator is somewhat patronizingly told, even in the eighteenth century 'it was foreseen that reason would one day make great progress' (Mercier 1772: II, 135). In other words, the political and social transformation has been gradual, essentially 'the work of philosophy' (I, 123), aided not least by the printing press which, 'by enlightening mankind, has produced this grand revolution' (I, 209-10). This theme is reinforced in the 1786 version, where we are informed that the revolution happened tres aisement, 'very easily' - all that was needed, apparently, was 'a dominant idea and a point of maturity' (Mercier 1787: III, 79). That the spread of enlightened ideas through 'philosophic' writings would inevitably bring about beneficial changes seems to have been one of Mercier's more consistently held ideas. In 1791, for example, he insisted that the Revolution had been 'entirely prepared by the genius of letters' (Mercier 1791: II, 222, his emphasis). Arecent analysis of his later writings suggests that he even attributed the revolutionary excesses of the 1790s to an inadequate understanding of books (Frantz 1988: 102-3). It would be wrong to see this as an unusual view in the

Mercier's Enlightenment utopia: progress and social ideals 99 context of the emergence of the idea of progress. Both Turgot and Condorcet, the authors of the two classic eighteenth-century statements of the idea, regarded the steady accumulation of ideas and knowledge as the principal key to future improvement (Manuel and Manuel 1979: 461-518). For more explicitly economic or sociological theories (or proto-theories) of progress, we have to turn elsewhere, to the Scottish Enlightenment, whose insights were only fully taken up in the grand nineteenth-century formulations of the idea. A modern scholar has observed that 'most critics concede very little measure of originality to Mercier' (Majewski 1971: 115). Mercier's originality in constructing a utopia that incorporates the idea of progress certainly merits more recognition than it commonly receives. Nor is his writing by any means lacklustre or pedestrian: L 'An 2440 has its entertaining moments as well as its longueurs, which only become really monotonous in the expanded version. In any case, the less prominent writers of a given period are sometimes more representative than its major figures, more likely (for their very lack of originality, even, one might say, their banality) to mirror a wide cluster of conventional attitudes. From the brief description of the utopia given here, it should be easy enough to see that L 'An 2440, building on the familiar nature-reason-happiness trinity of the Enlightenment, represents a projection into the future of virtually every aspect of the Enlightenment programme of reform: equality of rights, political liberalism, administrative simplification, scientific advance, humanitarian justice - they are all there. Mercier naturally adds flourishes of his own, notably in his moralistic decimation of past classics and his emotional approach to natural religion. Where his touch is less assured - in his varying discussions of foreign trade and luxury, for instance - he is often reflecting genuine differences of view within the Enlightenment. Yet considering L'An 2440 as a whole, it can hardly be doubted that by taking the common reform ideas of his own time and actualizing them - trying to guess what they might look like in practice in an imagined future world, Mercier offers an unusually vivid pi~ture of the Enlightenment's social ideals. The very fact that L 'An 2440 is a projection of a specific reform programme marks its essential novelty when set alongside the classic utopias of earlier times. All utopias without exception convey the message that society could be better organized. Thomas More's certainly did, but More never seriously expected his utopia to be realized in practice, and says as much at the end of his book. Mercier, by contrast, presents us with the image of a possible future, perhaps even a probable future. To what extent is the new variant of utopia a call to political action? Parts of Mercier's imagined future came rather more quickly than he thought - even (though Mercier was behind bars at the time) an attempt to set up a deist civic religion. There is no evidence that Mercier expected the collapse of the ancien regime, or that he advocated anything other than the monarchie refondue about which he had fantasized in L'An 2440. But when Enlightenment-inspired reforms did take place, in the Revolution, Mercier responded with evident enthusiasm, and could not refrain from claiming credit for having predicted them in the first place

100 Simon Collier (Mercier 1971: 49-50), even (in the preface to the 1799 edition of his book) asserting that he was the true prophet of the Revolution. L 'An 2440 suffers from many of the inherent limitations of its genre. Its characterization is non-existent - this is something that tends to be feeble even in fully novelized utopias such as Aldous Huxley's Island (1962). Like most utopias, too, it is sometimes self-contradictory and inconsistent. The reiterated emphasis on freedom we find in the book does not square well with the wholesale censorship of the past and the limitations on artistic expression which seem to exist in the twentyfifth century. Should atheists really be banished? It is pointless to pursue this theme very far. Such inconsistencies simply reflect the eternal dilemma of all utopias: how can the inhabitants of utopia (or most of them) be made, and credibly made, to behave in an appropriately utopian fashion? The reign of virtue, as Robespierre discovered to his cost, can only be brought about when everyone is willing to be virtuous. In real life it means guillotining atheists and keeping men like LouisSebastien Mercier in prison. With all its limitations, Mercier's version of the old European dream of the Just City remains a useful testimony to the Enlightenment's essentially humane and optimistic social ideals, and to the hopes beginning to be attached to the embryonic idea of progress. His picture of the world of King Louis XXXIV tells us nothing - how could it? - about the twenty-fifth century; it tells us a good deal about the eighteenth, and how an intelligent, lively Parisian of 1770 imagined the kind of world to which a triumphant Enlightenment might some day lead. As we now know, it did not. NOTE Quotations from Mercier's first version of L'An 2440 (1771) are taken from the 1772 translation, which is usually very accurate. Quotations from the 1786 version (which is identical to the third, 1799 version) are my own translations from the French.

7

Adam Ferguson and the enterprise culture TED BENTON

EDITORS' INTRODUCTION Mercier's commitment to the notion of 'progress' connects him with his more illustrious contemporaries, Turgot and Condorcet, whose respective books on the 'progress of the human spirit' embody the optimistic Enlightenment ideal of the perfectibility of man. But these philosophes - though often taken as representative - in fact stand, as Peter Gay put it, 'at the bright end of the spectrum of enlightenment thought' (Gay 1964-70: I, 271). In many ways more representative of the comparative method through which the foundations of modern historiography, anthropology and sociology were laid, is the tradition of Vico, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, tolerant and speculative, which found its culmination in the works of the Scottish Enlightenment, pre-eminently Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), John Millar's Observations Concerning the Distinctions of Rank in Society (1771), William Robertson's History ofAmerica (1777), and - the subject of Ted Benton's essay - Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). Ferguson was particularly well placed to make his enquiry. Rousseau's personal and imaginative odyssey had enabled him to contrast the corrupt manners of urban France with more authentic forms of life - with the Caribs of the West Indies seen as the best example of an existing people 'least of all deviated from the state of nature' (Rousseau 1973: 71). Ferguson, however, grew up on the very frontier of a dramatic confrontation between the burgeoning commercial civilization of lowland Scotland and the clan-based pastoralism of the Highlands. The complexity underlying such confrontations is instructive. The dominant forces were sometimes seen as civilization against barbarism, but also as Protestantism against Catholicism, and commercial urban life against primitive agricuTture. These polarities that were so deeply embedded in the experience of educated eighteenth-century Scots provided an extremely powerful set of categories around which the history of civil society could be built.

102 Ted Benton The cultural cosmopolitanism of that milieu probably explains why the Highlands themselves are not mentioned in Ferguson's Essay, though there is little doubt that they were a formative influence on his thinking. But Ferguson was certainly no Walter Scott, whose Waverley, written right at the end of our period (1814), sentimentalizes the I-Iighlands even as it views the destruction of their culture as an inevitable aspect of the progress of civilization. Ferguson's abstraction from his concrete circumstances - although there are plentiful references to the classics and to travellers such as Charlevoix and Lafitau - allows him a more general reflection on the characteristics of different forms of civil society (though, like Smith and Marx, his primary interest was undoubtedly in understanding the contemporary scene). As Benton points out, Ferguson's distinctive break with writers· like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau was to abandon as misgUided the search for some 'original' state of nature prior to society. Ferguson quotes Montesquieu's lapidary remark from the' Persian Letters: 'Man is born in society and there he remains' (Letter XCIV). Nor, on the other hand, did Ferguson concern himself too much with the stadial theory of development which found its most sophisticated form in Marx's theory of the modes of production. Rather, he worked with some flexible distinctions between 'savagery', 'barbarism', and 'refinement', and was less interested in formalizing his categories or in seeking explanation for historical change than in analysing the operation of the forces which were beginning to alter the workings of the moral economy of European societies.

7

Under the appellation 'the New Enlightenment', a certain view of human well-being and its institutional preconditions, is currently in vogue. According to this view the liberty and security of the individual are the principal - or exclusive - constituents of the good life. The purpose of government is to preserve this liberty and security, and whatever it attempts to do beyond this purpose is a despotic offence against the liberty of its subjects. Liberty consists in freedom of choice, and this, in turn, is taken to be equivalent to, or strongly dependent upon, the institutionalized market exchanges of private property owners. The defence of property ownership, and the promulgation of the market is, it follows, the principal purpose of government. One of the most appealing features of this view is that, unlike so many other utopian visions, it appears to harbour no unrealistic or elevated requirements of its constituent citizens. The effective participant in market exchanges needs only to possess a desire which requires satisfaction, and sufficient rationality to choose from among the goods on offer that which will satisfy the desire at least cost (we leave aside, for the sake of argument, those desires which cannot be satisfied by any of the goods for sale, and those would-be purchasers who have desires but insufficient means of exchange). Given this view of humans as motivated by self-interest, capable of cognising their interests, and rationally calculating the most efficient means for their pursuit, all that is required is that their activities should be brought into interconnection by the institution of market exchanges. Provided that no external force intervenes to disrupt the spontaneous flow of self-interested action in the market, the consequence, intended or not, will be a harmonious coincidence of the satisfaction of the self-interest of each, and the aggregate interest of all. The happy consequence of a pessimistic realism about human nature is that, allowed to follow its course in an appropriate institutional context, it issues in a mutually supportive harmony of the security, satisfaction, and liberty of the individual with the greatest good of all _

104 Ted Benton In this way are neatly combined together a philosophical psychology, an economic theory, and a political philosophy. The crucial elements of the philosophical psychology are a utilitarian conception of rational action, and a 'self-interest' model of human motivation. The key postulate of the economic theory is a notion of market relations as an 'invisible hand' which mediates the self-interested choices of individuals and in so doing brings about the good of all. The political philosophy advocates the liberty of the individual as constitutive of his or her well-being, and as the primary purpose of any legitimate public policy. All who desire the liberty of the individual will, so long as they accept the advocated view of human nature, necessarily be committed to the promulgation of the market society and the 'minimal' state. Easily the most frequently, if erroneously, invoked authority for this 'enlightened' synthesis of the self-interest view of human nature with advocacy of the market as the embodiment and presupposition of the liberty of the individual is Adam Smith. How paradoxical it must seem, then, that one of the most powerful and sustained critiques of these ideas should have been authored by Adam Ferguson, one of Smith's contemporaries and friends, and a fellow luminary of the Scottish Enlightenment. Ferguson and Snlith, together with David Hume, William Robertson, John Millar, and other less well-known figures, centred on Glasgow and Edinburgh, established a distinctive tradition of social philosophy during the eighteenth century. Arguably their very position as cosmopolitan intellectuals yet whose work was conducted in a provincial capital, in significant respects economically, socially, and politically overshadowed by its more 'advanced' neighbour, induced in them an ambiguous attitude to the rapid changes they witnessed in their lifetimes (see Kettler 1965, esp. chs 1 and 2; and Chitnis 1976, passim). While Hume was undoubtedly the greatest philosopher of the group, and Smith retains his celebrated status as one of the great founders of modern economics, it is Ferguson who provides the most telling sociological insights into the contradictory tendencies and dangers of the newly forming commercial society. Easily Ferguson's most important and original work was his Essay on the History of Civil Society, published in 1767, and the main purpose of what follows is to offer an exposition and qualified defence of Ferguson's sceptical view of the relationship between market society and the liberty of the individual. Necessarily, this will also involve us in an exploration of his rival vision of human nature, happiness and virtue. Ferguson's Essay is ostensibly an account of the progress of human society from the 'rude' to the 'polished' state, a secularized theodicy of a genre already well established in the mid-eighteenth century. But if we understand by 'progress' not merely cumulative and directional change, but also a coincidence of that change with the realization of human well-being, 'perfection' or virtue, then we shall miss Ferguson's central preoccupation. For him there is, indeed, cumulative and directional change in human history, but this brings in its wake the threat of corruption, misery, and despotism, no less than the possibility of virtue, happiness, and liberty.

Adam Ferguson and the enterprise culture 105 Indeed, it is hard to escape the conclusion that for Ferguson this trinity of values is more deeply threatened in the 'polished' commercial states than in earlier conditions of society. Along with many of his contemporaries in the Scottish Enlightenment, Ferguson rejected the concept of 'state of nature' as a foundation for political philosophy. His objections to the idea were, like Hume's, partly epistemological: ex hypothesi, the state of nature was not accessible to observation, and so could not be a proper object of positive knowledge. The state of nature theorists confuse poetry and imagination with science, make 'wild suppositions' about our pre-social state in order to buttress their prejudices, and set out to investigate the human case in a way quite different from the approach of the natural historian to any particular animal species. The only methodologically sound way of arriving at general principles in science is to ground them on 'just observation'. Applied to the human case, this method can yield but one conclusion: 'both the earliest and the latest accounts collected from every quarter of the earth, represent mankind as assembled in troops and companies' (Ferguson 1966: 3). Consequently: His mixed disposition to friendship or enmity, his reason, his use of language and articulate sounds, like the shape and the erect position of his body, are to be considered as so many attributes of his nature: they are to be retained in his description, as the wing and the paw are in that of the eagle and the lion. (3)

Humans are social by nature. It follows that the view of society as an 'artificial' creation, devised by individuals in order to realize purposes conceived independently of and prior to it, is incoherent. All that we do follows from our nature and the conditions in which that nature is exercised; there can be no opposition in human affairs between what is 'natural' and what is 'artificial'. It also follows that moral judgements may not be grounded on an appeal to the difference between the natural and the unnatural. Ferguson follows Montesquieu in acknowledging the great,diversity in human modes of social life and forms of government. The character of individuals, too, is shaped by habituation through 'forbearance or exercise' of their various faculties and dispositions. But this acknowledgement of diversity does not deter Ferguson from seeking the 'general characteristics' which constitute human nature. Indeed, following the Newtonian example, it is necessary first to establish these general characteristics if we are eventually to explain the diversity. Some of our general characteristics we have in common with animals. Like them, we have 'instinctive propensities' or dispositions. These in the human case are of two kinds. One set is directed to the preservation of self and the race, while the other leads to society. Where we differ from animals is in the extent to which these initial dispositions are moulded or directed by our mental capacity for reflection and foresight, which are themselves exercised under varied external conditions of life.

106 Ted Benton Among these conditions of life, Ferguson, unlike Montesquieu, assigns priority to the requirements and impositions of a definite mode of social life, and the values and purposes which prevail within it. Depending upon the condition of the social milieu and the relation of the individual to it, he may aspire to a happy and virtuous life, or fall into a state of extreme corruption. The transition from a 'rude' to a 'polished' state of society entails a clear danger of the latter outcome. It is Ferguson's purpose in the Essay to warn of this danger, to examine its historical causes, and to consider if and how it might be averted. But since social outcomes are products of a common human nature whose faculties and dispositions are exercised under diverse conditions of life, we are returned once again to the question of this common human nature. In addition to our selfpreservative and social instincts, we possess capacities to recollect, and to reflect upon our actions, and a further disposition to evaluate, to judge good or bad, which we exercise primarily in relation to ourselves and other persons. Taken together, this ensemble of natural capacities and dispositions implies a further universal characteristic of humankind; one upon which Ferguson places great emphasis. This is their perpetual restlessness and dissatisfaction with their current state: their desire of improvement. Mankind is an 'active being' forever 'in train of employing his talents' (8). This restlessness and desire of improvement, a universal character of individual humans, produces as its largely unintended and unforeseen consequence a distinguishing feature of the species: namely, its historical progress from a 'rude' to a 'polished' condition. Whereas the individuals of other species exhibit growth and development, in the human case these processes are continued at the level of the whole species. As we shall see, Ferguson recognizes that this phenomenon of historical development is more manifest with respect to the employment of some faculties than others, and herein lies one source of corruption and loss of liberty. But in any event, whatever the moral character of the outcome of human restlessness, its status as a key fact of human nature is unmistakable: 'We may desire to direct this love of improvement to its proper object, we may wish for stability of conduct; but we mistake human nature, if we wish for a termination of labour, or a scene of repose' (7). But we do not understand the true nature of this human disposition restlessly to employ talents in projects of improvement if we think of it as a disposition which will be exhibited by individuals independently of their external conditions. This, along with the other general characteristics of human nature, are only fully expressed in the appropriate milieu, and this milieu is society. To say that humans are by nature social is, for Ferguson, to say that society is the condition or context for which they are formed, and therefore the context in which alone their general and distinctive faculties are acquired and exercised. Individuals are most fully themselves, most fully human the more they are bound together in society, and the more they find within society the medium and the object of their activity. To imagine, or to observe (as in the case of 'wild-men') human individuals independently of their involvement

Adam Ferguson and the enterprise culture 107 in social life as a source of illumination on human nature is a profound mistake. An individual deprived of the proper context for the exercise of the powers of its species could not be representative of its kind. Ferguson supposes that such an individual would even suffer organic imperfections and deformities, so closely is the acquisition of our nature bound up with the social state. As we have seen, Ferguson also assigns to our social disposition the status of an 'instinct', albeit one that is subject to direction and moulding through habituation under varying conditions of social life. But that our attachment to society is one of primary affectivity is an important fact. We are not attached to society as a means of improving our material standard of life. Observation shows, on the contrary, that increase of luxury and 'external conveniences' is often accompanied by a loosening of the ties that bind individuals to society. Nor is it a matter of mere security: in times of national crisis and danger, we are frequently willing to sacrifice our lives in the service of society. Nor can the desire for mere honour and esteem explain the passions unleashed by the attachment to society. We are not, in fact, attached to society for any purpose extrinsic to it, but simply desire the society of others for its own sake, as an end in itself. But the passions which. bind us to social life are not to be reduced to mere 'benevolence' or 'sympathy'. The intensity of our social loyalties also begets and feeds from equally intense hostility and enmity. The willingness to defend by force of arms one's society against its enemies is for Ferguson not only evidence of the power of our social bonds, but also one of the highest expressions of public virtue. With this broad view of human nature in mind, we are now in a position to turn to Ferguson's critique of the 'selfish system' of philosophy, and to his closely related critique of the utilitarian view of happiness and virtue. Although not often named, the main target of Ferguson's criticisms was Hobbes, and certainly not Adam Smith, with whom Ferguson had much in common (see, for example, Smith 1976, Part II, Section III, chs 1 and 11). Ferguson's own critique of the selfish philosophy, or, more specifically, the 'self-interest' view of human motivation, has three main strands. First, the selfish philosophy misrepresents what is really only an innovation in language as a discovery of science. For example, parental care is regarded as 'selfish' since it is the parent's own desire which is gratified in ministering to the well-being of the child, no less than when the parent is taking care of her or himself. Ferguson argues that this is merely to redefine 'benevolence' as a disposition to act from no desires of one's own. The proponents of the selfish philosophy may adopt this revision, of course, but the rest of us will still need to mark the distinction previously made between action arising from a desire for the welfare of oneself and action prompted by a desire for the welfare of others. Second, if the 'selfish' philosopher is reluctant to admit 'benevolence' in this sense in which it is used by 'the vulgar', t~en surely he will at least admit that humans frequently act out of passions such as 'hatred, indignation, and rage' in opposition to their known interest. But the introduction of the term 'interest' here leads us to what is, for our purposes, the core of Ferguson's ~rl!!51~le_~ !h~ J~fjsb

108 Ted Benton philosophy. In what does appear to be a direct reference to Smith, he objects to the term 'self-love', partly because 'love is an affection which carries the attention of the mind beyond itself' (Ferguson 1966: 12), but also because of the degradation of our nature involved in the implicit reduction of the objects of self-regard to mere 'interest'. That humans act out of self-regard is not denied by Ferguson. As we have seen, he assigns to us a self-preservative instinct. But what is objectionable in the selfish philosophy is its limitation of 'this supposed selfish affection to the securing or accumulating the constituents of interest, or the means of mere animal life'. He continues: It is somewhat remarkable, that notwithstanding men value themselves so much on qualities of the mind, on parts, learning and wit, on courage, generosity, and honour, those men are still supposed to be in the highest degree selfish, or attentive to themselves, who are most careful of animal life, and who are least mindful of rendering that life an object worthy of care. It will be difficult, however, to tell why a good understanding, a resolute and generous mind should not, by every man in his senses, be reckoned as much parts of himself, as either his stomach or his palate, and much more than his estate or his dress. (13)

Ferguson's insistence, here, is on the importance of distinguishing between 'interests' as those 'objects of care which refer to our external condition, and the preservation of our animal nature', and the much wider range of faculties and qualities of the person which constitute human well-being, happiness, and virtue. Since these qualities are precisely the ones that are most dependent on our social bonds with others for their acquisition and exercise, then our desire to protect and augment them in ourselves cannot be opposed to our desire for the welfare of others and society itself. Properly understood, there is a natural coincidence of our selfregarding affections with our social dispositions. Of course, this does not rule out the sources of competition, conflict, enmity, and war, since for Ferguson these are rooted in our social dispositions, no less than benevolence and sympathy. It is the interests of the narrower, and, Ferguson clearly thinks, inferior sort which are mistakenly taken to be the sole motive of human action in the selfish philosophy. Here, in his elevated view of the identity of happiness and public virtue, and, indeed, in his refusal to make happiness dependent upon the 'externals' of life, Ferguson acknowledges a debt to the Stoic philosophy. But he is not content to rest his case on luminous classical references: the view of human faculties and dispositions is given a systematic observational grounding. Ferguson's critique of the selfish system of philosophy passes directly into his critique of the utilitarian view of happiness and morality. He admits that the pursuit of pleasures and avoidance of pain may enable us to fulfill the 'purposes of nature' in self-preservation and the continuation of the species. But they are not a solid foundation for human happiness. Pleasure, as an episodic sensation, terminated once the object of gratification has been obtained, is to be contrasted with happiness as

Adam Ferguson and the enterprise culture 109 an enduring quality of the individual. The happy individual is one who, exhilarated by the fullest exercise of his highest faculties, shows contempt for pleasure and indifference to pain. The pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain are associated by Ferguson with the much-criticized notion of 'interest', and likewise counterposed to the true fulfilment of our human nature in the active exercise of our faculties in the enhancement of social life: It should seem, therefore, to be the happiness of man, to make his social dispositions the ruling spring of his occupations; to state himself as the member of a community, for whose general good his heart may glow with an ardent zeal, to the suppression of those personal cares which are the foundation of painful anxieties, fear, jealousy, and envy.... (54)

Similarly with our moral sentiments. If the utilitarian view were correct, then man would be classed with the brutes with respect to the objects of our desires, differing only in our capacity of multiplying the means of achieving them. Our passions would be limited to joy of success or grief of disappointment, and our relations to others in society governed by considerations of utility or disutility only. But observation shows that this is not the case. The passions attending a perceived insult, injustice, or wrongdoing, and those kindled in the company of others are far greater than those attaching to 'interest', and so are not reducible to them. The 'self-interest' view of human motivation, and the closely related utilitarian views of happiness and moral virtue stand refuted. Their advocates gain plausibility by unacknowledged revisions of linguistic usage, and by conceptual confusions, but, above all, their theories are unsupported by readily available empirical observation. Ferguson's own account of human nature, happiness, and virtue is not deduced from 'first principles' but is rather presented as a set of inductively grounded empirical generalizations. But the perspectives against which Ferguson's arguments are pitted are not merely the conceptual and empirical errors of speculative intellects. Their persistence and at least superficial plausibility also call for explanation. If human purposes are reduced to the satisfaction of bodily appetites and the preservation of property, if human happiness is confused with the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, and if morality is equated with utility, then what can have engendered such confusions but a society which comes close to making them true? Ferguson's choice of empirical illustrations is an exemplary use of the comparative method to expose the insularity of his opponents' perceptions. Ferguson, in common with Smith and the other Scottish moral philosophers of the period, not only drew upon the Stoic philosophy (especially for a conception of civic virtue), but also took a deep interest in classical history and civilization. Late in his career, Ferguson wrote a widely regarded history of the Roman Republic and the Essay itself is replete with illus\trations drawn from histories of classical Greece and Rome. He was clearly a keen reader of travellers' tales, and of the histories of non-European peoples. His own I -------------------------------------

110 Ted Benton Highland background, too, no doubt endowed him with a certain sympathy for the positive qualities of social life in its 'rude' state, prior to the changes wrought by commercial society and constitutional government. Although resolutely opposed to the Jacobite cause, Ferguson retained a 'condescending identification' with his highland origins, and was most unusual for someone of his social position in his command of the Gaelic language (see Kettler 1965: 46). In the face of this weight of historical and anthropological evidence, the condition of commercial societies is represented as exceptional. In these societies, the instinctual disposition to sociability is least augmented by habituation, and social bonds are consequently at their most attenuated. In these societies, too, the selfpreservative instinct is most likely to take the form of an exclusive concern with possessions and mere bodily security - with 'interests' in Ferguson's disapprobatory use of the term. In the commercial nations, we have a form of society in which the paradigmatic personality-type, the predominant purpose of action, and the prevailing scale of values most closely approximate those represented in the philosophies to which Ferguson takes greatest exception. There is a clear affinity or complicity between these philosophies and the commercial societies which spawn them. Ferguson's critique of these philosophies, as misrepresenting human nature, happiness and virtue, is, then, at the same time, a critique of those forces at work in the society of his time which distorted, or corrupted human nature, withdrawing from it the conditions of its fulfilment in a happy and virtuous life. But the situation is more complex than this. Exceptional though they are, the commercial societies must continue to be viewed as, like all other forms of society, genuine expressions of human nature. In corrupting or distorting human nature, they nevertheless represent one among the many diverse ways in which it can be moulded or directed by the conditions of social life. If this were not the case, then observations of human life as it is lived in the commercial societies would stand as an empirical refutation of Ferguson's own general account of human nature. Social bonds are attenuated in such societies, and benevolent sentiments less widely or keenly felt, but they are still present. Parental care is a surviving example of the latter which Ferguson frequently cites, and we are reminded of the 'tolerable footing of amity' and restraint observed even in business transactions as an example of the former. Indeed, Ferguson tends to treat the commercial nations as a kind of experimental test situation, or 'worst-case' scenario for his theory of human nature: What must we think of the force of that disposition to compassion, to candour, and goodwill, which, notwithstanding the prevailing opinion that the happiness of a man consists in possessing the greatest possible share of riches, preferments, and honours, still keeps the parties who are in competition for those objects, on a tolerable footing of amity, and leads them to abstain even from their own supposed good, when their seizing it appears in the light of a detriment to others? (Ferguson 1966: 35) Wherever there exist societies that are 'polished' or civilized, and also have attained

Adam Ferguson and the enterprise culture III a high development of the mechanical and commercial arts, then there are attendant dangers of corruption, national ruin, and despotism, or political slavery. But there is no necessity about the 'progress' from civilization to corruption, or, indeed, from corruption to despotism. Both civilization itself and the advance of material wealth and technique bear within them the seeds of corruption but only under definite circumstances do these seeds germinate and flourish. Moreover, different forms of government - democratic, aristocratic, monarchical, and various admixtures - are consistent with the civilized state. A degree of ordered society, liberty, and even virtue may be preserved even in the face of widespread corruption, depending on the form of government and the kind of requirement it makes upon its subjects for virtue and public spiritedness. For Ferguson the designation 'polished' or 'civilized' refers primarily to the achievement of an ordered, law-abiding society, in which internal conflicts are settled peacefully and in which there is security from external invasion. But these conditions of peace and security in the enjoyment of the fruits of labour also foster the development of the mechanical and commercial arts. The discovery is soon made that a division of labour which allows each individual to specialize in a single task makes possible a greater perfection in the goods produced as well as an increase in the efficiency and quantity in which they are produced: there is a steady accumulation of technical powers and of material wealth. In turn, the division of labour and specialization, in severing the immediacy of the connection between production and consumption, requires and stimulates the development of market relations and what Ferguson calls the 'commercial arts'. Finally, the development of the mechanical and commercial arts rests upon 'accidental' inequalities in property, faculties, and dispositions, which it further progressively augments. The societies with which Ferguson is concerned, then, share four intimately connected features. They may be characterized by anyone of a number of possible forms of government, but all possess some form of constitutional government which, at the minimum, legally regulates transactions between individual subjects, provides security from external invasion, and includes a system of checks and balances by means of which the liberties of subjects are protected from possible excesses of the executive power itself. Second, there is a high level of development of technique and material production, manifested in a developed pattern of occupational specialization and differentiation. Third, consumer goods are primarily produced for, and obtained by, market exchange: that is, these are 'commercial nations', in Ferguson's terminology. Fourth, there are marked and entrenched inequalities in the ownership of property. As we have seen, Ferguson thought that notwithstanding the admitted benefits that flow from each of these features, their combination also renders a nation peculiarly liable to specific forms of corruption and to a consequent risk of decline, ruin, and despotic rule. In particular, Ferguson is concerned to demonstrate the actual incompatibility between such societies and a substantively democratic political order as well as to identify a series of threats to the liberty of their citizens. The two features most sharply incompatible with substantive democracy are the

112 Ted Benton advanced division of labour and marked inequalities of property. Some specialized occupations elevate the mind and engage the heart, but many have the opposite effect on those whose life is spent in pursuit of them. Indeed, the increase in efficiency and perfection of production resulting from the division of labour is most marked precisely when the labourers are least required to think or to be creatively involved in their task: Many mechanical arts, indeed, require no capacity; they succeed best under a total suppression of sentiment and reason: and ignorance is the mother of industry as well as of superstition. Retlection and fancy are subject to err; but a habit of moving the hand, or the foot, is independent of either. Manufactures, accordingly, prosper most, where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may, without any great effort of imagination, be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men. (Ferguson 1966: 183) This spine-chilling observation is the start of a long line of sociological concern with the social and human implications of modern manufacturing and industrial systems, and Ferguson has with some justification been accorded the status of one of the founding figures of modern sociology (see, for example, Meek 1954; McRae 1969; Swingewood 1970). Ferguson's own principal concern was with the degeneracy and narrowness of vision on the part of the labouring classes which must follow from their place in the division of labour. But if the division of labour alone has these baleful effects on those whose dispositions and faculties are moulded by it, then how much more serious the situation is when the effects of inequality of property are combined with them. Such classes as mechanics, labourers, and beggars are constrained to devote their lives to procuring the means to a mere livelihood. They are necessarily occupied with menial tasks, and preoccupied with the degrading object of material security. Depending upon their diverse characters and situations, members of these classes are liable to become envious, avaricious, criminal, servile, and/or mercenary: We think that the extreme meanness of some classes must arise chiefly from the defect of knowledge ... and we refer to such classes, as to an image of what our species must have been in its rude and uncultivated state. But we forget how many circumstances, especially in populous cities, tend to corrupt the lowest orders of men.... An admiration of wealth unpossessed, becoming a principle of envy, or of servility; a habit of acting perpetually with a view to profit, and under a sense of subjection; the crimes to which they are allured, in order to feed their debauch, or to gratify their avarice, are examples, not of ignorance, but of corruption and baseness. (Ferguson 1966: 186) Now, for Ferguson, democracy is a form of government in which sovereignty rests with the collective body of the whole people, and in which all citizens are eligible for

Adam Ferguson and the enterprise culture 113 public office. For a democracy to thrive, its citizens must love equality, and must be willing to work for the public good without hope of personal profit. In short, the virtue of the citizens is a necessary condition for democratic government. Since this condition, as we have seen, cannot be satisfied in the modern commercial societies, given the necessary preoccupation of the lower classes with mere survival, demeaning tasks, or with material interests, it follows that substantive democracy cannot be sustained in them. All that may remain are mere 'pretensions to equal rights'. Ferguson clearly regards the entrusting of major public office to the corrupted and degenerate lower classes of these societies as the height of folly - at most 'they may be entrusted with the choice of their masters and leaders' (187). But the choice between democracy and the market society presented no great dilemma for Ferguson. While democracy had a certain romantic attraction for him (he regarded the move away from democracy as inevitably involving a degree of corruption), he tended to regard it as an extreme and unsustainable form, as a 'paroxysm' of the political order. In enjoying the benefits of both material advancement and the security that comes from regular government, we must reluctantly accept political forms which fall short of substantive democracy. In practice, Ferguson always kept aloof from the Reform movement, consistently putting his loyalty to the established constitution and the system of class subordination it sustained before any appeal that an extension of the francise might have had for him. In this respect, Ferguson's views were superseded by later socialist writers who were able to make an analytical distinction between the increasingly capitalist commercial ordering of economic life, with its associated deskilling and impoverishment of the working classes, on the one hand, and the increase in material well-being that could come from the cooperative organization of production and the rational application of knowledge in technique, on the other. But even on his own premisses, Ferguson's bleak conclusion does not follow. Economic insecurity and poverty could, and did, just as easily lead to an elevating and invigorating combination among the dispossessed as to their corruption through envy and servility. In the early trade union and socialist movements could be found a social milieu in which the exercise of the highest human capacities and dispositions, such as benevolence, honour, loyalty, and courage was both required and made possible. That these virtues could be acquired and enhanced in a spirit of antagonism and competitive struggle is only to be expected on Ferguson's own view of human nature. If this modest revision of Ferguson's analysis is correct, it suggests that a healthy and vital labour movement is a necessary condition for substantive democracy in the advanced commercial states. For Ferguson himself, however, a degree of liberty, order, and virtue can be sustained in the face of the corrupting effects of the division of labour and economic inequality only if other forms of government (aristocratic, monarchical, or 'mixed') are allowed to prevail. Here, what is necessary is that the worst corruption of human nature should be confined to those classes least relied upon for public office. Even this, unfortunately, cannot be guaranteed, and in so far as the division of labour and

114 Ted Benton specialization of function becomes an all-pervasive principle of social organization it poses a threat not just to democracy, but to liberty itself. Implicit in Ferguson's comments are three features of occupational specialization which are potentially undermining of civil liberties. First, occupational categories are identity-forming in ways that compete with identification with and loyalty to nation. Each occupational group has its own 'carriage', 'point of honour', system of manners and ceremonial through which the character of the individual is formed. The resulting diversity of individuals and ranks 'suppresses' the bonds of similitude which make up the 'national character'. Second, as we have seen, life-long preoccupation with a single activity must narrow the vision. Not participating in the wide diversity of social practices, the individual plays a necessary part in the whole without any comprehension of what that part is, or how it relates to the others: 'society is made to consist of parts, of which none is animated with the spirit of society itself' (Ferguson 1966: 218). This loss of overall vision renders the individual unfit to playa full role in public life. Third, occupational specialization, concentrating the activity and attention of individuals on the sphere of private interest, withdraws them from the public domain: The separation of professions ... seems, in some measure, to break the bands of society, to substitute form in place of ingenuity, and to withdraw individuals from the common scene of occupation, on which the sentiments of the heart, and the mind, are most happily employed. (218) These three pervasive consequences of the division of labour and occupational specialization - individualism, narrowness of vision, and 'privatism' - were, of course, important topics of interest in subsequent sociological analyses of industrial capitalism, most famously, perhaps, in the great French sociologist, Emile Durkheim's Division ofLabour in Society (1933). The Hegelian-Marxist concept of 'alienation', too, includes as- a significant element the effects of the division of labour in detaching and isolating individuals from one another and from the life of society. Ferguson's own concern is with the loss on the part of individual citizens of the motivation and capacities to playa full, active, and disinterested part in public life. The consequence of this is a reduction in the public sphere itself, and a usurpation of power on the part of the executive. Incapable and unwilling to make sacrifices in defence of their liberties, a self-interested and preoccupied citizenry is liable to lose them. When the exercise of public office itself becomes subject to occupational specialization, then the threat to liberty is yet more dire. The functions of warrior and statesman, the paramount public offices, are the ones most decisive for national well-being, as well as for preserving the conditions for the highest development of individual happiness and virtue. Accordingly, for these activities to fall prey to selfinterested functionaries and men of narrow vision spells disaster for both national stability and the liberty of the individual. Ferguson lays greatest emphasis here on

Adam Ferguson and the enterpnse culture 115 the threat to liberty posed by occupational specialization in the military sphere. By employing a professional army, the citizenry is apt to take its security for granted, and to lose the capacity for self-defence. The way is then open for the military machine they have created to be turned against their own liberties. These arguments and others were used by Ferguson in his pamphlets supporting a Scottish militia, advocacy of which was a life-long commitment of his (see Kettler 1965: ch. 4). Earlier in his career he had served as a military chaplain with the notorious 'Black Watch' regiment, a fact no doubt associated with the continuing militarist cast of his notion of civic virtue. Despite the seriousness of all these dangers to national well-being, virtue, and liberty, Ferguson is clearly most exercised by a further threat to which the commercial nations are exposed. This threat is, perhaps, a culmination or synthesis, of each of the others. Secure, regular government, the advancement of the mechanical and commercial arts, and unequal property, are, severally, conditions which pose specific threats of individual corruption and national decline. But none produces such effects of necessity, or in abstraction from the influence of the others. These conditions affecting economic and political life, to produce their most ruinous effects, must further give rise to a wholesale and pervasive shift in values: A change of national manners for the worse, may arise from ... a change in the prevailing opinions relating to the constituents of honours or of happiness. When mere riches or court-favour, are supposed to constitute rank; the mind is misled from the consideration of qualities on which it ought to rely. (Ferguson 1966: 238) Under the influence of these 'prevailing opinions' social honour is assigned on the basis of wealth, or flattery of the powerful, independently of the intrinsic merit or virtue of its recipients. Happiness is confused with mere pleasure, and private interest is treated as the principal purpose of life. Public life, no longer the domain in which the highest purposes of the citizens are concentrated, becomes a mere means for the more successful pursuit of private interest. It is the pervasiveness of this cultural complex, rather than the mere existence of political security, material luxury, the market and economic inequality, which is the 'Achilles heel' of the modern commercial nations. The political and economic features of these societies predispose them towards the value-system and the personality-type which we may without too much difficulty recognize in the 'enterprise culture' of our own time and place. At the same time we may recognize in them the very view of human nature, happiness, and virtue which Ferguson denounced as the 'selfish system' of philosophy. In view of the quite special dangers which Ferguson attached to the enterprise culture, it will be worth spending a little time in exploring both his analysis of the conditions which bring it to prominence, and his reasons for fearing its consequences for the preservation of liberties. The first condition is prolonged peace and security itself. Although the achievement of this might require a great exertion of

116 Ted Benton national effort and virtue, once achieved it makes possible a 'growing indifference to objects of a public nature'. Constitutional government and the security it brings are taken for granted, and 'no engagement remaining on the part of the public, private interest and animal pleasure, become the sovereign objects of care' (Ferguson 1966: 256). Second, the restlessness and desire of perfection which are an intrinsic part of human nature itself tend to promote disproportionate attention to the development of the mechanical arts and the accumulation of wealth: these, compared with other objects of human concern, are capable of limitless augmentation. Third, although the resulting material wealth and 'luxury' is not itself identical with corruption, it certainly predisposes to it: Nations are most exposed to corruption on this quarter, when the mechanical arts, being greatly advanced, furnish nun1berless articles, to be applied in ornament to the person, in furniture, entertainment, or equipage; when such articles as the rich alone can procure are admired; and when consideration, precedence, and rank are accordingly made to depend on fortune. (251) Finally, public policy itself may become concerned only with preserving the security and property - the 'interests' - of the citizenry, without regard to the promotion of their higher faculties and virtues: If to any people it be the avowed object of policy, in all its internal refinements, to secure the person and the property of the subject, without any regard to his political character, the constitution indeed may be free, but its members may likewise become unworthy of the freedom they possess, and unfit to preserve it. (221-2) These, then, are the conditions under which a definite personality-type, a prevailing set of values and opinions, of preoccupations and 'objects of care' comes to pervade all classes in a commercial state. But what is it about these values and preoccupations which makes them 'corrupting' in Ferguson's sense, and how do they lead to a loss of liberty and to national ruin? First,lhe valuation of property over personal qualities such as merit and virtue, and the adoption of wealth as the foundation of the system of class 'subordination' involve a devaluation of the person, and a corresponding transfer of human value to mere material or animal objects and beings: He finds in a provision of wealth, which he is probably never to employ, an object of his greatest solicitude, and the principal idol of his mind. He apprehends a relation between his person and his property, which renders what he calls his own in a manner a part of himself, a constituent of his rank, his condition, and his character, in which, independent of any real enjoyment, he may be fortunate or unhappy; and, independent of any personal merit, he may be an object of

Adam Ferguson and the enterprise culture 117 consideration or neglect; and in which he may be wounded and injured, while his person is safe, and every want of his nature completely supplied. (12)

The 'enterprise culture', then, involves a kind of self-alienation in which regard for 'self is displaced into regard for property and/or mere material well-being, into a preoccupation with 'interest', while concerns properly addressed to the self take as their object mere material possessions. A house, ornaments, clothes, furniture, and so on, are substituted for merit and virtue as objects of esteem and social honour. But this alienation from self and its associated fetishism of commodities also implies an alienation between individuals and the social world, and consequently among individuals themselves. Where self-interest reigns supreme, the community, ceasing to be the object which directly engages the most powerful sentiments, becomes a mere instrument for individual advantage: The individual considers the community so far only as it can be rendered subservient to his personal advancement or profit: he states himself in competition with his fellow creatures; and, urged by the passions of emulation, of fear and jealousy, of envy and malice, he follows the maxims of an animal destined to preserve his separate existence, and to indulge his caprice or his appetite, at the expense of his species. (238-9)

In establishing a merely utilitarian relation between the individual and the community, or species, the preoccupation with 'interest' characteristic of the enterprise culture also reduces the relation between individuals themselves to matters of instrumental calculation, on a level with their relations to their non-human property: 'he has found an object which sets him in competition with his fellow creatures, and he deals with them as he does with his cattle and his soil, for the sake of the profits they bring' (19). Under the combined influence of these material and political conditions, and the shifts in the dominant value-system and practical orientations which they facilitate, human nature itself is corrupted and debased. Two basic character-types become pervasive: those who without moral restraint seek power and wealth on their own account, and those who, equally without moral restraint, make themselves the willing tools of the wealthy and powerful in order to acquire some share of their masters' acquisitions: On this corrupt foundation, men become either rapacious, deceitful, and violent, ready to trespass on the rights of others; or servile, mercenary and base, prepared to relinquish their own. Talents, capacity and force of mind, possessed by a person of the first description, serve to plunge him the deeper in misery, and to sharpen the agony of cruel passions; which lead him to wreak on his fellowcreatures the torments that prey on himself. To a person of the second, imagin-

118 Ted Benton ation, and reason itself, only serve to point out false objects of fear, or desire, and to multiply the subjects of disappointment, and of momentary joy. (239)

Crucially, these corrupting influences affect all classes and conditions of persons, including those classes upon whom devolve the duties of public life: But the higher orders of men if they relinquish the state, if they cease to possess that courage and elevation of mind ... are, in reality ... become the refuse of that society of which they once were the ornament. ... The care of his buildings, his equipage, or his table, is chosen by one; literary amusement, or some frivolous study, by another. The sports of the country, and the diversions of the town; the gaming-table, dogs, horses, and wine, are employed to fill up the blank of a listless and unprofitable life. (259-60)

Ferguson at one point even warns of the possibility of the Hobbesian war of each against each in the absence of the restraint of law. But such a war is not, for Ferguson, the consequence of unaided and unconstrained human nature; it is rather a measure of the corruption and degeneracy of human nature under the combined influence of luxury, economic inequality, the division of labour and the consequential changes in values and practices: Under this influence, they would enter, if not restrained by the laws of civil society, on a scene of violence or meanness, which would exhibit our species, by turns, under an aspect more terrible and odious, or more vile and contemptible, than that of any animal which inherits the earth. (12)

However, once this degree and spread of corruption is approached, even the restraint of law undergoes a transformation in its bearing on the liberties of subjects. The law only serves as a defence of liberty when it continues to be applied in that spirit, and with constant vigilance against abuse and usurpation. When these conditions are absent, 'they serve only to cover, not to restrain, the iniquities of power.' The influence of laws in preserving liberty, Ferguson contends, 'is not any magic power descending from shelves that are loaded with books, but is, in reality, the influence of men resolved to be free' (263-4). So, with pervasive corruption and debasement of human nature, those who hold executive power seek to extend it by overcoming all obstacles to their designs, while those subject to executive power actively connive in the destruction of their own freedoms. Not merely unfit either to exercise or to defend their liberty, they actively seek its annulment. Once the citizenry have connived in the usurpation of the executive power a process is set in motion in which all remaining centres of resistance are identified and eliminated:

Adam Ferguson and the enterprise culture 119 enemy; when his mind is elated, whoever pretends to eminence, and is disposed to act for himself, is a rival. He would leave no dignity in the state, but what is dependent upon himself; no active power, but what carries the expression of his momentary pleasure.... The tendency of his administration is to quiet every restless spirit, and to assume every function of government to himself. (274)

Consequently: Implicit submission to any leader, or the uncontrouled exercise of any power, even when it is intended to operate for the good of mankind, may frequently end in the subversion of legal establishments. This fatal revolution, by whatever means it is accomplished, terminates in military government. (273)

The progression is complete: a privatized, self-interested, and materialistic citizenry collaborate with a rapacious executive power, saturated by the same corruptive values and purposes, to yield despotic rule, political slavery, and national ruin. Ferguson's critique of the 'selfish system' and his analysis of it as a philosophical expression of that form of corruption of human nature to which modern capitalist societies are peculiarly liable is a powerful, and, to my mind, largely convincing one. Nevertheless, in important respects it is limited or defective. I have already noted Ferguson's (understandable, in context) failure to distinguish analytically between progress in human technical powers, on the one hand, and the institutional forms and inequalities of a market society, on the other. Lacking this distinction, Ferguson was unable to separate out the benefits that might come from a more equally shared material well-being from the corrupting combination of wealth and material insecurity in a class-divided market society. It was this analytical failing which also sustained Ferguson's apparent contempt for material well-being itself, as though this were properly the concern only of 'mere animals'. As Marx was to argue almost a century later (and, indeed, as the Stoics had argued centuries before) desires for food, shelter, clothing, and so on are not in themselves demeaning or corrupt, but they only become so in a form of life which abstracts them from their rightful place in a wider context of human and communal purposes, and turns them, in this abstract form, into the sole or primary end of life itself. Finally, there is an unmistakable masculine - even militarist - cast to Ferguson's concept of the virtuous life. He explicitly distances himself from values sometimes associated with civilization, such as gentleness, generosity, and leniency towards one's enemies. He contrasts such values with the bold and warlike virtues of the classical civilizations, and attributes the change to the spread of 'antiquated' notions of chivalry in relation to women into our public life, and even into the conduct of war. He frequently uses the word 'effeminate' to characterize a life-style corrupted by luxury and withdrawal from the exertion of public life. Notwithstanding these reservations, Ferguson's work contains the broad outlines of a quite startlingly prophetic sociological analysis of commercial civilization and

120 Ted Benton the corruptions to which it is susceptible. Ferguson tends to think of advancement in the 'material arts', specialization and the division of labour, and the growth of commercial society as indissolubly intertwined processes. While they lead to greater comfort, security, and luxury, they nevertheless lead to a new system of domination and subordination, a lop-sided development of the individual, a corrupting preoccupation among the lower classes with mere subsistence, and, above all, a dissolution of social bonds. In so far as commercial society assigns status on the basis of material success, and allows its citizens to take their peace, security and luxury for granted (through, for example, allocating the function of national defence to a specialist standing army), then to this extent self-interested motivations are favoured, and the vigour of civic virtue declines. The highest and most worthy exertions of humanity can flourish only where the intensity of social bonds and civic virtue also flourish. The ~ontrary tendency towards self-interested individual competition can only lead to a debasement of the aims and contents of individual action. Though Ferguson sees no inevitability in these negative aspects of the advance of commercial society, his arguments do suggest an interesting inversion of classical liberal (and modern conservative) assumptions about the relationships between individual well-being, commercial society, and political liberty. The enterprise culture, in fragmenting and dissipating social bonds, deprives individuals of the proper medium in which alone the higher goals of humanity and the full vigour of human activity can thrive. The full development of individual potentials, and the acquisition of personal autonomy cannot, as in the 'selfish' view of human nature, be taken as universally 'given' but must rather be understood as conditioned by the availability of an appropriate social milieu. The corruption, selfishness, materialism, class-division attendant upon the advance of commercial society make the citizenry incapable of wisely using their liberty, and unworthy of an active role in determining the policies of the state. In sum, they prepare the way for despotism and tyranny.

NOTE Further reading includes Davies 1981, Durkheim 1964, Ferguson 1975, Robertson 1985 and Swingewood 1984.

8 Imagining the Republic: the sign and sexual politics in France MARGARET IVERSEN

EDITORS' INTRODUCTION The idea of 'enlightenment' has two implications that are central to Margaret Iversen's paper. First, the importance accorded to light as a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge indicates the general significance of looking, and hence of the visual sign, whether this be in the process of learning, of leisure activities, or of social and political control. Second, obstacles to clear, unimpeded vision had to be removed. Many Enlightenment writers were, like Diderot, concerned about the differences between appearance and reality. For many commentators, thetheatre was the paradigmatic instance of the gap between appearance and reality and they debated not just the moral effects of plays, but many facets of acting, including how actors felt on stage, and whether they actually experienced the emotions they portrayed. Clothes, dissimulations in appearance, behaviour, and in speech were all obstacles to clarity of vision. So, of course, were masks. Yet there were social groups in eighteenth-century Europe that delighted in the masquerade, in the frisson that came from not knowing who was who in a setting charged with erotic excitement. Masks were thus linked with sexuality (Castle 1986), and more particularly with illicit sexuality. Iversen's paper shows some of the complex ways in which these matters were gendered. Most obviously, personifications of abstract issues revealed assumptions about gender in that male and female ones had distinct attributes, implications, and effects. Moreover, the virtues that were personified were themselves gendered. We can see this especially clearly in the case of Rousseau who had two quite different views of virtue for men and for women, and· depicted the two sexes as complementary rather than as politically equal or equivalent (see Bernstein this volume). Outram (1987) has shown how gendered ideas of virtue continued to have a strong grip on participants in the French Revolution, while Bloch (1987) has put a similar case for the American Revolution. We can go a step further than this. In taking the

122 Margaret Iversen story forward to the Statue of Liberty, Iversen shows how by associating Liberty with Progress the gendering becomes even more complicated. Science was often personified as male, nature as female. Or, more loosely, science was associated with the masculine triumph over nature, with the appropriation and deployment of natural forces like electricity. Liberty was ambivalently gendered: liberty as secular, and especially as economic and industrial progress was masculine; liberty as republic and as protective mother was female. Iversen discusses other associations of the idea of light. One of the most telling examples that she uses is the plan to inscribe the word 'light' on the forehead of a gigantic statue of Hercules. Here, the association between light and mental capacities is perfectly explicit. But we can also see in this instance the drive towards legibility that was so strong during the Enlightenment, which was, above all, a movement committed to didacticism, to the instruction of the middle and of the popular classes. A revolutionary situation, with its inevitable power vacuum, placed fresh demands on political language and on the communication of political ideas to the masses. Naturally, neither language nor ideas were stable and, as the revolutionary agenda changed, as different groups struggled for supremacy, symbolism was similarly mobile. Some themes emerged more strongly than others from this fluid situation, and one was that of the unity of the nation. We know from the writings of Rousseau that questions of political unity, of cohesion between citizens, was of great importance. The goal of national unity also had to be given visual form, as Iversen shows. The culture of the French Revolution is fascinating, not just because of its complex relationship to the Enlightenment, but also because here we can see the birth of the recognizably modern notion of a nation state. Visual images of the infant republic, in which the tensions and contradictions of the revolutionary process are so clear, give us access to many aspects of the Enlightenment and its shadows.

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The French Revolution presents us with an acute case of a crisis of representation. The image of the state before the Revolution had been provided by the body of the king whose figure appeared as a sort of 'sacred centre' of the cultural-political field (Hunt 1984: 87). The authority of the king was affirmed through repeated ceremonies, such as coronations and weddings, and annual festivals. So the Revolution not only abolished monarchy; it also left a gaping hole in the system of representation. The vacuum opened up had to be filled. However, because the monarchy and the church were thought to draw their power partly from the manipulative use of images, spectacles, and emblems, there was a strong current amongst radical thinkers of the Revolutionary period urging the abolition of symbols altogether. Throughout this period, then, there was a tension between an ideal of transparency in the sphere of representation and a need for persuasive symbolization in the political sphere. Another tension related to this is the Revolutionary leaders' demand for didactic clarity and the popular appeal of imagery and icons. Rousseau was the most important theoretical s~urce for the radical ideal of transparency. In the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1754) Rousseau attacked display and competitive games as powerful sources of corruption in the original state of nature: They accustomed themselves to assemble before their huts round a large tree; singing and dancing, the true offspring of love and leisure, became the amusement, or rather the occupation, of men and women assembled together with nothing else to do. Each one began to consider the rest, and to wish to be considered in turn; and thus value came to be attached to public esteem. Whoever sang or danced best, whoever was the handsomest, the strongest, the most dexterous, or the most eloquent came to be of most consideration; and this was the first step toward inequality and at the same time toward vice. (Rousseau 1973: 90)

124 Margaret Iversen Because people won favour for how they appeared in other people's eyes, semblance or the fa