The Secular Contract: The Politics of Enlightenment

The Secular Contract

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The Secular Contract The Politics of Enlightenment

Alex Schulman

2011 The Continuum International Publishing Group 80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038 The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX www.continuumbooks.com © Alex Schulman, 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schulman, Alexander T. The secular contract : the politics of enlightenment / Alexander T. Schulman. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-4411-0664-3 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Political science—History—18th century. 2. Enlightenment. 3. Secularization—History—18th century. I. Title. JC171.S38 2011 320.09’033—dc22 2011005237 ISBN:

978-1-4411-0664-3 (HB)

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to my parents, Alan and Carole Schulman

And let him do his best at deception, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I shall think that I am something. —Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy My own mind is my own church. —Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

Contents Acknowledgments

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INTRODUCTION

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1 THE TREATY OF ATLANTIS

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2 LEGITIMACY IN HISTORY

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3 AMERICAN ENCYCLOPE-DEISM (REVOLUTIONS AND OPEN SOCIETIES I)

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4 THE WELL OF THE CALIPH (REVOLUTIONS AND OPEN SOCIETIES II)

114

5 PARADISE WON

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6 SLOUCHING TOWARD GENEVA

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CONCLUSION—ACADEMIC COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE RECLINE OF THE WEST

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Index

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Acknowledgments Anthony Pagden of UCLA has been both a dedicated adviser and a friend ever since I wandered into his office, my first year of graduate school, with some disorganized thoughts about secularism, the Enlightenment, and the historical trajectory of the West. If even a small portion of his startling erudition is reflected in the final product, I shall count myself lucky. For dependably key support, in the sense of both scholarly guidance and general career advice, I would especially like to thank Joshua Foa Dienstag and Andrew Sabl of UCLA. For help of any relevant sort at various stages of the process I would also like to thank: Alisa Belanger, Michael Frazer, Benjamin Ginsberg, Kirstie McClure, Jeffrey Meikle, Brian Walker, and (of blessed memory) Victor Wolfenstein. Most of all I would like to express my love and gratitude to my wife Vanessa, who makes it all worthwhile.

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Introduction This book reexamines the process of secularization that went on in the European Enlightenment, specifically as it relates to theories of politics. The philosophers of the Enlightenment produced what I shall describe as a “secular contract” for modern politics. In what follows I will anatomize this secular contract and also argue that this was a normatively valuable enterprise whose purposes, arguments, and history we need to recover today as we face challenges from fundamentalist religions. The secular contract is about more than the separation of church and state, though it includes that among its premises. It is also about more than official religious tolerance, though some of the writers I shall examine spoke eloquently in favor of tolerance. At its core it involves not only the separation of the politicaltemporal sphere from spiritual matters, but the application to politics of a new, evolutionary form of knowledge birthed from the scientific revolution, a form of knowledge that of necessity diverges from both divine-scriptural authority and the hierarchical-dogmatic authority of a priestly caste. In this sense it deserves to be mentioned as something that runs concurrent to the development of “social contract” theorizing in the same period, but that also stands in distinction to it, and is not subsumable under it. The social contract was used by the Enlightenment as “less a scientific interpretation of political facts than an ideology for change.”1 “Liberal theory,” writes Carole Pateman, “and its conception of self-assumed obligation, was born in conflict with divine right and patriarchalist theorists who insisted that relationships of subordination and authority were God-given or natural.”2As Harvey Mansfield writes of the lineage leading up to the American founding: If rule derives from divinity, all government is theocracy, more or less, since even if priests are not rulers, rulers are required by the principles of divine right to serve, in some sense, as priests. If rule is made by men, government is constituted by human choice out of human nature, and ‘constitutional government’ so understood, though it may seek or accept the support of religion, is not based on—is indeed constituted against—divine right.3 I should say at the outset that the “secular contract” is an ideal type, built by my fusing together various aspects of Enlightenment political philosophy, something

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to be approached asymptotically. It is not an explicit justificatory mechanism (like Rousseau’s “general will”) that can affirm or dissolve society, with logical precision and beyond doubt, at a given point in time. Indeed, I doubt that any such mechanism is actually available to humans as we exist collectively and historically. I accept a conception of the social contract as a metaphor signaling, historically, the decline of hierarchical corporatism and the rise of egalitarian individualism.4The secular contract is premised upon the social contract, upon the idea that humans can in some sense create their own political universe on this earth, un-predetermined by a law-giving theos and constrained only by certain natural conditions. And as with the social contract, a secular contractarianism would be best theorized not in reference to an actual foundational moment, but instead as a “metaphor for a process of association and mutuality,”5 a “reconstruction . . . made with a view to the immediate application of the discoveries about natural right to present-day political life”6 or a “political metaphor designed to explain the way that individuals’ moral obligations might be self-imposed”7—except the content of the politics in this case emphasizes human cognitive evolution, something not necessitated by a straight social contract (as evidenced most starkly by the neo-Spartan Rousseau). Thus the secular contract is at once a branching off from the social contract, and a key addendum to it. Even the greatest modern social contractarians have tended to emphasize the “exist[ence] over time” of “a just and stable society of free and equal citizens”8 rather than the progress of such a society. This does not mean they are anti-progress; only that they, and thus we political theorists in general, have perhaps thought too little about its institutional preconditions.9 Classical social contract theories generally tell stories about how humans entered into political society from some sort of pre-political state, and in doing so justify or at least explain a preferred social order. What is usually missing from such theories is any comprehensive way to deal with the evolution of human societies over time—and this during a period when the West began a process of material progress and social change unequaled in any human society since the advent of agriculture. The secular contract is a way of re-theorizing the early modern/Enlightenment social contract so that it can politically incorporate the era’s idea of progress. Solidifying progress presupposes religious disestablishment, and not just in the familiar institutional sense: the timeless perfections of divinity and scripture have to be intellectually disestablished. The story told by this book can be boiled down as: from contract to progress via science and secularization. Whatever the contractarian thought experiment’s normative value, humans do not rationally rebuild their political world with every succeeding generation—if we did, that might actually threaten progress rather than enabling it, as we will see James Madison insist—and thus the conditions for affirming transparency and consent all the way down will always be, in practice, hard to consider met. “The problem is that, construed strictly, making actual consent the legitimating keystone of political authority is plainly implausible,” writes Bryan McGraw, “or, at the least, it makes every plausible government almost by definition illegitimate”;

Introduction

3

and turning to “tacit consent [has the] rather dubious effect of inoculating governments precisely against what the legitimacy-consent linkage was meant to do in the first place.”10 The classical contractarian philosophers address this problem, but often in an unsatisfactory way—I will examine this question in more detail later on, especially in light of the late eighteenth-century exchanges between Burke, Paine, Jefferson, and Madison. In any case, few probably consider a process of constant political reconstruction possible or, indeed, desirable. Part of the assurance of an ordered future one presumably desires as a reason for contracting in the first place is fatally undermined by too perpetual a reconstruction or revision of the contract. This is a dilemma that contemporary radical democrats, who “affirm the inescapability of conflict and the ineradicability of resistance to the political and moral projects of ordering subjects, institutions and values,” and value “unending and never-quite-mastered struggles of resistance, adjustment, and negotiation” as such, tend to avoid.11 The “social” in “social contract” ideally renders the contract approved by the society in question, as a whole. How precisely this is to happen has bedeviled, and continues to bedevil, those who want to adopt a contractarian outlook. Continuous active public legitimation seems illogical; but the “thought experiment” method of Immanuel Kant and, in our own era, John Rawls12 can come to seem so airy that the “contract” in question threatens to vanish into the ether—or into the misty realms of a Deified constitutional moment. The major differences in legitimation mechanisms between, for example, Hobbes’s Leviathan and Rousseau’s Social Contract are still mirrored as conflicts about the amount and character of participation necessary for a legal-political order to rightly deem itself consensual. “Participatory democrats” as a sect of modern political theory have been the most challenging, arguing, for example, that “political obligation in the liberal democratic state constitutes an insoluble problem; insoluble because political obligation cannot be given expression within the context of liberal democratic institutions.” I agree that consent theory “runs into difficulties when confronted by the demand to show who has, and when, and how, actually and explicitly consented to the liberal democratic state” and that liberal theorists “rarely treat their own ideals and values as seriously as they deserve and take a hard look at the practical requirements, especially the political requirements, for social life to be a voluntary scheme.”13 Stated thus, the problem may indeed be insoluble. In any case, I will not seek to solve it, so much as to offer a different way of looking at it, based on the very Enlightenment alleged to have bequeathed us (as Hegel argued in its immediate wake) the incoherent idea of a politics legitimated by contract and consent. Thus an aspect of my argument in what follows is that viewing society as a secular contract buttresses the social contract idea by making more meaningful—though not, of course, unassailable—the assumption of continual, piecemeal consent in the latter: the “daily plebiscite” of Renan, but one that accords with (at least potential) progress and evolution. Within the secular contract, political “action”—to use the term Hannah Arendt made popular,14 though of course hers is only one specific way of imagining a “participatory” state—is but one way of participating in the

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polity. Here I reflect my Enlightenment source material, where participation just as often meant adding to the stock of human knowledge and therefore human cognitive progress. But this was not a-political, either: indeed, a chief concern of my Enlightenment interlocutors is what sort of political order best supports that sort of participation. Participation in cognitive growth, and the expansion of opportunity for life experience in this world demonstrates why participation in (arbitrary, as typically birth-determined) surrounding sociopolitical structures is not the only factor in whether lives are held to be consensual. We might see our lives as ones of consent if we participate in the politics we find ourselves in, and thus gain a voice in their legitimation—but if our sociopolitical boundaries are hemmed in by, say, a long-running, large-scale attitude that prizes stasis and piety rather than cognitive expansion and mobility, then how consensual could they really be? Literally we now take “secular” to mean the opposite of sacred or religious, and this is also the sense in which I will mostly use it. A secular contract would thus be a bonding together of humans without the previously felt necessity of divine or priestly legitimation, and a promise not to allow future progress to be sacrificed to the timelessness of any conception of the sacred. “Secularization” once literally meant the expropriation of hitherto Church-held property by the state—but eventually came to be known, as in Max Weber’s work, as a more general long-term process of de-spiritualization or “disenchantment.” Again, I combine these two understandings when interpreting the Enlightenment: the expropriation these thinkers were concerned with was in the sphere of ideas as well as that of material property. The sociologist José Casanova has argued that the true core of the secularization thesis held by most of sociology’s founders lies in the “functional differentiation and emancipation of the secular spheres—primarily the state, the economy, and science—from the religious sphere and the concomitant differentiation and specialization of religion within its own newly found religious sphere,” as opposed to the end of religion itself, or its total privatization.15 Those latter forecasts have not proved entirely prescient. But here I am less interested in secularization as an empirical sociological prediction than in secularization as a normative political position. Casanova identifies in this Enlightenment stance “three clearly distinguishable dimensions: a cognitive one directed against metaphysical and supernatural worldviews; a practical-political one directed against ecclesiastical institutions; and a subjective expressive-aesthetic-moral one directed against the idea of God itself.”16 But political theory as I understand it is capacious enough to at least attempt to weave together these strands. The secular contract presses the intergenerational necessity of secularizing politics to enable moral, cognitive, and cultural progress and to maximize a certain temporally extended idea of consent. And I emphasize generations and the future because “secular” carries another meaning, though one now largely vestigial. It is that of a lasting age or extended time frame, as in the Latin saeculum or related French siécle. These are extended time frames that are decidedly not visions of timelessness. To the extent that social contract theories, and the stories of origin that accompany them, do not claim exact knowledge but rather thought experimentation

Introduction

5

towards ideal normative conclusions, then their critics are beating at an open door when they accuse the contractarians of a lack of historicity. The lack is admitted because, it is contended, premises from historical contingency could justify just about anything, while a truly rational legitimation of social arrangements can only follow on suitably universal premises. So, T. M. Scanlon writes, “An act is wrong if its performance under the circumstances would be disallowed by any system of rules for the general regulation of behaviour which no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced general agreement,” is an elegant contemporary restatement.17 This matrix of freedom and equality links liberalism to contractarianism, as Jeremy Waldron explains: the liberal position provides a basis for arguing against some arrangement or institution inasmuch as one can show that it has not secured, or perhaps could not secure, the consent of the people. And it provides a basis for arguing in favor of an arrangement or institution if one can show that no social order which lacked this feature could possibly secure popular consent.18 Building on seventeenth-century innovations, the Enlightenment left us the language of social contract. But its true legacy in political theory may in fact be the positing of a new “contractual” outlook not only between citizens and their governors, but also between citizens and their future equivalents. Such an emphasis on temporal continuity is typically associated with conservatism, but this is mostly because it was monopolized by religious structures before the Enlightenment’s anti-theocratic push. It had been perverted to serve the maintenance of an original social/political/cognitive model, usually owing to its allegedly divine origins. So just as Rawlsian contractarianism posits that (for example) no rational actor would approve a racial caste system for a society in which his racial status was unknown, the secular contract posits that no legislator not already under the spell of a divinity would approve a society that threatens the progressive potential of itself and its progeny through the sanctification of any of its politics, institutions, or cultural/intellectual life. My contention here is that in the work of the contractarian writers, from Hobbes to Kant, and their Enlightenment co-thinkers, one can trace—through their attitudes toward theology, religion, the conflict between the spiritual and the secular, and between church and state—the advent of a form of political theorizing beyond the social contract; one that, in seeking to tame religious belief and filter it out of the public sphere, also deals with fundamental questions about how human societies are to deal with the nature and evolution of knowledge itself.

Enlightenment(s) The often polemical series of evaluations and reevaluations, denunciations and salvagings, of the Enlightenment has in some sense gone on since Rousseau. “The Enlightenment,” as historian Olwen Hufton puts it, “has never been a neutral subject

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for study.”19 The interface between contemporary politics and recent intellectual trends gives this debate, if anything, a greater salience than usual. Debates for many decades thought to be relatively moribund—about the secular character of modern societies, the desirability and/or availability of the secularization process, and related issues regarding the place of religious faith in society—have been rekindled. In nearly every case it is the legacy of the Enlightenment that is implicitly or explicitly said to be up for reinterpretation, if not outright affirmation-versus-negation. All these works—from massive summa-minded exegeses from historian Jonathan Israel and philosopher Charles Taylor to more popularly pitched works by writers like Jennifer Michael Hecht, Mark Lilla, and Susan Neiman20—point us in interesting directions as to the character and future of what, for lack of an ultimately better phrase, we should still call the Enlightenment project. Yet we still lack an account of the specifically political salience of Enlightenment secularization: that is, not only how secularization matters to the proper interpretation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political theory, but how such a line of interpretation can provide a normative pathway through contemporary debates. The books mentioned above all, of course, offer some kind of an interpretation in this direction. But nowhere is secularization given its proper political centrality, and where the interface is discussed, I find the accounts to be, at least in part, simplistic or misleading. That is hopefully where my own work comes in. I seek to provide a detail-attentive but still openly normative (some might even say polemical) account of the lineage of modern liberalism in the early modern matrix of scientific revolution, social contract theory, and secular-progressive historical consciousness. Jonathan Israel’s project is closest to my own in its readings and sympathies. He is a tireless expositor of Enlightenment secularization, and I (and we) owe a great deal to his mammoth histories. However, he builds his work around a division of the Enlightenment into “radical” and “moderate” that, while common enough, does not stand up to scrutiny. Or, to put it differently: though one can surely find a party of radicals facing a party of moderates depending upon how one sets out the terms, I argue that what is most important in the political philosophy of the Enlightenment is not what can be attributed to one party of philosophes and not another, but rather what they shared. Israel’s view that “undeniably the Radical Enlightenment was republican, did reject divine-right monarchy, and did evince anti-aristocratic and democratic tendencies,”21 for example, discards any adequate optic for marquee names like Voltaire—broadly monarchist but with democratic “tendencies” if one seeks them out; deist but merciless toward organized religion—or Voltaire’s bête noire Rousseau—who would preserve a Spartan Geneva while consigning Paris to decadence; who would have his citystate execute atheists; at once the most “republican” and the most reactionary among the philosophes . . . and is an account of the Enlightenment that leaves a Montesquieu or a Voltaire in the dustbin of history satisfactory? To be fair, Israel has recognized the existence of such hard cases in his most recent installment— yet he remains staunch that “On the main points, bridging the points between

Introduction

7

Radical democratic Enlightenment and moderate antidemocratic Enlightenment was literally inconceivable both philosophically and practically.” 22 Such dichotomizing or pluralizing of the Enlightenment is an oft-encountered trope, with one of the sides typically being defended, in the process, as the “real” one, or at least the one that should be our principle guide, at the expense of the other. We now have well-argued accounts of not only the radical versus moderate Enlightenment, but also the high versus low Enlightenment,23 the nation versus nation Enlightenment,24 and the drily rationalistic Enlightenment versus the Enlightenment that embraced sympathy and the emotions.25 This is apart from the powerful tradition of post-1960s history of political thought that rereads this period as the last stand of classical republicanism, wrongly transformed into an ontogeny of modern liberalism by the latter’s apologists.26 Sometimes these divisions overlap. Friedrich Hayek divides the Enlightenment into English versus French, which equals moderate versus radical: “The first of these knew liberty; the second did not. As a result, we have had to the present day two different traditions in the theory of liberty: one empirical and unsystematic, the other speculative and rationalistic.”27 David Gress, in a similar vein, praises a moderate or “skeptical” Enlightenment as being the legitimate offspring of Western history, as against its bastard sibling, the “radical” Enlightenment: Hume against Rousseau.28 Thus Israel’s valuation is reversed, though the structure of the claim remains. A most explicit, propagandistic (xenophobic?) coloring of the radical-moderate dichotomy came recently from the pen of neoconservative historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, who wants “to reclaim the Enlightenment . . . above all, from the French who have dominated and usurped it . . . I propose to restore it, in good part, to the British,”29 and through them to the Americans, who built approximately the right sort of anti-statist, stillGod-fearing polity out of it. America’s Christian right intellectuals have pursued this line even further, positioning a Calvinist Locke and his pious cross-Atlantic heirs against atheistic (and thus terroristic) Frenchmen.30 It has been argued from the other side that classical contractarianism and its interpreters have ignored (or covered up) things like sexual and racial domination: most famously in the work of Carole Pateman and Charles Mills.31 But a large variety of political arrangements across time and space have been compatible with racial and/or sexual oppression. Why have the societies that historically legitimated themselves via contracts, real or metaphorical, proven more willing to liberate women at a legal level and weaken sexual taboos at a social level than have more traditional societies where religion, caste, or other hierarchical and patriarchal structures have yielded far less to “the standpoint of contract” (Hegel)? Only one culture at one point in time produced progressive public secularism—the one that simultaneously began to talk about its politics as a contract. One can seek to pluralize or unmask the Enlightenment apart from partisan purposes. The historian Roy Porter, for example, in a fluent and enjoyable account of one of the national Enlightenments (Britain in this case), begins with a warning: “The Enlightenment is not a good thing or a bad thing, to be cheered or jeered.

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Apart from anything else, heroes-and-villains judgmentalism would be absurd because . . . there never was a monolithic ‘Enlightenment project.’ ”32 Porter’s instincts are somewhat similar to Himmelfarb’s, though, in mourning “myopia arising from straining on France,” which leads to “hearing in the Enlightenment heartbeat a militant secularism” not necessarily there. “The simple fact is that Enlightenment goals—like criticism, sensibility or faith in progress—throve in England within piety.”33 This begs the question of what is meant by “piety.” At the time, plenty of Britons did not agree, painting an approving or apocalyptic picture (depending on where they stood) of coffee houses rife with skepticism, atheism, and gleeful satirical blasphemy.34 A willingness to live with the Church of England did not a pious person make. While Steven D. Smith, for example, is not entirely wrong to claim that the “unapologetically religious character of [this] eighteenthcentury Enlightenment discourse, and more specifically its persistent reliance on the premise of a providential order, may be disconcerting to modern heirs of the Enlightenment,”35 this line of argument suppresses the amount of meaningful Enlightenment theory that exists between having “the premise of a providential order” and being “religious,” either then or now. Porter is surely right—and many have made this observation—that the difference in political and social circumstances between Britain and France left the former without the same need for a dedicated anti-clerical philosophe party. “The deism of the philosophes,” writes Norman Hampson, “took on an anti-clerical, in some cases an anti-Christian edge that was unnecessary in England or the Netherlands and impolitic elsewhere. The result was often to give a provocative and an aggressive air to what was basically a quite moderate message.”36 But to draw too sharp a distinction between England and France, or AngloAmerica and France seems to me equally ahistorical. It does not explain the philosophe-friendly yet somewhat conservative-minded yet plainly atheistic David Hume, for example, any better than the eminent historian Peter Gay’s older broad tent of an “Enlightenment Project.”37 Ditto Thomas Jefferson, and for similar reasons. The evidence of cross-channel, and cross-Atlantic transmissions—going every direction—of intellectual and political passions is simply too great. This is not to say that context is unimportant (obviously). But we should not ignore the way in which intellectual trends in the academy, and the demands of the profession, themselves historically contingent, have produced this situation. One is more likely to get the attention of colleagues by pointing out how a previous unity must be pluralized or problematized, or how an existing grand narrative has effaced counter-narratives, and so forth, than by doing the opposite. Up to a point, there are good reasons for this. No one wants to be a terrible simplifier. Yet I believe that Graeme Garrard is right when he says that this drive to Enlightenment pluralization is “an over-reaction to the unavoidable vagueness of language and creates many problems of its own.”38 Or as Gerald Gaus puts it, Just as we run the risk of oversimplification by too easily identifying ‘the Enlightenment’ view, or thinking that all Enlightenment thinkers advocate

Introduction

9

this view, so too do we run the risk of failing to appreciate themes and overriding concerns if refused to allow such general descriptions.39 There is no perfect solution; but at the risk of being that simplificateur terrible my framework owes as much to that of older Enlightenment scholars like Ernst Cassirer40 and Gay as it does to those who made their names contravening them. No intellectual movement that contains both Montesquieu and Diderot, both Hume and Gibbon, can be reduced to any single set of premises with which a fan of parsimony will be completely comfortable. But I think the development of the web of interlocking positions I call the secular contract is, from the perspective of political theory at least, as good as any.

Liberalism, Enlightenment, and Religion In the past 20 years, a dauntingly vast literature has developed around questions about how an officially secular state should interact with citizens or groups who make claims based on their faiths.41 Though I will comment on some of these questions over the course of the book, it seems important to, at the outset, describe how this work does and does not address them. To a surprisingly large extent, this literature, at least at the level of normative philosophy, has grown out of a single concept, or web of concepts: the “political liberalism,” “overlapping consensus,” and “public reason” of the later work of John Rawls.42 To sum up a by now well-known story (and admittedly simplify a complex argument): in Political Liberalism (1993) Rawls disowned the “comprehensive” liberalism of his earlier work A Theory of Justice (1971), opting instead for something like a modus vivendi—the “overlapping consensus.” But the area of the overlap, Rawls claimed, was to be “public reason,” a mode of reason-giving that all members of a society in their public capacity as citizens can recognize and discuss. This might proscribe particularistic or nonrational moral viewpoints, like those based in theology. This idea has occasioned an immense outpouring of responses now stretching over decades. Though some have supported the position of Rawls—and of certain deliberative theorists working in the vein of Jurgen Habermas’s “ideal speech situation”—that religious arguments that cannot be rephrased with a secular rationale should be excluded from public life,43 the consensus has shifted toward those who take the position that excluding religion from the public sphere is either illiberal, or undemocratic, or unpragmatic and unnecessary, or some combination thereof.44 Some critics of the Rawlsian “overlapping consensus” have gone even further to insist that justice demands not only toleration but positive affirmation or recognition of the value of particularistic group identities, including religious ones.45 These are interesting issues, and scholars from political theory and related disciplines have ably staked out a variety of well-defended positions, often (though not always) based on studies of actual cases. But what is important, from my perspective, is as much what has been bracketed from this debate as what has been said in it. Broadly speaking, the strong Enlightenment position has gone missing. The

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liberalism and religion debate has revolved around the basis of reasons given by citizens (real or imaginary) in public about their political preferences. Such debate about the nature of reason-giving has been more prominent than debate about whether, or why, the actual content of our politics, the concrete actions taken by those in judicial and legislative office, should be secular or religious. And indeed, a debate about such content could hardly proceed absent sustained argument about conceptions of “the good” more generally, conceptions for a long time proscribed by the liberal intoxication with “neutrality.” This entity called “the good” is often presented by political theorists as a kind of master concept, an empty vessel into which individuals or groups place their “comprehensive” worldviews. Then the debate becomes about how to accommodate various conflicting “good” concepts, or whether to allow them to the dance in the first place. But why not just admit that we all—except thoroughgoing philosophical skeptics, perhaps—have substantive, content-filled political conceptions of “the good” and then have an argument about which one is true, or at least which one is best for collective human life? The philosophes would have found the absence of such a conversation, as well as what has replaced it, odd. I shall try to reconstruct their argument in it from my own perspective. I believe this is necessary, despite the seemingly already extensive debate about liberalism and religion, because even the most vigorous affirmers of public secularism have largely stayed within the framework established by Rawls. But the relationship between Rawlsian “public reason” and the “reason” looked to by the Enlightenment is problematic, as has been argued expertly by Steven D. Smith: Rawls’s ‘public reason’ is not the ‘Reason’ of . . . Enlightened thinkers; indeed, it comes closer in crucial respects to being Reason’s nemesis—or at least its nanny, whose task is to keep Reason under control and out of sight when the important public functions occur . . . in the eighteenth century a commitment to reason denoted a willingness to pursue the truth and to follow the argument wherever it leads, with the confidence that reason will ultimately lead people to converge on the truth. In contemporary political liberalism, in stark contrast, ‘reasonableness’ denotes a willingness not to pursue or invoke for vital public purposes what one believes to be the ultimate truth—a willingness based on the judgment that reason will not lead to convergence but will instead subvert a civic peace that can be maintained only if people agree not to make important public decisions on the basis of arguing about what is ultimately true.46 The problem is that the Rawlsian debate is about stability-tolerance-social contract, rather than progress-cognitive growth-secular contract. It is not that the former is not a worthwhile debate; it has been and is. But a great deal of the original impetus for the liberal and contractual theories of the Enlightenment has simply been read away. One may ultimately decide that this was a good thing, and that a chastened modus vivendi is all we should ever hope for. But the actual Enlightenment

Introduction

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position still needs to be strongly and honestly put forward. Otherwise we will have had a debate with one of the candidates barred from the auditorium.

*

*

*

I proceed as follows. Chapter 1 establishes the origins of the “secular contract,” this combination of contractarianism, secularism, and science-inspired progressivism, in the seventeenth century. In examining the writings of Bacon, Hobbes, and Spinoza, I argue that contemporary liberal theory has erred in treating exhaustion from the finally waning wars of religion as the necessary and sufficient condition for liberalism and toleration; though that was certainly an important element, the emergence of modern materialist science and the epistemological revolution it promised was just as important. Hobbes offered an enduringly famous absolutist solution to this epistemological-political problem; Spinoza, by temporalizing Hobbes’s secular contract, has proved more perspicacious about the long-term trajectory of modern politics. These theorists laid the groundwork for the “politics of progress” whose promises and perils would consume the subsequent centuries. Chapter 2 moves into the eighteenth century and reads Enlightenment historiography, Hume and Gibbon in particular, but others (Voltaire, Robertson) as well. It argues that though this move toward history is often seen as a rejection of earlier rational-contractual models of political legitimacy, in fact the historians thought their method was a wiser path toward the same outcome. Enlightenment historiography did this work in several interlocking ways I examine and relate to one another: first, it maintained that history could be both exhortative and empirical. Second, it questioned the veracity of social contract theorizing while broadly supporting the latter’s non-theistic and rationalist political conclusions. Third, it presented European history as a narrative wherein the process of secularization conferred legitimacy on modern politics (as opposed to legitimacy deriving from any one-time act of contract). The focus was in particular on events and processes that told a proto-dialectical (albeit non-deterministic) story of the negation of the Roman Empire by feudalism and in turn the negation of the feudalism by modernity, and in doing so offered lastingly important reinterpretations of major historical moments like the Reformation. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 take us from the early modern and early-Enlightenment secular contract theorists to the revolutionary era at the end of the eighteenth century. I compare thinkers—and actors—on both continents, in particular Jefferson and Madison in America, the Encyclopedists and Rousseau in France, and Immanuel Kant in Germany. In Chapter 3, the framework of the secular contract provides a novel optic for looking at enduring controversies about the place of religion in the project of the American founders, and thus its place in the modern commercial republic more broadly. I argue that there is a missing dimension in controversies over the founders’ “intentions” on this score, insofar as such controversies are framed by contemporary free exercise debates. This is perfectly legitimate, but it risks losing a major aspect of Enlightenment context, which was concerned not

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only with pursuit of happiness and freedom of worship (though it was that, too) but also with cognitive progress, and the political institutions and social temper necessary for it. The latter concerned the founders more than has been recognized, especially during the revival of evangelical Christianity that followed upon the French Revolutionary Wars. I then turn, in Chapter 4, to high-tide Enlightenment of the French Encyclopedistes and anatomize the politics of cognitive growth suggested by the clash of Montesquieu, Diderot, d’Alembert, Condorcet, and others with the power holders of the old regime. In so doing I elucidate Enlightenment anxieties about the fragility of intellectual progress, and the ever-available temptations to politically shut it down, by looking at the tumultuous entry or Jean-Jacques Rousseau onto the public stage, and reading Rousseau against the other philosophes, Condorcet in particular. Rousseau’s break with the “party of humanity” has, in political philosophy at least, been alluded to more often than properly explored. Rousseau here appears as an alarm to the philosophes that the theocratic temptation may be able to return again and again, often in unforeseen guises. Chapter 5 rereads in depth the political writings of Immanuel Kant, the man often thought to be a main philosophical progenitor of contemporary contractarian liberalism (mainly through his influence on John Rawls and Jurgan Habermas). I show how Kant has been misinterpreted in that his radical secularism, specifically as it tied into his political theory, has been ignored: thus if Kant is a or the quintessential Enlightenment liberal, we must conclude that quintessential Enlightenment liberalism is properly understood as the secular contract I have laid out. The final section take stock of the (broadly speaking) modern intellectual landscape, and outlines what I perceive as our failures as children of the Enlightenment to properly defend our inheritance. I argue that the secular counter-Enlightenment serves, intentionally or not, the twentieth and now twenty-first century revanche de Dieu: the theocratic challenge to modern secular politics. Here the contemporary relevance is probably at its most dangerous and badly analyzed in the academy: I refer to radical Islam and its imperious, anti-modern politics. I demonstrate the dispiriting tendencies among left/liberal thinkers who should otherwise be friends of secular and progressive politics, and argue that this would leave us in an unpromising position from which to defend liberalism (again, broadly speaking) against the forces of reaction and theocracy. Employing the tradition of strong Enlightenment liberalism I have elucidated in the first part of the book, I argue that a different liberalism, a “liberalism with spine,” is not only possible but necessary.

Notes 1. Louis Dupre, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 162. 2. Carole Pateman, The Problem of Political Obligation: A Critical Analysis of Liberal Theory (New York: Wiley, 1979), 6.

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3. Harvey Mansfield, America’s Constitutional Soul (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 101. 4. The classic statement is Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law: Its Connection to the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (London: J. Murray, 1861). For a more economistic account see C. B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 5. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 54. 6. Thomas L. Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism: a Commentary on the Spirit of the Laws (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 41. 7. Robert Wokler, “Anthropology and Conjectural History in the Enlightenment,” in Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth Century Domains, ed. Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), chap. 2, quote at 38. 8. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 4. 9. Economic historians, on the other hand, have developed a growing literature on progress and sociopolitical institutions. See in particular the works of Joel Mokyr: The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), and The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 10. Bryant T. McGraw, Faith in Politics: Religion and Liberal Democracy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 69–70. 11. Bonnie Honig, “Difference, Dilemmas, and the Politics of Home,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 258–9. On the rationality of collectively constraining our futures see Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979) and Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 12. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), esp. 11–22. 13. Pateman, The Problem of Political Obligation, 1–3, 15, and see 22 for the problems that contracting for future generations introduces into liberal consent theory. I will examine the intergenerational problem in greater detail later on. For a skeptical look at these issues from a liberal, rather than participatory democratic, position, see Don Herzog, Without Foundations: Justification in Political Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) and Happy Slaves: A Critique of Consent Theory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 14. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), esp. 175–247. 15. José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 19, and 3–66 more generally. 16. Ibid., 30. 17. T. M. Scanlon, “Contractarianism and Utilitarianism,” in Utilitarianism and Beyond, ed. Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (Cambridge University Press, 1982), 110.

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18. Jeremy Waldron, Liberal Rights: Collected Papers 1981–1991 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 50. 19. Olwen Hufton, Europe: Privilege and Protest, 1730–1789 (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 46. 20. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007); an extension of materials also found in Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), and most recently A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Jennifer Michael Hecht, Doubt: A History (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003); Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007); Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Inc., 2008). 21. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 21. For example, one of Israel’s radical exemplars is Pierre Bayle—but as I have shown elsewhere, Bayle was not unequivocally the Spinozist radical Israel makes him out to be. See Alex Schulman, “The Twilight of Probability: Bayle, Locke and the Toleration of Atheists,” Journal of Religion, 89 (July 2009), 328–60. 22. Israel, A Revolution of the Mind, 12–13. 23. Most famously in the work of historian Robert Darnton: see The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) and The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1995). 24. The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 25. Michael L. Frazer, Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and Today (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 26. See Part Three of J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Though and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975) and Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969). For a corrective that establishes liberalism as “born from the spirit of republicanism, from attempts to adapt republicanism to the political, economic, and social revolutions of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth,” a “conceptual hybrid both against and within republican terminology, ideas, and aspirations,” see Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1–17, quotes at 4–5. 27. Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: Regnery, 1960), 54–6. 28. David Gress, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and its Opponents (New York: Free Press, 1998), chap. 7. 29. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (New York: Knopf, 2004), 3. For her critique of the “French” Enlightenment see 147–88. 30. See Michael Lienesch, Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right (Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 145–7, 177–83.

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31. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988); Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Carole Pateman and Charles W. Mills, Contract and Domination (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity, 2007). 32. Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2000). 33. “The Enlightenment in England,” in The Enlightenment in National Context, 6. 34. See John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England 1660–1750 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). 35. “Recovering (From) Enlightenment?,” in America and Enlightenment Constitutionalism, ed. Gary L. McDowell and Jonathan O’Neill (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 22. 36. “The Enlightenment in France,” in ibid., 37. 37. See Peter Gay’s The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1967). 38. Graeme Garrard, Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2006), 7. 39. Gerald F. Gaus, Contemporary Theories of Liberalism: Public Reason as a PostEnlightenment Project (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003), 5–6. 40. See Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951 [orig. Tubingen, 1932]). 41. A good introduction to the various positions, with many references to actual cases, can be found in Obligations of Citizenship and Demands of Faith, ed. Nancy Rosenblum (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 42. See Rawls, Political Liberalism. For accounts of the premises behind Rawls’ shift from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism see McGraw, Faith in Politics, 8–9, 78–80; and Charles Larmore, “Political Liberalism,” Political Theory,Vol. 18, No. 3 (Aug., 1990), 339–60. 43. E.g., Robert Audi, Religious Commitment and Secular Reason (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and for a debate with the other side see Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Religion in the Public Square: The place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997). For arguments that the state has a legitimate civic purpose in creating a public sphere that excludes exclusivist identities like those of religion, see Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) and Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Eamonn Callan, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy (New York: Clarendon Press, 1997). 44. E.g., Ken Greenawalt, Religious Convictions and Political Choice (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) and Private Consciences and Public Reasons (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Christopher J. Eberle, Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Jeff Spinner-Halev, Surviving Diversity: Religion and Liberal Democracy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press); Paul J. Weithman, Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Jon A. Shields, The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

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University Press, 2009); Steven D. Smith, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2010); McGraw, Faith in Politics. 45. E.g., Anna E. Galeotti, Toleration as Recognition (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Ingrid Creppell, Toleration and Identity: Foundations in Early Modern Thought (New York: Routledge, 2002), esp. 159. On “toleration” as a point of contemporary theoretical debate more generally see Justifying Toleration: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives, ed. Susan Mendus (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, ed. David Heyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 46. Smith, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, 13–15.

1 The Treaty of Atlantis This chapter pivots around the political theory of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes’s work constitutes a foundational moment in the development of the political-theoretical structure I seek to describe, particularly insofar as he separates ethics from theology, redescribes supposedly divine or transcendent or holy experiences as purely naturalistic, and takes all this as evidence that modern politics must defang religion. But Hobbes, for all that he has often been read as the practically autochthonous legislator of political modernity, and for all that we should never underestimate his originality, does not exist in a vacuum. He writes as a participant in Francis Bacon’s “instauration”; broadly, the project to replace the existing cat’s cradle of theology and scholasticism with a science—in whose purview the human animal is included—fit for moderns. But there is a peculiar tension running through Hobbes’s work: Baconian fundamentals clash with Hobbes’s own distrust of experiment. This (among other things) leads him to a political solution that risks closing down or perverting the scientifically and epistemologically progressive society he seeks. Thus I turn at the end to Spinoza, who offers a rudimentary solution to the problem of starting with Hobbesian premises and nevertheless ending with institutionalized progress.

The Autarchic Politics of Progress: Bacon Bacon’s Utopia, like most Utopias, was an attempt to bring heaven down to earth. And so far as it promises an increase of power and of wealth through self-help and self-liberation through new knowledge, it is perhaps the one Utopia that has (so far) kept its promise. Indeed it has kept it to an almost unbelievable extent. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations Though he provided no architectonic political treatise to compare with the Leviathan, Bacon’s is a proto-secular contract theory in that his project for

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the peaceful accumulation of scientific knowledge under civil protection, whether suggested by a personal religious impulse or not, requires the disciplining of heretofore-existing religion. In his essay “Of Truth,” Bacon would “count it as a bondage to fix a belief ” (BW, 12:811). Though religion remains for Bacon “the chief band of human society,” Bacon nevertheless emphasizes the need for “circumspection” in any state enforcement of religious belief. There be two swords amongst Christians, the spiritual and temporal; and both have their due office and place in the maintenance of religion. But we may not take up the third sword, which is Mahomet’s sword, or like unto it; that is, to propagate religion by wars, or by sanguinary persecutions to force consciences . . . as the temporal sword is to be drawn with great circumspection, in case of religion; so it is a thing monstrous to put it into the hands of the common people. Let that be left unto the Anabaptists, and other furies. (12:90–1) Bacon fears the consequences for civil peace of a religious passion run amok, but the Baconian state is not simply the protector of a content-free perpetuation of peace and tolerance. It is the accumulation of human power over nature through experimental science that moved this philosopher-politician. Bacon does not share subsequent fears that the potential avalanche of secular information producible by empirical science is just as likely to exacerbate religiousideological disputes as to quiet them. His essay “Of Suspicion” reports, “There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little; and therefore men should remedy suspicion by procuring to know more, and not to keep their suspicions in smother” (12:190–1). And the most irascible producer of suspicion is religion, an “excess of outward and pharisaical holiness,” an “over-great reverence of traditions,” and “the taking and aim at divine matters by human, which cannot but breed mixture of imaginations” (12:136). Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning (1605) avers that it is misguided to impute a priori negative political consequences to a secular “instauration”: Again, for that other conceit that learning should undermine the reverence of laws and government, it is assuredly a mere depravation and calumny, without all shadow of truth. For to say that a blind custom of obedience should be a surer obligation than duty taught and understood, it is to affirm, that a blind man may tread surer by a guide than a seeing man can by a light . . . the most barbarous, rude, and unlearned times have been most subject to tumults, seditions, and changes. (6:104–5) The worst bowing of learning before custom is the bowing of scientific thinking before theology. Of the “facility of credit and accepting or admitting things weakly authorized or warranted,” Bacon specifically cites the “narrations of miracles

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wrought by martyrs, hermits, or monks of the desert, and other holy men, and their relics, shrines, chapels, and images” (6:125–6). It is in this sense that Bacon’s critique of atheism reads as rather tepid indeed. “It is true,” Bacon writes, “that a little philosophy inclines man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy brings men’s minds about to religion,” and yet he allows that atheism actually becomes likely only in “learned times, specially with peace and prosperity; for troubles and adversities do more bow men’s minds to religion” (12:134). (Indeed, there is a passage in the Advancement of Learning [6:147] about the civilintellectual splendors of the Roman Empire between Domitian and Commodus that maps almost exactly onto Edward Gibbon’s more famous later description.) Even if we read this to mean that a little philosophy might be a dangerous thing, Bacon is far more adamant that the wrong kind of religious learning is what is most potentially crippling for a society’s intellectual life. He gets more excited condemning the Scholastics (in this case adumbrating Hobbes, who as a young man spent a time as Bacon’s secretary2) than in discussing the atheists languishing under an Augustan peace. The problem with the “carping of the schoolmen,” as Hobbes will later describe it, or for Adam Smith “this cobweb science of Ontology, which was likewise sometimes called Metaphysicks” where “natural philosophy, came to be taught only as subservient to theology” and “the duties of human life were treated of as chiefly subservient to the happiness of a life to come,”3is the fundamentally anti-humanistic implications of putting theology on the throne as the “Queen of Sciences.” But what sort of science and learning is to replace it? The Scholastics are “for a while good and proportionable; but then when you descend to their distinctions and decisions, instead of a fruitful womb for the use and benefit of a man’s life, they end in monstrous altercations and barking questions” (6:123–4). Soon, in Smith’s account, the “doctrine of spirits, of which so little can be known,” crowds out “the doctrine of bodies, of which so much can be known.”4Testing the advance of knowledge based on its human usefulness, and applying the Baconian method of experimental testability is supposed to ensure that secular philosophical disputes to not mirror the hermetical intellectual labyrinths of Scholasticism. The scientific outlook furnishes a “natural philosophy as shall not vanish in the fume of subtle, sublime, or delectable speculation, but such as shall be operative to the endowment and benefits of man’s life” (6:187–8). Humans may pursue knowledge for all sorts of reasons, from “natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite” to “ornament and reputation” or “lucre and profession”— yet “the end ought to be . . . that knowledge may not be as a courtesan . . . but as a spouse, for generation, fruit, and comfort” (6:134–5). Thus the island denizens of Bacon’s fantasia New Atlantis (1627), though nominally Christian, study everything except God. They are particularly enamored of medicine—the visitors, washed ashore from a different cognitive sphere, now “between death and life . . . beyond both the old world and the New,” cannot but regard it as a religious sort of salvation: “the amendment of the sick, who thought themselves cast into some divine pool of healing, they mended so kindly and so fast” (5:366–7). As

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Karl Popper implied, Bacon’s “utopia,” however far-fetched then (or even, in some respects, now), was not literally a “no-place” and certainly no sort of satire. Yet the New Atlantis says little about political structures, and this is not because they were supposed to have evaporated as in later utopias.5 Throughout his tumultuous personal life, Bacon was ambivalent about the political life being a worthy one. Though he was deeply involved in the court politics of both the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, he claimed to desire a retired life of contemplation over one of political involvement, writing to his uncle, “I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civic ends.”6 Bacon saw no easy solution for the political problems that might inhere in this proto-Enlightenment epistemology. On the one hand, he was not as worried as Hobbes or Descartes about the potential “demons” that could render sense judgments untrustworthy. The denizens of New Atlantis do recognize that perceptions can deceive, but we only learn this via an implication that they have mastered said problem, keeping “houses of deceits of the senses, where we represent all manner of feats of juggling, false apparitions, impostures, and illusions, and their fallacies” (5:409). Error has been relegated to a museum, but the implication is that epistemological disputes might translate into political ones. This leads back to a warning that metaphysical inquiry “must be bounded by religion, or else it will be subject to deceit and delusion” (6:254). Kant thought that while Bacon “gave a brilliant example of the method in his Organon of how the hidden constitution of natural things could be uncovered through experiments,” the method remained insufficient to give instruction according to definite rules as to how one should search successfully, for we must always first presuppose something here (begin with a hypothesis) from which to begin our course of investigation, and this must come about as a result of principles, certain modes of procedure.7 Bacon saw this himself, and reached the basically Hobbesian conclusion that political peace requires an a priori settling of terms: “imitate the wisdom of the mathematicians, in setting down in the very beginning the definitions of our words and terms, that others may know how we accept and understand them, and whether they concur with us or no” (6:279). There were various potential political solutions to the controversies that surround the anti-theological “instauration” of the Bacon-Descartes-Hobbes period. Bacon’s political service and scientific reform projects were joined, it has been argued, by his belief that strong Tudor authority and technocratic management would reinforce each other, strengthening the realm.8 In the Discourse on Method (1637), written around a decade after Bacon’s death, René Descartes claimed to have little problem employing a radical skepticism against his own mind while simultaneously keeping to an essentially conservative political doctrine of obedience toward existing authority. He accepted “a provisional code of morals . . . to obey the laws and the customs of my country,” because “great bodies are too

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difficult to raise up once they have been knocked down, or even to hold up once they have been shaken; and their fall can only be very violent.” For Descartes, “imperfections are almost always more tolerable than changing them would be”9 where human society is concerned, though he held precisely the opposite view when it came to individual human cognition. Hume in turn thought that genuine “Cartesian doubt . . . were it ever possible to be attained by any human creature (as it plainly is not) would be entirely incurable,” but still recommended a moderate version of it as “a necessary preparative to the study of philosophy, by preserving a proper impartiality in our judgments, and weaning our mind from all those prejudices, which we may have imbibed from education or rash opinion.”10 Hobbes agreed with Descartes that it was “Want of Science” that “disposeth, or rather constraineth a man to rely on the advice, and authority of others” and “disposeth a man to make Custom and Example the rule of his actions” (L, 7311)—and, though he did not have the luxury of a stable polity whose maintenance he could recommend, he was as concerned as Descartes with the modern revision of ancient and scholastic knowledge being compatible with good political order. Thomas Spragens notes “the persistent conjunction in Western thought of epistemological inquiry and profound political theory”; the Enlightenment, he writes, produced “a sociology of error” that “indicted [the] institutional bulwarks of the epistemological failure.”12 Bacon composed tracts framing the tasks and potential methods of a new empirical science, but not its political management. Popper may be right that Bacon’s attitude toward the accumulation of information and its application toward “the enlarging of the bounds of human empire” remained fundamentally religious,13 but there is equally the sense that Bacon saw a normative project in the reorienting of human attitudes from religious to secular time, and the canalization of emotions from heaven down to earth, to the advance of the species over generations. He suggests that science might come to be seen as not only useful but supremely pleasurable in that human creativity, and the transmission of knowledge is both the only conceivable “immortality” and the only pleasure that is perpetually renewable: “in all other pleasures there is satiety” while learning “appears to be good in itself simply,” and moreover may achieve “immortality or continuance” (BW, 6:167–8). A lasting foundation can be built through the perpetual renewal of desire for knowledge and its fulfillment; this marks science off from bodily pleasures like eating or sex, where satisfaction just cycles us back to level zero. Hobbes suggests the same thing in chapter six of the Leviathan (1651). “Curiosity,” the “Desire, to know why, and how,” is a “Lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of Knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure” (L, 42). In his tart essays on marriage and parenthood, Bacon even suggests that the accumulation and transmission of knowledge could be seen as a nobler equivalent for species regeneration, the latter of which, because instinctual, does not distinguish us from animals (BW, 12:99–101). Spinoza, despite his materialism, drew a similar mind/ body comparison in a Baconian letter asking “whether there is or can be a method such that thereby we can make sure and unwearied progress in the study of things

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of the highest importance; or whether our minds, like our bodies, are at the mercy of chance,” and deciding to “show that there must be necessarily be a method whereby we can direct and interconnect our clear and distinct perceptions, and that the intellect is not, like the body, at the mercy of chance.”14 In De Sapienta Veterum (1609), Bacon’s commentary upon ancient myths and fables, Prometheus, rebel against the Gods, is redescribed as the manifestation of God itself. The Chief aim of the parable appears to be, that Man . . . may be regarded as the center of the world; insomuch that if man were taken away from the world, the rest would seem to be all astray, without aim or purpose, to be like a besom without a binding, as the saying is, and to be leading to nothing. (13:145–6) Yet this is not supposed to be a warrant for self-congratulation or egomania. Bacon tempers his hedonic interpretation of the pursuit of knowledge by redescribing the punishment of Prometheus as a kind of Protestant sermon of humility before this new God: the accusation of Prometheus, our maker and master though he be, yea sharp and vehement accusation, is a thing more sober and profitable than this overflow of congratulation and thanksgiving: let them know that conceit of plenty is one of the principle causes of want. (13:150) Bacon’s scientist is not a hero, and not a substitute shaman; he is more a simple workman. The authors of the Encyclopédie, indebted to Bacon’s “tree” of knowledges, would follow upon this marriage of pro-science ideology and the attempt to resuscitate dignity for technical crafts. Bacon’s sketch is often said to have predicted the explosion of scientific societies in the Enlightenment, one of the most famous of which—England’s Royal Society—was to draw both the affections and the wrath of Thomas Hobbes. If in the Royal Society “What was at stake . . . was the creation and the preservation of a calm space in which natural philosophers could heal their divisions, collectively agree upon the foundations of knowledge, and thereby establish their credit in Restoration culture,”15 then it played out Baconian concerns about the sheltering of science from politics. But Plato’s Academy this was not to be. The New Atlantis works via teams of virtually anonymous functionaries, not via a cult of genius that waits with baited breath to cast forth a Galileo or a Newton.16 The historian of science Herbert Butterfield claimed that Bacon erred in believing that his epistemological revolution could take place within one generation.17 But Bacon admits that “the perfection of the sciences is to be looked for not from the swiftness or ability of any one inquirer, but from a succession” (13:155–6), and theoretically an unlimited one. This forms something of a contrast with rhetoric suggesting that true science—science that plainly benefits the world mechanically and demonstrates its hypotheses—is so powerful as to be almost instantaneously convincing. As his commentary on “Sphinx, or Science” in De Sapienta Veterum argues,

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Wings are added because the sciences and the discoveries of science spread and fly abroad in an instant; the communication being like that of one candle with another, which lights up at once. Claws, sharp and hooked, are ascribed to it with great elegance, because the axioms and arguments of science penetrate and hold fast the mind, so that it has no means of evasion or escape. (13:160) But the residents of the New Atlantis have their scientific peace because they have in some sense evaded or escaped commerce with anyone else, except for the occasional awestruck shipwreck. There are “interdicts and prohibitions . . . touching entrance of strangers” and the potential “novelties and commixture of manners.” So while they occasionally send voyages out to collect information from abroad (5:381–4), Bacon’s dream of the scientific brotherhood converges with the dream of autarchy. He is still writing advice to the prince, hoping for enough (and the right kind of) internal political control such that this scientific brotherhood can exercise its own brand of control, human reason’s control over the natural world, with all its implied awesome potential. But political order in the state Bacon served was about to collapse. To some this indicated that the central node of authority needed to itself be more like science: depersonalized, rule-based, and all-powerful in the sense that reason, if given the berth, can use its “claws, sharp and hooked” to finish off once and for all the various religious visions and voices from the sky that remain poised in rebellion against it.

The Autocratic Politics of Progress: Hobbes Man, it is true, can, by combination, surmount all his real enemies, and become master of the whole animal creation: But does he not immediately raise up to himself imaginary enemies, the demons of his fancy, who haunt him with superstitious terrors and blast every enjoyment of life? David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion What precisely Thomas Hobbes stood for or proposed remains an object of dispute—ironically, considering his oft-expressed wish for definitional precision. Was he the godfather of modern despotism, and even totalitarianism?18 Or was he the founder of modern liberalism, as suggested by Leo Strauss and many others?19 Even within the latter position, Hobbes has been seen in radically different lights—is this liberalism as a spacious individualism, guaranteed under authority’s umbrella?20 Or liberalism as an ordering, disciplinary institution, manufacturing the very sort of citizen it claims to have found in the state of nature?21 Perhaps Geoffrey M. Vaughan is right in his assertion that “the ensuing liberal tradition of political theory is very much an attempt to rescue some of [Hobbes’s] insights from some of his others.”22 Since Hobbes pays so much attention to the place of religion—both the structure of organized religion and the nature of private belief about God—in political

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life, there has also been considerable dispute as to what, if any, religious beliefs he might have held. The historian of political thought Richard Tuck finds that “Hobbes’s idea of a natural religion can fairly be described as ‘deist,’ and his blend of deism and civil religion was to prove prophetic to much Enlightenment thinking,” but adds, “as soon as faith became exclusively a matter of believing what the civil sovereign said, then, on most understandings of religion, Hobbes had ceased to have one at all.”23 Elsewhere Tuck calls Hobbes’s beliefs, or lack thereof, “Christian Atheism,” explaining that seeming oxymoron thus: “in Leviathan . . . Christianity became in effect the civil religion of modern England, with no other meaning to its doctrines than the performative ones attached to any worship.”24 For many scandalized contemporaries and near-contemporaries Hobbes was an unadorned atheist. To Leibniz Hobbes, like “Epicurus in times past . . . hold[s] all things to be corporeal . . . on their view, there is no providence.”25 Or Giambattista Vico in The New Science (1725): “Thomas Hobbes failed to see [the] providential origin of human institutions . . . he went astray, led by the chance of his admired Epicurus.”26 Strauss agreed: “Whatever may have been Hobbes’s private thoughts, his natural philosophy is as atheistic as Epicurean physics.”27 “If he was not an atheist,” wrote Diderot, “it must be acknowledged that his god scarcely differs from that of Spinoza.”28 Pierre Bayle, for whom “the fundamentals of politics had never been previously analyzed so well,” tried to salvage Hobbes for his epochal Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1695–1702) by claiming that Hobbes was more anti-clerical than anti-religious.29 More recent trends in Hobbes scholarship have reopened his conviction as an early modern heretic, insisting that the long-held assumptions about his atheism or proto-Deism are a-historical.30 It has been argued, for example, that Hobbes’s social contract would fall apart without a theistic first position.31 One biographer even named Hobbes “a true Protestant,” who “separated theology from science” in order “to safeguard religious belief. His separation was a form of fideism and no more irreligiously motivated than Soren Kierkegaard’s.”32 Hobbes’s political writings are infused with vague references to God and/or Christianity, but stories from his private life abound suggesting atheism or skepticism. Certainly his contemporary enemies believed so: when fire and plague swept through London in 1666, the House of Commons blamed Hobbes’s writings for having provoked divine wrath.33 Alan Ryan points out that Hobbes’s contemporaries often found him alarming, not because of the authoritarianism and defense of despotism which his twentieth-century readers notice, but because of an individualism which . . . was hostile to an emphasis on community, tradition, ecclesiastical authority, and the derivation of political authority from a Christian view of the world.34 He was purportedly fond of repeating an aphorism to the effect that the soul had about as much chance of surviving the death of the body as the taste of bread has surviving mastication and digestion; and when his friend John Selden was determining whether or not to receive last rites on his deathbed, Hobbes is supposed

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to have said, “Will you that have wrote like a man, now die like a woman?”35 Thus would the philosopher who rooted a comprehensive human psychology in the fear of death have dismissed the fear (or hope) of the afterlife as sniveling. Hobbes provides material to support either side of such conflicting viewpoints—the affirmed believer in a Christian God versus the atheist who dressed up his books with theological references to avoid obloquy; a path-clearer toward unmoored despotism versus a founder of rights-based liberalism. But Hobbes’s importance in the early development of what I call the secular contract would stand even if it could be proven that he was privately God-fearing, or that his exegesis of Bible in the latter books of Leviathan was sincere. Hobbes radically removes both organized religion and most private religious belief from politics, and replaces them with a secular, rational conception of knowledge based on emergent modern science on the one hand, and his own idiosyncratic conception of natural law on the other. Richard Popkin, who is half-right to identify Hobbes’s “political rather than . . . epistemological criterion of truth,” is wrong to identify “a fundamental kind of skepticism that arises for Hobbes in the very attempt to distinguish the secular from the religious.”36 Hobbes may have been a skeptic in many matters, but that was not one of them. It may also be true, as Sheldon Wolin argues, that Hobbes’s historical placement within the chaos of the English civil wars—his “experience with the political void,” with “conditions of political nothingness”37— could have led him to overestimate the virtues of top-down, absolute order. Yet Hobbes proposes numerous safeguards to ensure that the rational, secular order of his new politics does not replicate what he sees as the problems posed by the intermingling of religion and government. Whatever Hobbes’s actual beliefs about the existence of God or the nature of the soul, his faith in the Golden Rule—separated from scripture and reimagined and rationalized for political society—was real enough, and his yearning for a social order that combined “public security” with “harmless liberty” and the happiness of its citizens (DC, XIII.6, 438) genuine. Wolin is incorrect to complain that “Hobbesian political science . . . teaches men what they can make, but what they make is arbitrary.”39 No—one might consider what Hobbes creates wrong, but his politics is based in consistent and clearly delineated principles that have an ethical basis. Only a believer in inherited, unchangeable scriptural religion as the overarching basis for political life would be justified in calling Hobbes’s system arbitrary, because the God understood by such religions is indeed absent from it. Moreso than Machiavelli or Bacon or Descartes, Hobbes is the first great theorist of the secular contract.

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Hobbes speaks of a deity, but it is a deity radically divested of content. We may assume that a creator exists, but literally nothing apart from that. The existence of God is shorn of all practical meaning except that of the uncaused causer “which men call God; and yet not have an idea, or image of him in his mind” (L, 74–5; EL, I.11.240). God is only needed as a recognized and orderly starting point, from

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which the sense of both the natural law and empiricist approaches can be derived: natural law, because the universe is created rather than accidental, and thus a priori endowed with some sort of order, and empiricist, because the creator has given humans the reason with which to figure out that order from the ground up. Scholastic quibbling about the precise nature of God is not only harmful to society and confusing to the laity (L, 77–8), it is the wrong track entirely, as God does not have nature knowable by humans. But many who recognize this rule for themselves suspend disbelief when it comes to others; thus they assume that there are appointed mediators between this otherwise remote God and themselves, or at least some who can achieve communion with the spiritual realm by magic or by accident. They do not realize that the injunction, “To make covenant with God, is impossible” (97) applies universally. Thus untoward amounts of power and prestige are available to those who claim to have knowledge of where the spiritual breaks into the material: some men have pretended for their disobedience to their sovereign a new covenant, made, not with men but with God . . . But this pretence of covenant with God is so evident a lie, even in the pretenders’ own consciences, that it is not only an act of an unjust, but also of a vile and unmanly disposition. (122) Here Hobbes imputes the basest possible motives to those who claim the power of mediation between spirit and matter. But elsewhere Hobbes implies that the real problem is not base motives for deception, but rather the nature of “true” belief itself. Those who claim to commune with angels to fill their coffers are in fact the least of our problems. In the radically egalitarian universe of the Leviathan, there is no reason to assume that, though the mental errors of the commoners are “real” enough—“they be timorous and superstitious, possessed with fearful tales, and alone in the dark, are subject to the like fancies, and believe they see spirits and dead men’s ghosts walking in churchyards” particularly evident “nowadays [as] the opinion that rude people have of fairies, ghosts, and goblins, and of the power of witches” (18)—the ones of their more self-confident would-be rulers are not just as genuine. Those who actually believe they can discern God’s nature, and convince others they are correct, are the chief enemy, because in transgressing Hobbes’s rule about a content-free deity, they present a perpetual affront to civil peace: The most frequent pretext of sedition and civil war in Christian Commonwealths hath a long time proceeded from a difficulty, not yet sufficiently resolved, of obeying at once both God and man then when their commandments are one contrary to the other. It is manifest enough that when a man receiveth two contrary commands, and knows that one of them is God’s, he ought to obey that, and not the other, though it be the command even of his

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lawful sovereign (whether a monarch or a sovereign assembly), or the command of his father. (402–3) This problem encompasses the major instance wherein people believe the divine and human spheres to have crossed: revealed scripture. Hobbes’s commonwealth expels not only disputatious preachers and false messiahs, but the Bible itself in its normative capacity: “A man therefore ought not to examine by reason any point, or draw any consequence out of Scripture by reason, concerning the nature of God Almighty, of which reason is not capable” (EL, II.6.14, II.6.9). To “Believe that the Scriptures are the word of God, having no immediate revelation from God himselfe” is really to invest “Beleefe, Faith, and Trust . . . in the Church; whose word we take, and acquiesce therein . . . Faith in men onely” (L, 49). In De Cive Hobbes outlines the distinction between secular and sacred laws: the latter are those which pertain to religion, that is to say . . . what persons, things, places, are to be consecrated, and in what fashion; what opinions concerning the deity are to be taught publicly; and with what words and in what order supplications to the deity are to be made; and the like. These rules are not determined by any divine positive law. (DC, XV.5) But they could be, and often are, determined by revealed scripture; Hobbes can only mean that scripture is not to be regarded as divine positive law. Not only hieratic dogma but also scripture itself shall be separated from human affairs, and from the God who is said to have produced them. Hobbes declares that even if “Divine Positive Laws” did exist, we must ignore them, because there is no orderly way to test or prove them (L, 197–8). He is Dostoevsky in reverse. Where the Grand Inquisitor suggests that even if a religion is false, humans must act as if they believe it to be true, Hobbes suggests that for the sake of the public good, even if religion is true we must act as if it is false. What is to replace the content that has been stripped away from God, his human intermediaries, and his revelations? It is something like “civil religion” in that adherence to the positive laws of the earthly commonwealth replaces any belief system based upon a definable nonmaterial divinity. The political community becomes humanity’s new, “public soul” (230). Here Hobbes is at his most authoritarian, sometimes writing as if the community’s process of giving names and definitions to things produces truth itself, over and above merely mandating pragmatic obedience. The resulting nominalism is well known: “nor any common rule of good and evil to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves; but . . . from the person that representeth it; or from an arbitrator or judge, whom men disagreeing shall by consent

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set up and make his sentence the rule thereof ” (39). In a material world divested of God there is no more sin, merely the question of obeying or disobeying positive law, which presupposes an absolute human authority to produce and enforce it: The desires, and other passions of man, are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions that proceed from those passions till they know a law that forbids them; which till laws be made they cannot know, nor can any law be made till they have agreed upon the person that shall make it. (89) When Hobbes limits the possibilities of individual conscience and independent thought—by lamenting “The poison of seditious doctrines; whereof one is, That every private man is judge of good and evil actions,” whereas really “it is manifest, that the measure of good and evil actions, is the civil law” (223)—he is claiming to guard against previously adduced threats of prophetic demagoguery breaking up social peace. If political authority “gives away the government of doctrines, men will be frighted into rebellion with the fear of spirits” (127), he warns. But the principle, as he states it, cannot logically be limited to the hobbling of religion. Consider his legal-positivist approach to censorship: it is annexed to the sovereignty to be judge of what opinions and doctrines are averse, and what conducing to peace; and consequently, on what occasions, how far, and what men are to be trusted withal in speaking to multitudes of people; and who shall examine the doctrines of all books before they be published. (124) When Hobbes accused the scholastics of disputing about nonsense, and false prophets of lying about or mistaking their source of inspiration (implying that confusing one’s dreams with reality is often involved), he was clearly appealing to some objective or common-sense standard about what constitutes truth. Now, however, truth seems to be whatever conduces to social peace, and what conduces to social peace is purely up to the magistrate: “doctrines repugnant to peace can no more be true, than peace and concord can be against the law of nature” (124–5). Noel Malcolm argues that Hobbes’s “nominalism was a good deal less extreme than is popularly supposed,” and that “Hobbes was a nominalist, not an arbitrarist.”41 As a materialist, Hobbes clearly did not think that naming produced truth in any scientific sense. Yet by the above criteria alone, Hobbes would have no justification to propose change to the belief system of even the most theocratic government, since the new knowledge proposed by a portion of said society would obviously be destructive of social peace. The nominalism or legal-positivism to which Hobbes turns to rid the political sphere of centrifugal and irresolvable religious controversy could end up looking just as coldly at natural science. One cannot simultaneously argue that a) natural reason and empiricist science are the God-approved conduits to truth, and b) the political authority determines the nature of truth by its definition

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of social peace—unless one has a generous faith that the workings of reason and science can proceed unfettered without leading to much social controversy. For Hobbes ideological conflict was in itself so dangerous to the peaceful accumulation of knowledge that absolutist order had to be set up not in spite of the need for progress but in its name. It is “Desire of Knowledge,” Hobbes says in Leviathan, that “enclineth men to obey a common Power: For such Desire, containeth a desire of leasure; and consequently protection from some other Power than their own” (71). Denis Diderot, a consistent admirer of Hobbes despite the former’s more democratic instincts, would write that “There is only one way to make philosophy truly desirable in the eyes of the people: to present it to them as something that is useful”; “The habitual practice of making experiments produces even in the most unrefined of workers involved with physical processes an intuition that is akin to inspiration.”42 At the beginning of De Cive Hobbes reveals that his oft-expressed fondness for geometric achievements rests not only on their precision but what he sees as their usefulness, perhaps at one or two removes. Geometers “have managed their province outstandingly” and “whatever benefit comes to human life” is “almost wholly the gift of Geometry”; but by “Geometry” here Hobbes seems to mean the physical sciences generally, something we must remember when evaluating Hobbes’s wish that moral and political studies be made more geometrical. “If the moral Philosophers had done their job with equal success” as had the geometers, Hobbes proposes, I do not know what greater contribution human industry could have made to human happiness . . . [the] human race would enjoy such secure peace that (apart from conflicts over space as the population grew) it seems unlikely that it would ever have to fight again. (DC, “Epistle,” 4–5) One of the reasons monarchy is recommended over democracy is that Hobbes considers it a better mechanism for managing expertise. Democracies attract would-be experts among “those who have beene versed more in the acquisition of Wealth than of Knowledge.” In both cases there are dangers—monarchies attract sniveling courtiers, democracies demagogues. But democracies, on this account, are doubly bad because the demagogues then become courtiers one to the other: an assembly is “seduced by Orators, as a Monarch by Flatterers; and becoming one an others Flatterers, serve one anothers Covetousnesse and Ambition by turnes” (L, 131–2). Hobbes believes that it is “Anxiety for the future time” that “disposeth men to enquire into the causes of things,” though for utility-minded Hobbes such anxiety was not necessarily an indictment: “because the knowledge of them, maketh men the better able to order the present to their best advantage” (74). Despite Hobbes’s absolutist conclusions he shares—even helps inaugurate—the secular contract’s theoretical focus on futurity. A good society properly orders desires, but “the same man, in divers times, differs from himselfe”; this is

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THE SECULAR CONTRACT because the constitution of a mans Body, is in continuall mutation; it is impossible that all the same things should always cause in him the same Appetites, and Aversions: much lesse can all men consent, in the Desire of almost any one and the same Object. (110, 39)

Heterogeneity is micro- as well as macro-. Just as the state is an “Artificiall Man,” so too should the state within time aim for “an Artificiall Eternity of Life; without which, men that are governed by an Assembly, should return into the condition of Warre in every age” (135). Such acknowledgement of the heterogeneity and mutability of desire (within universal basic desire for survival) forms the thin end of the wedge by which Hobbesian social-contract absolutism can be merged with coevolutionary theories of progress. Within the confines of Hobbes’s theory it makes sense that the community would trump the individual—the shift from state of nature to political commonwealth is predicated on such a transfer of power. Outside of a rule-bound polity individuals are so unmoored as to be definitionally incapable of moral judgment, as in the famous passage about the “war of every man against every man,” the pre-political stage during which “notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have . . . no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice.” Hope for peaceable industry and consumption is subordinate to the pervasive, existential sense of fear (90).43 It may be that Hobbes grew more pessimistic about human interaction, or became more open about his pessimism, from De Cive to Leviathan. And yet in Behemoth, his dialogic history of the English Civil War, written later, the transference of religious enthusiasm from God to society is given at least something of a normative sheen. “The end of moral philosophy is to teach men of all sorts their duty, both to the public and to one another,” one of the interlocutors argues, and “The virtue of the subject is comprehended wholly in obedience to the laws of the commonwealth . . . nothing is injustice or iniquity, otherwise, than it is against the law.”44 The basic argument accords with that of Leviathan, but the emphasis on morals, virtues and duties contrasts with colder statements like: “The public worth of a man, which is the value set on him by the Common-wealth, is that which men commonly call dignity” (63). Which is Hobbes, the legal-positivist unmasker of useful pieties, or the civil moralist? Or is he compartmentalized—both at once? One of Behemoth’s interlocutors speaks almost like Machiavelli: I confess, that, for aught I have observed in history, and other writings of the heathens, Greek and Latin, that those heathens were not at all behind us in point of virtue and moral duties, notwithstanding that we have had much preaching, and they none at all.45 “Preaching” stands between humans and the simple exercise of their virtues and moral duties, but not only because, as Hobbes often suggests, preachers are likely to turn their parishioners against the political authority. It is also because the

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system of revelation and prophetic inspiration throws a wrench into the reasonable accumulation of knowledge. Hobbes desires the latter, but it is arguable that, other things being equal, his legal positivism would stand in the way of reason and science much like supra-political religious enthusiasms. If “the possibility of replacing late Renaissance skepticism with a philosophy accommodated to the ideas (above all) of Galileo”46 was Hobbes’s purpose, his authoritarian political solution may get in its own way.

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The most famous part of Leviathan tells a story of humans prudentially leaving the state of nature by transferring all power and judgment to the political authority. But elsewhere Hobbes suggests that a sort of cognition beyond mere prudence frames human actions. Prudence cannot be at the center, because “it is not prudence that distinguisheth man from beast. There be beasts that at a year old observe more and pursue that which is for their good more prudently than a child can do at ten” (23). What actually distinguishes humans might be broadly called imagination, or the capacity to extrapolate into the future: “a man did excel all other animals in this faculty, that when he conceived anything whatsoever, he was apt to enquire the consequences of it, and what effects he could do with it” (34). That is why, though the capacity to reason may be inborn, reason itself can only be acquired across time: not, as sense and memory, born with us . . . but attained by industry: first in apt imposing of names; and secondly by getting a good and orderly method in proceeding from the elements, which are names, to assertions made by connexion of one of them to another. (35) Note here that the “imposing of names” does not settle questions in perpetuity. Knowledge is intrinsically evolutionary, and thus always provisional: “No discourse whatsoever can end in absolute knowledge of fact, past or to come . . . the knowledge of consequence, which I have said before is called science, it is not absolute, but conditional” (47). But the probabilistic nature of such knowledge does not rule out the possibility of discovering truth. Regarding natural science, Hobbes proposes an early version of Karl Popper’s falsifiability rule: “when he that pretendeth the science of anything can teach the same; that is to say, demonstrate the truth thereof perspicuously to another” (37). Evolving experimental knowledge remains at war with the previous cognitive conceptions of humans, wherein the collapsing of the spiritual into the material world prevents the orderly examination of a rule-bound nature, and empowers those who claim to be special intermediaries in the system. On Hobbes’s view of knowledge, one must have the ability to test the claims of would-be prophets, but since those claims involve the alleged interference by God in the material world, and since God is antecedent to the world and thus cannot be supposed to be bound

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by its rules, testability is stillborn. A Hobbesian “God” would never deign to give specific orders to specific individuals or tribes; claims along those lines were based on either delusion or will-to-power. The more radical implication, however, is that even if God in fact instructed prophets, we must disobey them. Absent a reliable method for evaluating prophetic claims, even the truly ordained among them would, by their very success, lead to an intolerable situation wherein “the tongues, and pens of unlearned divines” could “make men think, that sanctity and natural reason, cannot stand together” (224). When one “speaks by supernatural inspiration,” this is just to say “he finds an ardent desire to speak, or some strong opinion of himself, for which he can allege no natural and sufficient reason” (257). Even an actual interruption of the divine into the material is intolerable—it allows the thin end of unreason’s wedge back into society, recreating a chaotic aspect of the state of nature, removing the necessity of rule-bound coherence and once again making each individual his own judge as to good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice (DC, XII.6; L, 223–4). It is a political as well as a cognitive problem that one can with impunity “set up a supremacy against the sovereignty; canons against laws; and a ghostly authority against the civil”; “When therefore these two powers oppose one another, the commonwealth cannot but be in great danger of civil war, and dissolution” (226–7). That is Hobbes’s story of England’s Civil War. The prophetic or divinerevelation conception of knowledge made it “impossible that the multitude should ever learn their duty, but from the pulpit and upon holidays; but then, and from thence, it is, that they learned disobedience,” his historical interlocutors lament.47 The same warnings, however, apply to scripturally based religion more generally. If we shall not trust the claims of the divinely inspired, and that goes whether they are legitimate or not, why should we listen to what is in the Bible? We shouldn’t, says Hobbes. Richard Tuck surmises that “like almost all the most interesting seventeenth-century political theorists (including Grotius and Locke), [Hobbes] seems to have feared the moral and intellectual disciples of Presbyterian Calvinism far more than anything else.”48 Belief in scripture is as untestable, and thus as arbitrary and socially pernicious, as belief in a charismatic sermon that claims its authority from that scripture: “reasoning from the authority of books . . . is not knowledge, but faith” (458–9). There is a problem antecedent to that of exegesis: not only can humans not know the correct method of scriptural interpretation, they cannot even know if God gave humanity these scriptures in the first place. The same worries that apply to contemporary preachers claiming divine inspiration apply, mutatis mutandis, to whoever transcribed scripture under the supposed tutelage of the divine: “how [do] we know the Scriptures to be the word of God? . . . if by knowledge we understand science infallible and natural . . . proceeding from sense; we cannot be said to know it,” and all demonstrations thereof must be tautologies: if we understand knowledge as supernatural, we cannot know it but by inspiration; and of that inspiration we cannot judge, but by the doctrine.

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It followeth therefore, that we have not any way, natural or supernatural, that knowledge thereof which can properly be called infallible science and evidence. It remains, that the knowledge we have that the Scriptures are the word of God, is only faith. (EL, I.11.8) Scripture may contain moral exhortations that are indeed in line with natural law and conducive to Hobbes’s preferred vision of social life; but these are discernible without scripture. So Hobbes has banished religion, at least in the sense that nearly any of his contemporaries would have understood the term. Any version of God recognizable to the majority of believing humans in history has vanished. Hobbes resisted allowing Leviathan to be used as a pro-royalist, anti-republican tract—indeed, many royalists saw it as treacherous, a back-door endorsement of regicide principles.49 Of course Hobbes carried no water for the Puritan side of the Civil War either, disliking, as he put it, “the growing disposition of the roundheads to regard their successes as signs of God’s providence.”50 Diderot, though on the whole bending over backwards to prove he admired the man, expresses the standard misreading of Hobbes in his Encyclopédie article about him (“Hobbisme”), wherein he compares Hobbes with Rousseau. “The philosophy of Monsieur Rousseau of Geneva is almost the inverse of that of Hobbes. The one thinks man naturally good, the other thinks him wicked.”51 But neither in fact uses such terms and both basically agree that the language of good and evil is meaningless outside of a rule-bound political order. It makes no sense to say that Hobbes posits humans as by nature wicked or evil. What they are, really, is easily confused, which is why the organization of knowledge, and not just prudential obedience via diktat, is so important to the functioning of society. For Hobbes the presence of religion in the public sphere is dangerous, not only because there is a tendency for power-hungry ecclesiastics to undermine secular authority, but because the basic cognitive structure of religion impels people to arrogate to themselves the private right to determine good and evil. Sometimes his answer is a pure legal-positivism based on the sovereign’s conception of public interest—but elsewhere, Hobbes speaks of universal natural law, which calls such a solution into question. If natural law is anything more than the simple necessity for humans to live in political society—in which case a legal-positivist strategy for maintaining said society could accord with natural law no matter what it leads to—then the interpretation of what natural law in fact is might run into the same dilemma that confronts the exegete of scripture, or the follower of the latest prophet to claim divine warrant. Who decides the truth, and how? Though “Experience concludeth nothing universally” for Hobbes, “it is plain, that they shall conjecture best, that have most experience” (EL, I.4.10). Unlike Bacon, Hobbes considered experiment a weak approximation for true science, especially compared to geometry.52 Mathematical knowledge “is free from controversies and dispute, because it consisteth in comparing figures and motion only; in which things truth and the interest of men, oppose not each other” (EL, “Epistle”). Real humans buck against a reduction of their interpersonal affairs to

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Euclidean formulae; but this surely does not indicate that disputes arising in the human sciences could never admit of a most rational solution. If “in what matter soever there is place for addition and subtraction, there also is place for Reason,” (L, 32) and if a balance sheet of pleasure and pain, or of desire and fulfillment can be drawn up, then one can have a kind of political geometry. If “there is no . . . Finis ultimus (utmost aim) nor Summum Bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers,” then we need new moral philosophers to advocate for a new, if severely humbled, “greatest good.” And if a “general inclination of all mankind” to “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death” (70) sounds like a bleak answer, we should remember that Hobbes pressed increase in knowledge as an ever-renewable, non-zero-sum, and thus in some sense summum desire. “Reason is the pace; increase of Science, the way; and the benefit of mankind, the end” (36). For Hobbes there was no necessary conflict between freedom on the one hand and a purely materialist determinism on the other—that philosophical problem that has dogged theists and atheists alike in the modern era. Freedom is simply freedom to fulfill our desires, and it is absurd to ask whether or not we are free to have desires, or whether true freedom would be the creation of an infinite variety of possible worlds. Hobbes did not find his desire, as Quentin Skinner puts it, “to speak of human freedom in a manner wholly consistent with his determinism”53 particularly problematic, intellectually or morally. This does not mean that we cannot, within the bounds materialism sets, dissect and to some degree remake the world. It is immaterialism that, for Hobbes, is the true sign of hubris: people not only “feign unto themselves . . . Powers invisible” but “stand in awe of their own imaginations,” pleading to them in “distresse” and “in the time of . . . successe, [giving] them thanks; making the creatures of their own fancy, their Gods” (75). The intrusion of the immaterial into the human imagination explains moral diversity among humans—“the natural seed of Religion; which, by reason of the different fancies, judgements, and passions of several men, hath grown up into ceremonies so different that those which are used by one man are for the most part ridiculous to another” (79). But this also proves there is latitude within Hobbesian materialism to turn the stuff of nature—the invention of religion is at base, in Leviathan, a completely explicable process of sense impressions banging about in the brain—to diverse outcomes. Diversity is not limitless—Hobbes surely noticed that, although the human imagination has produced different religions, there are remarkable similarities among them. Hobbesian ethics aims at rediscovering the rational morality at the base of religions long deformed by “ceremonies . . . ridiculous to one another”: in his post-Christian case, something like the Golden Rule. The seemingly innate and cross-cultural tendency to hit upon the latter—one finds defensible versions of it in Socrates and Confucius, among other places54—is evidence that human affairs may be reducible to basic principles: “my design being,” as Hobbes puts it, “not to show what is law here and there, but what is law” (183). The human shall, for Hobbes, “be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men

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against himself” (92). It is a “law of nature” that “every man acknowledge every other for his equal by nature” and that “no man require to reserve to himself any right, which he is not content should be reserved to every one of the rest” (107). Though “contrary to our natural passions, that carry us to partiality, pride, revenge, and the like,” for Hobbes “justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and (in sum) doing to others as we would be done to” (117) is a de-theologized “law of nature.”55 Even if political power fails to enforce it, it still stands as a rationally realizable best of all possible worlds. Passion will always challenge reason, but it is when passion ceases to understand itself naturalistically that we are in real trouble. Those who “will not have the Law of Nature, to be those Rules which conduce to the preservation of mans life on earth; but the attaining of eternal felicity after death” are for Hobbes those who may well “think it a work of merit to kill, or depose, or rebel against, the Soveraigne Power.” They do not see that “because there is no naturall knowledge of mans estate after death; much lesse of the reward that is then to be given to breach of Faith; but onely a beliefe grounded upon other mens saying, that they know it supernaturally,” or that some other priviledged caste knows it supernaturally, “Breach of Faith cannot be called a Precept of Reason, or Nature” (103). This promises too little authority in the right places, and too much in the wrong places. If “men were at liberty, to take for Gods Commandements, their own dreams, and fancies, or the dreams and fancies of private men; scarce two men would agree” and “every man would despise the Commandements of the Common-wealth” (199). The worst of all possible worlds is one where another world altogether presumes to be legislator. It is imperative “that we conclude not such things to be without, that are within us” (EL, I.4.11). Law is to be grounded in universal and material facts about human psychology and physiology. Thus Hobbes’s sardonic redescriptions of common ethical terms away from any religious basis: “REPENTANCE” is mere “passion that proceedeth from opinion or knowledge that the action they have done is out of the way to the end they would attain”; “PITY is imagination or fiction of future calamity to ourselves, proceeding from the sense of another man’s present calamity”; “CHARITY” is an “argument to a man of his own power” whereby “the affection wherewith men many times bestow their benefits on strangers, is not to be called charity, but either contract, whereby they seek to purchase friendship; or fear, which maketh them to purchase peace” (EL, I.9.7–20). This might sound misanthropic, but in his Political Treatise Spinoza describes a similar move as humanism: “I have labored carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand human actions,” which entails seeing “passions, such as love, hatred, anger, envy, ambition, pity, and the other perturbations of the mind, not in the light of vices of human nature, but as properties, just as pertinent to it, as are heat, cold, storm, thunder, and the like to the nature of the atmosphere” (I.456). Hobbes’s evaluation by posterity comes at some point to a stark fork in the road. On the one hand, by modern standards, his advocacy of a purely materialist explanation for ethics is no longer particularly controversial, at least among the non-religious. (One could even say he scooped evolutionary psychology by three centuries.) On the other hand, few in the West would still consider the absolutist

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political solution legitimate. One scholar has argued that this is because Hobbes’s horizons were irrevocably those of hereditary monarchy, a premodern regime swept away by electoral politics.57 Perhaps; but I have argued that the conflict exists at a deeper philosophical level. There is a contradiction between the spirit of cognitive advancement pressed by the Baconian instauration, and the cognitive stasis that could follow upon a once-and-for-all contractual settlement. Hobbes’s contractarian descendants would see a great part of their task as remedying this error. The priests have been defrocked; but the political settlement of Atlantis still needs to be turned to progress.

Toward a Democratic Politics of Progress?: Spinoza Those who look upon the Bible as a message sent down by God from Heaven to men will doubtless cry out that I have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost because I have asserted that the Word of God is faulty, mutilated, tampered with, and inconsistent; that we possess it only in fragments, and that the original of the covenant which God made with the Jews has been lost. Spinoza, Tractacus Theologico-Politicus Perhaps the only accusation worse than “Hobbist” in the century to follow was that of “Spinozist.” This remains important because Spinoza’s legacy has been central in the attempt to categorically differentiate a “radical” from a “moderate” Enlightenment. The most notable present exponent of such a view is the historian Jonathan Israel, whose massive, important project chronicling Enlightenment intellectual history describes the whole enterprise as in some way an extended commentary upon Spinoza’s ideas. An even more extreme example can be found in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s neo-Marxist trilogy (Empire [2000], Multitude [2004] and Commonwealth [2009]), which frames Spinoza as a symbol of lone dissent to what was otherwise (à la Foucauldian genealogy) the tyrannically disciplinary political-intellectual project of modernity. Here Spinoza’s “is a philosophy that renewed the splendors of revolutionary humanism, putting humanity and nature in the position of God, transforming the world into a territory of practice, and affirming the democracy of the multitude as the absolute form of politics.” This Spinoza revels in “the creative and prophetic power of the multitude,” in “democratic liberation of the multitude.” This Spinoza “shows us how today, in postmodernity, we can recognize . . . the possibility to create an alternative society.” In Spinoza “the problem of democracy invests all of life, reasons, the passions, and the very becoming divine of humanity.”58 A recent book title goes so far as to thank Spinoza for “giving us modernity.”59 Spinoza’s early detractors and his contemporary boosters all seem to me correct that Spinoza’s pantheism is essentially atheism by another name.60 But Hobbes was just as atheistic, and the same authors rarely give Hobbes anything like the same honored place in the Enlightenment pantheon. From the standpoint of political thought, marking off “Spinozism” as the true radicalism in a “radical” Enlightenment (and I am not denying the contention that the Enlightenment was “radical”) is of limited utility.

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As Stuart Hampshire points out, “There have been many Spinozas over the years since his death: a Parminedean Spinoza, a Cartesian Spinoza, a materialist-atheistdeterminist Spinoza, a mystical pantheist Spinoza,” and “There is some foundation in the texts for each of these over-simplifications.” What of the political Spinoza? One scholar goes so far as to call Spinoza’s Tractacus “the least read work of political theory by a philosopher of the first rank,”61 a defensible claim. Though Spinoza was certainly influenced by Hobbes, Hampshire credits him with “modifying the excessive political rationalism of Hobbes and of Machiavelli.”62 Hobbes believed in freedom of thought if such thought was rational but he doubted the political validity, or pragmatism, of freedom of expression; Spinoza rues the moment when laws are enacted about doctrinal matters, and beliefs are subjected to prosecution and condemnation as if they were crimes, and those who support and subscribe to these condemned beliefs are sacrificed not for the common welfare but to the hatred and cruelty of their enemies. (TPT,63 6) But it would be a mistake to place Spinoza at too far a remove from Hobbesian thought. The former agrees with the latter that “each individual thing has the sovereign right to do whatever it can do . . . the right of each thing extends so far as its determined power extends,” such that the “right, and the order of nature, under which all human beings are born and for the most part live, prohibits nothing but which no one desires or no one can do” (195–7). He agrees that “Justice is . . . to assign to each person what belongs to them in accordance with civil law” (203). By nature “no one is obliged . . . to live according to the views of another person: rather each is the defender of his own liberty” (11). (Spinoza expands upon these points in the Political Treatise [PT, II.19 and II.23]). The Political Treatise affirms that “men are naturally enemies” and is broadly in line with Hobbes’s theoretical deployment of the state of nature: “since fear of solitude exists in all men, because no one in solitude is strong enough to defend himself, and procure the necessaries of life, it follows that men naturally aspire to the civil state” (PT, II.14, VI.1). The Ethics argues that, in a universe stripped of final causes, “Knowledge of good and evil is nothing other than the emotion of pleasure or pain in so far as we are conscious of it” (ETH,64 158–9 [IV, prop. 8]). For Spinoza, “If every individual had the liberty to interpret the public laws at his own discretion, no state could survive; it would immediately be dissolved . . . and public law would be private law” (TPT, 116). When Spinoza says that “Those who hold sovereign authority . . . have the right to do all things that they have the power to do, and are the sole defenders of rights and liberty, and everyone else must do everything . . . by their decree alone,” but also that “they can best retain their authority and fully conserve the state only by conceding that each individual is entitled both to think what he wishes and say what he thinks” (11), he is drawing the un-Hobbesian conclusion of freedom of expression while still maintaining that it is the state—not nature, not God—which establishes freedom. Steven B. Smith claims that Spinoza’s “defense of democracy is undergirded by a ruthlessly

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naturalistic psychology that is even more immoralistic than Hobbes’s.”65 Rights have still been “transferred,” and in a sense Spinoza disagrees with Hobbes less in terms of what the state can rightfully do than in terms of what it should rightfully do. Spinoza does not think Hobbes has crushed liberty and democracy beneath a nominalist pragmatism; he thinks a Hobbesian system is basically un-pragmatic. The social order serves utilitarian purposes—“Society is extremely useful, indeed wholly essential, not only for living safe from enemies but also for acquiring many other advantages,” like a division of labor—and should grant freedoms so as to self-stabilize: “human nature does not allow itself to be absolutely compelled . . . it is the moderate regimes that endure” (72–3). Hobbes saw the parallels.66 But Spinoza’s points of departure from Hobbes are clearly as important as the similarities in terms of integrating these philosophers into a larger story. From the conclusion that “the object of revealed knowledge is simply obedience,” that it is “therefore entirely distinct form natural knowledge both in its object and in its principles and methods” such that “neither should be subordinate to the other,” Spinoza affirms that “everyone should be allowed the liberty of their own judgment and authority to interpret the fundamentals of faith according to their own minds” (10). Hobbes had allowed that “there are very few so foolish, that had not rather governe themselves, than be governed by others” (L, 107) in the section of Leviathan establishing egalitarian natural law. If Spinoza’s Hobbesian premises lead to anti-Hobbesian conclusions, it is not only because Spinoza thought that he had found a more pragmatic solution to the theological-political problem than Hobbes’. It is also because Spinoza sees the need to temporalize the social contract in order to give it a chance of serving peace and human progress simultaneously—the production of, as one scholar puts it, “a new kind of liberal polity with a new kind of liberal citizen,” living in “a commercial republic with economic, political, and religious freedom.”67 It is here that we find the political Spinoza’s signal contribution to the secular contract tradition. The precondition is to “separate philosophy from theology, and to establish the freedom to philosophize which this separation allows to everyone” (TPT, 195). One scholar summarizes Spinoza’s ideas as “the labor of human beings to become increasingly like God,”68 and while this makes him sound slightly too much like Marx or Nietzsche, Spinoza does follow Bacon, Descartes and Hobbes in arguing that the modern epistemological project is in the broad sense one of pulling heaven down to earth. Asked about his divergence from Descartes and Bacon, Spinoza declares in a letter, “they have failed to understand the true nature of the human mind.”69 We must now “affirm that it is the nature of the mind . . . that is the primary source of divine revelation” (14). And Spinoza follows Hobbes’s break with the more reticent Bacon and Descartes in recognizing that the intellectual project cannot help but have serious political implications. Since “knowledge is common to all men as men, and rests on foundations which all share,” it follows that there is no reason to privilege prophecy or revelation qua prophecy or revelation:

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natural knowledge . . . is in no way inferior to prophetic knowledge—unless perhaps one is willing to accept the nonsensical suggestion that the prophets did not have human minds though they had human bodies, and that their sensations and consciousness therefore were of a quite different nature from ours! (14) In contrast to Hobbes’s experience with Puritan-republican revolutionaries, Spinoza wrote in an environment where “it was above all the Orangist monarchy in collusion with the Calvinist pastorate that conspired to keep the people in a state of ignorance and superstition.”70 His deconstruction of scriptural truth claims followed, he thought, the general cognitive demands of the Baconian instauration, but was at once overtly political. “Spinoza determined that he must engage and subvert fundamental Protestant assumptions about scripture,” one scholar writes, “because scripture was the ultimate weapon that defeated any challenge to the dominant and sometimes oppressive regime.”71 Thus Spinoza’s path of biblical criticism—“the prophets were not endowed with more perfect minds than others but only a more vivid power of imagination, as the scriptural narratives . . . abundantly show” (27)—links up to his epistemology and political theory. He prefaces the Tractacus with a Hobbes-like dirge about those “prone to superstition of every kind . . . implor[ing] divine assistance with prayers and womanish tears,” who “swear that reason is blind and human wisdom fruitless,” who think their “delirious wanderings of the imagination, dreams and all sorts of childish nonsense are divine replies”; “It is dread that makes men so irrational” (4). Spinoza agrees with Hobbes that it is the potential for reason that links all humans together on equal terms, not the outcomes of reason’s exercise. So it is surprising that Spinoza has been enlisted as a radical democrat when he thenceforth concludes, “the real purpose of laws is normally evident only to a few; most people are more or less incapable of grasping it, and hardly live by reason at all.” An elite rationalizes society through law based on a Hobbesian utility calculus: “restrain[ing] the common people like a jorse with a bridle” (58). The problem remains that many will typically invest their reverence in the wrong sort of shepherd. Those who “habitually call that knowledge which surpasses human understanding ‘divinity,’ ” which is “any phenomenon whose cause is unknown by the common people,” will tend to suppose that the existence of God is proven by nothing more clearly than from what they perceive as nature failing to follow its normal course . . . they suppose that all those who explain or attempt to explain phenomena and miracles by natural causes are superfluous whenever God is active. (81) Religious awe for moral rules might be necessary for political stability, but that same awe will present a perpetual affront to reason’s attempt to understand the world: in political language, I call this the problem of God’s line-item veto. What’s

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more, belief in miracles plays into a human pride that would be wounded by an impartial investigation into our true place in the universe. Humans yearn to show that the whole of nature was directed by the governance of the God whom they adored solely for their own benefit. People have always been so drawn to this idea that to this day they have not ceased to invent miracles, in order to foment the belief that they are dearer to God than others and are the ultimate reason for God’s creation and continual governance of all things. (82) The truth, though, is that “nothing happens contrary to nature” for “nature maintains an eternal, fixed and immutable order”—and Spinoza taunts the believers in miracles that they are trying to shore up mankind’s dignity while in fact deriding that of their professed God, who in this scenario “has created a nature so impotent and with laws and rules so feeble that He must continually give it a helping hand, to maintain it and keep things going” (82–3). Those who cannot be trusted to interpret scripture correctly also cannot be trusted to correctly identify their proper intellectual managers. And neither Hobbes nor Spinoza believes in a Platonic mechanism whereby elites can be confidently self-selected. Spinozan sovereignty is initially described in starkly Weberian terms, as simply the locus of legitimate violence (199–200). Also like Hobbes, Spinoza says that this sovereignty has the same content whether it is exercised by a democracy or a monarchy. The former “is properly defined as a united gathering of people which collectively has the sovereign right to do all that it has the power to do . . . sovereign power is bound by no law and everyone is obliged to obey it in all things” (200). Spinoza’s preference for democracy is explained thus: “there is less reason in a democratic state to fear absurd proceedings. For it is almost impossible that the majority of a large assembly would agree on the same irrational decision” (200–1). Irrational or dangerous passions are flattened out, not exacerbated, by the crowd. Hobbes thought that “no one mans Reason, nor the Reason of any one number of men, makes the certaintie; no more than an account is therefore well cast up, because a great many men have unanimously approved it” (L, 32); but he also suggested, “Commonly truth is on the side of the few, rather than of the multitude” (EL, I.13.3). Spinoza, on the other hand, sees safety—moreso than nobility or justice—in numbers.72 Absent a foolproof self-selection method for political elites or philosopher-kings, monarchy and aristocracy are easily as dangerous as democracy was for Hobbes, and for similar reasons. If anything, there is for Spinoza more danger that the one or the few can be manipulated by conniving priests or led astray by false prophets. If Spinoza is “the philosopher who founded liberal democracy, a specifically modern regime,”73 it was work done less as a rhapsodizer of the creative power of the multitude than as a promoter of, à la Winston Churchill, the worst regime aside from all the others.

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Spinoza stands between Hobbes’s static social contract and the temporalized contractarianism of Locke and his followers. Like Hobbes and Locke he relies on a “state of nature” whose theorization signals a usurpation of the Theos: “prior to religion both by nature, and in time . . . The state of nature is not to be confused with the state of religion, but must be conceived apart from religion and law, and consequently apart from all sin and wrongdoing” (TPT, 205). In the state of nature “each person retains many aspects of his right, which therefore depend upon no one’s will but their own” (209). As in Hobbes, the reduction of justice to contract is specifically meant to eliminate the immaterial: “For if anyone wished to transfer their right to God, they would have to make an explicit covenant with God . . . this would require not only the will of those who were transferring their right, but also the will of God to whom it was to be transferred” (230). Such pretense leads to “ceremonies . . . indifferent in themselves . . . whose rationale is beyond human understanding,” those “external signs . . . not . . . things that contribute to happiness or have any sanctity in them” (61, 75). But contra, or perhaps beyond, the Protestant critique of religious pageantry, Spinoza argues that the Bible itself must become an object understood materialistically, like the communion wafer. To the extent that scripture may contain important ethical injunctions, a reader “might just as well read the Koran or the dramatic plays of the poets,” but this does not deify a text, and “On the other hand . . . he who is completely ignorant of them, and nevertheless has salutary opinions and a true conception of living, is truly happy and truly has within him the spirit of Christ” (78–9). Though ostensibly criticizing rote and unthinking religious performance in the interest of “true religion and faith,” Spinoza in doing so lets slip the possibility that scriptures can come to “have neither use nor sanctity . . . both words and book which were formerly sacred will become profane and impure. From this it follows that nothing is sacred, profane, or impure, absolutely or independently of the mind but only in relation to the mind” (163–5). Hobbes meets a more sanguine Hamlet.74 Temporally frozen knowledge, like that codified in scripture, is a standing threat to the accumulation of real knowledge. Would Spinoza not have seen, deep down, an oxymoron in one readers’ judgment that his thought “is at once Biblical and modern”75? Natural laws are timeless, but our understanding of them can unfold in time if God’s line-item veto is abolished. Argumentative resort to the “will and decrees of God” is “a ridiculous way to acknowledge one’s ignorance,” Spinoza argues. On the other hand, “we must conclude, unconditionally, that we get a fuller knowledge of God and God’s will as we acquire a fuller knowledge of natural things and more clearly understand how . . . they behave according to the eternal laws of nature” (85–6). A letter evinces confusion at a correspondent’s “conviction that God speaks more clearly and effectually through Holy Scripture than through the light of natural understanding which he has also granted us . . . I plainly and unambiguously avow that I do not understand Holy Scripture”76— meaning that he does not understand the concept, not just that he is skeptical about the text in question. The Bible’s anthropomorphizing of God, like its claims

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that “men’s sins and prayers can be a cause of rain or the earth’s fertility, or that faith can heal the blind” is to be taken as an appeal to primitive emotion—that is, not only historically primitive, but an enduring non-rational element in the human psyche (91—at one point Spinoza says that the Hebrews who received the Pentateuch should be “looked on as if they were infants” [163]). Hume’s critique of miracles follows upon Spinoza’s scriptural critique in its insistence that religious irrationality is a sort of atavism, transmitted through time because Theism lacks a proper structure for self-correction.77 For Spinoza those who claim that “the natural right of reason does not have the power to interpret Scripture” merely “have been trying to admit, in very obscure terms, that they are generally in doubt about the true sense of Scripture” (112). The exegetical critique of scripture leads Spinoza to a political argument, because any belief system resting on such sources “does not belong to any public law or authority,” and thus it is “the authority to interpret religion and make judgments about it, will lie with each individual man, because it is a question of individual right” (116). While for Hobbes politics has to be purged of religion because it has to be purged of mass irrationality, for Spinoza politics has to be purged of religion because politics, representing in some sense the common, must be purged of what cannot possibly be made common except by obfuscation and/or force. But because of this, Spinoza cannot let himself stray very far from Hobbesian premises, and hedges on the democratic freedoms he had started to support in matters of religion. It has been argued that the strength and optimism of his republican principles tracked the Dutch cycles of liberalization and reaction in the second half of the seventeenth century.78 Spinoza’s “multitude . . . if it is free, transfer[s] to the king” what “it cannot itself have absolutely within its authority, namely, the ending of controversies and the using dispatch in decisions” (PT, VII.5). Not one, in the end, to hope for much reasonableness from his multitude, he sets up ruling elites as religious inoculators: “all the patricians must be of the same religion, that is, of that most simple and general religion,” and though everyone is to be given liberty to speak out his opinion, yet great conventicles are to be forbidden. And, therefore, those that are attached to another religion are, indeed, to be allowed to build as many temples as they please; yet these are to be small, and limited to a certain standard of size, and on sites at some little distance one from another. But it is very important, that the temples consecrated to the national religion should be large and costly, and that only patricians or senators should be allowed to administer its principle rites, and thus that patricians only be suffered to baptize, celebrate marriages, and lay on hands, and that in general they be recognized as the priests of the temples and the champions and interpreters of the national religion. (VIII.46) We will see this same mixture of radicalism and conservatism via Deistic religious establishment in the writings of Hume. We are still a distance from any comprehensive

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contemporary understanding of what a politics of progress would entail. Yet for Spinoza to achieve his proper place in the pantheon of the philosophical founders of modernity, it must not be as a radical democrat avant la lettre but rather as an explorer in the same tangled brush of proto-liberalism as Bacon and Hobbes: individualism combined with a fear of unmoored individuals combining; demands for secularization combined with (a dimming) respect for transcendent religions as disciplining institutions; the simultaneously democratic and autocratic potentials of an absolute sovereignty divorced from religious lineages; the cognitively progressive potential of a new, contractual understanding of society. Spinoza’s arguments here—that the “only free person is one who lives with his entire mind guided solely by reason,” that the “freest state, therefore, is that whose laws are founded on sound reason,” that in a properly contractual understanding of politics “no one transfers their natural right to another in such a way as they are not thereafter consulted” (TPT, 201–2)—are the first major philosophical signal that the social contract and progressive liberal democracy could be productively allied in the modern age.

*

*

*

Hobbes, like Bacon, tried his hand at political history—but he did this more in the Machiavellian spirit of providing lessons by example than in the spirit of revealing long-term processes that were carrying humans inexorably toward certain social forms. The latter characterizes the kind of historical writing that would develop during the Enlightenment and reach its peak in the century following it. The strategy of the historian, it might be assumed, is pretty starkly opposed to the strategy of the rationalist reconstructor of political order—and as we shall see, many Enlightenment historians underlined that divide. Yet one of the most surprising and interesting things about the development of secular history in the eighteenth century is how closely it mirrored, on its own terms, the premises of the secular contract. By filling in the abstract contractarian picture of Hobbes and Spinoza with an actual story of the development of European modernity, they enriched not only Enlightenment history but also Enlightenment political theory, as I shall argue in the next chapter.

Notes 1. BW = Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, 15 vols., ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denton Heath (Boston, MA: Brown and Taggard: 1860). 2. See A. P. Martinich, Thomas Hobbes: A Biography (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 65–9. For the view that Bacon’s influence on Hobbes has been underestimated see Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 215. 3. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner and W. B. Todd, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1979 [1776]), 771.

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4. Ibid., 770. 5. But for a tart critique of Bacon’s utopianism as frigid despotism see Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), chap. 9. 6. Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 18. 7. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. and trans. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 119. 8. See Julian Martin, Francis Bacon, the State, and the Reform of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 9. Rene Descartes, Philosophical Essays and Correspondence, ed. Roger Ariew, trans. Donald Cress (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000), 56, 52. 10. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), 103. 11. L = Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 12. Thomas A. Spragens, Jr., The Irony of Liberal Reason (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 10, 26. 13. See Steven Matthews, Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008) and Steven A. McKnight, The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon’s Thought (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2006). Some of Bacon’s views were plainly unscientific by subsequent definitions: See I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 147, and Charles Webster’s discussion of Bacon in From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 14. Baruch Spinoza, The Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1995), 211. 15. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 76. 16. See Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity, 39. 17. Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science 1300–1800 (New York: Free Press, 1965), 108–9. 18. See Sheldon Wolin’s “Hobbes and the Culture of Despotism,” in Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, ed. Mary J. Dietz (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 9–36. 19. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 181–2. 20. See in particular the works of Richard Flathman: Willful Liberalism: Voluntarism and Individuality in Political Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 2–4, and Thomas Hobbes: Skepticism, Individuality and Chastened Politics (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993). 21. See Mark E. Button, Contract, Culture and Citizenship: Transformative Liberalism From Hobbes to Rawls (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), chap. 1; Melissa A. Orlie, Living Ethically, Acting Politically (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), chap. 2; Don Herzog, Happy Slaves: A Critique of Consent Theory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), chap. 3. 22. Geoffrey M. Vaughan, Behemoth Teaches Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Political Education (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), vii.

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23. Richard Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 80, 88–9. Also see Hiram Caton, The Politics of Progress: The Origins and Development of the Commercial Republic, 1600–1835 (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1988), 139–62, and Gregory S. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 362–3. 24. “The ‘Christian Atheism’ of Thomas Hobbes,” in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. Michael Hunter and David Wooton (Oxford: Clarendon Press and New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 111–30. 25. “Two Sects of Naturalists,” in G.W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1989), 282. 26. Giambattista Vico, New Science, trans. David Marsh (London and New York: Penguin, 1999), §179. 27. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 170. 28. Denis Diderot, Political Writings, trans. and ed. John Hope Mason and Robert Wolker (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 28. 29. Pierre Bayle, Political Writings, ed. Sally L. Jenkinson (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 89. 30. See J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 192, and Eldon J. Eisenach, Narrative Power and Liberal Truth: Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, and Mill (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2002), 23–66. 31. See Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 99. 32. Martinich, Hobbes, 31, 185—see also Martinich’s The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). A similar argument “that Spinoza has better Christian credentials than is commonly supposed” is found in Graeme Hunter, Radical Protestantism in Spinoza’s Thought (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), quote at 3. 33. Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 407. 34. “Hobbes and Individualism,” in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, ed. G. A. J. Rogers and Alan Ryan (Oxford: Clarendon Press and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 100. 35. On Hobbes and the finitude or nonexistence of the “soul” see Carl Zimmer, Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain—And How It Changed the World (New York: Free Press, 2004), 96–9, 127–31. For the Selden story, see Tuck, Hobbes, 32—the account comes from John Aubrey’s Brief Lives. 36. Richard H. Popkin, The History of Skepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 201, 204. 37. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, exp. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 218. 38. DC = De Cive, translated as Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 39. “Thomas Hobbes and the Culture of Despotism” in Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, 22. 40. EL = Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law: Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand Tonnies (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1969).

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41. Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 152. 42. “On the Interpretation of Nature,” in Diderot’s Selected Writings, ed. Lester G. Crocker, trans. Derek Coleman (New York: Macmillan, 1966), §§XIX–XXX. 43. Unlike Locke, Hobbes does not think that a contract’s basis in fear suggests its illegitimacy—indeed he could not, since fear is above the pervasive basis of nearly all human encounters. See EL, I.15.13. 44. Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth: The History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England (New York: Burt Franklin, 1963), 56–7. 45. Ibid., 81. 46. Tuck, Hobbes, 40. 47. Hobbes, Behemoth, 50–1. 48. Tuck, Hobbes, 30. 49. Ibid., 27–9. 50. Quoted in Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, Volume III: Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 15. 51. Diderot, Political Writings, 27. 52. See Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 153. 53. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 226. 54. See Michael Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004), 25–6, 185–6. 55. For an earlier version see EL, I.17.1–11. 56. PT = “Political Treatise,” in Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1951). 57. See Deborah Baumgold, “Hobbes’s and Locke’s Contract Theories: Political not Metaphysical,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Sept., 2005), 289–308. 58. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 77, 65, 185–6; Hardt and Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 194, 285; Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 53–4, 181, 190–4; Etienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, trans. Peter Snowdon (London and New York: Verso, 1998); and Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 79–80, 220, 159. For a critique of this position see Hans Blom’s essay “Spinoza on Res Publica, Republics, and Monarchies,” in Monarchisms in the Age of Enlightenment: Liberty, Patriotism, and the Common Good, ed. Hans Blom, John Christian Laursen, and Luisa Simonutti (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2007), chap. 1. 59. The author is Rebecca Goldstein, and the full title is Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (New York: Shocken, 2006). Another able argument for Spinoza’s centrality to the path of modern Western philosophy is Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 60. See Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 45–6, and Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1952), chap. 5.

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61. Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 13. 62. Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza and Spinozism (Oxford: Clarendon Press and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 6–7. On the Hobbes influence, but with Spinoza as a step toward modern liberalism see ibid., 135–8 and Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, chap. 2. 63. TPT = Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, ed. Jonathan Israel, trans. Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 64. ETH = Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics; Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect; Selected Letters, ed. Seymour Feldman, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1992). 65. Smith, Spinoza, 22. 66. See Rahe, Republics, 404, 463. 67. Smith, Spinoza, 20, 24–5. 68. Nancy K. Levene, Spinoza’s Revelation: Religion, Democracy, and Reason (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), xi. 69. Spinoza, The Letters, 62. 70. Steven B. Smith, Spinoza’s Book of Life: Freedom and Redemption in the Ethics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 130. 71. J. Samuel Preus, Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 6, 161. 72. For a slightly different account along these lines see Harvey Mansfield, America’s Constitutional Soul (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 108–11. 73. Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (New York: Shocken, 1965), 16. 74. Or Horatio: for Spinoza as a modern stoic see Firmin DeBrabander, Spinoza and the Stoics: Power, Politics and the Passions (London and New York: Continuum, 2007). 75. Brayton Polka, Between Philosophy and Religion: Spinoza, the Bible, and Modernity, 2 vols. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006–7), II, 289. 76. Spinoza, The Letters, 151. 77. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 79–80. 78. See Lewis Samuel Feuer, Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1958), which is still a useful study. The most recent and thorough biographical study in English is Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

2 Legitimacy in History For Augustine, as for any medieval believer, the course of history would be satisfactorily complete if the world came to an end in his own lifetime. J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress An examination of the turn toward historical writing by the eighteenth-century philosophes illustrates not only a continuation but a deepening of the politically secularizing instincts of previous generations. Though Enlightenment history developed the account of humankind as in some sense (though not divinely) “destined” to pass through a succession of historical stages, it also maintained the openness and indeterminacy of a human history written without God in the background. Building on the epistemological brush clearings of the seventeenth century, the Enlightenment took aim at the theocratic view of history in which “God is the sole agent, for it is only by the working out of God’s providence that the operation of man’s will at any given moment leads to this result, and not to a different one,” and where “man exists merely as a means to the accomplishment of God’s ends, for God has created him only in order to work out His purpose in terms of human life.”1 Merging aspects of Pagan and Christian historiography, Enlightenment history aimed for both atheism and progress.2This has invited the accusation that the Enlightenment simply replicated religion on its own terms, seeing in history “nothing more than a transposition of the Christian doctrine on the ways of Providence into profane spaces.”3An atheistic account of history allows for nothing pre-given except whatever can be discovered about the permanent nature of human beings and their institutions on the one hand, and a patient gathering of actual historical data on the other. The latter might suggest (though none went so far as to affirm this) that the concept of “the human” itself is something of a chimera, falsified by the extensive variation between cultures or even within the same culture from one century to the next; and our moeurs, however worthwhile they seem, will inevitably give way to others as others still gave way to them. In that case the study 48

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of history would be little more than a pastime unless humans could consciously take history’s reins. The philosophes “criticized society in the light of an ideal that was moral and valuative, but it pretended to base that criticism on a purely causal analysis of historical processes,” writes Hayden White. “The result of this conflict between the means of historical representation and the end to which it was meant to contribute was to drive thought about history into a position that was overtly and militantly Ironic.”4 Can one really be “militantly” ironic? The philosopher Richard Rorty famously suggested that the only appropriate intellectual response to the deconstruction of providential universalism is an embrace of irony and the “contingency” of one’s placement in time and space, all of which was supposed to rule out any “militant” value commitment.5 Yet this was certainly not the view of the Enlightenment historians who made a serious attempt to deal with historical and cultural variation, as part of that continual early modern “effort to master and use the floods of information pouring into Europe from travelers, navigators, and missionaries.”6 White is correct that there is a tension between the Enlightenment’s often polemical intent on the one hand and, on the other, for example, Voltaire’s insistence that “We admit as historical truths none but what are well supported” (WV, 23:1107). And yet the former surely overreaches with the claim that “in its Irony, it recognized that the specific truths it established were ambiguous and taught no general truths at all, only that, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”8 Secularized progress may be cut with considerable doses of irony and contingency and yet still be meaningful—such is how we might put one of the many historical “lessons” taught by the likes of Hume, Voltaire, Gibbon, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith.

The Uses and Abuses of History for Enlightenment Enlightenment history polemicizes while attempting to expose the partisan nature of previous history. History is, for d’Alembert, indivisible from moral education. In the Encyclopédie (“Collége”: 3:6379) he presents it as “quite useful to children by the examples it presents them and the living lessons of virtue it can give at an age where they do not yet have fixed principles, good or bad.” And the lessons we may take from the past are, for d’Alembert, somewhat predetermined: “It is from History that we learn to hold men in high regard solely for the good that they do and not for the imposing pomp which surrounds them.”10 “History,” the Abbé de Mably writes at the outset of his study of the ancient Greeks, “is a school of philosophy. It teaches us the knowledge of the world; expounds, and enriches our reason, by discriminate observations on the wisdom and folly of past ages.”11 It “serves to purge the mind of . . . national partialities and prejudices,” writes Lord Bolingbroke, “and the just applauses or censures of historians, will have a much better and more permanent effect than declamation or song, or the dry ethics of mere philosophy.” Such a study “renders a man better, and wiser, for himself, for his family, for the

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little community of his own country, and for the great community of the world.”12 But the polemical or exhortative nature of such history writing is often more subtle than it is given credit for.13 History must play to the emotions in some sense, Hume admits, because interest presupposes emotion: “The perusal of a history seems a calm entertainment; but would be no entertainment at all, did not our hearts beat with correspondent movements to those which are described by the historian.”14 Hume reports beginning his monumental History of England project (which he wrote reversechronologically) with “the accession of the house of Stuart; an epoch when I thought the misrepresentations of faction began chiefly to take place.” “I thought,” he replies to early critics of his allegedly too pro-Stuart position, “that I was the only historian that had at once neglected present power, interest, and authority, and the cry of popular prejudices” (HE,15 1:iv). Hume turns the tables on critics of his sympathetic account of the Stuart kings by averring that it is in fact he who has chosen to look objectively at the facts, unpolluted by the perils of victor-written history.16 The struggles over the English crown from the onset of the civil war to the accession of William and Mary “have long, by the representations of faction, been extremely clouded and obscured. No man has yet arisen, who has paid an entire regard to truth, and has dared to expose her, without covering or disguise, to the eyes of the prejudiced public.” Liberty’s development is becoming a story told through history, a story perhaps not best told by its present partisans: “Even that party amongst us, which boasts of the highest regard to liberty, has not possessed sufficient liberty of thought in this particular; nor has been able to decide impartially of their own merit, compared with that of their antagonists” (8:309–10). And yet Hume is also the historian who did himself no favors among Whig contemporaries by confessing, famously, to tears shed over the execution of Charles I. Hume had also famously rejected the assurance of inferential knowledge accumulated out of discrete facts—“It is impossible . . . that any arguments from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future,” such that “If we be, therefore, engaged by arguments to put trust in past experience, and make it the standard of our future judgment, these arguments must be probable only”17—in an injunction that seems to reflect dimly on the ability of historical knowledge to form coherent lessons. History would need a base propping up its variety such that an order could be assured despite the Humean induction problem. Normally such a constant had been God—as it would be again, in a transmogrified way, for Hegel and some of his followers. This was not an option for Hume. Like Spinoza he replaces God with nature: “there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations.” So history’s use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature, by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations,

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and furnishing us with materials, from which we may form our observations, and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behavior. (ibid., 55) Historical data constitute “so many collections of experiments, by which the politician or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science” just “as the physician or natural philosopher becomes acquainted with the nature of plants, minerals, and other external objects, by the experiments, which he forms concerning them.”18 Yet Enlightenment history developed—and not only in the “four stages” paradigm of the Scottish theorists –an account of historical change. If human nature is a constant, its potentialities nevertheless are duly activated and deactivated in changing intellectual and sociopolitical circumstances. This “uniformity of human actions” will not “be carried to such a length, as that all men, in the same circumstances, will always act precisely in the same manner, without making any allowance for the diversity of characters, prejudices, and opinions.”19 And the causal variables, whether intellectual, social, or natural, explaining the transmutation from basic homogeneity into historical heterogeneity, are not just a matter of scholarly interest. They have a political salience. Though humanity is in some sense a singularity, different sub-humanities, so to speak, will be produced by a shift from hereditary, honor-based social orders to commercial, interest-based ones.20 Not just the genealogy but the legitimacy of the sociopolitical order is at stake. History is called forth to supplant the deficiencies increasingly seen in the Cartesian-Hobbesian-Lockean thought experiment method for evaluating political or cognitive authority. It was this regard for foundational (or refoundational) moments that Hume claims had, from Locke’s generation onward, obscured the actual events of the Stuart century, events that, evaluated objectively, tell a more complex and less triumphalist story. The “general humor of that time” was intellectually compromised by being “intent on plans of imaginary republics” (HE, 7:85). The conferences of 1689 to settle crown-parliament relations after the accession of William of Orange were “frivolous, more resembling the verbal disputes of the schools, than the solid reasonings of statesmen and legislators” (8:302). The remote events of 1066 have fallen prey to “the controversies of faction,” even though “it is evident, that the present rights and privileges of the people, who are a mixture of English and Normans, can never be affected by a transaction, which passed seven hundred years ago” (1:285). Historical process replaces the misplaced faith in discrete historical instances, a faith that can only be obscurantist, and inimical to the managed evolution of society over time. We seek the true account of “How [government] arose,” declares Adam Smith, “not as some writers imagine from any consent or agreement of a number of persons to submit themselves to such or such regulations, but from the natural progress which men make in society.” A normative reliance on events rather than processes reduces to absurdity, “phantasticall claims which some accidentall occasion may give them an opportunity of employing to their own and their neighbours disquiet.”21

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Voltaire calls it “an idle project, and an ungrateful task, to endeavor to refer everything to ancient customs, or to fix that wheel which time is eternally whirling around with an irresistible motion.” To seek legitimacy in feudal-era constitutional arrangements is to willfully ignore the developmental nature of history—at least, of European history as the philosophes saw it. Because: To what era must we go back? To that when the word ‘parliament’ signified an assembly of the leaders of the Franks, who met together on the first day of March, to settle the division of spoils? . . . to the times when the barons held the commons in a state of slavery?” (VW, 26:77) In Hume’s opinion, one is typically comparing apples and oranges: feudal liberties really signify “a mixture, not of authority and liberty, which we have since enjoyed in this island, and which now subsist uniformly together; but of authority and anarchy” (HE, 6:46n). Nothing normative, for Hume, can be taken from any pre-English civil war constitutional arrangements, because the war itself showed that “constitution” to be “an inconsistent fabric, whose jarring and discordant parts must soon destroy each other, and from the dissolution of the old, beget some new form of civil government, more uniform and consistent” (6:13). In Hume’s view it is the discrepancies, and not the continuities, between past and present, that constitute what is politically edifying about historical study. Rightly understood it makes one “cautious in appealing to the practice of their ancestors, or regarding the maxims of uncultivated ages as certain rules for their present conduct”; it instruct[s] them to cherish their present constitution, from a comparison or contrast with the condition of those distant times . . . instruct[s] them in the great mixture of accident, which commonly concurs with a small ingredient of wisdom and foresight, in erecting the complicated fabric of the most perfect government. (3:297) Voltaire’s commissioned entry for “Histoire” in the Encyclopédie (8:223) praises “the comparison that a statesman or citizen can make between foreign laws and manners and those of his country: this is what stimulates modern nations to raise each other up in arts, commerce and Agriculture.” Narratives of progress spur progress. And while Hume’s emphasis on accident trumping “wisdom and foresight” in the development of modern political structures sounds a bit like an “ironic” reading of progress, Hume’s work as a whole places the emphasis more on human responsibility within contingency and openness. The Enlightenment has often been accused of blithe optimism about human achievement, and many passages might certainly be quoted to that effect, but it is just as often the tragic fragility of human accomplishment that is notable in the philosophes’ accounts. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) especially, read by Hayden White as “the greatest achievement of sustained Irony in the history of historical literature,”22 while

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possessing its share of arch Augustan passages, is surely just as much a deadlyserious description of the continual fragility of civilization in the face of barbarism, and political reason in the face of theocracy.

History and Contract Enlightenment history is tied to the eighteenth-century critique of seventeenthcentury social contract models of the political order. Indeed, it is arguable that the eighteenth century’s development of historical writing is where the roots laid by the post-religious wars social contract become the secular contract as I have been describing it. As contractarian a political thinker as Kant would admit it “futile to hunt for historical documentation” where political obligation was concerned: “we cannot reach back to the time at which civil society first emerged,” and an event so enshrined (reminiscent of a religious creation?) tends to confine our options to total obedience or total revolution instead of “alter[ing] the mode of government by a gradual and continuous process . . . ”23 Like the secular contract, history locates humans within a past-present-future narrative wherein they find a kind of meaning that does not rely on transcendent sources. As Duncan Forbes writes of Hume and his critique of the contract theory, “without his critique of the religious hypothesis he has only scotched the snake, not killed it.” “Only if one accepted Hume’s secularization of politics,” claims Forbes, “could one accept his demolition of the contract theory.”24 Here the historiographical aspect of the Baconian instauration becomes increasingly important. History in Lord Bolingbroke’s account “carries us forward and backward, to future and to past ages. We imagine that the things, which affect us, must affect posterity . . . we live with the men who lived before us, and we inhabit countries that we never saw.” Since “we are born too late to see the beginning, and we die too soon to see the end of many things,” History provides the secular missing link.25 It can make us, à la Bacon, the “true” ancients. The contractarian stance, on the other hand, seems to invest an atemporal calculation of self-interest with too much authority. This explains Hobbes’s resort to anti-progressive authoritarianism—locating oneself within a historical narrative is a partial correction. To the extent that the social contract is a thought experiment rather than an actual event, is not its critique from the perspective of factuality specious? The change is in structure, not in content. Indeed, Hume claims that his historical critique is a way to safeguard post-1688 liberty against lingering deficiencies in the contract model.26 The latter embodies a populism falsified by any real and unprejudiced inquiry into the historical facts. Actual foundational processes “are commonly conducted with such violence, tumult, and disorder, that the public voice can scarcely ever be heard; and the opinions of the citizens are at that time less attended to than even in the common course of administration” (HE, 8:304–5). Even if “the agreement, by which savage men first associated and conjoined their force . . . is acknowledged to be real,” it could have for Hume no normative import: “being so ancient, and being obliterated by a thousand changes of government and

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princes, it cannot now be supposed to retain any authority.” Hume admires consensual politics as the conclusion, but suggests that there might be a more useful method of attaining it than imagining a contractual event: My intention here is not to exclude the consent of the people from being one just foundation of government where it has its place. It is surely the best and most sacred of any. I only pretend that it has very seldom had place in any degree, and never almost in its full extent. And that therefore some other foundation of government must also be admitted.27 The third earl of Shaftesbury, grandson to Locke’s political patron and himself Locke’s intellectual ward for a time, treated the Hobbesian contract in a similar manner at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Hobbists, Shaftesbury suggests, “espouse these paradoxical systems” not because “they are so fully satisfied with them, but in a view the better to oppose some other systems, which by their fair appearance have helped, they think, to bring mankind under subjection”28— namely, religion, either of the Catholic “superstitious” or Protestant “enthusiastic” variety, the Scylla and Charybdis between which, for Enlightenment intellectuals, there had been little to choose during Europe’s wars of religion.29 While contractarians were right to replace the divine basis of the political order with human reason, it was now time to fill in their too-abstract picture. This was a two-pronged assault. First, the theories of sociability and empathy that framed the debate on a secular moral order from Shaftesbury to Adam Smith made the ties that bind us—“some internal sense or feeling, which nature has made universal in the whole species,” as Hume described it30—more “natural,” as well as more naturally pleasurable, than had Hobbes or Locke. Second, Enlightenment intellectuals began to look hard for whatever political legitimacy could be teased out of the actual story of history, a legitimacy thus shorn of, to them, increasingly inutile metaphors and thought experiments, those “imaginary republics” derided by Hume. Just as positing an innate empathetic drive would call into question the individualistic picture drawn by Hobbes and Locke, a shift from conjectural history to empirical history informed the eighteenth century that there had never been individuals without groups, at least not in any meaningful way. “Mankind are to be taken in groups, as they have always subsisted,” writes Adam Ferguson, “and every experiment relative to this subject should be made with entire societies, not with single men.” There may have been a human existence completely anterior to socialization (though this, it is implied, is doubtful), but from Ferguson’s pragmatic perspective, since nothing can be historically known about such an existence—any written records being already the province of societies—nothing normative can be pulled from it either. For homo sapiens, the society appears to be as old as the individual, and the use of the tongue as universal as that of the hand or the foot. If there was a time in which he had

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his acquaintance with his own species to make, and his faculties to acquire, it is a time of which we have no record, and in relation to which our opinions can serve no purpose, and are supported by no evidence.31 We are “to look for the original character of mankind” in “the commencement of history” rather than prehistory, because on this account precisely what sets humans apart from other animals is their possession of a history. Enlightenment history largely affirms, albeit with modifications and additions, the state-of-nature viewpoint of Hobbes and Locke. Actually, Hobbes’s Leviathan makes the state of nature encompass “small Families” who “robbe and spoyle one another” and observed no other Lawes . . . but the Lawes of Honour . . . And as small Familyes did then; so now do Cities and Kingdoms which are but greater Families for their own security enlarge their Dominions, upon all pretences of danger, and fear of Invasion . . . and are remembered for it in after-ages with honour. (L, 118) The rule and political control of scattered families “are very rare in commercial countries” on Adam Smith’s account. But “In countries which have little commerce, on the contrary, such as Wales or the Scottish highlands, they are very common.”32 There had always been the suggestion that experience could offer concretization of the thought experiment or conjectural history, which would then become stylized extrapolation from fact—for Hobbes, the political chaos of the English civil war, for Locke, travelers’ accounts of the Amerindians. But the Enlightenment historians often found their “state of nature” closer to home, and backed, they thought, by the empirical record. For Hume as for Smith, the conflicts between the Highland Scots and their Anglicized Lowland cousins—and, even more brutally, between Protestant settlers and Irish natives—were, at least on Britain’s scale, as much evidence as was needed. (In one letter Hume complained to Baron Mure of Caldwell of “this Inundation of Scots boys, of which some pour in fresh from the Caledonian Mountains, like untam’d Sarmatians, to destroy all the Arts and Civility of the South.” 33)More generally, however, the “state of nature” to be negated by the march of civilization was the tribal or earlyfeudal society that emerged across Europe from the ruins of the Roman Empire. Even when the scope of study is widened—by Gibbon to Byzantium, the rise of Islam and the Golden Horde, and by Voltaire, occasionally, to the whole world— the basic terms remain the same.

The Second State of Nature Rome was for five hundred years one continual miracle which the world should not hope to see again. Rousseau, “Discourse on Political Economy”

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The journey from savagery to civilization becomes a long-term, multi-stage story to be told rather than a conjecture as to what single event—the appearance of language, the first seizure of property, the collective ceding of authority—is to be counted as foundational. The Scottish historian and minister William Robertson, head of the University of Edinburgh for 30 years, makes the task explicit in his history of the Middle Ages (orig. 1762) which takes the reader from the fall of Rome to the reign of Charles V. It is necessary to mark the great steps by which they advanced from barbarism to refinement, and to point out those general principles and events which, by their uniform as well as extensive operation, conducted all of them to that degree of improvement in policy and in manners34 that marks modernity. Paradoxically, this narrative of progress must admit as its background the most significant example of regress in human history: Rome’s collapse. “In less than a century after the barbarous nations settled in their new conquest, almost all the effects of the knowledge and civility which the Romans had spread through Europe, disappeared” (ibid., 11). Though the barbarian hordes imbibe, to some extent, Christianity and Roman law, in general they reintroduce the savage state, though one where small groups, usually extended families or tribes, have replaced Hobbes’s self-interested individuals. It is tribalism to Robertson that signifies the true core of the Middle Ages, however covered over by a patina of chivalrous glory. Every offended baron buckled on his armor, and sought redress at the head of his vassals. His adversary met him in like hostile array. Neither of them appealed to impotent laws which could afford them no protection. Neither of them would submit points, in which their passions were warmly interested, to the slow determination of judicial inquiry. Both trusted to their swords for the decision of the contest.35 For Robertson—as for Adam Smith, who claims that “the liberty of the subjects was secured in England by the great accuracy and precision of the law and decisions given upon it”36—the existence of an impartial and inscribed code of laws is the baseline for civilization: once produced, though, it will not necessarily last. As Hume writes, considering the Middle Ages, “perhaps there was no event, which tended farther to the improvement of the age, than one, which has not been much remarked, the accidental finding of a copy of Justinian’s Pandects, about the year 1130, in the town of Amalfi in Italy” (HE, 3:290). “Accidental”: though many of the philosophes idealized progress it remains in general a misreading to accuse the Enlightenment of promising linear or ordered progress, that being more symptomatic of the re-divinization of the historical process that occurs with Hegel. The Enlightenment’s obsession with the decline and fall of Rome is not the only example, but it is the most serious one. “Among the calamities which the

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devastations of the barbarians who broke in upon the empire brought upon mankind,” Robertson mourns, “one of the greatest was their overturning the system of Roman jurisprudence, the noblest monument of the wisdom of that great people, formed to subdue and to govern the world.”37 “The ruin of the empire of the Romans,” to Adam Smith, “the subversion of all law and order, which happened a few centuries afterwards, produced the entire neglect of that study of the connecting principles of nature, to which leisure and security can alone give occasion.” The catastrophe links the cognitive with the political. It is only, à la Hobbes, “when law has established order and security, and subsistence ceases to be precarious” that “the curiosity of mankind is increased, and their fears are diminished.”38 In Hume’s account an “irruption of the barbarous nations, which soon followed” the decline of Rome, “overwhelmed all human knowledge . . . men sunk every age deeper into ignorance, stupidity, and superstition; till the light of ancient science and history had very nearly suffered a total extinction in all the European nations.” What emerged was very little advanced beyond the rude state of nature: Violence universally prevailed . . . The pretended liberty of the times, was only an incapacity of submitting to government: And men, not protected by law in their lives and properties, sought shelter, by their personal servitude and attachments under some powerful chieftain. (HE, 3:289–92) Gibbon’s masterwork views the Germanic-tribal overrunning of Rome as, among other things, a reversal of civilization’s trends toward abstract and anonymous structures of authority, based in the imperial code of laws. The northern tribes, described almost admiringly as “a voluntary alliance of independent warriors,” are only effective through seeing themselves as “a numerous and increasing family; which, in the course of successive generations, has been propagated from the same original stock” (DF, 3:8039). But any idealization of such vigorous and dedicated peoples must simultaneously recognize that their primitive solidarity can have no purpose except war: “the pastoral manners which have been adorned with the fairest attributes of peace and innocence are much better adapted to the fierce and cruel habits of a military life” (3:75). This story would become more familiar in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: vigorous and warlike peoples euthanize decadent and tired civilizations: “It has always necessarily happened that the most learned, rich, and civilized nations have, in the course of time, been obliged almost everywhere to yield to a savage, poor, and hardy people,” sighs Voltaire (WV, 27:233). Yet Voltaire does not posit the fall of advanced civilizations before primitive hordes as a law of history, but rather, like Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon, as an example that we can avoid by exploring its genesis. From Rome’s perspective, says Gibbon, “The northern countries of Europe scarcely deserved the expense and labor of conquest” (DF, 1:2)—and yet the conquest ended up going the other way. Hume’s evaluation of Rome is, like Gibbon’s, double-edged. The empire “had diffused slavery and oppression,

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together with peace and civility, over so considerable a part of the globe” (HE, 1:24). Rome is complicit to some degree in its own downfall, though not to the extent that the combined Christian-Germanic assault on Pagan antiquity is to be, as with Hegel,valued in and of itself. Hume explores these processes on a more local plane, where “The Britons,” who “under the Roman dominion, had made such advances towards arts and civil manners, that they had built twenty-eight considerable cities within their province, besides a great number of villages and county seats,” are now thrown “back into ancient barbarity” (1:41) by the Saxons. These warriors were little removed from the original state of nature: The social confederacy among them was more martial than civil: They had chiefly in view the means of attack or defense against public enemies, not those of protection against their fellow-citizens: Their possessions were so slender and so equal, that they were not exposed to great danger; and the natural bravery of the people made every man trust to himself and to his particular friends for his defense or vengeance. This defect in the political union drew much closer the knot of particular confederacies. (1:219–20) Such a “wild and imperfect state of society” naturally “bred endless disorder in the nation” (1:220). The Anglo-Saxons who emerge from the retreat of Rome were, up to the Norman invasion, “a rude, uncultivated people, ignorant of letters, unskilled in the mechanical arts, untamed to submission under law and government, addicted to intemperance, riot, and disorder.” The language of late-Roman stagnation notwithstanding, imperial organization had at least instituted a cognitive economy of scale that allowed the spread of learning a wide berth. Post-barbarian fragmentation, by abandoning populations to local genera of ignorance, needed to reestablish foreign connections to reinvigorate learning. This, for Hume, is all the legitimacy that can be extrapolated from the Norman invasion. “The conquest put the people in a situation of receiving slowly, from abroad, the rudiments of science and cultivation, and of correcting their rough and licentious manners” (1:233). So begins Hume’s national-level example of the slow European resurrection elsewhere described by Voltaire, Robertson, and Gibbon. There remain standing examples of barbarian hordes inside Europe itself. One need only look at Ireland, Hume thinks, where the natives of its dependant state remained still in that abject condition, into which the northern and western parts of Europe were sunk, before they received civility and slavery from the refined policy and irresistible bravery of Rome . . . a people, whose customs and manners approached nearer those of savages than of barbarians. (5:335)

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Here as elsewhere Hume repudiates the then-common reliance on climate and geography as the central explanatory factor in human variance. One need only compare the climatically interchangeable Greeks and Turks—or peoples in the same place across time, like the ancient Gauls and modern French, or the ancient and contemporary Romans—to see the absurdity of the position. While climate “may affect the grosser and more bodily organ of our frame,” it does not “work upon those finer organs, on which the operations of the mind and understanding depend.”40 A society’s cognitive-political structure, Adam Smith argues, explains why learning in “Italy, the country in which it was first revived . . . has been almost totally extinguished” and in “Spain, the country in which, after Italy, the first dawnings of modern genius appeared, it has been extinguished altogether.”41 Gibbon, too, dismisses climatic factors as a significant causal factor in history; instead, “The different characters that mark the civilized nations of the globe may be ascribed to the use, and the abuse, of reason” (DF, 3:74). Maybe history demonstrates that every country gets the government it deserves; but this is for reasons quite different than such cold, immobile, geological ones.

Dialectical Secularism Gibbon ends the Decline and Fall with the observation that what he has just described, “the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene, in the history of mankind,” was in its essence “the triumph of barbarism and religion” (7:338, 7:321). But, as many readers have noted, the very title of Gibbon’s summa is somewhat misleading, as the work actually goes on long after the fall of the Western Empire, winding through the rise of Islam, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, and the terminal centuries of the Byzantines all the way to the Reformation. Lurking within it is a story of recovery, as much as one of collapse.42 The Enlightenment does not lock its historical actors in a premolded (because divinized) dialectic like Hegel’s, or a materialist determinism like Marx’s. Its history can usefully be called dialectical though, in that the legitimacy of modern Europe is produced through a long and painful process of negating the earlier negation of Pagan antiquity by Gibbon’s “barbarism and religion.” It is the “religion” side that emerges as truly central. As one reader of Hume observes, “he made a point of showing how the Church had succeeded in corrupting politics at nearly ever important period of British history.”43 The various peoples ruled by a structure like the Roman empire each have their “traditional tales and fictions, which may be different in every sect, without being contrary to each other”—but “when Christianity arose, the teachers of the new sect were obliged to form a system of speculative opinions; to divide, with some accuracy, their articles of faith; and to explain, comment, confute, and defend truth with the subtlety of argument and science.”44 And the most close-to-home example Hume uses to reject the climate variable overtly replaces it with religious attitudes: in Britain

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where “superstition” is the word used to signify bowing before priests, and “enthusiasm” bowing before the local Bible-thumping evangel. The study of history is a weapon to show up religious presumption, the most widely used examples in the Enlightenment being the denial of extensive Roman persecution of Christianity, and the exposure of the donation of Constantine as fraudulent. But medieval or “barbarous” religion itself has its beyond-the-grave revenge by distorting the possibilities of a fact-based study of history. “The scanty and suspicious materials of ecclesiastical history seldom enable us to dispel the dark cloud that hangs over the first age of the church,” (2:1) warns Gibbon when beginning his controversial chapter on the rise of Christianity. And yet he holds out the promise that proper modern history will counteract the obfuscations of “the primitive fathers, who interpret facts by prophecy,” like that, for example, “of a devout but careless writer, the measure of whose belief was regulated by that of his wishes. But neither the belief nor the wishes of the fathers can alter the truth of history” (2:67–8). The progress of the ars historica itself, as just one part of the general cognitive awakening of modernity, reveals the extent to which the medieval European was oppressed by the lack of a rational method, as in a musing of Hume’s about the “forgeries” designed to legitimate papal domination: “these forgeries are so gross, and confound so palpably all language, history, chronology, and antiquities . . . But in the dark period of the thirteenth century, they passed for undisputed and authentic;” people “had nothing wherewithal to defend themselves, but some small remains of common sense, which passed for profaneness and impiety” (HE, 2:217). The distorted cognitive structure of religion here explains its accompanying the barbaric stage of history; yet religion also manages to stand apart from progress as an ever-present danger, one whose defeat requires constant vigilance. Hume’s account of the Druids, for example—who “inculcated the eternal transmigration of souls; and thereby extended their authority as far as the fears of their timorous votaries,” who “practiced their rites in dark groves or other secret recesses,” and who, “in order to throw a greater mystery over their religion . . . communicated their doctrines only to the initiated, and strictly forbade the committing of them to writing; lest they should at any time be exposed to the examination of the profane vulgar” (1:18)—is clearly more than a colorful description of a bygone cult. Of the Jansenist ban on dancing, Voltaire writes, “Abolishing these diversions was an act more worthy of the age of Attila than that of Louis XIV” (WV, 23:116). This reads like a fairly close historical recurrence of the picture Gibbon paints of early Christianity’s assault on Paganism: “the severity of the fathers, who despised all knowledge that was not useful to salvation, and who considered all levity of discourse as a criminal abuse of the gift of speech” (DF, 2:37). And the irruption of civilization-wide religious warfare during the Reformation signals that when

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divinely-inspired, barbarism can quite easily overwhelm even a civilization in the midst of a printing-fueled Renaissance. Thus Voltaire’s melancholic codicil on the sixteenth century: “the disputes which now began to arise about religion sullied the end of this century, and even rendered it terrible, by giving it a certain cast of barbarism, scarcely known to the Huns and Heruli” (WV, 26:270–1). So is this simply a series of antireligious polemics, and history only secondarily, or incidentally? The hortatory intention of much of Enlightenment history, especially where religion is concerned, is undeniable. But these antireligious histories also allow for a more two-sided reading of the place of religion in history—one that, once again, can usefully be called dialectical but not deterministic. As in the Enlightenment’s general cognitive-political project, the intellectual monopoly of self-perpetuating priesthoods is singled out as a serious problem Europe has had to outgrow. But the positive side of this caste-organization is emphasized here as nowhere else in Enlightenment writings. It is religious law, Robertson admits, that stepped in to tame the tribal state-of-nature that emerged from the ruins of Rome: It is not surprising, that even to rude people, the maxims of the canon law should appear more equal and just than that ill-digested jurisprudence which directed all proceedings in the civil courts. According to the latter, the differences between contending barons were terminated, as in a state of nature, by the sword; according to the former, every matter was subjected to the decision of laws.46 Divine law offers generality, albeit of a perverted kind, in an environment where the “civil law,” such as it is, only legitimates the tribal/clan-based warfare already deterministic of most conflicts. If “Law . . . became a science” after the Norman invasion, as Hume claims, it still “required so much study and application, that the laity, in those ignorant ages, were incapable of attaining it, and it was a mystery almost solely confined to the clergy, and chiefly to the monks” (HE, 2:116). Religion offered a resocialization process—though one that must eventually be negated by its secular, civil society equivalent47—that leads Hume close to a familiar rhetoric of religion as interpersonal glue: It must be acknowledged, that the influence of the prelates and the clergy was often of great service to the public. Though the religion of that age can merit no better name than that of superstition, it served to unite together a body of men who had great sway over the people, and who kept the community from falling to pieces, by the factions and independent power of the nobles. (2:147) The need for a divinely preordered community signifies a primitive stage in development, even if it also points to a form of human need that enlightenment has a hard time fully eradicating. Still, the cognitive monopoly pursued by the clerisy

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and the holy orders after the collapse of Roman authority ensured that, at least in some form, belles lettres would survive (Adam Smith also emphasizes the role of the medieval caliphate48). “This advantage we owe entirely to the clergy of the church of Rome,” allows Hume, who . . . preserved the precious literature of antiquity from a total extinction; and under shelter of their numerous privileges and immunities, acquired a security, by means of the superstition, which they would in vain have claimed, from the justice and humanity of those turbulent and licentious ages. (3:288–9) Because “Superstition, the child of ignorance, invested the clergy with an authority almost sacred,” the priests and monks “engrossed the little learning of the age, their interposition became requisite in all civil business, and a real usefulness in common life was thus superadded to the spiritual sanctity of their character” (1:270)—a mixed review, to be sure. The church institutes a sort of manqué imitation of Rome’s cognitive-political economy of scale: it “facilitated the intercourse of nations, and tended to bind all the parts of Europe into a close connection with each other” (4:4–5). Such praise is more and more qualified as history advances and Hume’s “superstition and enthusiasm” combine to check the modernizing initiatives of enlightened rulers. The investiture of cognitive authority in religion, Voltaire argues, leads naturally to political encroachment: From the great ignorance of the people, the clergy and monks had, by the means of a little knowledge, especially in religious matters, acquired that kind of authority over their minds which a superiority of the understanding naturally gives a master over his scholars; and from this authority they derived all their power. There was not a bishop in Germany, or in the North, who was not a petty sovereign; not one in Spain, France, or England, but was possessed of, or disputed with their prince, part of the regal rights. (WV, 25:261) Religion is praised, but only when it trumps the most primitive of authoritystructures: Voltaire elsewhere extols monks by noting that “It was for a long time a consolation to mankind to find asylums open for the reception of those who were desirous of flying from the oppressive government of the Goths and Vandals.” Since “Almost everyone who was not a lord of a castle was then a slave,” “the tranquility of a cloister afforded a happy retreat from tyranny and war,” and “many useful inventions arose from the cloisters” (27:133). A major “irony” of European history, if one wants to use such a term, is that one of the major problems that the secular contract of the Enlightenment aimed to solve had been, at one time, the solution, the lone bulwark against a total destruction of knowledge. “The scanty portion of science which served to guide men in the ages of darkness, was wholly engrossed by the clergy,” Robertson writes. “They alone were accustomed to read, to inquire, and to reason. Whatever knowledge of ancient jurisprudence had been

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preserved, either by tradition, or in such books as had escaped the destructive rage of barbarians, was possessed only by them.”49 Priestly “abuses were common to all the European churches” then as now, writes Hume, “but the priests in Italy, Spain, and Gaul, made some atonement for them by other advantages which they rendered society. For several ages . . . they preserved the Roman language and laws, with some remains of the former civility” (HE, 1:73n). The social theorist Ernest Gellner argues that for most of human history the basic political choice was one of tyranny by “kings or cousins”: “Traditional man can sometimes escape the tyranny of kings, but only at the cost of falling under the tyranny of cousins, and of ritual.”50 The authors examined here would, I think, mostly agree. Hume’s historical account of Europeans being thrown back into post-Roman tribal dominance replaces Hobbes’s and Locke’s conjectures on a pure state of nature: On the whole, notwithstanding the seeming liberty or rather licentiousness of the Anglo-Saxons, the great body even of the free citizens, in those ages, really enjoyed much less true liberty, than where the execution of the laws is the most severe, and where subjects are reduced to the strictest subordination and dependence on the civil magistrate. The reason is derived from the excess itself of that liberty. Men must guard themselves at any price against insults and injuries; and where they receive not protection from the laws and magistrate, they will seek it by submission to superiors, and by herding in some private confederacy, which acts under the direction of a powerful leader. (1:212–3) The post-Roman age in England is marked by “the great influence of the lords over their slaves and tenants, the clientship of the burghers” and “the total want of a middling rank of men,” which leads to “loose execution of the laws” and “continued disorders and convulsions of the state” (1:219). The lack of a “middling” class enables a mid-level accumulation of power that is thus all the more extensive and irresponsible: “the vassals . . . in the feudal constitutions, fell into a greater subordination under the baron, than the baron himself under his sovereign; and these governments had a necessary and infallible tendency to augment the power of the nobles” (2:103). Adam Smith describes the institution of primogeniture both responding to and reinforcing this environment: “disorderly times” where “every great landlord was a sort of petty prince,” surrounded by “tenants and dependants” and despising any entrepreneurial proto-bourgeois as “a parcel of emancipated slaves, almost of a different species from themselves . . . in the same manner as in several of the tartar governments of Asia at present.”51 Like Smith, Hume connects the rise of modern freedom to the triumph of a commerce-minded middle class, a development frustrated by the benighted localism of the feudal era: The languishing state of commerce kept the inhabitants poor and contemptible; and the political institutions were calculated to render that poverty

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This tells Hume that “an industrious tradesman is both a better man and a better citizen than one of those idle retainers, who formerly depended on the great families” and “the life of a modern nobleman more laudable than that of an ancient baron” (3:391). Even the Magna Charta, on this reading, was not a foundational moment of liberty but rather one more in a long line of self-serving anti-monarchical maneuvers by a class of petty-tyrannical lords. Beneficial results were mostly accidental (2:82). Even if the church acted as a check against the “oppressive government of the Goths and Vandals,” it was only at the cost of its own brand of tyranny. And, as Hume argues above, the political problems of “barbarous” times actually end up being exacerbated by religion, after the initial gains in security and the casteprivileged sheltering of knowledge. Soon “frivolous controversies in theology were engendered . . . which were so much the more fatal, as they admitted not, like the others, of any final determination” (1:75), which parallels Gibbon’s description of Christian theologians fiddling with various heresies and controversies while Rome burned. The “people possessed no science or reason, which they could oppose to the most exorbitant pretensions.” Thus “Nonsense passed for demonstration: The most criminal means were sanctified by the piety of the end: Treaties were not supposed to be binding, where the interests of God were concerned.” One reason Hume distrusts appeals to England’s “ancient” constitution or feudal law is that they functioned within a system where officially sanctified irrationality possessed a line-item veto (1:329–30). William Robertson cuts to the heart of the problems about priesthoods within a developmental history: the “doctrine of infallibility renders all such institutions and ceremonies as have been once universally received, immutable and everlasting,” so they “must continue to observe in enlightened times, those rites which were introduced during the ages of darkness and credulity.”52 Hieratic spiritual organization naturally intrudes upon the workings of secular government. Its cognitive authority rushes into the post-Roman vacuum, but its power ends up being an obstacle to development. England’s story becomes one of “the gradual subjection of the kingdom to a foreign jurisdiction” (1:74). There is a dual allegiance problem, even apart from the ubiquitous pope-versus-emperor (or pope versus pope) problem of the Middle Ages. “Every superior who finds himself at the head of a little state is desirous of increasing the number of his subjects,” Voltaire says, but “a monk, though heartily tired of the confinement of a cloister, has still the imaginary good of his order at heart, in preference to the real good of his country” (WV, 27:150). Hume, too, never describes the seizure of power by the priesthood

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as mere self-interested lying, which would be too simplistic. But since the dog of temporal authority is wagged by its spiritual tail in this age, the priestly seizure of cognitive power is also, literally, a land-grab: “they had cast a wishful eye on a vast revenue, which they claimed as belonging to them, by a sacred and indefeasible title” (HE, 1:83–4). The French Enlightenment put much stock in the public expropriation of church resources, so as to institute a more rational usage of the nation’s land and wealth. But this was part of a larger project: the cognitive expropriation of all religious authority by secular civil society.

Nationalizing Religious Assets A stock character throughout Enlightenment history is the potentially rational leader foiled by religious ideas or structures. Premodern kings are often described as caught between a rapacious nobility on the one hand, and the juridical intrusion of the Catholic Church on the other. Hume’s extensive narration of the conflict between Henry II and Thomas à Becket demonstrates the wrench thrown by religion, specifically, into Europe’s hopes for development out of its postRoman barbarism. The latter is a loyal and pragmatic servant of state until he is made archbishop of Canterbury, after which “he totally altered his demeanor and conduct . . . pretending, that he must thenceforth detach himself from secular affairs, and be solely employed in the exercise of his spiritual function” (1:383). The question is not simply one of dual loyalty between England and Rome. The wider problem is that the existence of spiritually privileged sites serves as a selffulfilling prophecy, naturally asserting dominance over temporal power. There is something bizarre about entrusting temporal concerns to a system of thought that in its essence rejects—or at least seriously devalues—the earthbound and human. Voltaire calls this “the abuse . . . of granting worldly power to those who had renounced the world” (WV, 24:148–9). Secular authority is perpetually harried by tendencies inherent in theology, which quite literally alienates the material world. “So fruitless is it for sovereigns to watch with a rigid care over orthodoxy, and to employ the sword in religious controversy, that the work, perpetually renewed, is perpetually to begin,” Hume warns, for history shows us that “a garb, a gesture, nay, a metaphysical or grammatical distinction, when rendered important by the disputes of theologians and the zeal of the magistrate, is sufficient to destroy the unity of the church, and even the peace of society” (HE, 5:92). The arbitrary infusion of spiritual powers into the material world not only presents irrational if largely harmless distinctions—like dietary injunctions—but corrupts justice, which relies on predictability and universality.53 Such a disconnect renders religion politically dangerous, but it also contains, for the philosophes, the seeds of its defeat. The oft-adduced “faith” of the Enlightenment in humanity is not a faith in natural linear progress, and certainly not a faith in natural benevolence—if it is anything, then, it is faith that humans will gradually be able to concern themselves solely with what is rationally within human experience. Such a faith influences these historians’ oft-paradoxical

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descriptions of the medieval church. The papacy lorded it over kings, and sowed civil discord throughout Europe—yet there is something of the paper tiger about this imposing edifice. Gibbon puzzles over the “profound reverence of an absolute monarch towards a feeble and unarmed assembly of his own subjects” (DF, 2:348) that one finds in Rome post-Constantine. Nevertheless, when push came to shove, the Holy See has been surprisingly easy to toss aside. Vis-à-vis the Pope, Voltaire quips while praising Louis XIV’s secularization of power, “It is the maxim of the French government to look upon him as a sacred and enterprising person whose hands must sometimes be tied, though they kiss his feet” (WV, 22:22–4). Even in the Middle Ages, Voltaire reports, an enterprising leader could turn popes into something resembling “the caliphs of Baghdad, who were revered by all the Mahometan states, as the heads of their religion; but yet had no other privilege left them than that of bestowing the investiture of kingdoms on those who demanded them sword in hand” (24:214). And the church’s local material circumstances often made light of its universal spiritual pretensions: “the disposal of states cost them only paper, but they could not recover a single village near Mantua or Ferrara, without having recourse to intrigues.” A cross-cultural comparison is sobering: Cesare Borgia “made use of more art and dexterity to get possession of eight or ten little towns, and to rid himself of a few noblemen that stood in his way, than Alexander, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, or Mahomet had done to subdue the greater part of the habitable globe” (25:82, 26:216). “Happily for mankind,” says Robertson of the papacy, “while their spiritual jurisdiction was most extensive, and at its greatest height, their temporal property was extremely limited. They were powerful pontiffs, formidable at a distance; but they were petty princes, without any considerable domestic force.”54 Redescribing spiritual power in temporal-material terms emphasizes the potential in a secular authority not mystified by relics and miracles. Hume writes that “ecclesiastical power, as it can always cover its operations under a cloak of sanctity, and attacks men on the side where they dare not employ their reason, lies less under control than civil government.” Yet his History of England, despite cataloging at length the chaos imposed on the nation by superstition and enthusiasm, also teaches that “the right of blood” often “prevailed over religious prejudices; and the nation had ever shown itself disposed rather to change its faith than the order of succession” (HE, 2:135, 5:11). This leads us to a problem that has vexed Hume scholarship—the advocacy of religious establishment by such a militant skeptic, and, more generally, the occasional embrace of traditional authority from the author, elsewhere, of the radioactive Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.55 I argue that Hume’s friendliness toward religious establishment is predicated on the belief that secular government will discipline religion, and skeptical-probabilistic philosophy will discipline theology, beyond all recognition. A proper union of spiritual and temporal powers, “prevent[ing] those mutual encroachments, which, as there can be no ultimate judge between them, are often attended with the most dangerous consequences along these lines,” would really just be a tacitly acknowledged subordination of the former to the latter (1:386).

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“State control of a significant sector of the religious life of the nation,” Frederick Whelan rightly points out, “is a realist political strategy intended to moderate religious zeal and thus help solve the potential problem of the socially disruptive effects of fanaticism.”56 For Hume a minimal post-Enlightenment establishment of religion is designed not to save society from its otherwise centrifugal tendencies, but rather, paradoxically, to save society from religion itself. Gibbon was skeptical: “Mr. Hume . . . too hastily concludes that, if the civil and ecclesiastical powers be united in the same person, it is of little moment whether he be styled prince or prelate, since the temporal character will always predominate” (DF, 7:309n). But Hume’s History never ignores the contingencies introduced by better or worse secular political management. This is a Humean leitmotif, from the limited praise of William the Conqueror, who “reduced the ecclesiastical revenues under the . . . feudal law” (1:256), to the more fulsome eulogizing of Elizabeth I (5:157). England’s exceptional tranquility in the midst of continental religious war depended upon a ruler who, “making allowance for the prevailing prejudices of the times . . . established no inquisition into men’s bosoms . . . imposed no oath of supremacy, except on those who received trust or emolument from the public,” and who declined zealous enforcement of the antiCatholic laws indicative of the zeitgeist. Actually, Hume finds, Elizabeth “appeared rather more anxious to keep a strict hand over the puritans; who, though their pretensions were not so immediately dangerous to her authority, seemed to be actuated by a more unreasonable obstinacy” (5:158–9). English Catholics “generally expressed great zeal for the public service” (5:273) throughout Elizabeth’s conflicts with foreign Catholic powers. Thus history shows Hume that a weak establishment, overseen by a strong secular leadership, might have inoculated the modernizing state against the second great revanche de Dieu within Europe’s development towards a reasonable regime of prosperity and freedom: not the “superstition” that rotted out Rome, but the “enthusiasm” that fueled the wars of religion.

Case Studies: Crusaders and Reformers Had not the wound been poisoned by the infusion of theological hatred, it must have admitted of an easy remedy . . . Hume, History of England The nature of the tiger was the same, but he was gradually deprived of his teeth and fangs. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire After the collapse of Rome, two eras deserve special attention for their pronounced placements in Enlightenment history, as they illuminate the paradoxes surrounding religion and development: the Crusades and the Reformation. The Crusades, for Hume “the most signal and most durable monument of human

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folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation” (1:293), were nevertheless for Robertson “the first event that roused Europe from the lethargy in which it had been long sunk.” It is to Robertson a melancholy paradox that “The only common enterprise in which the European nations ever engaged, and which all undertook with equal ardor, remains a singular monument of human folly.”57 Voltaire takes deflationary aim at the objective—“our dominions were stripped of men and money, to make the conquest of a wretched and barren province of Judea,” which “was then what it is at present, the worst of all the inhabited countries of Asia” (WV, 22:138, 25:88)—but Gibbon allows himself a moment of celebration that “a new spirit had arisen of religious chivalry and papal dominion; a nerve was touched of exquisite feeling” (DF, 6:268). Voltaire’s point about depopulation and misappropriated resources notwithstanding, Robertson identifies “beneficial consequences . . . which had neither been foreseen nor expected” which echo Hume’s account of the Norman Conquest spurring England to greater intellectual contact with the continent. Robertson writes, It was not possible for the Crusaders to travel through so many countries, and to behold their various customs and institutions without acquiring information and improvement. Their views enlarged; their prejudices wore off; new ideas crowded into their minds; and they must have been sensible on many occasions of the rusticity of their own manners when compared with those of a more polished people. These impressions were not so slight as to be effaced upon their return to their native countries. A close intercourse subsisted between the East and West during two centuries; new armies were continually marching from Europe to Asia, while former adventurers returned home and imported many of the customs to which they had been familiarized by a long residence abroad. Accordingly we discover, soon after the commencement of the crusades, greater splendor in the courts of princes, greater pomp in public ceremonies, a more refined taste in pleasure and amusements, together with a more romantic spirit of enterprise spreading gradually over Europe; and to these wild expeditions, the effect of superstition or folly, we owe the first gleams of light which tended to dispel barbarity and ignorance.58 One hardly gets the sense that the central spur to this inter-civilizational traffic was a brutal series of religious wars, typically accompanied by rapine and plunder on all sides—though the other philosophes certainly do not come up short on this account (e.g., Diderot’s roundly scoffing Encyclopédie article “Croisades,” or Hume’s account of the taking of Jerusalem [HE, 1:311]). The Crusades present an interesting exception to the “superstition-enthusiasm” typology of religious organization: a period of large-scale pre-Luther enthusiasm that occurred within superstition-dominated Catholicism. They foreshadow the Reformation by demonstrating the crisis that allegedly divinely inspired emotions can bring to politics—but in this case hieratic authority happily joined in, the

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object of enthusiasm’s passions being conquest abroad rather than revolution at home. Witness Gibbon’s brilliant portrait of Peter the Hermit, medieval evangel: In this austere solitude, his body was emaciated, his fancy was inflamed; whatever he wished, he believed; whatever he believed, he saw in dreams and revelations. From Jerusalem the pilgrim returned an accomplished fanatic; but, as he excelled in the popular madness of the times, Pope Urban the Second received him as a prophet, applauded his glorious design, promised to support it in a general council, and encouraged him to proclaim the deliverance of the Holy Land . . . When he painted the sufferings of the natives and pilgrims of Palestine, every heart was melted to compassion; every breast glowed with indignation, when he challenged the warriors of the age to defend their brethren and rescue their Savior: his ignorance of art and language was compensated by sighs, and tears, and ejaculations; and Peter supplied the deficiency of reason by loud and frequent appeals to Christ and his mother, to the saints and angels of paradise, with whom he had personally conversed. The most perfect orator of Athens might have envied the success of his eloquence: the rustic enthusiast inspired the passions which he felt, and Christendom expected with impatience the counsels and decrees of the supreme Pontiff. (DF, 6:270–1) Hume always felt that as dangerous as “enthusiasm” could be to peace, it was ultimately conducive to political freedom by privileging individual judgment over top-down doctrine. When Gibbon, however, writes that the “magnanimous spirit of Gregory the Seventh had already embraced the design of arming Europe against Asia” (6:271), there is implied praiseworthiness in redirecting the conquering spirit away from Europe. Indeed, Gibbon suggests that a defensive crusade against Islam could have been justified on purely secular grounds. “In the eleventh century,” he argues, “the victorious arms of the Turks presented a real and urgent apprehension” of total conquest, just as previous Islamic warriors had in the time of Charles Martel. “They had subdued, in less than thirty years, the kingdoms of Asia, as far as Jerusalem and the Hellespont; and the Greek empire tottered on the verge of destruction” (6:277). But the religious basis of the war eliminated its potential worldly utility. Rather than properly channeling religious emotions, the church hierarchy deflected attempts by secular rulers to rationalize or redirect the passions issued forth by the conflict. Thus Gibbon’s account of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who, advanced in age and authority . . . repented of the rash engagements of his youth; his liberal sense and knowledge taught him to despise the phantoms of superstition and the crowns of Asia; he no longer entertained the same reverence for the successors of Innocent; and his ambition was occupied by the restoration of the Italian monarchy from Sicily to the Alps. But the success of this project would have reduced the popes to their primitive

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Irrational cause produced irrational effect: “The principle of the crusades was a savage fanaticism; and the most important effects were analogous to the cause.” Europe was “corrupted by new legends” and “new superstitions; and the establishment of the inquisition, the mendicant orders of monks and friars, the last abuse of indulgences, and the final progress of idolatry flowed from the baleful fountain of the holy war.” Though “some philosophers have applauded the propitious influence of these holy wars,” they “appear to me to have checked, rather than forwarded, the maturity of Europe. The lives and labours of millions, which were buried in the East, would have been more profitably employed in the improvement of their native country” while “the accumulated stock of industry and wealth would have overflowed in navigation and trade.” What’s more, “the Latins would have been enriched and enlightened by a pure and friendly correspondence with . . . the East.” The last clause somewhat contradicts Gibbon’s previous description of Islam as a religion of conquest well on the march. And only a page later Gibbon admits that irrational cause might have actually had the effect of toppling an outmoded and irrational social order at home: “Among the causes that undermined the Gothic edifice, a conspicuous place must be allowed to the crusades” (DF, 6:464–6). Similar ambivalence pervades Enlightenment writings about the crusaders’ enthusiastic successors: What place are we to give the Protestant Reformation in the story of modernity’s development? In Voltaire’s blunt summation, “the private interest of a few monks in a corner of Saxony produced more than two hundred years of discord, rage, and misfortunes among thirty kingdoms” (WV, 27:58). Even Hume—whose limited praise of “enthusiasm” as conducive to freedom echoes the Madisonian strategy of divide and conquer—describes the Reformation as basically a relic of medieval times, only given a modern context by its lucky connection with the printing boom. “The quick and surprising progress of this bold sect may justly in part be ascribed to the late invention of printing, and revival of learning”—but he hastens to add, lest the final clause be misinterpreted, “Not that reason bore any considerable share, in opening men’s eyes with regard to the impostures of the Romish Church,” for clearly “the rapid advance of the Lutheran doctrine, and the violence, with which it was embraced, prove sufficiently, that it owed not its success to reason and reflection” (HE, 4:9). The printing boom and the success of the Reformation have been linked many times; Hume’s point, though, is that the historical confluence of the two should not blind us to the compatibility of the one, and incompatibility of the other, with what he values about modernity. His is the Reformation that, less than being memorable as the historical key to modern legislatures or capital markets, was as one historian put it “above all else a revival of religion” and perhaps even “the last great flowering of the piety of the Middle Ages.”59 The “humor of the reformers” was not “inquisitive” but “rather

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disputative”—the existing scholasticism suddenly mixed with “a mysterious species of faith, in inward vision, rapture, and ecstasy” (4:10). Indeed, Hume’s account has the increase in freedom coming at the beginning of the Reformation, after which it is predictably stifled by the cognitive deficiencies of religion: though the first broaching of religious controversy might encourage the skeptical turn in a few persons of a studious disposition; the zeal, with which men soon after attached themselves to their several parties, served effectually to banish for a long time all such obnoxious liberties. (4:66) Hume (no proto-Madisonian here) mourns the spirit of party and faction that will “subvert government, render laws impotent, and beget the fiercest animosities among men of the same nation, who ought to give mutual assistance and protection to each other.”60 And religious faction is the most dangerous to social peace, due to its non-material and thus irrational content. In Hume’s eyes only a tremendous defanging of religious feeling makes sense of the Lockean-Madisonian position that religious sects might function in society like any other competing groups. When Hume observes that “Parties from principle, especially abstract speculative principle, are known only to modern times, and are, perhaps, the most extraordinary and unaccountable phaenomenon, that has yet appeared in human affairs,”61 he is implicating the sectarian spirit of the Reformation for bequeathing the vestiges of holy war to even nominally secular parties. Religious and political irrationality track one another closely, as in Hume’s evaluation of the “fanatics” of the English Civil War.62 We might say that tragedy repeats itself as farce, but there is an element of tragic farce about Hume’s description of the holy war version of parliamentarianism during the Reformation: when the reformers proceeded thence to dispute concerning the nature of the sacraments, the operations of grace, the terms of acceptance with the Deity, men were thrown into amazement, and were, during some time, at a loss how to choose their party. The profound ignorance in which both the clergy and laity formerly lived, and their freedom from theological altercations, had produced a sincere, but indolent acquiescence in received opinions; and the multitude were neither attached to them by topics of reasoning, nor by those prejudices and antipathies against opponents, which have ever a more natural and powerful influence over them. As soon therefore as a new opinion was advanced, supported by such an authority as to call up their attention, they felt their capacity totally unfitted for such disquisitions; and they perpetually fluctuated between the contending parties. (4:95) Politics will be irrational to the degree that the content of the debate precludes rationality.

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In the History of England Hume fills out historically the abstract typology of the “Of superstition and enthusiasm” essay. It is only to a limited extent that the History supports the famous conclusion of the essay that “superstition is an enemy to civil liberty, and enthusiasm a friend to it.”63 The History’s story is more nuanced, emphasizing the contingency involved in the political management of religious enthusiasm. The essay had claimed that “Enthusiasm . . . begets the most extreme resolutions” when it “inspire[s] the deluded fanatic with the opinion of divine illuminations, and with a contempt for the common rules of reason, morality, and prudence” and “produces the most cruel disorders in human society”; but “its fury is like that of thunder and tempest, which exhaust themselves in a little time, and leave the air more calm and serene than before.”64 However, a history of the political strife caused by post-Luther theological disputes could hardly support the claim that enthusiasm burns itself out in “a little time.” Hume finds that the “natural aversion to episcopal authority, to ceremonies, rites, and forms” on the part of “enthusiasts” fearing the suppression of their “rapturous flights, ecstasies, visions, inspirations . . . the liberal effusions of their zeal and devotion” finds its parallel in a distrust of contemporaneous centralizing monarchs like the Tudors in England (5:92–3). So Hume identifies the paradox whereby “the noble principles of liberty took root” and “became fashionable among the people” only “under the shelter of puritanical absurdities” (5:406). Yet he elsewhere makes clear that whatever genuine liberty was produced by modernity had to come about not merely through the Reformation but through its subsequent negation. The erstwhile connecter of enthusiasm and civil liberty warns that “the doctrine of absolute decrees has ever been intimately connected with the enthusiastic spirit”—“that doctrine” creates a “supposed elect” after its own fashion, just like hieratic Catholicism, “and exalts them, by infinite degrees, above the rest of mankind” (6:107). In the philosophes’ account, the Catholic hierarchy was toppled in part because it had ceased to provide rational, utilitarian political management. Their monopolization of learning and wealth, in Adam Smith’s telling, produced a certain liberality and elegance, but also decadence and weakness, such that “when attacked by a set of popular and bold, though perhaps stupid and ignorant enthusiasts” the Popes and cardinals were “as perfectly defenceless as the indolent, effeminate, and full fed nations of the southern parts of Asia, when they were invaded by the active, hardy, and hungry Tartars of the North.”65 Note the analogy. A pre-secularized population can only revert to fanaticism, and will continue to do so until the expropriation of religion and theology by civil society and political theory completes its work. What could have been progressive reform turns into, for Voltaire, “Fanaticism” such as “had never before produced a fury equal to this in the world.” Political authority is turned over to “peasants, who all thought themselves prophets, and knew nothing more of Scripture than that it commanded them to massacre without pity all the enemies of the Lord,” Luther and Calvin included: “full of ardor to . . . gain that ascendancy over the minds of others which is so flattering to self-love, and which makes a kind of conqueror of a divine.” These were “men of the most rigid manners” who “condemned celibacy

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in the priests, and opened the gates of the convents . . . only to turn all society into a convent,” who “condemned auricular confession, but . . . enjoined a public one; and in Switzerland, Scotland, and Geneva it was performed the same as penance” (WV, 27:79–84). Here Marx was solidly of the Voltairean persuasion, describing a Luther who overcame servitude through devotion but only by substituting servitude through conviction . . . shattered the faith in authority by restoring the authority of faith . . . transformed priests into laymen by turning laymen into priests . . . liberated man from external religiosity by making religiosity the innermost essence of man.66 Eighteenth-century Britain seemed particularly praiseworthy to certain of the philosophes; Hume suggests that this is not owing to any innate genius for constitutionalism or compromise. It is because the political management of the Reformation’s furies was better exercised there than elsewhere (HE, 4:115). This historical observation does not lead to a blanket approval of strong, centralizing authority, but it does indicate that religious passion requires the response of an assertive secular leadership to be made safe for society. Hume makes his defense of Anglican religious establishment a lesson of history: Wherever the reformation prevailed over the opposition of civil authority, this genius of religion appeared in its full extent, and was attended with consequences, which, though less durable, were, for some time, not less dangerous than those which were connected with the ancient superstition. But as the magistrate took the lead in England, the transition was more gradual; much of the ancient religion was still preserved; and a reasonable degree of subordination was retained in discipline, as well as some pomp, order, and ceremony in public worship. (4:254) Of all the European churches, which shook off the yoke of papal authority, no one proceeded with so much reason and moderation as the church of England; an advantage, which had been derived partly from the interposition of the civil magistrate in this innovation, partly from the gradual and slow steps, by which the reformation was conducted in that kingdom. (5:8) These arguments have been taken to signal a Burkean streak in the man Peter Gay raised up as the signature “modern pagan” of his Enlightenment history.67 Had Hume lived to see the execution of Danton we might be able to settle the question with greater confidence. It is clear from the History, however, that defenses of tradition and authority are seen as utilitarian inoculations against the centrifugal force religious passions bring to society. England was also just lucky, in that its physical separation from Europe allowed rational leadership a wider berth in managing the political manifestations of

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enthusiasm. The archaism of the Reformation revealed itself to Hume by its effect in the author’s native Scotland—Hume watched the ill-starred Jacobite rising march in and out of Edinburgh—where “commenced . . . that cant, hypocrisy, and fanaticism, which long infested that kingdom, and which, though now mollified by the lenity of the civil power, is still ready to break out on all occasions” (4:436). This is not a comforting backward glance at a comfortably buried stage of history: one of Hume’s History lessons is that, however much religious passion might decline in tandem with liberal progress, a constant vigilance is required lest it return, perhaps in unforeseen guises. That “politics may be reduced to a science,” as one of his essays argues, only holds as a practical statement if political actors approximate a scientific outlook. The History demonstrates that religion presents a running challenge to such a possibility, one rarely well-managed. It reveals, in Scottish history as Hume sees it, a “spirit of fanaticism . . . so much the more dangerous, as religion . . . is not restrained by any rules of morality,” and it unconstrained “by any principles of ordinary conduct and policy” (5:212–3). Thus the separation of religion from politics that some post-Enlightenment writers credited to the Reformation remains, for Hume, a false promise until it is religion itself that has been cognitively expropriated. Otherwise, plus c’est la même chose: one finds in charge the “Millenarians” “who pretended, that the saints in the meanwhile, that is, themselves, were alone entitled to govern” (7:223). The replacement clergy is not content with the unlimited jurisdiction, which they exercised in ecclesiastical matters: They assumed a censorial power over every part of administration; and, in all their sermons, and even prayers, mingling politics with religion, they inculcated the most seditious and most turbulent principles such that “Scarcely, even during the darkest night of papal superstition, are there found such instances of priestly encroachments, as the annals of Scotland present to us during that period” (6:25–6). When religion defines political conflict it is “impossible to set bounds to these holy fervors, or confine, within any natural limits, what was directed towards an infinite and supernatural object” (7:17–8). Gibbon agrees that freedom “was the consequence, rather than the design, of the Reformation,” judging the Reformers “ambitious of succeeding the tyrants whom they had dethroned,” imposing “creeds and confessions” and asserting “the right of the magistrate to punish heretics with death” (DF, 6:132–3). The problem with a religious reformation, as deserving of attack as the old order might be, is that “It is the first care of a reformer to prevent any future reformation” (4:499). The act of sanctification makes particularly perilous a general human tendency to sacrifice progress to continuity, as suggested by Diderot in the context of knowledge: “Those who succeeded the first innovators have, for the most part, been captive to them; achievements which should have been regarded as the first step were blindly taken to be the last word”; thus are we reduced “to the servile condition of copyists.”68 How much graver this dilemma is if the innovator is blessed with the

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eternal approval of God—or is God! The Enlightenment historians teach that the infusion of the divine has hampered, and may well again hamper, the progressive potential of the human.

Notes 1. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 48. 2. See Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York: Norton, 1994), 55. 3. Tzvetan Todorov, In Defence of the Enlightenment, trans. Gila Walker (London: Atlantic Books, 2009), 18. 4. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 48. 5. See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 6. Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 200. 7. WV = Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet), The Works of Voltaire, trans. William F. Fleming (Paris: DuMont, c. 1901). 8. White, Metahistory, 68. 9. References are to the online transcription of the Encyclopédie, also searchable by title and author, at www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/encyc/ ; translations are my own. 10. Jean Le Rond D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. Richard N. Schwab (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merill, 1963), 35. For a nuanced analysis see Judith Shklar, “Jean d’Alembert and the Rehabilitation of History,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Oct.–Dec., 1981), 643–64. 11. Abbé de Mably, Observations on the Greeks (London: R. Baldwin, 1776), “Dedication.” 12. Lord Bolingbroke, Historical Writings, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 15, 62, letters 2 and 5. 13. For exemplary criticisms of Enlightenment history see Benedetto Croce, Theory & History of Historiography, trans. Douglas Ainslie (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1921), 249; Karl Lowith, Meaning in History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1949); and Collingwood, Idea of History, 77, 80. 14. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983), 45. 15. HE = David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 8 vols. (London: J.F. Dove, 1822). 16. See Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 310. 17. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 22–4. 18. Ibid., 55. 19. Ibid., 56–7. 20. See Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 61, for a summary account. 21. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael and P. G. Stein (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), iv.19, i.89–90.

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22. White, Metahistory, 55. 23. Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 162–3 (Metaphysics of Morals §52). 24. Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 66–8. 25. Bolingbroke, Historical Writings, 7, 18–19, letter 2. 26. On Hume’s partial embrace of Contractarianism within his rejection of it, see Frederick G. Whelan, “Hume and Contractarianism,” Polity, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Winter, 1994), 201–24. For the argument that Hume was more of a contractarian than is usually thought see David Gauthier, “David Hume, Contractarian,” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 88, No. 1 (Jan., 1979), 3–38. For the view that Hume stayed closer to Hobbisme than has been noted see Jean Hampton’s essay “The Hobbesian Side of Hume,” in Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays For John Rawls, ed. Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman and Christine M. Korsgaard (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 66–101. 27. “Of the Original Contract,” in David Hume, Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 189, 192. 28. Shaftesbury [Anthony Ashley Cooper], Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 43–5. 29. On Hume’s context of English religious controversy see Nicholas Phillipson, Hume (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 93. 30. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 15. 31. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 10–12. 32. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner and W. B. Todd, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1979 [1776]), 421. 33. Letters of David Hume, 2 volumes, ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), II, 187 (8 Oct. 1768, #422). Also see Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, 87. 34. William Robertson, A History of the Middle Ages Describing the Progress of Society in Europe from the Subversion of the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century, Confirmed by Historical Proofs and Illustrations: And the History of the Reign of the Emperor of Germany, Charles V., and of All the Kingdoms and States of Europe During His Age (Columbus, OH: Published by William Hall for J. & H. Miller, 1850), 7. Also see Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 427. 35. Ibid., 26–7. 36. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, v.31. 37. Ibid., 40. 38. “History of Astronomy,” in Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 67, 50. 39. DF = Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 7 vols., ed. J. B. Bury (London: Methuen & Co., 1909). 40. “Of National Characters,” in Hume, Political Essays, 84–5, 91. 41. “Letter to the Edinburgh Review,” in Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, 243. 42. On the recovery aspect see J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 4 vols. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2005), I, 3, 304. 43. Phillipson, Hume, 12.

Legitimacy in History 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

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“Of Parties in General,” in Hume, Political Essays, 38. “Of National Characters,” in ibid., 85. Robertson, History of the Middle Ages, 39–40. On this see Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, I, 306. “History of Astronomy” in Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, 67. Robertson, History of the Middle Ages, 39. Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994), 7. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 383–5, 397. For Smith’s account of the alliance between these proto-bourgeois and their monarchs against the mid-level authority of feudal barons and the clergy, see 389, 402, 797–803, 878–9. Robertson, History of the Middle Ages, 134. Also see Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 30–1. Robertson, History of the Middle Ages, 76. See Will R. Jordan, “Religion in the Public Square: A Reconsideration of David Hume and Religious Establishment,” The Review of Politics, Vol. 64, No. 4 (Autumn, 2002), 687–713; and Frederick G. Whelan, “Church Establishments, Liberty & Competition in Religion,” Polity, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Winter, 1990), 155–85. Frederick G. Whelan, Hume and Machiavelli: Political Realism and Liberal Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 156. Robertson, History of the Middle Ages, 14–6. Ibid., 16–7. Ronald H. Bainton, The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1952), 3. “Of parties in general,” in Hume, Political Essays, 34. Ibid., 36. See Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 27. “Of superstition and enthusiasm,” in Hume, Political Essays, 49. For trenchant analyses of the way Hume saw such passions intersecting with politics, especially as regards the Reformation, see the essays by Andrew Sabl and Sharon R. Krause in The Arts of Rule: Essays in Honor of Harvey C. Mansfield, ed. Krause and Mary Ann McGrail (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 245–66, 289–312. I am more inclined toward Sabl’s view that Hume, in the end, associated modern freedom with the disciplining/channeling of passions by stable liberal-constitutional rule. Ibid., 48–9. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 789. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 60. See Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1967), I, 401–22. Denis Diderot, Political Writings, trans. and ed. John Hope Mason and Robert Wolker (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 25.

3 American Encyclope-Deism (Revolutions and Open Societies I) I shall examine the various religions of the world only in relation to the good to be drawn from them in the civil state. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws At the birth of societies, the leaders of republics create the institutions; thereafter, it is the institutions that form the leaders of republics. Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline

Montesquieu’s Children In June of 1788 Alexander Hamilton, advocate for a stronger federal Constitution, spoke to the New York Ratifying Convention of “a celebrated writer, who, by being misunderstood, has been the occasion of frequent fallacies in our reasoning on political subjects.” The Baron de Montesquieu, a source of American optimism as to separation of powers but pessimism as to the prospects for republican governance on so large a scale, had, according to Hamilton, been misread. Montesquieu’s admonition about size “relates only to democracies, where the whole body of the people meet to transact business; and where representation is unknown.”1 In an earlier speech on the same subject Hamilton had launched a similar defense of modern republicanism—which could function on a large scale, and in fact might work better if it did—versus ancient democracy. The latter “never possessed one feature of good government”; its “very character was tyranny; their figure deformity . . . an ungovernable mob, not only incapable of deliberation, but prepared for every enormity.”2 Hamilton hammered upon this ancient-modern distinction throughout deliberation on the Constitution and then defense of its ratification. “No friend to order or to rational liberty can read without pain and disgust the history of the 78

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Commonwealths of Greece,” claims the first Continentalist. The ancient city-states “were a constant scene of the alternate tyranny of one part of the people over the other, or of a few usurping demagogues over the whole”; so Hamilton praises “representation” as the alternative to “tumultuary assemblies of the collective body of the people, where the art or impudence of the ORATOR or TRIBUNE, rather than the utility or justice of the measure could seldom fail to govern.”3 Though James Madison would turn against Hamilton in the debate over chartering a national bank with a funded debt, he was fundamentally in agreement about abandoning excessive attachment to local institutions. In his “Observations on the ‘Draught of a Constitution for Virginia’ ” of 1788 he called the “spirit of locality” an “evil . . . fully displayed in the County representations; the members of which are every where observed to lose sight of the aggregate interests of the Community, and even to sacrifice them to the interests or prejudices of their respective constituents,” and added, “In general these local interests are miscalculated.”4A meaningfully decentralized democracy like the Swiss system is quite unworthy of our imitation . . . one of the vilest aristocracies that ever was instituted: the peasants of some of their cantons are more oppressed and degraded than the subjects of any monarch in Europe: nay, almost as much so as those of any eastern despot.5 Madison wrote Jefferson (10/24/1787) during the debate over the Constitution that America needed a national government with veto power over the states because “Without such a check in the whole over the parts, our system involves the evil of imperia in imperio.”6 During the War of Independence Hamilton had already decided that the United States should abandon the idyll of small-scale establishments attached to volunteer militias and agricultural self-sufficiency and embrace instead a progress-oriented economy of scale. In a September 1780 letter to James Duane, Hamilton mourned “an excess of the spirit of liberty which has made the particular states show a jealousy of all power not in their own hands.”7 A rational politics, for Hamilton as for Madison, balances geographical levels of identification and participation, but centralization ultimately facilitates freedom.8 In Federalist Hamilton followed eighteenth-century historians’ argument that the development of modern freedom was a dual attack, from below and from above, against local grandees: “The barons, or nobles, equally the enemies of the sovereign and the oppressors of the common people, were dreaded and detested by both; till mutual danger and mutual interest effected an union between them fatal to the power of the aristocracy.”9 But Hume’s use of the history of the English Reformation to press the rationality of a moderate religious establishment did not convince the founders. Hamilton asked pointedly in his prerevolutionary “A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress,” (1774) How would you like to pay four shillings a year, out of every pound your farms are worth, to be squandered, (at least a great part of it) upon ministerial

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Hamilton associates state-maintained clergy with parasitic ministers. A reflection of the era’s propagandistic needs, perhaps; Hume recommended establishment as a defuser of both the “superstition” and “enthusiasm” inherent in religious passion, and Hamilton recommends his federal system of representation as serving a similar function vis-à-vis political passion. In his “Memorial and Remonstrance” against establishment in Virginia Madison considered the utility of religious establishments, and rejected Hume: they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of Civil authority . . . they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been seen the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty, may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries.11 Logically, “the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects”; even a liberal establishment implies either that the Civil Magistrate is a competent Judge of Religious truth; or that he may employ Religion as an engine of Civil policy. The first is an arrogant pretension falsified by the contradictory opinions of Rulers in all ages, and throughout the world: The second an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation.12 Despite the founders’ extended public harangue against British religious establishment, their real concern seems not to have been a national American church but rather a patchwork of local clerical tyrannies. A major spur to anti-federalist wrath against the Constitutional settlement was its prohibition of communitydetermined religious tests for public office.13 As the historian William Lee Miller reminds us, early America’s avoidance of a British-style Establishment regime was a closer call than we tend to remember.14 “To the generation that adopted the First Amendment,” legal scholar Leonard Levy explains, “establishment had also come to mean, in the main, the financial support of religion generally, by public taxation.”15 Madison had seen the potential for smaller scale religious domination in the earlier debates about establishing toleration in Virginia. He noted that the pleas of minority sects for toleration were falsified by opposite behavior as soon as such sects were in a more powerful position. The Presbyterian clergy, Madison noted, were “as ready to set up an establishment which is to take them in as they were to pull down that which shut them out.”16 Fiery invocations of “the people” were, to Hamilton, most likely a cover for demagoguery, no less demagogic for its being exercised at a subnational level: “a dangerous ambition

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more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearances of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.”17 Hamilton writes of the difference between “maxims in geometry” and “maxims in ethics and politics”: the former are “entirely abstracted from those pursuits which stir up and put in motion the unruly passions of the human heart” while “in the sciences of morals and politics, men are found far less tractable.” But this does not indicate that politics should not be made as much of a “science” as is possible within such constraints: Though it cannot be pretended that the principles of moral and political knowledge have, in general, the same degree of certainty with those of the mathematics, yet they have much better claims in this respect than to judge from the conduct of men in particular situations we should be disposed to allow them.18 That a science of politics—like, more broadly, the “science of man” to which it was attached—could be developed from a combination of empirical historical study, rational deduction, and experiment, was a dream shared by the Federalist and the encyclopédiste. It was not just to taunt the old regime that Holbach suggested the French “add George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Antoninus, Trajan, Julian, Alfred, Henri IV”19 and others on the typical eighteenth-century list. Montesquieu’s ideas were key here, even if Hamilton and Madison thought the content outmoded, or incorrectly absorbed. European observers less radically inclined than Holbach tended to agree that the Americans had created something new for the ages—as Dupont de Nemours promised Jefferson, “we shall laugh at those who believed for such a long time that no republic could be organized outside of the precincts of a small town or a small canton.” Such laughter would be tempered “with indulgent moderation. They had no idea of representative government, and they had experienced the danger of stormy assemblies.”20 But the enthusiasm of the philosophes that America would show the way to Europe should not obscure the European intellectual framework for American independence. Jefferson cited the collective production and diffusion of knowledge as a supranational project that would outlive the more narrowly temporal contests between peoples, a “republic of letters . . . a great fraternity spreading over the whole earth, and their correspondence is never interrupted by any civilized nation.” Epochal utilitarian changes in the human prospect would follow: “Vaccination has been a late and remarkable instance of the liberal diffusion of a blessing newly discovered.”21 Around the same time that Adam Smith proposed the once-heretical notion that material growth among nations was not a zero-sum game, Jefferson emphasized the same about cognitive growth: “Its peculiar character . . . is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives

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light without darkening me.”22 The upshot being: a cognitive monopoly is just as if not more inutile over time as a commercial one. The cross-pollination of French Enlightenment with Anglo-American Enlightenment thought across the entire prerevolutionary era belies any attempt to raise a high wall between them. Most, then, expected an eventual convergence; a biographer of Diderot calls the political philosophy of the Encyclopédie “Hamiltonianism plus the Bill of Rights.”23 It would be perverse, of course, to deny that there were meaningful differences, but a stylized black-versus-white portrait of American [common sense, moderation, respect for religion, etc.] against French [radicalism, militant atheism, focus on the “social question,” etc.] covers over as much as it reveals. It is easy to forget that relative to population the American Revolution produced more refugees than the French and confiscated as much property. Next I examine what the American founders shared or did not share with the High French Enlightenment vis-à-vis the political salience of religion.

Secularization and the Separation of Powers: The Case of Montesquieu Montesquieu has endured as a theorist of separating the loci of power within a government, which influenced the framers of the American constitution, Madison in particular. Hence we shall examine his work avant le déluge before moving into the revolutionary era—in both American and France. Scholarship on Montesquieu tends to discuss his comparative anatomy of regimes without focusing on his critique of religion—or by focusing almost exclusively on a narrative of religious toleration as opposed to secularization.24 But when it came to the conflict between spiritual and temporal authority, Montesquieu was of no mind to set up a power-sharing arrangement, and strongly recommended the subordination of the sacred to the secular. So despite his limited embrace of cultural relativism,25 and an approach to politics somewhat more organic and conservative26 than that of later republicans like Jefferson, Kant, or Rousseau, Montesquieu was solidly within the Enlightenment’s attempt to forge a secular contract for human political affairs. It is true that, taking Pierre Bayle as his foil, Montesquieu says in The Spirit of the Laws (1752) that genuine atheism would be inimical to the body politic: “it is quite useful for one to believe that god is . . . he who has no religion at all is that terrible animal that feels its liberty only when it claws and devours” (SL, 24.2). Acknowledging the creator is a foundational premise: “The law that impresses on us the idea of a creator and thereby leads us toward him is the first of the natural laws of importance” (1.2). Elsewhere, though, he follows Bayle in the latter’s proposal that a nation of atheists could be adequately moral. Usbek, the principal travel writer in Montesquieu’s epistolary sensation Persian Letters (1721) muses, “even if there were no God, we should nonetheless still love justice . . . Even if we were to be free of the constraints of religion, we ought not to be free of those imposed by equity” (PL, §8327). That is Montesquieu’s own view. The Spirit of the Laws, despite

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using natural and climatic conditions to explain human diversity, also suggests an anatomy of secular natural law: “not a moral virtue or a Christian virtue; it is political virtue . . . the good man . . . is not the Christian good man, but the political good man, who has the political virtue I have mentioned” (SL, “Foreword”). He speaks of republics, just one possible form of government, but the Machiavellian divorce between secular and sacred is elevated to the level of an absolute principle. It is not mere expedience, there is a discernible secular natural law and sociopolitical life invites Newtonian analysis: “the necessary relations deriving from the nature of things.” A Deist background God may have set this arrangement in place, but is now an absentee landlord.28 Anyway, we can know natural law without certainty about God: “To say that there is nothing just or unjust but what positive laws ordain or prohibit is to say that before a circle was drawn, all its radii were not equal” (1.1). Like Hobbes and Leibniz, Montesquieu takes mathematics to be an example of a priori knowledge—a circle’s properties are not subject to cultural specificity. A rule-bound world may or may not be the best possible world, but it is the only possible world. People might benefit by believing this rule-bound world to have been set in motion by God, but Montesquieu finds the belief systems that have evolved out of this possibly useful (and perhaps ingrained) concept to be almost universally detrimental to political life. He goes beyond an anti-clericalism merely based on the abuses and hypocrisies of the clergy to view religion as itself a fundamental obstacle to the rationalization of politics. Thus Usbek indicts religious distortions of both sexual and economic life (PL, §117). Montesquieu rejects heresy as grounds for punishment less because it is a victimless crime than because it is not rationalizable within a secular system of laws. “The ill came from the idea that the divinity must be avenged . . . if one were guided by the latter idea, where would punishments end?” Nowhere: crimes like heresy or sacrilege are fatally “susceptible to infinite distinctions, interpretations and limitations” (SL, 12.4, 12.6). Deism’s absentee landlord does not inform us of the limits of its tolerance, and Montesquieu rejects out of hand the use of ancient texts to decide the parameters of secular law. He specifically identifies the rules of the jealous, exclusive God set down in Deuteronomy 13—which advises the killing of heretics, even if they are in one’s own family—as a Biblical edict inappropriate for political life (12.17). Montesquieu simply could have argued that rules set down in Leviticus or Deuteronomy concerning marriage, or taxation, or the dividing of inheritances, were logically inappropriate for modern France—few clerics would have disagreed. But by banishing the jealous, exclusivist God from political life, he is telling his readers where the secularization of politics will end; that is, in the impotence of the religion’s core tenets, and not just a pruning of its archaic branches. Like other Enlightenment theorists who supported secularization without embracing a full-on atheism, Montesquieu’s proposes a minimal universal religion, more concerned with ethical matters than the “civil religion” of a Machiavelli or Rousseau, but about as scripture-free. Usbek proposes that what is basically reasonable in religions will not differ much from faith to faith: “the secret ways

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of Providence . . . want[s] to prepare them in this way for general conversion . . . I see Islam everywhere, though I cannot find Mohammed” (PL, §35). Of course his suggestion that there could be Islam without Mohammed (and thus without much of the Qur’an) would have puzzled many of his countrymen, and would likely outrage most Muslims today. When Usbek refers to “general conversion,” he means the general convergence of rational societies toward a deist compromise, not the “conversion” of the holy warrior or crusader. Religious toleration prepares humankind for this future convergence. Convergence is to be based upon the progress of human reason, and thus the evolution of belief from exclusive religion toward universal natural law. Proselytizing, on the other hand, is an “epidemic, “a spirit of dizzy madness,” and “the total eclipse of human reason,” because Someone who tries to make me change my religion does so only, I presume, because he would not change his own, even if attempts were made to compel him; so that he finds it strange that I will not do something that he would not do himself, perhaps not even to be ruler of the world. (§85) Usbek finds the proselytizer’s behavior strange—but this is because the enlightened, in Montesquieu’s world, have already dispensed with the jealous God of Deuteronomy in order to secularize and rationalize society. The inquisitor and his quarry now exist in two very differently arranged worlds. An enlightened world divorces secular from sacred knowledge and subordinates the latter to the logic and needs of the former. Usbek’s friend Rhedi exclaims, “Happy is the ignorance of the children of Mohammed!” but Usbek knows where his allegiances lie. While theologians have saturated mankind with arbitrary rules, scientists “have put order into chaos, and explained by simple mechanisms the organization of God’s architecture,” demonstrating the service of “general laws, immutable and eternal, which are observed without any exceptions, with infinite regularity, immediacy, and orderliness, in the immensity of space” (§§105, 97). Rationalizers of matter and the universe have inherited the mantle of true prophecy. Secular knowledge wins out because it is debatable and thus progressive. Debatable knowledge advances, while the terms of theology remain stagnant and thus shall eventually comprise a dead tongue. A recurring rhetorical trope in the Persian travelers’ comparative sociology is the difference between Eastern stasis and Western movement (§§24, 99, 98). The cloistering and sequestering of women was associated with political despotism across the Enlightenment, from the Persian Letters to Diderot’s titillating novel La Religieuse (1760). We sense the tragically closed-off intellectual options, and not just for females, when Diderot has a dutiful wife in one of his dialogues announce, “you must know that my reading has always been confined to my missal and that my experience of life has been limited entirely to practicing the teachings of the Gospels and producing children.”29 The Marquis d’Argens presses the comparison in his Chinese Letters (1741), where as in Montesquieu’s earlier work an Eastern visitor indicts his own society on counts of hermeticism; in each case gender is at the forefront. Nonfiction amateur ethnography made the same

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point—witness Thomas Jefferson’s thoughts on Native American society in his Notes on Virginia. Though Jefferson finds the Amerindians to be broadly equal to whites, a salient difference is that “The women are submitted to unjust drudgery. This I believe is the case with every barbarous people. With such, force is law. The stronger sex therefore imposes on the weaker.”30 Similarly, Lord Kames’s historical sketches announce, “Where women are excluded from society, it can never arrive at any degree of refinement, not to talk of perfection.” The point is simultaneously rights-based and utilitarian: “Due cultivation of the female mind would add greatly to the happiness of the males, and still more to that of the females . . . contributing no less to the public good than to private happiness.”31 Argens’ traveler reports to his friend at home French outrage at Chinese foot-binding—but that is not where the comparison ends. The binding of feet is a metaphor for enforced stasis more broadly. China is also Adam Smith’s main example of a “stationary” or nonprogressive economic state, in large part because it “neglects and despises foreign commerce” and “cannot transact the same quantity of business which it might do with different laws and institutions.”32 An exchange between Argens’ traveler and his friend back in Peking turns to China’s inability (then) to strategically absorb European modernity. “I could wish [the Chinese] would study to improve the Hints given them by other Nations, for bringing the Arts and Sciences to Perfection.” Instead they act “as if the Grandeur of a State depended on the Maintenance and Continuation of old Errors, that are deeply rooted in it.” Though the Mandarinate long believed “that their Empire was almost as extensive as the whole Earth, that there was nothing out of China worth feeling and enjoying, and that their Men of Letters knew every thing that was to be known,” intervening developments making them “sensible how far the Europeans out-strip them in almost all the Arts, and in all the Sciences, they ought to depart from their Errors and to give up their Prejudices.”33 The corporatist elite attached to long-cemented ideas and arrangements and averse to progress of course has non-Chinese equivalents. Montesquieu’s Usbek gives the East-West comparison a religious dimension: “I have not observed among Christians the same lively faith in their religion that is to be found among Muslims”; the Christians “ask for things to be proved” and “live in an ebb and flow of belief which carries them ceaselessly from one to the other” (PL, §75). Here, too, gender is central. The movement/stasis trope extends to the famous seraglio. Montesquieu does not only use Usbek’s harem to diagnose (or titillate by describing) Eastern effeminacy and luxury, as in the “Orientalism” complaint. The larger problem about the harem structure is its stasis and hermeticism. Its critique of coerced affection is an indictment of the French monarchy, but not just that. Usbek compares his Persian consorts to the women he has met in Europe: “the former are more tender and retiring, the others more lively and gay”; the harem is “without stimulus. Everything is based on subordination and duty. Even pleasures are taken seriously there, and joys are severely disciplined; they are hardly ever indulged in except as a means of indicating authority and subjection” (§34).

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In the Spirit of the Laws Montesquieu makes the same point about the relationship between domestic arrangements and despotic politics: in Asia domestic servitude and despotic government have been seen to go hand in hand in every age. In a government in which one requires tranquility above all and in which extreme subordination is called peace, women must be enclosed; their intrigues would be disastrous for the husband. (SL, 16.9) He then speculates on the effects of Western women being transplanted into Islam: “Suspects everywhere, enemies everywhere; the state would be shaken, one would see rivers of blood flowing” (ibid.). From a contemporary vantage, the case that eighteenth-century European women were peculiarly liberated may not strike us as all that plausible. But there is historical validity to Montesquieu’s portrait; Islamic visitors to Europe throughout the early modern era perceived gender relations to be a (or even the) major site of difference between the two civilizations.34 Although Usbek speaks as a philosophe when in France, another nature emerges when he deals long-distance with upheavals in the harem. Ordering his top eunuch to crush the incipient wives’ revolt, he advises, “everyone must live in dread, everyone must weep before you . . . Expose the darkest secrets, purify this place of infamy, and bring back virtue from its exile” (PL, §148), odd sentiments considering other thoughts of his expressed thus far. Despotism is structurally embedded into the society itself; it is not just an outgrowth of Usbek’s personality. The hermeticism of the harem is one such despotic structure, but throughout Persian Letters and the Spirit of the Laws the most indictable examples are those of religious dogma and clerical authority (in this case, of course, the examples are related). A historian of political thought argues that the divergence between Islam and the West occurred as early as the high Middle Ages: “both philosophy and the appeal to reason as an independent guide died out in the Muslim world; while in the West they became established and respectable pursuits and methods of argument.”35 Early in the Letters Montesquieu compares the open society Usbek and Rica encounter in France and the type of knowledge that awaits them at home. A Persian friend writes to Usbek of his inner conflict between seeking virtue and pleasure: “I have asked our mullahs about it, but they drive me to desperation with their quotations from the Koran” (§10). Usbek himself writes home concerning various ethical concerns, and gets a similar response from clerical authorities: “Why not read the traditions of the theologians? Why refuse to consult that pure source of understanding? You would find all your doubts resolved” (§18). Sacred knowledge seals itself off, while the needs of humans in modern societies calls for a progressive structure of knowledge and debate. The more advanced society is the one where secular authority has fully usurped the religious kind. Though the Persians make fun of Europe’s Pope, who turns wine into ancient blood as if by magic, they quickly add, “Once he was formidable even to princes, for he would depose them as easily as our magnificent sultans depose the kings of Iremetia or

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Georgia. But nobody fears him any longer” (§§24, 29). A divorce between Pope and Emperor leaves the former’s authority necessarily wilted, because scriptural religion cannot give up temporal authority without, essentially, giving up the ghost. The above-mentioned historian again: What was peculiar about the West was the reaction which attempts to conflate religion and politics, and in particular to assert the authority of the church over the state, provoked in the long term. It was precisely the attempt to subsume the political under the religious which led eventually to the European concept of the state as independent first from the church, then from religion altogether.36 Montesquieu describes Islam’s alternative as a fusion of the two that leaves the worst sort of despotism: “fear added to fear. In Mohammedan empires the peoples derive from religion a part of the astonishing respect they have for their prince” (SL, 5.14). The Spirit of the Laws devotes an entire book to delimiting the role religion shall play in government. Tellingly, Montesquieu does not include clerical or spiritual authority among the different loci of authority that are to be divided and played against each other in a functioning republic. That is the role religion plays in despotic states: “To the extent that the power of the clergy is dangerous in republics, it is suitable in monarchies, especially in those tending to despotism.” In Spain and Portugal, the church is “the power that alone checks arbitrary power . . . it forms a kind of permanent depository, and if it is not religion, it is customs that are venerated in the place of laws”; in Iberia “the very ill that limits [absolute rule],” religion, “is a good” (2.4). The message is not that religion is a naturally antiauthoritarian counterforce. It only fulfills that function in Iberia because religion and despotism are in fact intimately related. The historian Mark Hulliung argues contextually that The deepest fear of Montesquieu was that the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes . . . meant that France was on the verge of duplicating the appalling historical record of the Spaniards, brutal perpetrators of the Inquisition at home and bloody conquest in the Americas.37 Clerical authority is similar to arbitrary despotism: both belong to humankind in a retarded stage of development, which is why only those governed despotically can hope to profit by turning to church or scripture. The successful polity must banish core dogma in such a way as to effectively banish the God presented by scriptures and theologians. Men who believe in the certainty of rewards in the next life will escape the legislator; they will have too much scorn for death. How can one constrain by the laws a man who believes himself sure that the greatest penalty the

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Montesquieu suggests that inflexible dogma will breed both quiescent and subservient populations and persons inassimilable into a republic of secular law. Religion is at once a force for stagnation in despotic times, and a force for centrifugal chaos in republican ones: this resembles Hume’s typology. So conceptions of the divine must be severely tamed in a proper transition from tyranny to modern political freedom. The evaluation of dogma, for modern man, shifts from truthvalue to use-value; dogma is desacralized and rationalized (24.19). The transition from judgment based on revealed truth to judgment based on usefulness extends throughout political life. In dealing with religious toleration “we are political men and not theologians . . . it is useful for the laws to require of these various religions not only that they not disturb the state, but also that they not disturb each other” (25.9). In playing to what is “useful,” Montesquieu mixes a dose of empiricism into his earlier invocation of mechanical, a priori natural law. Compare Usbek’s rumination on his religion’s proscription of pork: “It seems to me that things in themselves are neither pure nor impure” (PL, §17). Politics will be rationalized as much by experimental empiricism as by return to the fount of natural law. A secular legal structure of reward and punishment is sensually learned; religion is learned but not testable, and cannot be explained except by the circular (and unfalsifiable) “God said so.” But the structure of reward and punishment is rational only if Deism’s absentee landlord God has replaced the old understanding whereby the divine could be perpetually invested in the material world, and thus legislated. For example, Montesquieu objects to making violation of church property a more serious offense than violation of lay property: “to pay attention to the place alone is to fail to reflect either on the nature and definition of robbery or on the nature and definition of sacrilege” (SL, 26.8). The shift from “the place” to “the thing” is the shift from a society wherein a privileged sector is spiritually invested, existing in an uneasy (because logically indefinable) division of labor with the other sectors, to one in which the material world is flattened out and equalized. So Montesquieu’s political theory involves not only the divorce between the spiritual and the secular. Rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s is sage advice, but too unspecificied. Rather the divorce ends with the awarding of worldly assets to the secular party. “One should not enact by divine laws that which should be enacted by human laws . . . The nature of human laws is to be subject to all the accidents that occur and to vary as men’s wills change, whereas the nature of the laws of religion is never to vary.” Thus “The things that should be ruled by the principles of civil right can rarely be ruled by principles of the laws of religion” (26.2, 26.9). By saying that human laws are mutable while divine ones “never vary,” Montesquieu is not praising some conception of eternal natural law. Since knowledge in modern society shall be seen as progressive and debatable, the end result of the above

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comparison is to banish divine law altogether. Life belongs to human laws because life is subject to “accidents” and cannot be hermetically sealed towards eternal order, as Usbek finds out about his long-suffering harem.

Time, Consent, Progress: How Secular Contract Problematics Framed the American Founding In 1789, watching the French state collapse around him, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison38 from Paris that The question Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another, seems never to have been started either on this or our side of the water. Yet it is a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also, among the fundamental principles of every government.39 Turgot wrestled with the same question in his Encyclopédie article “Fondations”, which warns that “Founders grossly deceive themselves, if they imagine that their zeal will communicate itself from century to century to those charged with perpetuating its results.” Turgot oscillates between two Enlightenment languages, that of the heroic legislator and that of the rational contractors, but in either case progress is ill-served by what stability at first required, “precautions . . . to assure the perpetual execution of the pledge contracted by these individuals.” (7:72–5) Indeed, the better established the original stability the worse-off the society as time goes on, potentially negating said stability: Measures for sheltering their establishments from exterior innovations are ordinarily so well-taken by the founders, that it is typically found easier, & doubtless just as honorable, to found new establishments as to reform the old . . . the immutability that founders sought . . . remains a considerable inconvenience, because time brings new revolutions that cause its original utility to disappear, & that can even render it detrimental. Society does not always have the same needs; the nature and distribution of property, the division between the different orders of the people, the opinions, the manners [moeurs] . . . even climate, disease & other accidents of human life, experience continuous variation: new needs are born; others cease to be felt . . . (ibid.) However ennobling a respect for tradition and the continuities of humanity are from a certain perspective, to locate a binding authority in the past tends to be an act of credulity. That even secular foundations take on religious aurae as the events recede into history indicates that progressive politics will always have to fight such a religious instinct. “Public utility,” Turgot avers, “is the supreme law, & must not be swayed, neither by a superstitious respect for whatever is named the founders’ intention”—because none “had had the right to chain to their capricious wills

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generations that had not yet existed”—“nor by the fear of injuring the pretended rights of certain bodies . . . ” (ibid.) Jefferson was acutely aware of his paradoxical position as a founder who did not like deference to foundations: “get rid of the magic supposed to be in the word constitution,”40 he pleads. Fellow republican and American philosophe Joel Barlow wrote to the French National Convention in 1792 to advise them against adopting their new Constitution “in a light so sacred, as to favour too much of the old leaven of veneration for precedent” and thus sacrifice “the chance of improvement.”41 Jefferson was making explicit, and explicitly political, what his contractarian and natural-rights predecessor John Locke had left shrouded by metaphor. Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government, written during the 1680s as Shaftesbury and his circle were plotting against the throne, replaced two lineages given for absolute sovereignty: Robert Filmer’s story of patriarchal descent from the Bible onward, and Thomas Hobbes’s story of a fearful, yet still rational, alienation of all pre-political freedom to the state. Throughout his public career, Locke obscured his intellectual debt to Hobbes, probably intentionally given the opprobrium surrounding “Hobbism” at that period.42 Indeed, Locke’s state of nature often sounds a great deal like Hobbes’s—“very unsafe, very unsecure . . . a condition which, however free, is full of fears and continual dangers” (T2, §12343)—but he departs from Hobbes’s absolutist conclusions. He does this first because Hobbes mistakenly left his sovereign body (whether monarchical or not) in a state of nature viz. its subjects (§§90–4), and second because the once-and-for-all model of contractual alienation is inconsistent with the spirit of progress inaugurated by the post-Baconian “instauration” of knowledge and science. An atemporal contract stumbles on the fact that Things of this world are in so constant a flux, that nothing remains long in the same state. Thus people, riches, trade, power, change their stations, flourishing mighty cities come to ruin, and prove in times neglected desolate corners, whilst other unfrequented places grow into populous countries, filled with wealth and inhabitants. Locke then gives the example—not irrelevant to modern America, where electoral rules from the eighteenth century are still preserved—of the perils of keeping representational arrangements static as demographics shift (§157). Mainly Locke treats the problem of consent-over-time metaphorically, focusing on the microcosm of the family as evidence for problems at the macro- or state level. Stability, and humanity in general, is served by reproducing consent across time without reverting to the sort of pre-political state that spurred the contract in the first place—but then how, as the original act fades further and further into the past, can we trust that our political life is actually one of consent? Few have gone so far as Jefferson, who toyed with the Rousseauian idea that only a reforming of the polity with every new generation would endow real legitimacy. Jefferson went well beyond Locke here, for whom negation of the contract only

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occurs when made a fait accompli by tyrannical leadership. But Jefferson certainly had a case that he took the inability of the past or present to bind the future to its logical end. Locke uses the family as an institution that blends the social and the natural, the consensual and the arbitrary. One might imagine away social institutions and laws, but one cannot imagine away the fact that every human experiences a period of development where all authority and protection is exogenous: as Hume later put it, “Men are necessarily born in a family-society, at least; and are trained up by their parents to some rule of conduct and behavior.”44 As in Aristotle’s critique of Plato,45 Locke’s First Treatise criticized Filmer for collapsing the familial and the political. But as an intergenerational entity that blends, often uneasily, authority and freedom, the family does tell us much about the state. Parents “have a sort of rule and jurisdiction over” their children, “but it is but a temporary one” (§55). Parents hold a trusteeship over their offspring, where authority over them is mixed with a duty to educate them sufficiently into reason so that they merit political freedom at the age of majority (§59). This perpetually reenacted story of the individual’s passage from dependence to freedom mirrors the history of the species; ontogeny replays phylogeny implicitly for Locke, as it will more explicitly for later thinkers like Kant and Freud. Kingship institutionalized the tendency of primitive bands to “set up the stoutest and bravest man for their ruler,” which is “why people in the beginning generally pitched upon this form” (§§105–6). Far from being a rational settlement of then-contemporary political problems, monarchy was a relic of “a simple poor way of living” wherein people’s desires were simple, they “made few controversies,” and they had “no need of many laws to decide them, or variety of officers to superintend the process, or look after the execution of justice, where there were but few trespasses, and few offenders” (§107). Locke’s Kingship is little more than the generalship early societies required for frequent periods of warfare, when they most needed political organization (§108). Adam Smith later countered the anti-modernity of Rousseau with a similar argument: early democracy was hardly corrupted by development, and to tremble before authority was an aspect of primitive more so than advanced society.46 To suggest that autocracy, though rational for early humans—“unless they had done so, young societies could not have subsisted; without such nursing fathers . . . all governments would have sunk under the weakness and infirmities of their infancy, and the prince and the people had soon perished together” (§110)—is contractually binding for all time violates not only natural right, but common sense. Again Locke’s analogy is the family. He asks, who can think the command, Children obey your parents, requires in a man, that has children of his own, the same submission to his father, as it does in his yet young children to him; and that by this precept he were bound to obey all his father’s commands, if, out of a conceit of authority, he should have the indiscretion to treat him still as a boy? (§68)

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An absurd chain of command; yet for Locke that is what the species allows when political authority is absolute—phylogeny has achieved its “adult” stage, but is still mired in dependent status. When Locke tries to make the family story correspond to the political story, however, he forces himself into a conclusion not much less absurd –citizens at the age of majority are presumed to consent to the existing order because they do not abandon their polity for another (§118). Otherwise “tacit consent” (§119) shall be assumed—but surely even intellectuals who fled back and forth across Europe understood that this was not a viable option for the vast majority of people (this aside from neglecting the question of whether foreign peoples were obliged to consent to such emigration.) “Can we seriously say,” replied Hume, that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires? We may as well assert, that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her.47 Government cannot truly be contractual, Hegel later argued, because the individual “is not in a position to break away from the state” as freely as real contract would require.48 There is another solution though, deriving from Locke’s analysis of property. His emphasis on productivity does not merely symbolize the interests of one ascendant class.49 Instead of, or in addition to, seeing Locke’s focus on property as a handmaiden to early modern capitalist accumulation, we might view it as the term linking the various needs of the polity over time: consent but also stability and reproduction, stability and reproduction but also progress. Locke’s pre-political human seeks more than Hobbes’s: beyond safety, she/he seeks improvement. In practice Hobbes, no less than Locke, desired commercial and scientific growth and likely thought his political theory would serve not only peace but peaceful progress. However, the model of existential terror yielding to an absolute settlement should not on its own terms need or even want mechanisms for change. In his earlier, more Hobbes-indebted essays on government Locke indicated that the creator “intends man to do something” with his fellows, but decides that this merely signifies “pressing needs to procure and preserve a life in society with other men . . . and to be prepared for the maintenance of society by the gift of speech and through the intercourse of language.”50 By the Second Treatise the view is broadened. Now “the increase of lands, and the right employing of them,” is not only a, but “the great art of government” (§42, my emphasis). The institution of marriage, too, is described not as a religious sacrament but instead as a contract owing to “foresight, and an ability to lay up for the future,” so that “industry might be encouraged” (§80). Locke’s political division of powers is also premised on progress, growth, adaptation-to-change, and the problems inherent in static institutional arrangements. Thus the executive supplements the legislative and from a

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certain perspective seems to do a lot more governing than it, due to the latter’s “not being able to foresee, and provide by laws, for all that may be useful to the community”; “Many things there are, which the law can by no means provide” and “many accidents may happen, wherein a strict and rigid observation of the laws may do harm”; it is “impossible” for the legislative “to foresee, and so by laws to provide for, all accidents and necessities that may concern the public” (§§159–60). Stability’s nemesis is stasis; rebellion’s is chaos, the demise of the ordered growth provided by property rights. These are the Scylla and Charybdis to be navigated by the executive. The reproduction of consent across generations via the inheritance of property is similar. Though “it has been commonly supposed that a father could oblige his posterity to that government, of which he himself was a subject, and that his compact held them,” Locke denies this any natural basis. It does have a pragmatic basis, though, based on the transfer of the father’s property: “the inheritance of an estate which is under that government, reaches only those who will take it on that condition, and so is no natural tie or engagement, but a voluntary submission.” So those coming of age can choose emigration, “But if they will enjoy the inheritance of their ancestors, they must take it on the same terms their ancestors had it” (§73). This may be cold comfort to the inheritor, who chooses between penurious exile and bribed consent. But the argument is as much political metaphor as legal guideline. Locke’s inheritor is not expected simply to maintain the property “on the same terms” as his father, except in the banal sense that he is expected not to destroy it. More relevantly, he is expected to improve it, to continue adding value through labor. So too the polity: though we may in theory abandon our inheritance, humanity is best served by our having regard for its continuity, even as we prove that consent was not once-and-for-all by seeking improvement. Consider a famous passage from Edmund Burke, one of the foundational thinkers (though perhaps the most classically liberal among them) of the conservative reaction to the Enlightenment. Surveying the same revolution as Jefferson, Burke reached rather different conclusions as to the same problem Jefferson suggested to Madison, the binding together of political society over time. The error, Burke says, lies not in viewing society as a contract but instead in viewing it as a contract just like any other: Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure—but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. Instead, human society is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”51 One can agree without also agreeing that such a notion implies obviously conservative conclusions. Jeremy Bentham pointed out that the anti-Jacobin’s desire

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not to subjugate “the well-informed to the ill-informed classes of mankind” itself had become a subjugation of “the well-informed to the ill-informed ages”; it was in bad faith to warn of democratic despotism while positively depicting “a country enslaved forever to a past Assembly of dead barbarians, without a possibility of emancipation.”52 And Thomas Paine’s rebuke to Burke, for example, makes the point that thinking temporally and thinking progressively need not be so opposed. So while Paine allows that the English state-builders of 1688 “did a certain thing, which, for themselves and their constituents, they had a right to do, and which it appeared right should be done,” this nevertheless cannot imply the right “of binding and controlling posterity to the end of time.” He makes the point memorably: There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the ‘end of time,’ or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore, all such clauses, acts or declarations, by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void.— Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow. The parliament or the people of 1688, or of any other period, had no more right to dispose of the people of the present day, or to bind or to control them in any shape whatever, than the parliament or the people of the present day have to dispose of, bind or control those who are to live a hundred or a thousand years hence. Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns of this world, he has no longer any authority in directing who shall be its governors, or how its government shall be organized, or how administered.53 This is a bit unfair to its target, who questioned progress’s pace, scope, and conceptualization, rather than progress, period. Paine’s equation of slavery to government from “beyond the grave” actually marks him as similar to Burke if only in the distrust of timeless abstractions. The question is one of emphasis. Burke sees Paine’s “rights of man” as such an abstraction, ontologically suspect (John Adams compared Paine’s concepts to “the Logos of Plato”54); but, Paine replies, the freezing of time by tradition-fetishizing cognitive structures is the most reality-crushing abstraction of all. New generations have inalienable rights less because everyone is the same than because everything changes, all the time. A right is defensible as an abstraction that serves

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real progress. The “rights talk” of modern liberalism has raised up a wall between itself and utilitarianism, but we should remember how entangled the two were in liberalism’s developmental period. “The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of men change also” and that is why “government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it.”55 “You possess . . . too much science,” Jefferson tells John Adams in this vein, “not to see how much is still ahead of you, unexplained and unexplored. Your own consciousness must place you as far before our ancestors as in the rear of our posterity.” Thus “reformation of institutions” should proceed “pari passu with the progress of science,” ensuring “that no definite limits could be assigned to that progress.”56 We are to govern, writes Paine, “as if posterity had been continued by creation instead of generation”57 not only because new humans have rights, but also because societies have an interest in correcting the accumulated mistakes of the past. Burke’s occasionally prophetic insights about the course of events in France aside, any pledging of deference to the wisdom of tradition(s) must face the objection made by John Locke a hundred years before that no ground can be assigned why one man of the older generation, rather than another maintaining quite the opposite, should be credited with the authority of tradition or be more worthy of trust; except it be that reason discovers a difference in the things themselves that are transmitted, and embraces one opinion while rejecting another, just because it detects more evidence recognizable by the light of nature for the one than for the other. Such a procedure, surely, is not the same as to believe in tradition, but is an attempt to form a considered opinion about things themselves; and this brings all the authority of tradition to naught . . . in trying to become acquainted with the law of nature as promulgated by tradition one has to employ reason and understanding, and then the whole of tradition becomes void.58

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The American founders took up these questions of progress, temporality, consent, and political obligation around the same time as Burke, and the echoes of the concerns Burke expresses in the Reflections are striking. Jefferson’s conclusion to Madison that “no such obligation can be transmitted” involves the transfer of material debts of parents to their children—Jefferson had bitter experience amortizing inherited debts.59 But he goes on to muse that the contract-across-time issue touches on all sorts of political questions: This principle that the earth belongs to the living and not to the dead is of very extensive application and consequences in every country, and most especially in France. It enters into the resolution of the questions Whether the nation may change the descent of lands holden in tail? Whether they

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Economic historians have led historians of political thought in examining the political (and not just financial) implications of early modern attitudes toward trans-generational debt and obligation, a subject rich in paradox. It seems that the successful establishment of long-term government debt was a key step on the road to the modern North Atlantic democracies. “The growth of democracy is now seen not as a recovery of lost freedoms, but as an economic imperative for the advancement of society,” one historian writes. “High levels of technology require an educated workforce, and a high-output economy requires wealthy consumers.”61 Niall Ferguson claims pro-democratic and pro-growth effects for a system that makes present and future citizens stockholders in the public treasury.62 Yet the most “democratic” political philosophers of the time, like Jefferson or Barlow, were often the most vigorously opposed to centralized banking and funded debts, considering them the tools of warmongering despotisms. Their “art,” Barlow warned the revolutionary French, whose memory of the John Law debacle was growing more and more distant, “consist[s] in making calculations to enable governments to hire mankind to butcher each other, by drawing bills on posterity for payment.”63 Alexander Hamilton, on the other hand—no agrarian republican, though not the stealth monarchist the Jeffersonians tarred him as—looked at the very same institutional model of intergenerational linkage as a facilitator of progress. Throughout the Enlightenment, this issue was also being discussed at a broader level, one encompassing the entire intellectual lives and trajectories of human societies. Declaring “no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law,” Jefferson decided that since a generation lasts about 19 years, not only incurred debts, but “Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years.”64 To this Madison gave something of a Burkean response: “Would not a Government so often revised become too mutable and novel to retain those prejudices in its favor which antiquity inspires, and which are perhaps a salutary aid to the most rational Government in the most enlightened age?” The liberal political theorist Stephen Holmes argues that radical democrats like Jefferson and Paine erred by devaluing “each generation’s need to unclutter and systematize its own agenda by acceding to certain power-granting, proceduredefining, and jurisdiction-specifying decisions of the past,” the “paradoxical dependence of the sovereignty of the present on the precommitments of the past.” For Holmes “a right to bind subsequent generations minimally” might be needed to “prevent them from binding their successors maximally.”65 Madison thought

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that buttressing the social contract with the promise of cross-temporal consistency would actually serve progress in a way that Jefferson missed. If the earth be the gift of nature to the living their title can extend to the earth in its natural State only. The improvements made by the dead form a charge against the living who take the benefit of them. This debt can no otherwise be satisfied than by executing the will of the dead accompanying the improvements.66 Our duties to generations across time, both those who have come before and those who will come after, lie not in a narrative of tradition but in one of progress. And the social contract cannot align itself with progress unless it is secularized—stripped of religious or pseudo-religious absolutes, which tend to hallow themselves by seeking to freeze time. So it was not only a fear about stability but a fear about progress that caused Madison to rebuke Jefferson. Like Locke during an earlier period of uncertainty, Madison writes of Jefferson’s musings on permanent revolution that “the uncertainty incident to such a state of things would . . . discourage the steady exertions of industry” and, like Locke advocating for the progress provided by inheritable property and stable sovereignty, declares, “I find no relief from these consequences, but in the received doctrine that a tacit assent may be given to established Constitutions and laws, and that this assent may be inferred, where no positive dissent appears.” He wonders “whether it be possible to exclude wholly the idea of an implied or tacit assent, without subverting the foundation of civil Society?”67 During ratification Madison advocated for the Constitution’s strength, yet he had been attracted to Jeffersonian principles of revisability during the Articles of Confederation period, writing to Caleb Wallace: I should think it both imprudent & indecent not to leave a door open for at least one revision of your first Establishment; imprudent because you have neither the same resources for supporting nor the same lights for framing a good establishment now as you will have 15 or 20 Years hence; indecent because an handful of early settlers ought not to preclude a populous Country from a choice of the Government under which they & their Posterity are to live.68 By the time a new Constitutional convention became likely Madison had turned back toward the rhetoric of stability, writing to James Monroe, “If any thing comes of the Convention it will probably be of a permanent not a temporary nature, which I think will be a great point”—though he still saw fit, in 1787, to advise the convention that “In framing a system which we wish to last for ages, we shd. not lose sight of the changes which ages will produce.”69 Perhaps Madison see-sawed strategically, and successfully; but there is deeper significance, I think, in these fluctuations between the contractual framings for stability and/or change.70 As a

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later liberal like John Stuart Mill pointed out, the conception of a social contract across time, rather than implying an unreflective and supine awe before tradition, actually implies internalizing Mill’s view of “utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.”71 If our ancestors left us, by their actions and ideas, to inherit a world preferable to the one they departed from, it becomes our duty to do the same for future generations.

The Forgotten Founders: Secularization, Disestablishment and Fears of Intellectual Decline in the Early Republic The Virginia act for religious freedom has been received with infinite approbation in Europe and promulgated with enthusiasm. I do not mean by the governments, but by the individuals which compose them. It has been translated into French and Italian, has been sent to most of the courts of Europe, and has been the best evidence of the falsehood of those reports which stated us to be in anarchy. It is inserted in the new Encyclopédie, and is appearing in most of the publications respecting America. In fact it is comfortable to see the standard of reason at length erected, after so many ages during which the human mind has been held in vassalage by kings, priests and nobles; and it is honorable for us to have produced the first legislature who has had the courage to declare that the reason of man may be trusted with the formation of his own opinions. Jefferson to Madison, 12/16/1786 In his Notes on Virginia Thomas Jefferson remarked that Britain’s “philosophy has crossed the channel, her freedom the Atlantic.”72 Advocates of disestablishment among the American founders had an easier time of it than like-minded philosophes in France, lacking opposition from a centralized, parasitic and longstanding state church. One does not find as brash an atheism as Diderot’s or Holbach’s among the enduring voices of the American Enlightenment; in its place, perhaps, is what Clinton Rossiter calls “the vaguely Christian rationalism that governed the tolerant minds of men like Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, and Washington.”73 Yet it would be wrong to draw the America-France distinction as a simple one of religious pluralism versus militant secularism. Though the Americans did not have a land-swallowing Gallican church to deal with, they did have the specter of local or state establishments, de facto or de jure. And while it would be folly to attribute one single worldview to as variegated a group as Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, etc., their instincts were on the whole similarly secularizing. It has been argued that the peculiar flourishing of religious enthusiasm in the United States—an increasingly controversial signal of its “exceptionalism” among the rich democracies—was due to its embrace of religious freedom and concomitant lack of polarization between secularist and clerical-reactionary parties. Madison, usually as dedicatedly anti-establishmentarian among the major founders as Jefferson, argued that religious piety would be insured, not threatened, by a regime of toleration. As he wrote to Edward Everett (3/19/1823) toward the end of his life,

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The settled opinion here is that religion is essentially distinct from Civil Govt and exempt from its cognizance, that a connexion between them is injurious to both, that there are causes in the human breast, which ensure the perpetuity of religion without the aid of the law, that rival sects, with equal rights, exercise mutual censorships in favor of good morals, that if new sects arise with absurd opinions or overheated imaginations, the proper remedies lie in time, forbearance and example, that a legal establishment of religion without a toleration could not be thought of, and with a toleration, is no security for public quiet & harmony, but rather a source itself of discord & animosity, and finally that these opinions are supported by experience, which has shewn that every relaxation of the alliance between Law & religion, from the partial example of Holland, to its consummation in Pennsylvania Delaware N J , &c, has been found as safe in practice as it is sound in theory.74 As is often the case in Madison’s writings, the animating wish is unclear— is it the divide and conquer logic of Federalist #10, which needs see no value in religious enthusiasm at all? Or a genuine regard for the religious piety that the author thinks will follow general toleration? One scholar has argued that Madison sought state “noncognizance” of religion moreso than the “toleration” that contemporary stretchers of the free exercise clause have, in the interest of seeking religious exemptions to general laws, sought in his writings.75 Madison suggested to Edward Livingston (7/10/1822) that “religion & Govt. will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.” But greater “purity” for religion here means greater reasonableness—not the “purity” of puritans. This is what Jefferson had in mind as well: “Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other.”76 Adam Smith was proposing a “Madisonian” (to speak somewhat anachronistically) toleration solution to the theological-political problem at around the same time, suggesting that the “doctrine of the greater part of ” a multitude of competing sects would flatten out “to that pure and rational religion, free from every mixture of absurdity, imposture, or fanaticism, such as wise men have in all ages of the world wished to see established . . . ”77 But why is this equivalent of the invisible hand presumed to produce calm equilibrium, rather than the perpetual tumult of entrepreneurship and innovation? Monopolies invited Smith-ian disdain among the Americans, in any case. In the run-up to the Revolution, Madison complained to William Bradford (1/24/1774) that “Ecclesiastical Establishments tend to great ignorance and Corruption; all of which facilitate the Execution of mischievous Projects,” and surmised that “If the Church of England had been the established and general Religion in all the Northern Colonies . . . slavery and Subjection might and would have been gradually insinuated among us.” Even among the Americans in such Enlightened and antiauthoritarian times That diabolical Hell conceived principle of persecution rages . . . and to their eternal Infamy the Clergy can furnish their Quota of Imps for such business

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Madison’s original objection to Jefferson’s advocacy of attaching a Bill of Rights to the Constitution79 owed in part to fear that an American majority might not accept the level of secularization the founders wanted: there were already signs that “the rights of conscience in particular, if submitted to public definition would be narrowed . . . One of the objections in New England was that the Constitution by prohibiting religious tests opened a door for Jews Turks and infidels.”80 Jefferson wrote in a tradition of dissenting Protestantism that, in its reliance on reason and distrust of faith, easily shaded into Socinianism and Deism, if not virtual atheism. Toleration was not just a matter of rights but pragmatic public policy. Post-Lockean Deist defenses of minority religious groups, like philosopher John Toland’s brief for naturalizing Jews (1714), spoke the language of social utility. Toland argued that those “useful and advantageous to the public Weal” should not be harassed by the state, whose intolerance cut off the nose to spite the face: Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes just sent the exiled Huguenots’ commercial and scientific expertise elsewhere. Jews “encrease the number of hands for labor and defence, of bellies and backs for consumtion of food and raiment, and of brains for invention and contrivance, no less than any other nation.” Wise and unwise policies had been demonstrated by intolerant Spain, “grown so prodigiously weak and poor,” as compared to Holland, “ever well stockt with people, and consequently both rich and powerful to an eminent degree.” 81 Spain’s decline was for Toland evidence of “how dangerous a thing it is, that one sett of Clergy-men should dispose and influence all things at their pleasure in any country . . . This is the never-failing effect of letting the Clergy meddle in state affairs.” Avoiding philosophical or theological dispute about whether Jews would be prone by scripture or divine covenant to disobey laws in extremis, Toland simply concluded that they are “better us’d with us, than any where else in the world,” imagining the good they could be put to draining bogs and serving in the East India Company.82 Some belief systems proved harder to tolerate. Andrew Murphy cautions us against seeing too close a connection between the English toleration debates of the seventeenth century and the liberal toleration familiar today. In some ways the men who, like Locke, constructed the political settlement of the late seventeenth century were actually less tolerant than their opponents: particularly regarding Catholics. As Murphy writes, the post-1688 “Toleration Act granted considerably less religious liberty than either James II’s Declaration of Indulgences . . . or Cromwell’s Protectorate. Indeed, one of the key factors in the desertion of James II by English political and religious elites lay in his tolerationist efforts” for Catholics. For Murphy “one of the chief reasons for James II’s overthrow in 1688 was the almost unanimous opposition among the English political nation to his dogged pursuit of toleration.”83 There was a point at which toleration became self-harm.

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Like Jefferson, Madison worried increasingly as he aged about the growing religious fervor in the union, which could efface the secular legacy of the founding generation, forged at the high tide of the Enlightenment.84 Already in the early nineteenth century, for example, Paine’s role in the birth of the United States had been virtually obliterated by religious diffidence.85 Madison’s “Detached Memoranda” (1819) stated, “The danger of silent accumulations & encroachments by Ecclesiastical Bodies have not sufficiently engaged attention in the U.S.” If religious tyranny came to America it would not wear the obvious papal robes, he allowed. Yet smaller scale religions evince similar pretensions: “besides the danger of a direct mixture of Religion & civil Government, there is an evil which ought to be guarded agst in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by ecclesiastical corporations,” who manage to do at subnational levels what would be intolerable nationally. “I doubt,” he wrote, “whether the people of this country would suffer an execution for heresy, or a three years imprisonment for not comprehending the mysteries of the trinity. But is the spirit of the people an infallible, a permanent reliance?” He thought “the spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may commence persecutor, and better men be his victims.”86 In another letter Madison tied the protection of public secularism to another defining concern of his and Jefferson’s later years: national education.87 Here too the American founders associated cognitive growth with the expropriation of theology. “I am not surprised at the dilemma produced at your University by making theological professorships an integral part of the System,” he told Edward Everett—in his life a Congressman, the President of Harvard, and the eclipsed-by-history warm-up speaker for Lincoln at Gettysburg—“A University with sectarian professorships, becomes, of course, a Sectarian Monopoly: with professorships of rival sects, it would be an Arena of Theological Gladiators.” On Madison’s “view of the subject, there seems to be no alternative but between a public University without a theological professorship, and sectarian Seminaries without a University.”88Divide and conquer, again: but the conquest is of public education by secular humanism. So too Jefferson’s plan to “establish an university or college on a reformed plan,” reformation here meaning “omitting those branches of science no longer useful or valued . . . and introducing the others adapted to the real uses of life and the present state of things.”89 Jefferson worried that absent a nationalizing system of education, the immigrants “we are to expect the greatest number of ” will be inassimilable into the mores of republican liberty. “They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave,” and these “they will transmit to their children . . . warp and bias [the polity’s] directions, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.” But he made known that his fears in this area did not preclude a pro-growth, including cognitive growth, immigration policy. “I mean not that these doubts should be extended to the importation of useful artificers,” he added. “Spare no expence in obtaining them. They will after a while go to the plough and the hoe; but, in the mean time, they will teach us something we do not know.”90 The historian Gordon Wood believes a key difference between liberal

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Enlightenment elites in England and America was that the former “opposed educating the masses for fear of breeding dissatisfied employees and social instability” while the latter “wholeheartedly endorsed education for ordinary people”; this was prosaically reflected in the huge and speedy expansion of newspaper subscription and the postal service.91 Jefferson’s policy concerns about education were as much utilitarian, even elitist, as they are rights-based and democratic. He floated a plan which prescribes the selection of the youths of genius from among the classes of the poor, we hope to avail the state of those talents which nature has shown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use, if not sought for and cultivated.92 Madison linked his concern with solidifying the American branch of Enlightenment instauration to both a secular politics and the contract-over-generations attitude we have seen him discuss with Jefferson. Such a politics of cognitive growth is a matter of both national honor and duty to posterity, he told William Barry (8/4/1822) in a letter worth quoting at some length: Throughout the Civilized World, nations are courting the praise of fostering Science and the useful Arts, and are opening their eyes to the principles and the blessings of Representative Government. The American people owe it to themselves, and to the cause of free Government, to prove by their establishments for the advancement and diffusion of Knowledge, that their political Institutions, which are attracting observation from every quarter, and are respected as Models, by the new-born States in our own Hemisphere, are as favorable to the intellectual and moral improvement of Man as they are conformable to his individual & social Rights. What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty & Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual & surest support?93 Madison not only repeated the by-now commonplace argument that democracy can only function with an informed populace. He did believe that: “popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or, perhaps both” and “a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” A cognitive economy of scale ameliorates the problems endemic to a large and unwieldy republic. “The larger a country,” he wrote, “the less easy for its real opinion to be ascertained, and the less difficult to be counterfeited . . . the more extensive a country, the more insignificant is each individual in his own eyes. This may be unfavorable to liberty.” As a remedy he suggested Whatever facilitates a general intercourse of sentiments, as good roads, domestic commerce, a free press, and particularly a circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people, and Representatives going from, and

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returning among every part of them, is equivalent to a contraction of territorial limits, and is favorable to liberty, where these may be too extensive.94 The message of the above, as much Kantian as utilitarian, is that self-government would be worth little absent a coexistence with intellectual progress. The latter is a necessary model for revocability that infuses a functional republic with the idea of a contract-across-generations. Following Locke, Madison hoped we would see “inheritance” as more than a byword for money and property. There is another kind of transferable capital, in which investment should be mandatory. Things like “the establishment and endowment of Academies, Colleges, and Universities are a provision, not merely for the existing generation, but for succeeding ones also”; these public cognitive goods are similar to the “constant rotation of property” that “results from the free scope to industry.” Late in his life Jefferson wrote to Madison regarding his opposition to a tariff on the importation of books: “Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not then an article of consumption but fairly of capital.”95 The famous documents in the American religious freedom canon—those still pored over in contemporary Supreme Court cases, like Jefferson’s “wall of separation” letter to the Danbury Baptists and Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance” against mandatory public religious funding in Virginia—must be placed within this broader matrix, that is, the founders’ participation in the general Enlightenment project of freeing social structures to enable perpetual cognitive growth. Otherwise a neutered and ahistorical picture emerges, of theorists litigating competing rights claims. The upshot of “the good effects of this religious as well as Civil Liberty” Madison wrote to William Bradford (4/1/1774) during the Virginia debate, was that “Commerce and the Arts have flourished and I cannot help attributing those continual exertions of Genius . . . to the inspiration of Liberty and that love of Fame and Knowledge which always accompany it.” Alternatively, “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize [and] every expanded prospect.”96 Jefferson, the most philosophe-friendly of the major early-American political theorists save Thomas Paine,97 advised, “Read the bible . . . as you would read Livy or Tacitus.” When we “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion” including even “the existence of a god,” then we “shake off all the fears & servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched.”98 It is the atemporality of theology—which Thomas Paine called “the study of nothing . . . founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and admits of no conclusion”99—that makes it a political problem. Paine explicitly connected this to the destruction of knowledge, arguing that Christianity, as much as “the Goths and Vandals,” is to be blamed for “the age of ignorance” that followed the collapse of Rome. This was an effect of Neolithic monotheism itself: The setters up, therefore, and the advocates of the Christian system of faith, could not but foresee that the continually progressive knowledge that man

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Repudiating Burke during the optimistic phase of the French Revolution, Paine dismissed the idea of permanently effective conservative or clerical reaction: “Ignorance is of a peculiar nature: once dispelled, and it is impossible to re-establish it.” But he continued with language not entirely so assuring, imagining “an obliteration of knowledge” even though “it has never yet been discovered, how to make man unknow his knowledge, or unthink his thoughts.”101 Yet this is exactly how other philosophes described religion—an unknower of knowledge, an unthinker of thought. Like the Encyclopédistes and Gibbon earlier in the century, Jefferson brooded upon intellectual catastrophe as his friend the scientist Joseph Priestley was hounded from London in the eruption of reactionary rioting during Britain’s conflicts with revolutionary France. The barbarians really flattered themselves they should be able to bring back the times of Vandalism, when ignorance put everything into the hands of power & priestcraft. All advances in science were proscribed as innovations. They pretended to praise and encourage education, but it was to be the education of our ancestors.102 This was standard American intellectual currency among the founding generation—even its most resolutely Francophobic member shared it. John Adams echoed Jefferson’s latter-day fears that religious subjugation, in perhaps unforeseen guises, would steal over the novus ordo seclorum. “I wish you could live a year in Boston, hear the Divines, read their publications, especially the Repository,” Adams complained to Jefferson (6/25/1813). “You would see how spiritual tyranny and ecclesiastical tyranny are beginning in our country: at least struggling for birth.” Soon after he told Jefferson (7/9/1813) that “the dissenters of all denominations in England, and especially the Unitarians, are cowed, as we used to say at college. They are ridiculed, insulted, persecuted. They can scarcely hold their heads above water.” Adams’s worry that the true history of the American founding would be distorted by party spirit was based on a broader anxiety about the destruction of knowledge: “Records are destroyed. Histories are annihilated, or interpolated, or prohibited: sometimes by popes, sometimes by emperors, sometimes by aristocratical, and sometimes by democratical assemblies, and sometimes by mobs.”103 Vigilance toward freedom and openness is necessary not only to protect rights, but to protect knowledge itself. Adams explained his virulent disapproval of the French Revolutionaries, in retrospect, as an attempt to salvage the progressive

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work of the eighteenth century from collapse at the hands of the new vandals—a judgment that Condorcet and Lavoisier would perhaps have had to agree with, ultimately. He recalled, The nations of Europe appeared to me, when I was among them, from the beginning of 1778, to 1785, i.e., to the commencement of the troubles in France, to be advancing by slow but sure steps towards an amelioration of the condition of man in religion and government, in liberty, equality, fraternity, knowledge, civilization and humanity.The French Revolution I dreaded, because I was sure it would not only arrest the progress of improvement, but give it a retrograde course, for at least a century, if not many centuries.104 Adams told the Francophile Jefferson (11/13/1815) that his objection to the French revolution was based on a distrust of absolute power wherever located, “the same in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratical council, an oligarchical junto, and a single emperor; equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody, and in every respect diabolical.” Such tyranny, monkish or Jacobin, “never failed to destroy all the records, memorials, and histories of former times which it did not like, and corrupt and interpolate such as it was cunning enough to preserve or tolerate.” Though it led to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars—disruptive to the Adams, Jefferson, and Madison presidencies—Adams still found “the eighteenth century, notwithstanding all its errors and vices . . . the most honorable to human nature. Knowledge and virtues were increased and diffused. Arts, sciences useful to men, ameliorating their condition, were improved more than in any former equal period.” Reasonably hopeful about the future, Adams nevertheless conjured up a vision of some development that would “extinguish all the lights of its predecessors,” some new version of “the Inquisition, the Index Expurgatorius,” or “the knights-errant of St. Ignatius Loyola” under the aegis of a post-Waterloo Holy Alliance. “All will depend on the progress of knowledge,” he concluded (2/2/1816; to Jefferson). “But how shall knowledge advance? Independent of temporal and spiritual power, the course of science and literature is obstructed and discouraged by so many causes that it is to be feared their motions will be slow.”105 An interesting disagreement-within-agreement for Adams and Jefferson in their late letters was about the specific religious danger to America. Both used Hume’s superstition-enthusiasm typology. Adams worried (5/6/1816) about the Jesuits, or a similar group: “Our system . . . of religious liberty must afford them an asylum,” he allowed. “But if they do not put the purity of our elections to a severe trial, it will be a wonder.” Jefferson agreed (8/1/1816) “their restoration . . . marks a retrograde step from light towards darkness,” but did not expect the American problem would lie there: “ours will be the follies of enthusiasm, not of bigotry, not of Jesuitism. Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant.” But religious enthusiasm could serve bigotry, as Jefferson saw in the near-lynching of Priestley. America would be judged, on Jefferson’s

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account, by her guarding against such atavisms. “Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both. We are destined to be a barrier against the returns of ignorance and barbarism. Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders, and to hobble along by our side, under the monkish trammels of priests and kings, as she can.” Adams replied (5/18/1817) with typical skepticism: “I wish that superstition in religion, exciting superstition in politics . . . may never blow up all your benevolent and philanthropic lucubrations. But the history of all ages is against you.” Adams likewise doubted any bright future for Europe (1/22/1825), “deeply tainted with prejudices both ecclesiastical and temporal . . . infected with Episcopal and Presbyterian creeds and confessions of faith”—and spoke almost verbatim the language of Voltaire. “They all believe that great principle which has produced . . . Newton’s universe . . . came down to this little Ball to be spit upon by Jews. And, until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there will never be any liberal science in this world.”106 Adams’s mixture of attachment to the growth of knowledge with his latter-day intimations of disaster was more in line with French Enlightenment polemic than he may have assumed. Michael Lienesch describes the way in which “Americans could be found combining themes of corruption and progress with surprising alacrity. Fearful of decline but hopeful about the possibilities for human betterment,” they did all they could in “attempting to create a more comprehensive concept of change and, with it, a politics more appropriate to their changing times.”107 That is a gloss on the European Enlightenment tout court, despite its cleavages. Joel Barlow’s faith that “The liberal sciences are in their nature republican” because “they delight in reciprocal communication . . . and lead to a freedom of intercourse”108 was one strand of this thought; although for Adams, in the end, there was more nobility in cognitive expansion than in political glory: I have no idolatry for politicians or warriors. Who would not prefer Hippocrates to Alexander or Demosthenes? Every discovery, invention, or improvement in science, especially medical science, is lasting. Political and military glories transient as the wind. Solon and Lycurgus have passed away, and what good have they done? It would be republican blasphemy to say that Pisistratus, the tyrant, did more good than both. Yet history would countenance a doubt.109 Adams’s pessimism, much like David Hume’s in his late letters to Turgot and others, emphasized political decay.110 But Adams tied political decadence to religious counter-Enlightenment more intensely than he employed the familiar trope associating decline with hedonism, the erosion of piety, and so on. The “germ of religion in human nature” does not save society; sometimes it is “so strong that whenever an order of men can persuade the people by flattery or terror that they have salvation at their disposal, there can be no end to fraud, violence, or usurpation.”111

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As early as the ratification period Madison wrote Jefferson (10/24/1787) that religion was overrated as a curb against political oppression. As William Lee Miller notes, The silence of The Federalist on religious matters is almost as striking as the silence of the Constitution. Nowhere in its eighty-five essays, covering the whole polity in defense of the Constitution, is there any discussion of religion as an element in the social order.112 “The inefficacy of this restraint on individuals is well known,” said Madison. When infused by public piety, individuals join without remorse in acts against which their consciences would revolt, if proposed to them separately in their closets. When Indeed Religion is kindled into enthusiasm, its force like that of other passions is increased by the sympathy of a multitude. But enthusiasm is only a temporary state of Religion, and whilst it lasts will hardly be seen with pleasure at the helm. Even in its coolest state, it has been much oftener a motive to oppression than a restraint from it.113 Louis Hartz’s claim, in his classic study, that the American polity “remained, with the exception of a few men like Paine and Barlow, curiously untouched by the crusading intensity we find in the French and the Russians at a later time,” conceals as much as it reveals.114 As far as secularism at the American founding is concerned, the purported gap between radicals and moderates is largely illusory, and the lonely minority status of American lumiéres like Tom Paine and Joel Barlow, hounded by waves of popular and-Jacobinism, not necessarily what it seems. Barlow’s warning that “it is not the church which is corrupted by men, it is men who are corrupted by the church”115 was as American a sentiment as it was an imported French one. Actually, a Barlow’s occasionally Rousseauian political radicalism may mark him as less progressive than the “moderate” American Enlightenment. He complained— this, too, echoes Hume’s late letters—that funded public debt was a concept just as harmful to humanity as religion; the former, indeed, had replaced the latter. As an engine of state, the funding system has completely taken the place of religious enthusiasm; and mankind have been hurried on to their own destruction by the former, within the last two ages, with as little prudence and as much delusion, as they were by the latter, in the twelfth century. Indeed, I see no reason why a genuine crusade could not have been undertaken, even by the government of Great Britain within the last 50 years, and carried on to any extent, by the aid of the funding system . . . In one age it is the superstition of religion, in another the superstition of honor, in another the superstition of public credit.116 Barlow dissented from the median view of the American founders not in his antireligious sentiment but rather in this attitude to the transmission of obligations across generations, and the state’s method for balancing consent and growth.

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Hume had rooted for American independence in the midst of a series of epistolary jeremiads about eighteenth-century England: Our Government has become an absolute Chimera: So much Liberty is incompatible with human Society: And it will be happy, if we can escape from it, without falling into a military Government, such as Algiers or Tunis . . . Notwithstanding my Age, I hope to see a public Bankruptcy, the total Revolt of America, the Expulsion of the English from the East Indies, the Diminution of London to less than a half, and the Restoration of the Government to the King, Nobility, and Gentry of this Realm.117 But Diderot, across the channel, mourned in 1771 that “we are on the verge of a crisis which will end in slavery or liberty,” and “if it is slavery, it will be a slavery like that which exists in Morocco or Constantinople.”118 With Hume, in fact, we have an example of a “moderate” Enlightenment figure who was too Francophile for his own predictive good. He thought the technocratic French monarchy could withstand a public debt crisis, while the English mixed regime faced social and political collapse followed by military dictatorship. The reverse, in fact, proved true.

Notes 1. Alexander Hamilton, Writings, ed. Joanne B. Freeman (New York: Library of America, 2001), 507. 2. Ibid., 489. 3. Ibid., 100. 4. James Madison, Writings, ed. Jack N. Rakove (New York: Library of America, 1999), 409. 5. James Morton Smith ed., The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison 1776–1826, 3 vols. (New York: Norton, 1995), I, 498. 6. Ibid. 7. Hamilton, Writings, 70–3. 8. See Mark Hulliung, The Social Contract in America: From the Revolution to the Present Age (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 30. 9. The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1961), #17. 10. Hamilton, Writings, 32. 11. Madison, Writings, 33. 12. Ibid., 31–2. 13. See Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 268. 14. William Lee Miller, The First Liberty: America’s Foundation in Religious Freedom (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2003), 43. 15. Leonard W. Levy, The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill, NC and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 10. 16. Quoted in ibid., 29.

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17. Federalist #1. 18. Federalist #31. 19. Baron D’Holbach, The System of Nature or Laws of the Moral and Physical World, trans. H. D. Robinson (New York: Burt Franklin, 1868), 154. 20. Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours 1798–1817, ed. Dumas Malone, trans. Linwood Lehman (Boston, MA and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 158, 5/26/1815. For an argument that the liberal/republican divide is inappropriate to discussions of the American founding, see Mark Hulliung, Citizens and Citoyens: Republicans and Liberals in America and France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), xi; Michael Lienesch, New Order of the Ages: Time, the Constitution, and the Making of Modern American Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 7, 13; and Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1985), 285, 287. 21. Jefferson, Writings, 1201 (to John Hollins, 2/19/1809). 22. Ibid., 529–30 (to Isaac McPherson, 8/13/1813). 23. Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 7. 24. See Sharon R. Krause, “The Uncertain Inevitability of Decline in Montesquieu,” Political Theory, Vol. 30, No. 5 (Oct., 2002), 702–27; Alan Gilbert, “ ‘Internal Restlessness’: Individuality and Community in Montesquieu,” Political Theory, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Feb., 1994), 45–70; or John Plamenatz, Man and Society, Volume 2: From Montesquieu to the Early Socialists (London and New York: Longman, 1992), 47, which limits itself to calling Montesquieu’s comments on religion “written, for the most part, much in the spirit of Machiavelli.” David Carrithers’s introduction to a co-edited volume on The Spirit of the Laws calls that work a “veritable compendium of liberal principles” but then references only a vague religious toleration among such principles. See Montesquieu’s Science of Politics: Essays on The Spirit of the Laws, ed. David W. Carrithers, Michael A. Mosher, and Paul A. Rahe (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 5. The only section in that otherwise rich book devoted to religious issues is a chapter (chap. 9) by Rebecca E. Kingston which, despite doing interesting contextual work, settles on the problematic conclusion that toleration within France is the main goal, and that “Montesquieu did not support the separation of church and state” (397). Judith Shklar’s comments on the subject are brief and scattered but worthwhile: see her Montesquieu (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 44, 61, 73, 84. More extensive examinations of Montesquieu’s critique of religion include Robert C. Bartlett, “On the Politics of Faith and Reason: The Project of Enlightenment in Pierre Bayle and Montesquieu,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Feb., 2001), 1–28; and Diana J. Schaub, Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), chap. 6. 25. Wielded approvingly by some modern proponents of multiculturalism: see Bhiku Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 55–67. 26. But Mark Hulliung reminds us that we should not necessarily see this as nostalgia for feudalism: see his Montesquieu and the Old Regime (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 73. 27. PL = Montesquieu [Charles-Louis de Secondat], Persian Letters, trans. C. J. Betts (London: Penguin, 1973).

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28. An observation also made by Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism, 26. 29. “Conversation with a Christian Lady,” in Diderot’s Selected Writings, ed. Lester G. Crocker, trans. Derek Coleman (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 255. 30. Jefferson, Writings, 185–6. 31. Henry Home [Lord Kames], Sketches of the History of Man, Considerably Improved in a Third Edition (Dublin: James Williams, 1779), 157, 339. 32. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner and W. B. Todd, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1979 [1776]), 111–2. 33. Marquis d’Argens, Chinese Letters (London: D. Browne and R. Hett, 1741), 11, 25–6. On Montesquieu’s fear of “Oriental despotism” as a running warning for Europe, see Hulliung, Montesquieu and the Old Regime, 100; or Sharon R. Krause, “Despotism in The Spirit of the Laws,” in Montesquieu’s Science of Politics, chap. 5, quote at 236, and see esp. 249–55. 34. See Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: Perennial, 2003), 66–9. 35. Antony Black, The West and Islam: Religion and Political Thought in World History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 6. For a vast, illuminating and colorful history see Anthony Pagden, Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East and West (New York: Random House, 2008), which, despite its title, focuses on the West’s divergence from the “Near East.” 36. Black, The West and Islam, 21. 37. Hulliung, Citizens and Citoyens, 150. 38. Their philosophical relationship has not always been considered as interesting as their political relationship, though the two were obviously intertwined. A recent, exhaustive dual biography is Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, Madison and Jefferson (New York: Random House, 2010); an older, more compact but still useful study is Adrienne Koch, Jefferson and Madison: The Great Collaboration (New York: Knopf, 1950). One wonders whether that shift in titular ordering over six decades represents a scholarly revalution of their comparative importance. 39. The Republic of Letters, 631–2 (9/6/1789). 40. Query XIII of Notes on the State of Virginia in Jefferson, Writings, 249. 41. Joel Barlow, A Letter to the National Convention of France: On the Defects in the Constitution of 1791 and the Extent of the Amendments Which Ought to Be Applied (London: J. Johnson, 1792), 28. 42. See Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (London: Longmans, 1957), 62–3. 43. T2 = “Second Treatise” in John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 44. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983), 25. 45. See Aristotle, The Politics, ed. Steven Everson (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1261a10–35. 46. See Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982 [1759]), 53. For an insightful reading of Smith’s work as a refutation of Rousseau see Dennis C. Rasmussen, The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society: Adam Smith’s Response to Rousseau (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2008).

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47. “Of the Original Contract,” in Hume, Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 192. 48. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §75. 49. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 240, and generally C.B.MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1962). 50. John Locke, Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 105–6. 51. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1968), 193–4. 52. Quoted in Philip Schofield, Utility and Democracy: The Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), 103. 53. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (New York: Penguin, 1984), 41. 54. Letter to Jefferson (6/28/1812) in “Ye Will Say I Am No Christian”: The Thomas Jefferson / John Adams Correspondence on Religion, Morals, and Values, ed. Bruce Barden (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2006), 34. 55. Paine, Rights of Man, 45. 56. “Ye Will Say I Am No Christian,” 57 (6/15/1813). 57. Paine, Rights of Man, 66. 58. “Essays on the Law of Nature,” in Locke, Political Essays, 92–3. 59. For the context see Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Knopf, 1997), 131–6, 230–4. 60. Republic of Letters, 635 [9/6/1789] 61. James MacDonald, A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003), 4. 62. Niall Ferguson, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700–2000 (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 63. Barlow, A Letter to the National Convention of France, 42. For a wonderful intellectual history of such fears, see Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 64. The Republic of Letters, 634–5 (9/6/1789). 65. Stephen Holmes, Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 159, 162. 66. The Republic of Letters, 650–2 (2/4/1790). 67. Ibid. 68. Madison, Writings, 45–6 (8/23/1785). 69. Ibid., 51, 111. 70. For an argument that there were coherent principles beyond mere expediency in Madison’s shifts between Jeffersonianism and Hamiltonianism, see Gary Rosen, American Compact: James Madison and the Problem of Founding (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1999). 71. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 14. 72. Jefferson, Writings, 191.

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73. Clinton Rossiter, 1787: The Grand Convention (New York: Norton, 1987), 36. 74. Madison, Writings, 796. 75. Vincent Phillip Muñoz, “James Madison’s Principle of Religious Liberty,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 1 (Feb., 2003), 17–32. The lead opponent here, cited often by the Supreme Court in religion/state jurisprudence, is Michael W. McConnell. See, e.g., “The Origins and Historical Understnading of Free Exercise of Religion,” Harvard Law Review 103 (May, 1990), 1409–1517. 76. Jefferson, Writings, 286. 77. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 792–3. 78. Madison, Writings, 5–7. 79. For historical accounts of Madison’s switching over to Jefferson’s position see Robert A. Goldwin, From Parchment to Power: How James Madison Used the Bill of Rights to Save the Constitution (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1997) and Richard E. Labunski, James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 80. Republic of Letters, I, 564–5 (10/17/1788). 81. John Toland, Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland, on the same foot with all other Nations. Containing also, A Defence of the Jews against All vulgar Prejudices in all Countries (London: J. Roberts, 1714), 5–6. 82. Ibid., 7–14, 28. 83. Andrew P. Murphy, Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 9, 125. 84. For an argument that Madison’s general hostility to religion has been underestimated see Thomas Lindsay, “James Madison on Religion and Politics: Rhetoric and Reality,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Dec., 1991), 1321–37. For an opposing argument that Madison’s politics were strongly influenced by Calvinism see Garrett Ward Sheldon, The Political Philosophy of James Madison (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 85. See Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 256–64. 86. Jefferson, Writings, 287. 87. On the link between Jefferson’s desires for secularization and his public education proposals see Miller, The First Liberty, 45–51. 88. Madison, Writings, 795. 89. Correspondence, 8 (to Nemours, 4/12/1800). 90. Jefferson, Writings, 211–2. 91. “The American Enlightenment,” in America and Enlightenment Constitutionalism, 166. For an examination of the widespread trepidation in the English case see Don Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 92. Jefferson, Writings, 274. 93. Madison, Writings, 790–4. 94. Madison, Writings, 790, 501 (to William T. Barry, 8/4/1822). 95. Smith ed., Republic of Letters, III, 1831 (9/16/1821). 96. Madison, Writings, 9. 97. See Jean M. Yarbrough, American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 48–59, 177–93.

American Encyclope-Deism 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

107. 108. 109.

110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115.

116. 117. 118.

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Jefferson, Writings, 902–3, 1336 (to Thomas Law, 6/13/1814). Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896), 191. Ibid., 58, 60–1. Paine, Rights of Man, 118–9. Jefferson, Writings, 483. “Ye Will Say I Am No Christian,” 59–60, 70–1. “Ye Will Say I am No Christian,” 76. Ibid., 76, 152–3, 159. Ibid., 173, 175–6, 196–7, 216; a key context for this back-and-forth about religion and politics, external but still, to the authors, relevant enough, was inchoate establishment of constitutional republics in Catholic Latin America. Lienesch, New Order of the Ages, 39. Joel Barlow, Prospectus of a National Institution, To Be Established in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Samuel H. Smith, 1806), 5. The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805–1813, ed. John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1966), 275 (to Rush, 2/21/1813). Ibid., 119–20, 137 (to Rush, 9/27/1808 and 3/23/1809). Ibid., 224 (to Rush, 6/12/1812). Miller, The First Liberty, 103. The Republic of Letters, I, 502. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1991), 36. Joel Barlow, Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe, Resulting from the Necessity and Propriety of a General Revolution in the Principle of Government (London and New York, 1792), I, 49. Ibid., II, 88, 90–1. Letters of David Hume, II, 210 (#434—To William Strahan, 10/25/1769). Quoted in T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe, 1660–1789 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), 404.

4 The Well of the Caliph (Revolutions and Open Societies II) I was in that state of doubt and uncertainty which Descartes considers essential to the search for truth. It is a state which cannot continue, it is disquieting and painful; only vicious tendencies and an idle heart can keep us in that state. Rousseau, Emile In the Discourse on Method Descartes suggested that his personal epistemological revolution could be kept apart from any general political revolution (see chapter 1). Was this division of labor likely to go on indefinitely? Cognitive deconstruction and reconstruction was heady stuff, perhaps not suitable for just any burgher, or worse, peasant, and perhaps best ignored even by the courtiers and managers of the ancien régime. At some point, as it has been pithily put, “Cartesian doubt . . . slipped its leash.”1Later analysts named the French Revolution an instantiation, however misguided or bungled, of the dream of the rationalized and reorganized society on the part of the various reformers and intellectuals working in the twilight of the monarchy.2 As a practical matter, however, as a historian of the period points out, “Despite their progressive ideas, their anticlericalism, and their criticism of official politics, very few of the Encyclopedists went on the play an active role in the Revolution”3(though of course some major players died before getting the change to take a side.) Another historian’s view: “The Encyclopédie’s coverage of politics attempted to ameliorate rather than annihilate the Old Regime.”4 Yet it would be simplistic to associate the Encyclopédie project only with moderation and meliorism, even if the coming revolution was only partially carried out in its name. This chapter examines these issues by tracing arguments about the politics of secularization and cognitive growth among the philosophes, specifically as they faced, at the political level, the decay of the old regime and the tumultuous passions of republicanism, and faced, at the philosophical level, the world-historical defection from their ranks of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 114

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Materialism, Freedom, and the Advance of Knowledge: Diderot’s History of Philosophy Sustained and cumulative cognitive growth is neither a birthright nor the fulfillment of some age-old pervasive trend: it is an altogether singular predicament. Ernest Gellner Denis Diderot, unlike Montesquieu, did not leave us a magnum opus synthesizing and systematizing his philosophy or politics. The Encyclopédie project was meant not to be a final systemization of knowledge but rather a compendium of existing knowledge that would evolve as new discoveries arose—indeed, many of Diderot’s entries are largely propositions for further historical research. That the political salience of knowledge’s organization was a central concern is revealed by the series of articles Diderot wrote for the Encyclopédie about the history of philosophy. Though they anatomize arcane and long-dead sects, both in Europe and elsewhere, their lessons on the political economy of cognitive organization converge. Writing of the “ACOUSMATIQUES” (1:111) Diderot notes that “the disciples of Pythagoras were distributed into two classes separated within his school by a veil; those of the first class, the more advanced class,” the Esoterics, “were finally admitted into the sanctuary” of the master after 5 years of silence. Meanwhile, “Pythagoras only spoke symbolically” to the Exoterics, not reasoning with them. The standard answer to queries from the Exoterics was “Pythagore l’a dit,” while the Esoterics could expect answers of a more evaluable character. A similar story animates “JAPONOIS, Philosophie des” wherein a certain sect “recognize no national gods” and “have neither a temple nor religious ceremonies: if they take part in public worship, it is in the spirit of obedience to the laws” and are recognized by an Enlightened monarch. It was not long before a Japanese prince, named Sisen, who had developed a taste for Science & Philosophy, founded an academy in his domains, summoned there the most educated men, encouraged their studies through rewards; & reason began to make progress in a canton of the empire, when some vile, petty sacrificers who lived off of the superstition & the credulity of the people, angered by the disrepute of their reveries, complained to the emperor . . . & threatened the nation with the greatest disasters, if he did not hasten to suppress this emerging impious race. Sisen saw ecclesiastic and civil tyranny suddenly conjured against him, & found no other means of evading the peril that surrounded him, than abandoning his projects, & yielding his books & his dignities to his son. (8:455–8) So reform in a land rotted out by “superstition” is no easy matter, and the generation that sees its need may not have the tools to accomplish it. As Diderot’s entry on “Platonisme” (12:745–52) recounts, “The death of Socrates left terror and distress among the Philosophers.” But Diderot’s aim is not

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to separate philosophy from theology to protect the former’s Academic (in Plato’s sense) comforts. It is to identify the perversions of cognitive political economy that hobble progress. The terror of Socrates’ followers after his execution inspired a flight into esotericism that, on this reading, infected Christianity. Diderot, like most of the philosophes, thought that Christianity’s early development involved a fatal amalgamation of Eastern cultic religions and mystical neo-Platonism. A letter of Spinoza’s suggested that force and fraud had settled the ancient, but enduring, kulturkampf: The authority of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates carries little weight with me. I should have been surprised if you had produced Epicurus, Democritus, Lucretius or one of the Atomists . . . It is not surprising that those who have thought up occult qualities . . . and a thousand more bits of nonsense should have devised spectres and ghosts, and given credence to old wives’ tales with view to disparaging the authority of Democritus, whose high reputation they so envied that they burned all the books which he had published amidst so much acclaim.5 In his entry on “Orientale” philosophy Diderot describes “divine things” as “those that are the most believed because least understood,” and wonders how surrendering human knowledge to such entities drained Hellenic philosophy. It would be desirable to examine in detail the origin and progress of the sects: the discoveries we would make on this point would throw light on the sacred and philosophical history of the first two centuries of the Church; a period that will only lose its obscurity when some man of uncommon erudition and penetration accomplishes this work. (11:642–4) His “conjecture” is that “the Pythagorean-Platonic philosophy passed from Greece into [the Near East], arriving shortly before the birth of Jesus Christ.” In radical ally Holbach’s similar account, “natural philosophers and poets were transformed by leisure into metaphysicians and theologians” who “subtly distinguish[ed] nature from herself ” and “made an incomprehensible being of this energy, which . . . they called the mover of nature, or God.”6 Mental atrophy more than political fear is the culprit: a human tendency, not a specifically Western story. Diderot’s typologies are not limited to the West either: “One finds,” for example, “traces of Manichaeism in the most distant centuries and among the most savage nations” (“Belbuch & Zeombuch,” 2:193). The “Manichaeist” perversion is more than an affront to rational Theism or Deism—it is the fatal division of spirit from matter. Thus, among the “MALABARES, Philosophie des” of India, Diderot finds extremes of both Pythagorean Esotericism and monkish self-mortification. Sanctifying a scripture “which there is only one Brahmin who can read without crime,” a “family of skilled imposters conserved for itself great authority in the state, & absolute empire over consciences.” A select few among the votaries become hermits who

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work from morning to night at deadening their minds, at desiring nothing, hating nothing, thinking nothing, feeling nothing; & and when they have attained this state of complete stupidity where the present, the past & the future have been annihilated for them . . . where they have lost all feeling, all movement, all thought, then they believe themselves . . . neighbors of the condition of God. (9:921–5) Diderot’s conclusion: “Everywhere that man . . . propose[s] the immobile, eternal, impassible, inalterable Being as his model, he of necessity descends below the beast. Since nature made you man, be man and not God.” The false distinction between matter and spirit models the division of Satan from God, Christianity’s absorption Manichaeism. To posit a perfect and immaterial being outside time— “immobile, eternal, impassible, inalterable”—is to create a false idol that real humans will ruin themselves trying to approximate or please. Beyond stifling the individual, an irresistible opportunity arises for either cynical or deluded powerseekers to claim exclusive access to this otherwise hard-to-approach Being and thereby gain untoward political power. If spiritual perfection is “immobile, eternal, impassible, inalterable,” then the corresponding opposites of earthly life, its mobility, perishability and changeability, are evils rather than simply facts that can be channeled in any number of directions, including toward progress. Diderot openly names atheism as an alternative. No longer a code word for license or nihilism, it is for Diderot simply freedom. It had “its partisans,” he reports teasingly, even “among the Malabare,” an unnamed poet of which insisted that there is no God, that reasons given for his existence are unavailing; that there are no absolute truths; that good and evil are circumscribed by the short bounds of life; that it is folly to abandon real happiness in order to chase after chimerical felicity that by definition does not exist. (9:921–5) What Jonathan Israel describes as Diderot’s “materialism, hylozoic monism, and atheism”7 is for Diderot the only possible pathway through the twin falterings of “Skepticism & credulity . . . two vices equally unworthy of a thinking man,” as he puts it in his entry for “MOSAIQUE et chrétienne philosophie” (10:741–5). A healthily skeptical spirit is fine, of course, but when skepticism (even with an ancient pedigree) goes too far toward devaluing the real materialist advances of modern science, it threatens to let “credulity” in the back door. A “contempt for reason & Philosophy,” whatever its source, occasions “the pretended necessity of having recourse to revelation, as the only torch that can enlighten us in natural science and morality.” Such a transformation occurred during the Athenian Academy’s shift from Socrates to Plato and his followers (“Platonisme”: 12:745–52): the “affected doubt of Socrates, became in some of his disciples the germ a real doubt, about the senses, about conscience & about experience.” Then, divinized via Eastern currents, this “real doubt” flipped over, and excessive skepticism became excessive credulity. Eventually “the doctrine of the absolute weakness of human

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understanding, & of the general uncertainty of all our knowledge” kneels and begs forgiveness, shouting allegiance to the heavens. Esoteric wisdom, “badly guarded,” became “blurred and confused,” and gave itself up to theology. “Le Christianisme . . . fut le sort du Platonisme dans l’Eglise.” Post-Baconian philosophy, on the other hand, inaugurates the production of new knowledge as goal, in place of Scholastic dispute over existing definitions. It was Leibniz (“LÉIBNITZIANISME ou PHILOSOPHIE DE LÉIBNITZ,” 9:369–79) who, Diderot reports, first imagined the Encyclopedia: “he intended to reconcile the different sciences, & mark the lines of communication existing between them.” Leibniz was also, of course, “the founder of optimism, or of that system that seems to have made of God an automaton in his decrees & in his actions, & to return under another name & in spiritual form to the fatum of the ancients, or that necessity of things being as they are.” But Diderot is more merciful than the Voltaire of Candide. Emphasizing “things being as they are” rather than “the best of all possible worlds,” he suggests that Leibniz’s monistic Deism, if anchored in modern science and stripped of the lineage of Thomist disputation, becomes, for all intents and purposes, materialism. Both Leibniz and Newton, in historian Margaret Jacob’s estimation, “relied on an incredibly rich and baroque ontology to save their systems from materialistic consequences.”8 It was not just a possibility but a necessity to be, for Diderot, “a materialist and a humanist in the same breath,” as biographer Arthur Wilson describes him. Diderot’s naturalism allowed him to sit out the dispute over the problems posed to theodicy by the Lisbon earthquake—there was no problem whatever “explaining” the event.9 “For good or for evil,” he wrote to Sophie Volland (10/20/1760), “everything has to be as it is.”10 This is the tightrope between naturalism and terror that the Encyclopédie generation’s forerunner and model, Huguenot refugee Pierre Bayle, author of the Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, read into Spinozism. Epicureans and their ilk who “maintain that men should apply themselves to virtue on account of its excellence and because one finds enough advantage in the practice of morality in this life not to have anything to complain about,” do not see where this doctrine might lead weaker characters. The “impious man” Spinoza “did not know the inevitable consequences of his theory . . . If he had reasoned logically, he would not have treated the fear of hell as chimerical.”11 Is Bayle’s condemnation genuine? He is introducing us to the supposedly toxic theory, after all. And in his Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet he had avowed that there has “never been a misfortune less to be feared than atheism,” and that atheists are likely to follow the same political calculus as others.12 Bayle questioned Locke’s claim in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding that “a God, who sees men in the dark, has in his hands rewards and punishments, and power enough to call to account the proudest offender” (EH13, I.III.§6) is the only ultimate and efficient guarantor of social order. If that were true, why has there been so much sinful behavior in professedly God-fearing societies? Bayle concluded that “a society of atheists would perform civil and moral actions as much as other societies do, provided that it

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punish crimes severely and that it attach honor and infamy to certain things.”14 But to the Bayle of the Dictionnaire, Spinoza’s pantheism, which it is implied is tantamount to atheism, suggested the answer to the theodicy problem was as simple as it was discomfiting: if a single God exists, and is responsible for all of nature, and we see good and evil in nature and in humanity, then God must be just as responsible for the evil as for the good. Spinoza’s God of everything is, Bayle suggests, a sort of nothingness, because it gives us no way to discern values from nature, and has no stake, emotional or juridical, in what occurs on earth. This mixture of melancholia and empowerment in the materialist paradigmshift also pervades Hume’s remarkable essay “On Suicide” (1783), which explores the far reaches of human control over the material world at the individual level. We “restore men to their native liberty” by affirming this example of human selfownership, however emotionally fraught. What could give the Divine a more tyrannical power than to deny its creatures this act that they were obviously created capable of? If such a creator exists, there is “no event, however important to us, which he has exempted from the general laws that govern the universe, or which he has peculiarly reserved for his own immediate action and operation.” Modern science and material progress is based on its materialism, which deems it incoherent to posit human control over seas and forest but not over ourselves. If control over our own bodies is impious, then why not impious, say I, to build houses, cultivate the ground, or sail upon the ocean? In all these actions we employ our powers of mind and body to produce some innovation in the course of nature . . . They are all of them therefore equally innocent, or equally criminal.15 But Enlightenment fatum was not surrender: secular philosophy proposes changing things by understanding that things are only what they are. There is promise of extensive improvement here, but there is also humility, as in materialist La Mettrie’s humbling and depressing suggestion that “A trifle, a tiny fiber, something the most subtle anatomical dissection cannot discover, would have made idiots of Erasmus and Fontenelle.”16 Diderot thought that relevance in the sciences was shifting from the abstract to the material, from mathematics to chemistry and especially applied biology. This viewpoint set him increasingly at odds with Encyclopédie coeditor (and mathematician) d’Alembert. “The fact is it is very difficult to think cogently in metaphysics or ethics without being an anatomist, a naturalist, a physiologist, and a physician,” he argued. He supported smallpox vaccination against d’Alembert’s anti-probability theory skepticism; more broadly, he followed the opinion of Buffon and Voltaire that mathematics had reached some sort of practical limit and the future belonged to fields like anatomy, chemistry, natural history, and the like.17 “Indulge your passion for science,” said Hume, “but let your science be human, and such as may have a direct reference to action and society.”18 The groundwork was Lockean empiricism (“LOCKE, Philosophie de,” 9:625–7), which Diderot interprets thus: “all expression

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that does not find outside our mind a sensible object to which it can reattach itself, is meaningless.” That human cognition finds it hard to understand itself objectively is no proof of divine intervention: “Locke . . . saw no impossibility in thinking matter. Some pusillanimous men took fright at this assertion. Of what importance is it whether matter thinks or not? What is done to justice or injustice, to immortality, & to all the truths of a system, whether political or religious?” D’Alembert said Locke “created metaphysics, almost as Newton had created physics”—that is, Enlightenment “metaphysics,” purged of “the abstractions and ridiculous questions which had been debated up to that time and which had seemed to constitute the substance of philosophy”; Locke “reduced metaphysics to what it really ought to be: the experimental physics of the soul.”19 But the “soul” of the Encyclopédie was the discomfortingly material one of Holbach, La Mettrie, and the other radicals. Diderot’s article ruled out any Cartesian matter-thought distinction by referring to cases of head injuries, brain surgeries, and their effects on reason. All it took was “some disturbed tissue . . . a fall; a concussion; and adieu judgment, reason, & all those qualities of which men are so proud, for all this pride depends on a filament placed well or badly, healthy or diseased.”20 Perhaps this means the philosophes simply repudiated Locke; they claimed to be completing him. Holbach credited the Lockean system with having dispensed with God, “sapped the very foundations of that theology, which never occupies man but with those objects, of which, as they are inaccessible to his senses, he, consequently, can never form to himself any accurate idea.”21 Throughout the Enlightenment there was tension between a radical empiricism which tended to destroy all claims to received truth, and a need still felt for a supreme being who could successfully—and ultimately—reconcile secular disputes. On the eve of the French Revolution there were out-of-the-closet atheists among the salonniéres like Holbach; Voltaire advised them, so the famous story goes, to keep their views to themselves while the servants were around.22 Montesquieu called it “quite useful for one to believe that god is” because “he who has no religion at all is that terrible animal that feels its liberty only when it claws and devours” (SL, XXIV.2). Rousseau’s civil religion suggested banishing or putting to death anyone who was shown not to believe in “the existence of the powerful, intelligent, prescient, and provident Divinity, the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked.” Those are the “positive dogmas”; the negative dogma is against “intolerance” (SC, 150–123), presumably intolerance of any other sort. Locke’s otherwise radical A Letter Concerning Toleration withheld toleration from those who professed atheism.24 Yet Locke’s argument against innate ideas in the Essay was seen, not without reason, as anti-theism. Since even wide assent does not imply innateness, the commonness of theism cannot on Locke’s terms mean that the idea of God is innate. The reverse is also true: that the God idea is not innate is not an argument against God’s existence, any more than centuries of Ptolemaic assent were an argument against Copernicus (I.IV.§7). Locke’s answer is that something can be a “law of nature” without being innate:

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I would not be here mistaken, as if, because I deny an innate law, I thought there were none but positive laws. There is a great deal of difference between an innate law, and a law of nature; between something imprinted on our minds in their very original, and something that we being ignorant of may attain to the knowledge of, by the use and due application of our natural faculties. And I think they equally forsake the truth, who running into the contrary extremes, either affirm an innate law, or deny that there is a law, knowable by the light of nature; i.e. without the help of positive revelation. (I.III.§13) It is proper to speak of laws of nature rather than innate laws because the discussion of laws of nature, which can be rationally and universally evaluated, accords with the Enlightenment’s cognitive democratization. After all, “if it be the privilege of innate principles, to be received upon their own authority, without examination, I know not what may not be believed, or how any one’s principles can be questioned” (I.III.§27). A concept of innateness would interfere with the intellectual openness needed for knowledge to progress: Another reason that makes me doubt of any innate practical principles is, that I think, there cannot any one moral rule be proposed, whereof a man may not justly demand a reason: which would be perfectly ridiculous and absurd, if they were innate, or so much as self-evident; which every innate principle must needs be, and not need any proof to ascertain its truth, nor want any reason to grant it approbation. (I.III.§4) Locke tries to build a bridge between empiricism and faith by declaring that “Reason is natural revelation” (IV.XIX.§4; this could be a suitable summary of much of Leviathan). But how so? Joshua Mitchell writes, “The politics of reason does not countermand Revelation. Reason can clear away false religion so that the true religion may take its rightful place as reason’s necessary supplement. No more.”25 I would go further. There is a tension within the text, and it is not simply an anachronistic backward glance on the modern reader’s part.26 Presumably since a creator endowed humankind with reason, then the products of said reason are the functional equivalent of revelation—indeed, the only defensible way of reaching it, as it allows for the demonstration that comes of discussion and experiment. Otherwise revelation relies on faith: Locke has shown that we do not universally possess the innate concepts necessary to distinguish true prophets from false ones. The “volumes of interpreters and commentators on the Old and New Testament are but too manifest proofs of this” because “Though everything said in the text be infallibly true, yet the reader may be, nay, cannot choose but be, very fallible in the understanding of it” (III.IX.§22). Prophetic knowledge must accord with knowledge deducible elsewhere by rational means, which essentially eliminates the need for prophets: “no man inspired by GOD, can by any revelation communicate to others

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any new simple ideas which they had not before from sensation or reflection” (IV XVIII.§3). Tautological monotheism: God gave humanity reason, so we must be able to use that reason to discover the existence of God. But where does the first premise come from? Locke lets revelation in the back door for fear that without it his empiricist system would make atheism reasonable: For our simple ideas, then, which are the foundation, and sole matter of all our notions and knowledge, we must depend wholly on our reason; I mean our natural faculties; and can by no means receive them, or any of them, from traditional revelation. I say, traditional revelation, in distinction to original revelation. By the one, I mean that first impression which is made immediately by GOD on the mind of any man, to which we cannot set any bounds; and by the other, those impressions delivered over to others in words, and the ordinary ways of conveying our conceptions one to another. (IV.XVIII.§3) A cognitive Big Bang sets reason in motion, but that must be understood as a divine act and thus itself outside the realm of reason or cognition. That principle, unadorned, could indicate the following: a) human claims to receiving revelation are always to be doubted; b) any truth supposedly revealed should also be reachable via reason; thus c) the lack of clear evidence that there is a God requires us to doubt that there is in fact one. Locke wields doubt against other traditional mainstays of spirituality: “The existence, nature, and operations of finite immaterial beings without us; as spirits, angels, devils, etc.,” because “falling not under the reach of our senses . . . are not capable of testimony” (IV.XVI.§12). Not so the theos; though “of the father of all spirits, the eternal independent author of them and us and all things we have no certain information . . . but by revelation,” still “the knowledge of [one’s] own mind cannot suffer a man, that considers, to be ignorant, that there is a GOD” (IV.III.§27). Locke gropes to salvage God from the jettisoning of generations of religious authority, entering a netherworld of caveats and provisos. “GOD in giving us the light of reason has not therefore tied up his own hands from affording us, when he thinks fit, the light of revelation,” and “revelation . . . must carry it, against the probable conjectures of reason”; and yet, “it still belongs to reason to judge of the truth of its being a revelation, and of the signification of the words, wherein it is delivered.” With “uncertain evidence . . . an evident revelation ought to determine our assent even against probability,” because “whatever GOD hath revealed is certainly true: no doubt can be made of it”; and yet, “This is the proper object of faith,” for “whether it be a divine revelation or no, reason must judge; which can never permit the mind to reject a greater evidence to embrace what is less evident, nor allow it to entertain probability in opposition to knowledge and certainty” (EH, IV.XVIII.§8–10). But why can reason not claim, without risking prior restraint due to the incipient collapse of the republic, that the only “revelation” transmitted to us by the night’s nebulae is that we are on our own?

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In Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, the character Cleanthes, arguing with the Theist Demea and the skeptic Philo (for whom reason cannot judge religion: “we are employed upon objects . . . too large for our grasp . . .”), speaks as the Enlightenment rationalist for whom no concept can claim immunity from reason’s gaze: why not the same, I ask, in the theological and the religious? Why must conclusions of this nature be alone rejected on the general presumption of the insufficiency of human reason, without any particular discussion of the evidence? Is not such an unequal conduct a plain proof of prejudice and passion?27 Interestingly Cleanthes claims Locke as an ancestor: “the first Christian, who ventured openly to assert, that faith was nothing but a species of reason, that religion was only a branch of philosophy, and that a chain of arguments, similar to that which established any truth in morals, politics, or physics, was always employed in discovering all the principles of theology, natural and revealed.”28 Cleanthes legitimately asks why religious matters may claim exemption and whether this point of view, in degrading reason within the material world, may perversely end by strengthening the immaterial as a causal entity. As Diderot put it, during his transformation from Deist to atheist, “thanks to the extreme confidence I have in my reason, my faith is not at the mercy of the first charlatan.” Theistic invocations are the sort that “demonstrates everything but proves nothing; that one dares not contravene lest one be impious, and that one cannot believe, lest one be an imbecile.”29 One can ascribe to God whatever edicts one likes; divine knowledge and its transmission does not and cannot play by the rules of the new form of knowledge instantiated by the Encyclopédie. Thus such knowledge is incompatible with enlightened government. “The distance between the throne and the altar can never be too great,” Diderot advised Catherine the Great. Priesthoods are inassimilable by the rational state because they answer to, or pretend to answer to, the decrees of a non-rationalizable entity: “Nowhere in the world has it been possible without violence to reduce them to the pure and simple status of a citizen.” Priests “have never ceased to think, that they were answerable only to God” and can “sanctify crime when it pleases them.” Like Montesquieu in his comments on Iberian religion, Diderot associates priestly influence with despotism, implying that people turn to religious authority when secular authority is too oppressive: “People who have been frequently oppressed are accustomed to look to the priests as their protectors, for they intercede on their behalf to God, the only avenger of the oppression of kings.” But he also observed that priesthoods more often served as the tool of tyrants: “Wicked kings need cruel gods in order to find an example of tyranny in heaven; they need priests so as to have tyrannical gods worshipped.”30 In his Encyclopédie article “Synode” (15:755–6) d’Alembert rejected the idea that Constantine’s supposed ceding of power to the church was dispositive for

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modern Europe: “the prince can ratify or annul all the acts of the synod, & suspend the execution of all or some of these ordinances. In short the authority of the synodal acts depends entirely on the monarch, & no synod has the right to break off without his acquiescence.” Like “the most learned politiques” we “uphold that civil authority should incorporate ecclesiastical affairs just like civil ones.” Diderot even vehemently objected to boilerplate phrasing: By the grace of God, a theocratic phrase. The anointed of the Lord: another theocratic phrase. Phrases from a very ancient time, when the people lived under the domination of priests . . . When these two heads separated, the priest still kept the privilege of consecrating the king, who was subjected to carrying the priest’s livery.31 The consecration of king by priest, even if it seems a mere formality, hamstrings the progress of politics toward the secular contract, maintaining a faux-divine investiture in authority. The priest’s connection to the divine is, in Diderot’s view, unproveable if not deliberately falsified; the king’s authority is materially based and thus mutable; so this arrangement results in the latter ruling on the former’s sufferance. Diderot surely appealed to Catherine’s pride, but his long-term motive was to rationalize the state through secularization. Though disputing the contractarianism of conjectural history—“Men gathered together in society by instinct, just as weak animals form herds. There was certainly no kind of primitive agreement”32—he nevertheless chided Catherine (and, a bit unfairly, Montesquieu) for placing God above law or contract: “Catherine and Montesquieu began their works by referring to God. They would have done better to begin with the necessity of laws, which are the foundations of human happiness, and with the contract which is the basis of our liberty and property.”33 For Diderot these invocations of God are lamentable results of political authority’s need to placate priesthoods or other believers, who either desire power for themselves, or need assurance that their earthly authorities have been vetted by the divine. Diderot’s singular vehemence about the “priesthood” was to some degree peculiarly French, the Gallican Church having withstood the assaults of the Reformation. He even remarked, in his contribution to the abbé Raynal’s influential history of European imperialism (1st ed. 1770), “In England the love of freedom . . . was aroused in the population by the [Protestant] innovators in religion.”34 But Diderot’s overall view was secular, not sectarian. When he wrote that in England freedom “ended by triumphing, and everything, even the fanaticism of religion, contributed to its triumph,”35 he meant to suggest how improbable was such an alliance between freedom and religion, even Protestant religion. The Protestants can free themselves from the Catholic hierarchy, and this may constitute a step forward, but they have not freed themselves fully as long as they remain wedded to a view of knowledge based upon scriptural revelation.

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The faith in “enlightened” modernizing monarchs like Frederick, Catherine, or Joseph II was premised not only on the idea that they would efficiently crush feudal priesthoods, but that a managerial elite is required to do so because their populations were not yet suitably educated so as to consent to the process. That said, Diderot’s relationship with Catherine did not signify unequivocal faith in the enlightened despot. In a critique of Helvétius, he in fact called enlightened despotism more dangerous the more “enlightened” the leader: The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues and the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid. Such a prince deprives his people of the right to deliberate, to will or not to will, even to oppose his will when he orders what is good . . . [the] subjects resemble nothing but a herd of cattle whose protests are ignored on the pretext that they are being led to fat pastures.36 Such “sleep” is “the most perfect slavery,” a “sleep that may be sweet but also like death, a sleep during which patriotic feelings flicker out and citizens become strangers to the government of their own State.” He added, “If the English had been ruled by three Elizabeths in succession, they would now be the basest slaves in all Europe”37. Generations of absolutist leadership, however allegedly modernizing, had left the French people miserable and cowed, with a buried instinct for self-government that found no real institutional outlets. Starvation was such an omnipresent concern among the peasants that it would be hard to make the case that such self-government should even have been a top concern—even if progressive French economists convincingly made the case that freeing and marketizing agriculture would eventually banish famine. As historian Hippolyte Taine later noted, British visitors to the ancién regime French countryside frequently thought that, basically, they were looking at another Ireland.38 It did not take long for the French Revolutionaries to see that opposition to their new dawn was not limited to intransigent clerics and nervous Austrian nobles, but was quite powerful among elements of the French peasantry itself. The equally common praise of “English liberty,” made most famous in France by Voltaire and Montesquieu, is praise of decentralized and diffused power, but one always tempered by monarchical and aristocratic elements. As late as 1790–91, Sieyès countered Thomas Paine’s democratic fervor—Paine himself soon admitted that “The intolerant spirit of church persecution had transferred itself into politics; the tribunals, stiled Revolutionary, supplied the place of an Inquisition; and the Guillotine of the Stake”39—by informing him that citizens were freer under a monarchy because “kings were necessary to save us from the peril of masters”; and Robespierre was propagandizing on behalf of the Constitution’s “Republic with a monarch.”40 The Francophile and republican Jefferson looked back on the French Revolutionary Wars in 1815 and “congratulate[d]” the French, via the Dupont

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de Nemours, “on having got back from Robespierre and Bonaparte, to your anterevolutionary condition.” Louis XVI “would then have yielded . . . freedom of religion, freedom of the press, trial by jury, Habeas corpus, and a representative legislature,” the “essentials constituting free government”; the return of a “moderate and friendly” monarch/executive would “give you a temperate degree of freedom and security” (though Jefferson soon became disenchanted with the settlement).41 A complex of institutional safeguards replaces a plebiscitary general will. Hence the place of Jean-Jacques Rousseau has come to be contested. Even among those who see the story of eighteenth-century philosophy as a more or less unified crescendo toward a radical remaking of the social order, and who place Rousseau within this tradition, there is agreement that Rousseau added something new and volatile to the mix—but what exactly it was remains the object of dispute.42 It is noteworthy that most talented early counter-Enlightenment polemicists, from Burke and Maistre to Blake and Coleridge, attacked Rousseau and Voltaire (one imagines they spun in unison in their Pantheon tombs) in the same breath: “The source of his errors . . . was in the spirit of his century to which he paid tribute without perceiving it” is how Maistre put it in 1795.43 Hegel accused him of bringing forth “the most terrible and drastic event” because he reduced the state to an amalgamation of “individual will[s]” embodying “express consent given at their own discretion.”44 In his magisterial biography of Diderot, Arthur Wilson surely let his own passions get away from him with the accusation, “Rousseau was the precursor of Robespierre, Diderot of Danton, and a generation later one sent the other to the guillotine.”45 The later attempt to assign intellectual blame for twentieth-century totalitarianism hit Rousseau specifically hard. Jacob Talmon called Rousseau “the master of Robespierre,” maintaining that “although Rousseau . . . quarreled bitterly with the two atheistic materialists [Helvétius and Holbach], there was hardly a fundamental disagreement between them.” The only difference was that “Rousseau puts the people in place of the Physiocratic enlightened despot.”46 Rousseau inaugurates a tradition wherein “total revolution” becomes the only solution to the inadequacies of modern life, whose heirs are Marx and Nietzsche.47 Rousseau’s partisans in this battle have either defended his proto-romanticism against these charges,48 or posited a basically Enlightenmentfriendly Rousseau: “Rousseau was not wholly in the Enlightenment, but he was of it,” writes Peter Gay; he “always remained a member of the family he would not have and that would not have him.”49 Despite Gay’s valiant attempt to integrate Rousseau into a general tradition of Enlightenment reformism—and admitting that Rousseau, Voltaire, Helvétius, and other bugbears of Burke agreed on at least some things—it seems to me unavoidable that a signature contribution of Rousseau to Western intellectual life is to have inflicted a wound upon Gay’s “Party of Humanity” that never really healed.50Defenders of Rousseau against the postwar proto-totalitarian accusation rightly see too much being made of the “General Will” of the Social Contract and its portentous phrase “forced to be free.”51 At least, it is not Rousseau’s fault if his disciples ignored the caveat he stressed quite clearly: anti-modern republicanism of his

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sort could only work in a small, willfully non-complex polity. An idealized Sparta, however misguided its invocation in modern conditions (as Benjamin Constant classically argued52), is not Red Square. But neither is it Bacon’s New Atlantis, and it is Rousseau’s attitude toward the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, and its political significance, that mark him out most clearly as a dissenter from the spirit of his time. Gay is wrong to insist that “Rousseau urged mankind in the direction that the Enlightenment as a whole wanted mankind to go,”53 Even the modified claim that Rousseau sough to “launch an alternative Enlightenment, as a sequel to his earlier efforts to force the Enlightenment to question itself ”54 is too conciliatory. The nature of “enlightenment” is in question. I shall now examine Rousseau’s positions on religion and the associated cognitive-political problem. Then I will contrast him to a subsequent figure often thought, in a different way, to have embodied the highs and lows of French Revolution, to the point of becoming “victim of the triumph of his ideas”55—Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, the Marquis de Condorcet, ideologist of progress, statistical innovator, and martyr to the Committee of Public Health, his “Fragment on the New Atlantis” written, poignantly, in hiding from the self-styled enforcers of Rousseau’s new Sparta.

Surplice and Sword: Rousseau’s Deism For who is there that does not see, to whose benefit it conduceth, to have it believed, that a King hath not his authority from Christ, unlesse a Bishop crown him? Hobbes, Leviathan Calvin, doubtless, was a great man; but in the end he was a man, and what is worse, a Theologian . . . indignant that anyone disagree with him. Rousseau, “Letters Written from the Mountain” In religious matters, Rousseau would seem to be solidly in the Enlightenment mainstream. He presents government as a secular contract quite literally, and therein merits being called not wholly of the tradition I am elucidating, but certainly in it. The similarities and differences are both of interest. The two central texts are the discussion of civil religion in The Social Contract (Book IV, Chapter 8) and the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” in Émile, the work that an elderly Rousseau found “ignobly prostituted and desecrated by the present generation, but which may one day effect a revolution in the minds of men, if ever good sense and good faith return among them” (RSW56, 55). The Savoyard priest proposes a tolerant Deism; something like what Gibbon identified as the creed of the wise at the height of the Roman Empire (E57, 265). A Catholic priest faithfully fulfills various rites and ceremonies without actually believing in their significance—here the Enlightened manage coexistence compassionately, rather than razing temples. But Rousseau has more trouble than Gibbon dividing those who can stomach skepticism from those who cannot: “Doubt . . . is a condition too

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violent for the human mind; it cannot long be endured; in spite of itself the mind decides one way or another, and it prefers to be deceived rather than to believe nothing” (230–1)—at all social levels. The Savoyard priest is enough of a skeptic to distrust all claims to special revelation, openly supporting “natural religion.” Rousseau wrote to Voltaire, “one cannot too forcefully attack the superstition that disturbs society, nor too much respect the Religion that upholds it” (D58, 244). The Savoyard priest follows Voltaire in ridiculing the cognitive structure of revealed or exclusivist religion via a plea to common sense (E, 269). However, while reason judges revelation and not vice versa, there is a kind of back door for the latter: “He who begins by selecting a chosen people, and proscribing the rest of mankind . . . who consigns to eternal punishment the greater part of his creatures, is not the merciful and gracious God revealed to me by my reason”; yet “there is something lacking in natural religion . . . with respect to the obscurity in which it leaves the great truths it teaches; revelation should teach us these truths in a way which the mind of man can understand” (263–4). Revelation tends toward the particular, creating Gods who embody the more unflattering traits of humans; but the “natural religion” preached by the partisans of reason is too “obscure” to satisfy our emotional needs. And Rousseau’s distaste for abstract thought is about more than just its affectlessness. There is something simply wrong with it. For the Savoyard priest, “The chief source of human error is to be found in general and abstract ideas” (236). To solve the problem Rousseau settles, with an Archimedes-in-the-bathtub flourish, on “Conscience!” Just as pity and self-love are precognitive species universals in the second Discourse, conscience is an irreducible and unassailable quality. It is “the voice of the soul” just as “the passions are the voice of the body,” and it trumps reason: “Too often does reason deceive us . . . but conscience never deceives us . . . he who obeys his conscience is following nature and need not fear that he will go astray” (249–50). The species universals of the second Discourse do not mark off Rousseau’s proto-humans from other animals, but conscience does. It even fulfills the Promethean function typically assigned to reason and science: “infallible judge of god and evil, making man like to God! . . . apart from thee, I find nothing in myself to raise me above the beasts” (254). The Vicar having spoken, Rousseau sums it up for his charge thus: Mere reason is not active; occasionally she restrains, more rarely she stimulates, but she never does any great thing. Small minds have a mania for reasoning. Strong souls speak a very different language, and it is by this language that men are persuaded and driven to action. (286) This regard for “strong souls” explains an interesting aside of the Savoyard priest on the subject of atheism. Now, one should not expect a priest, even a tolerant minister of Deist natural religion, to express respect for atheism. But Rousseau’s contrasting “atheism” and “fanaticism” sets him apart from Voltaire, Gibbon, Montesquieu, or Hume.

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Fanaticism, though cruel and bloodthirsty, is still a great and powerful passion, which stirs the heart of man, teaching him to despise death, and giving him an enormous motive power, which only needs to be guided rightly to produce the noblest virtues; while irreligion, and the argumentative philosophic spirit generally, on the other hand, assaults the life and enfeebles it, degrades the soul, concentrates all the passions in the basest self-interest, in the meanness of the human self; thus it saps unnoticed the very foundations of all society. (276n) For Tracy Strong, “one major point of Rousseau’s political teaching is to remove death from a privileged place,” in contrast to Hobbes.59 Rousseau’s atheist is not the maniacal lawbreaker of previous polemics: the problem is more like that of Nietzsche’s last man. What “stirs the heart of man,” however “cruel and bloodthirsty,” is preferable to what does not—this is unlike the criticism of the atheist philosophes Rousseau makes elsewhere, a criticism precisely of their dogmatism in tearing down temples and proselytizing disbelief (RSW, 52). Gibbon blamed otherworldly Christianity for the decline of public-spiritedness in late imperial Rome; but the Savoyard priest claims, in stark contrast to the argument made only a few years later by The Social Contract, that Christianity provides modern government with strength (E, 312–3). In The Social Contract Christianity is by its very nature a problem for good political order. Here Rousseau seeks to combine public-spirited civil religion with Deist metaphysics. There is “a perpetual conflict of jurisdiction” between sacred and secular authorities “which has made any good polity impossible in Christian States,” such that although “no State has ever been founded without Religion serving as its base . . . the Christian law is at bottom more harmful than useful to a strong Constitution of the State” (SC, 145–6). Rousseau criticizes Hobbes’s state of nature but grants Hobbes perspicacity as to the theological-political problem: Of all the Christian Authors the philosopher Hobbes is the only one who clearly saw the evil and the remedy, who dared to propose reuniting the two heads of the eagle, and to return everything to political unity, without which no State or Government will ever be well constituted. But he must have seen that the domineering spirit of Christianity was inconsistent with his system, and that the interest of the Priest would always be stronger than that of the State. It is not so much what is horrible and false as what is just and true in his politics that has made it odious. (146) This Hobbes is not anti-Christian enough—but it is unclear whether Rousseau’s own ideas end in such a different place. Following Hobbes, and departing from the mixed review the Savoyard priest gave to “fanaticism,” Rousseau says that while a pure “Theocracy” (a version of “reuniting the two heads of the eagle”) might actually be more sensible than the crippling division of powers extant in Christian Europe, it is not a very attractive option, “bad in that . . . it deceives men, makes

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them credulous, superstitious, and drowns the true cult of the divinity in a vain ceremonial.” Since revelation is likely to fall into exclusivity, as suggested in Émile, theocratic politics makes a people bloodthirsty and intolerant . . . breathes only murder and massacre, and believes it performs a holy deed in killing whoever does not accept its Gods. This places such a people in a natural state of war with all others, which is most prejudicial to its own security. (147) Since a society of atheistic, rationally self-interested contractors is destructive as well, there is but one option left, the civil religion, which posits a “powerful, intelligent, beneficent, prescient, and provident Divinity, the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social Contract and the Laws,” and proscribes intolerance. Its justification is pragmatic: It is impossible to live in peace with people one believes to be damned . . . Wherever theological intolerance is allowed, it is impossible for it not to have some civil effect . . . Now that there no longer is and no longer can be an exclusive national Religion, one must tolerate all those which tolerate the others insofar as their dogmas contain nothing contrary to the duties of the Citizen. But whoever dares say, no Salvation outside the Church, has to be driven out of the State; unless the State is the Church, and the Prince the Pontiff. Such a dogma is good only in a Theocratic Government, in any other it is pernicious. (SC, 150–1) Hobbes “reunited the two heads of the eagle” in order to crush divinely inspired pretenders to earthly power, but also to create a rationalized political space for the undisturbed working of science. He worried about the power of ideas to disrupt social peace, like Rousseau, but always emphasized religion as the chief problem. In that sense it is unfair of Rousseau to accuse Hobbes of faltering in his anti-religious conviction—it is Rousseau, at least equally and perhaps moreso, for whom Theocracy can make sense as a political form. The historian Antony Black identifies the Christian elements in the ostensibly anti-Christian Social Contract, where “ecclesiological ideas of inerrancy and unanimity reappear in the concept of the general will . . . the peculiar kind of authority vested in the general will derives from the model of the church.”60 Rousseau’s distaste for anti-religious polemic was one of the things that drove him from the philosophe party, and an aspect of his thought that endeared him to those in the counter-Enlightenment tradition.61 A biographer contextualizes the matter: It was Calvin who . . . fus[ed] theocracy with oligarchy and democracy with the aim of making political institutions the instruments of Providence. If more recent historians consider Calvin no more than a draughtsman of the constitution, Rousseau was brought up to think of Calvin as the law-giver

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who had made the republic of Geneva what it was; the future philosopher felt himself to be the citizen of a state founded by a philosopher, and this circumstance seems to have colored his whole attitude to politics.62 It was more than prudence compelling Rousseau to flatter Geneva’s city fathers, in the dedication to the second Discourse, by declaring: “Perhaps only the City of Geneva can offer the edifying example of such a perfect union between a Society of Theologians and of Men of Letters” (D, 121).

The Bottom of the Well: Rousseau’s Rejection of an Open Cognitive Political Economy The more we know, the more mistakes we make; therefore ignorance is the only way to escape error. Form no judgments and you will never be mistaken. This is the teaching of both nature and reason. Rousseau, Emile Rousseau’s understandings of luxury and simplicity, a much-discussed dyad in the eighteenth century, were more radical than mere provincial distaste at the baubles and glitter of Paris. If “it is iron and wheat that civilized men, and ruined Mankind” (D, 168), then Rousseau’s revolt was not just about “his objections to the artificialities of a superannuated regime,”63 decadent prerevolutionary France. And if “the man who meditates is a depraved animal” (138), then thinking itself is one of the luxuries that the human race is pursuing on expired credit. Rousseau’s prize-winning Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, his tumultuous entry onto the public stage, offered a qualified praise of mankind’s attempt “to dispel by the lights of his own reason the darkness in which nature has enveloped him,” but ultimately judged the effort a mistake: “our souls have become corrupted in proportion as our Sciences and our Arts have advanced toward perfection” (6, 9). He yearned for the lost antiquity where “virtue was learned as Science is learned among us,” exhorting, “Romans, hasten to overturn these Amphitheatres; smash these marbles; burn these paintings; drive out these slaves who subjugate you and whose fatal arts corrupt you” (10, 13). Now benevolent despotism stands for de-development, not progress: “nature . . . wanted to preserve you from science as a mother snatches a dangerous weapon from the hands of her child” (14). Whence this preservation? There is a censor in the Social Contract, but the extent of his jurisdiction is debatable: Just as the general will is declared by law, the public judgment is declared by the censorship; public opinion is the kind of law of which the Censor is the Minister, and which, on the model of the Prince, he does no more than apply to particular cases. So that, far from being the arbiter of the people’s opinion, the censorial tribunal does no more than declare it, and as soon as it departs from it, its decisions are vain and without effect. (SC, 141)

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Should censorship lead public opinion, or reflect it? In neither case is the result an “open society,” but perhaps in a well-formed state the question does not even come up. A properly Rousseauian state presupposes a uniformity that obviates the need for aggressive censorship. Yet there is an obvious chicken-egg problem here, considering how morally degraded most contemporary societies are in Rousseau’s eyes. Many commentators have seen the character of the “legislator” in the Social Contract as the deus ex machina conjured up by Rousseau to solve the problem.64 What has been called the “cult of the legislator” in ancien régime France65 preached a chopping of the Gordian knot—that is, the complex matrix of interests and coalitions framing the politics of a representative commercial republic like the English one Rousseau disdained. Mably, too, called up Spartan Lycurgus, who “reasoned on different principles from other Grecian legislators”; they, “by striving to accommodate matters and oblige all parties, contrived schemes of reformation that satisfied none; and left the rancorous weeds of dissension unexterminated.”66 Here legislation exterminates social complexity instead of channeling it. But elsewhere Rousseau suggests another solution readily available to even the most ordinary of actual legislators. A footnote to the first Discourse contains perhaps the most chilling passage he ever wrote, an aside on one Theocracy’s solution to the problem of knowledge dissemination: Considering the frightful disorders Printing has already caused in Europe, and judging of the future by the progress this evil daily makes, it is easy to foresee that before long sovereigns will take as many pains to banish this terrible art from their states as they took to establish it in them. Sultan Ahmed yielding to the importunacies of some supposed men of taste had consented to establish a Printing Shop in Constantinople. But the press had hardly begun to run when it had to be destroyed and the equipment thrown into a well. It is said that the Caliph Omar, when asked what should be done with the library of Alexandria, answered in these terms. If the Books in this library contain things contrary to the Koran, they are bad and ought to be burned. If they contain nothing but the doctrine of the Koran, burn them still: they are superfluous. Our learned men have cited this reasoning as the height of absurdity. Yet suppose Gregory the Great in the place of Omar and the Gospel in the place of the Koran, the Library would still have been burned, and it might perhaps be the finest episode in that Illustrious Pontiff ’s life. (D, 25–6n) There is an exaggerated element of épater les philosophes here, as in much of Rousseau. But reading the first Discourse, youthful and undisciplined as it may be, in the context of Rousseau’s later work, it is hard to doubt his sincerity. “For years,” a biographer of Diderot’s observes, the philosophes “regarded his diatribe against the arts and sciences as more of a paradox than a conviction, failing to understand how deeply committed he was to this outlook on life.”67 Hostility toward the

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development of human knowledge imbues Rousseau’s entire corpus. The printing boom is merely the most extensive depredation: “I assigned this first stage in the decadence of morals to the first moment at which Letters came to be cultivated in any country in the world, and I found the progress of these two things to be directly proportional” (29) he tells Raynal. Though thinking in itself seems to be central to primitive humanity’s fall, a second fall is assigned to the moment when thinking becomes writing (249, 253, 260). Rousseau’s antipathy for books is never reconciled with the fact that his knowledge of the great Spartan and Roman lawgivers owed to European and Islamic scribal classes’ transmission of ancient texts (Plutarch at the very least). One may well rail against bad books, but it is a peculiar philosophe who dismisses books outright—which is also to say that, if we are stuck, as Rousseau admits, with thinking, why should we also be stuck with our single copy of Sultan Ahmed’s Qur’an? Is that even possible? Pacification is well served by an informational vacuum, he tells Beaumont: “A person who loves peace should not have recourse to Books . . . Books are sources of inexhaustible disputes. Glance through the history of Peoples: those who have no Books do not dispute.”68 To paraphrase Tacitus, he makes an intellectual desert and calls it peace. Joseph de Maistre suggested with justification, if also with typical hyperbole, that as “Rousseau admired the Judaic law and that of the child of Ishmael, which have lasted so many centuries,” he may as well have admitted that “in the Koran as in the Bible, politics is divinized, and human reason,” thankfully “crushed by religious ascendancy, cannot insinuate its isolating and corrosive poison into the mechanisms of government . . . citizens are believers whose loyalty is exalted to faith, and obedience to enthusiasm and fanaticism.”69 (How justified, indeed, was Maistre’s trashing of Rousseauisme?) Rousseau allows the arts and sciences utility only as unavoidable distractions in already decadent polities, “temper[ing] the ferociousness of the men they have corrupted” (51). Still, Rousseau’s attempt to create a man who can live in modern society without being of it is decidedly on the anti-intellectual side. It is also strangely antisocial, misanthropic even, considering the yearning elsewhere for a strong, emotionally fulfilling community. “There is an obvious tension between the return to the city and the return to the state of nature,” as Leo Strauss observed. This leads to cognitive dissonance: At one moment [Rousseau] ardently defends the rights of the individual . . . against all restraint and authority; at the next moment he demands with equal ardor the complete submission of the individual to society or the state and favors the most rigorous moral or social discipline.70 Natural man and social man practically belong to different species: Natural man is entirely for himself. He is numerical unity, the absolute whole which is relative only to itself and its kind. Civil man is only a fractional unity

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Nevertheless Emile and The Social Contract together represent, in some sense, an attempt to reintegrate natural humanity into its fallen but irreversible social state. “The pathos of the human condition,” as has been said in summation of Rousseau’s political thought, “lies in wanting identity and community too, and both in full measure.”71 Hence Rousseau’s is a peculiarly antisolidaristic defense of community absolutism. “If Rousseau is a communitarian,” William Connolly writes, “it is a community in which public politics is minimized, tradition controls much of life, and citizens subject themselves to self-control in preparation for the occasional call to validate through formal action principles already implicit in the common life.”72 This solution would seem more logical in Hobbes’s system, where the alienation of sovereignty to the state is premised solely on rational self-interest. Rousseau’s distrust of other people—l’enfer is often les autres here—is in friction with his longing for an affectively bound community that calls back true compassion and genuine pity from their long hibernation. The connecting thread is that the exchange and dissemination of knowledge, when not severely corseted, fatally perverts human relations. A biographer locates Rousseau, a decade before the First Discourse, “as a young man just as progressive as his Baconian friends on the subject of technological development.” Epistemological development as well: “in the earlier 1740s Diderot and Rousseau were more or less agreed in holding the moderately empiricist Lockean views which Montesquieu and Voltaire had introduced into avant-garde circles.” Strikingly, this un-Rousseauian position coincided with another youthful dalliance that seems surprising in retrospect: a defense of inequality.73 Whatever brought about the change, the important point is the mature Rousseau’s denial that the cognitive development of humankind over time is an egalitarian force. Jean Starobinski describes Rousseau’s as “a philosophy haunted by the idea that human communication is impossible.”74 Rousseau was fatally at odds with fellow encyclopédiste d’Alembert’s encomium to “the pleasure and advantage we find in . . . interchange, whether in sharing our ideas with other men or in combining their ideas with ours,” which “ought to lead us to strengthen more and more the bonds of the society thus established and to make it as useful for us as possible.”75 The polity of The Social Contract is not, in modern political theory’s parlance, a place of deliberative democracy or communicative action. If we were never “meant” to augment our status in nature by reasoning about it, then gains can always be reinterpreted as losses. We should not embroil young Émile in “our vain sciences”:

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O tremble, you, who are going to lead him in these perilous paths and raise nature’s sacred curtain before his eyes. Stay your hand . . . remember constantly that ignorance never did any harm, that error alone is fatal, and that one is misled not by what he does not know but by what he believes he knows. (E, 167) The “Letter to Beaumont” declares, “Men should not be half taught. If they must remain in error, why not leave them in ignorance?”76 Something can only be understood as “error” where truth can also be found. Rousseau’s privileging of ignorance over error rules out a system where accumulation of errors goes hand in hand with accumulation of true understanding. The master error of them all, one presumes, is the idea that we are made to understand the natural world in the first place. At the very least there is a rather random line drawn between what it is natural and unnatural to seek to know. Picture a philosopher relegated to a desert island with instruments and books, sure of spending the rest of his days there. He will hardly trouble himself about the system of the world, the laws of attraction, differential calculus. He will perhaps not open a single book in his life. But never will he refrain from visiting the last nook and cranny of his island, however large it may be. Let us, therefore, also reject in our first studies the kinds of knowledge for which man does not have a natural taste and limit ourselves to those instinct leads us to seek. (167) But in the second Discourse “instinct” does not impel us to study anything, and it is pure accident that humanity becomes the studious animal—or at least pure accident in the original instance, after which collective arms race logic supervenes: “By leaving the state of nature we force our fellows to leave it, too. No one can remain in it in spite of the others” (193). Differential calculus might well go by the wayside for our scientist Robinson Crusoe, but would he find instinctual pursuits enough to fill his solitary hours without ever turning back to his books? “I hate books. They only teach one to talk about what one does not know,” Rousseau declares in Émile—at the very point he recommends Robinson Crusoe as a training manual. The surest means of raising oneself above prejudices and ordering one’s judgments about the true relations of things is to put oneself in the place of an isolated man and to judge everything as this man himself ought to judge of it with respect to his own utility. (185) Science’s utility ceases when its practice becomes intersubjective. This stands for the most basic transmission of knowledge across generations: “It is said that Hermes engraved the elements of the sciences on columns in order to shelter his

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discoveries from a flood. If he had left a good imprint of them in man’s head, they would have been preserved by tradition” (184). Is Émile supposed to be ignorant? Rousseau does not say so outright, though at the end of his life he announced, “the knowledge that the experience of twenty years has brought me is a poor thing, and even ignorance would be preferable” (RSW, 47). The pupil is trained to negotiate his precarious path through a corrupted society, and is stuck with that society’s methods: “Émile is not a savage to be relegated to the desert. He is a savage made to inhabit cities. He has to know how . . . to take advantage of their inhabitants and to live, if not like them, at least with them” (E, 205). That sounds like a blueprint for alienation from society rather than submergence within a communal will, as does the following, with its suggestion that pity entails affective separation: Although in general Émile does not esteem men, he will not show contempt for them, because he pities them and is touched by them . . . Therefore, he is not disputatious or contradictory; neither is he accommodating and fl attering. He gives his opinion without combating anyone else’s, because he loves freedom above everything and frankness is one of the finest of rights. He speaks little because he hardly cares whether any attention is paid to him. (336) Émile must reason without submitting it to intersubjectivity: “Forced to learn by himself, he uses his reason and not another’s; for to give nothing to opinion, one must give nothing to authority, and most of our errors come to us far less from ourselves than from others” (207). Absent is the idea that what is precisely unconventional about reason is that a genuinely scientific epistemology can be shared in a manner that stands outside of and even subverts socially inherited models of authority. It has been argued that Rousseau “turned against reason, because he saw in the process of intellectualization also that of social segregation.”77 But Émile emerges the most segregated of them all, ideally aloof from, indeed haughtily superior to, the decadent society in which he is supposed to be a rebirth of natural humanity. There is something of the legislator in him. Rousseau is so afraid of the domination supposedly latent in all personal interactions that he rejects any benefit that a student might get from the accumulated knowledge of others. This goes for person-to-person encounters and person-to-print encounters: “The child who reads does not think, he only reads. He is not informing himself, he learns words . . . He will be nothing more than a plaything of others’ opinion” (131). Of course there would likely not be any science if science only acquired legitimacy by being discovered anew every generation in more or less atomistic conditions. There would certainly be no scientific progress—here Rousseau remained true to the convictions expressed in the first Discourse until the bitter end. Reveries of a Solitary Walker re-embraces the detachment and solipsism that seem to be latent in Émile’s character. “Everything external is henceforth foreign to me. I no

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longer have any neighbors, fellow-men or brothers in this world” (RSW, 27, 31). Rousseau’s solitary reveries contain bizarre ruminations on natural science: These medicinal associations are certainly ill suited to make botany an attractive study; they tarnish the color of the meadows and the brilliance of the flowers, they drain the woods of all freshness and make the green leaves and the shade seem dull and disagreeable. All the charming and gracious details of the structure of plants hold little interest for anyone whose sole aim is to pound them all up in a mortar, and it is no good seeking garlands for shepherdesses among the ingredients of an enema. And: I have often reflected, as I studied the fields, the orchards, the woods and all the plants that live in them, that the vegetable kingdom is a plentiful store of food given by nature to man and the animals. But never did it occur to me to look there for drugs and medicines. In all the many productions of nature I see nothing that could prompt us to use them in this way, and nature would have given us some sign if she had ordained some particular plants for our use, as she has for the things we eat. Indeed I feel that the pleasure I take in roaming the woodlands would be soured by the idea of human ailments, if this made me think of fevers, stones, gout and epilepsy. (110–1) Several questions come to mind. How and why is the pursuit of botany to be aesthetically judged? Does cognizing leaves (in whatever sense) really make them less green, less beautiful? Couldn’t nature’s “sign” that it has given certain of its materials to our use be simply the fact that they work in that capacity? And how did a prophet of pity and compassion reach the conclusion that his personal pleasure in “roaming the woodlands” is more important than aiding the sick? Rousseau says, “the animal kingdom is more within our reach and certainly more deserving of study.” But his subsequent skepticism as to whether anything of value could be learned is oddly framed: he simply does not have the time, energy, or ability to round up the specimens and perform the experiments that could produce knowledge (114). The post-Enlightenment critique of modern science often describes the latter as an alienating force. Here we have a countertradition well in advance of that one: antiscience as solipsism. Rousseau’s compassion can be easily overstated, and not just due to counterevidence from his life (which he was always ready, even eager, to admit). Take his “Letter to Voltaire” on the latter’s reaction to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Rousseau blames the victims, who should not have lived in a city in the first place: “nature had not assembled two thousand six- or seven-story houses there.” What’s more a quick death is not always a real evil, and may sometimes pass for a relative good. Of the many people crushed under the rubble of Lisbon, some, no

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Candide’s Dr. Pangloss has endured, but the book lacks a character preaching the above: one doubts it could be made sufficiently amusing.

Where are the Spartans of the Eighteenth Century? Rousseau and Enlightenment Fears of Intellectual Catastrophe All that human wisdom can do is to forestall changes, to arrest from afar all that brings them on. Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert The Social Contract has been overburdened as an allegedly proto-Jacobin document; we might turn to Rousseau’s other political writings for a fuller picture. There was a Montesquieuan streak that never left Rousseau—the idea that exogenous factors, or “climate” broadly understood, condition political possibilities and resists their being reconstructed along universal rational lines. Rousseau’s advice to the peoples of Geneva, Corsica, and Poland is filled with caveats that local circumstances will produce politics as much as or even more than the other way around. “There is, from people to people, a prodigious diversity of morals, temperaments, and characters.” Though “Man is one” in some sense, “man modified by religions, governments, laws, customs, prejudices, and climates becomes so different from himself that one ought not to seek among us for what is good for men in general, but only what is good for them in this time or that country,”78 he argues in the Letter to D’Alembert against opening theaters in Geneva. The Social Contract says, “The bounds of the possible in moral matters are less narrow than we think,” but simultaneously qualifies any possibility of a single solution: “despotism suits warm countries, barbarism cold countries, and good polity intermediate regions” (SC, 110, 102). Rousseau’s determining factor is not climate, though, but size. His horror at D’Alembert’s proposal that Geneva permit theater is not universalized—a large city “can never increase the number of pleasures permitted too much or apply itself too much to making them agreeable in order to deprive individuals of the temptation of seeking more dangerous ones.” The reverse is true of “less populated places where individuals, always in the public eye, are born censors of one another and where the police can easily watch everyone.”79 Mably was giving the Americans unsolicited Rousseauian advice when he warned them, just a few years before the Constitutional Convention founded representative democracy on a large scale, that democracy “cannot long subsist, except in a republic, like those of ancient Greece, in which all the citizens were acquainted, were mutually the censors of each others conduct, and were constantly under the eye, and within the

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reach, of the magistrate.”80 Such egalitarian policing was for Rousseau a normative ideal, not just a description of Genevan conditions.81 “Born censors of one another” who act within the same understanding of the public interest should not need a police force: actions and exchanges should be automatically policed. We need not rig the debate in advance by speaking of “totalitarianism.” But Rousseau’s effort to prevent Geneva from becoming Paris does raise questions as to the sort of freedom produced by Rousseauism in practice. In one sense Rousseau was presciently attuned to modern ideas of selfdetermination. He sought freedom for the Poles—who other philosophes were content to consign to one of their many partitions between Germany and Russia, and the “enlightened despots” thereof.82 But Rousseau’s nationalism is simply a tool that individuates collectives from each other while de-individuating those within them. Polish leaders must “give their [citizens’] souls a national physiognomy which will set them apart from all other peoples”; this provides “a vigor which will take the place of deceptive appeals to empty precepts.” This is not nationalism’s famous “invention of tradition,”83 not quite, but it is a rehabilitation of tradition, and a suspension of judgment about it. Traditional “practices, even if they are indifferent, even if they are in some respects bad . . . will still have the advantage of making the Poles fond of their country and give them a natural revulsion to mingling with foreigners” (SC, 184–5). Poland shall take pains to differentiate itself from France or Germany while simultaneously taking pains that its citizens do not differentiate themselves from each other. Rousseau’s recommendation that children should play “all together and in public, so that there is always a common goal to which all aspire and which excites competition and emulation” sounds strange, since elsewhere it seems that “competition and emulation” are exactly what he wants “extirpated from the depth of men’s hearts” (191, 189). One can have emulation without differentiation, but not “competition”—unless the competition is simply about who is the most dedicated emulator. The quest for improvement and progress, which causes the differentiation that accompanies an ever-more-complex specificity of social roles, is only arrested by enforced rusticity. The common denominator in Rousseau’s political writings is that only this rusticity is compatible with a democracy worth having. This conflicts with the account in the second Discourse, where it was precisely the transition to settled agricultural societies that began our downward trajectory. Yet to the Corsicans the soldier-farmer is called forth as the ideal.84 Rousseau claims, “the rustic system entails the Democratic state,” and a purely democratic government suits a small town rather than a nation. One could not assemble the whole people of a country like that of a city and when the supreme authority is conferred upon deputies, the government changes and becomes Aristocratic. Corsica is not quite suited to the ideal type, though, as it is not a city-state. Therefore what “suits Corsica is a mixed Government in which the people is assembled

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only in parts and in which the depositaries of power are often changed”; these “depositaries of power . . . confer the administration only upon a small number, which allows the selection of enlightened people.”85 Does this not render the antiAthenian objection of his Encyclopédie entry on “Political Economy”—“Do not, therefore, raise the democracy of Athens as an objection to me, because Athens was in fact not a democracy, but a most tyrannical aristocracy governed by learned men and orators” (SC, 8)—moot? If the conditions in eighteenth-century France obviated the frequent public assemblies and social surveillance of Rousseau’s Social Contract ideal—and that tract declares, after all, that “In the strict sense of the term, a genuine Democracy never has existed, and never will exist” since “It is unimaginable that the people remain constantly assembled to attend to public affairs” (91)—then the Corsican alternative, with its “administration” by “enlightened people” would have to exist on an even grander scale. Was not the transition away from obsolete throne-and-altar social organization via the rational management of publicly minded functionaries more or less the dream of the philosophes Rousseau came to count as mortal enemies? If so, Rousseau’s disdain for the decadence of ancien régime France might represent a failure of moral imagination more than an infusion of the same into the gaieties and frivolities of the salons. Human ingenuity and creativity—in Lavoisier’s laboratory or d’Alembert’s theater—might be turned toward human utility, away from conversational sparring and empty displays of taste or erudition. The latter was the precise complaint against scholastic disputation made by Enlightenment intellectuals from Bacon onward. Rousseau warned the Corsicans: “A capital is a pit into which almost the entire nation goes to lose its morals, its laws, its courage, and its freedom . . . From the capital is exhaled a continuous plague which undermines and finally destroys the nation.”86 The language of parasitism and disease reveal that while Rousseau had supported, from a distance, the medieval Caliph’s ultra-centralization of cognitive authority, he will not do likewise for the cognitive political economy of an urbanized intellectual elite like the Encyclopedistes. What talisman could exist against change as such? If the point is to minimize intellectual exchange on the ground, the logical choice is to cede cognitive rights to an entity outside the flux of human experience. Nearly all the philosophes at some point voiced a fear that the dictatorial settling of intellectual disputes would be a temptation too strong for human polities to resist. As Jonathan Israel explains, Theories of progress . . . contrary to what many have assumed, were usually tempered by a strong streak of pessimism, a sense of the dangers and challenges to which the human condition is subject. The notion, still widespread today, that Enlightenment thinkers nurtured a naïve in man’s perfectibility seems to be a complete myth conjured up by twentieth-century scholars unsympathetic to its claims. In reality, Enlightenment progress breathed a vivid awareness of the great difficulty of spreading toleration,

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curbing religious fanaticism, and otherwise ameliorating human organization, orderliness, and the general state of health and was always impressively empirically based. Its relative optimism rested on man’s obviously growing capacity to create wealth, invent technologies capable of raising production, and devise stable legal and political institutions, as well as, it should be mentioned, the disappearance of the plague.87 The Enlightenment historians, for all their preaching of progress and celebration of modernity’s successes, were curiously obsessed, to the point of melancholia, with what might be called the cognitive extinction level event—the destruction of intellectual gains, the reversal of progress, by torch-wielding mobs, religious armies, or barbarian hordes, “the great eruption of the Moguls and Tartars,” for example, “whose rapid conquests may be compared with the primitive convulsions of nature, which have agitated and altered the surface of the globe” (DF, 7:1). From wistful accounts of burned libraries to martyrologies of stifled innovators like Galileo and Bruno, the key point was the vulnerability of human accomplishment, and the politics necessary to keep the fragile edifice afloat. Historian Lorraine Daston speaks of “two fears which are mirror-image twins of one another: the Enlightenment fear of the fragility of scientific fact, and our contemporary fear of the tyranny of scientific fact,” and asks, “Why did Enlightenment savants fear that facts might be suffocated by the imagination, and why do we fear that the imagination might be suffocated by facts?”88 But it was not only “imagination” that was seen to threaten the suffocation of science. Such anxieties were about facts of social and political organization. There were many reasons for Enlightenment historians to draw our attention to these cognitive extinction-level-events (they actually occurred, after all); I see them as, among other things, a response to Rousseau’s challenge. Rousseau always agreed with d’Alembert that “the different forms of government, which have so much influence on [men’s] minds and on the cultivation of letters, also determine the principal types of knowledge which are to flourish under them,”89 though as time went on the two ceased to agree on much else. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall argued that Europeans were unlikely to be laid waste by the barbarian eruptions complicit in the deaths of so many previous civilizations. And yet the tone of the “General Observations” section, dividing the work neatly in half, does not recommend complacency. The suggested location of unforeseen peril is telling, given the passage from Rousseau that gives this chapter its title. It is due southwest from the Asian steppe, where new enemies, and unknown dangers, may possibly arise from some obscure people, scarcely visible in the map of the world. The Arabs or Saracens, who spread their conquests from India to Spain, had languished in poverty and contempt, till Mahomet breathed into those savage bodies the soul of enthusiasm. (4:177)

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Of course the “eruption” could take place anywhere there are “savage bodies” inside of whom the “soul of enthusiasm” could be breathed by a like-minded legislator. Even in Europe: a lesson Gibbon draws from the collapse of Rome is that early Christianity’s “enthusiasm” for otherworldly matters weakened the empire’s defenses against the northern hordes. Hume, praising the Decline and Fall in torchpassing tones, wrote Gibbon, “among many other marks of Decline, the Prevalence of Superstition in England, prognosticates the Fall of Philosophy and Decay of Taste.”90 Gibbon liked Europe’s chances but made sure to remind his readers, as if it were a comfort, that Should . . . victorious Barbarians carry slavery and desolation as far as the Atlantic Ocean, ten thousand vessels would transport beyond their pursuit the remains of civilized society; and Europe would revive and flourish in the American world which is already filled with her colonies and institutions. (4:178) These “General Observations” are the intermission and not a coda to the work. Gibbon’s history continues past the collapse of Rome and the rise of proto-feudal Christianity, expanding its geographical scope to Asia, and to the birth and spread of Islam, which threatens to strangle emergent Carolignian civilization in its cradle. If the philosophes can be plausibly accused of “essentializing” certain cultures—this applies to the debate about a Voltaire’s or a Gibbon’s alleged anti-Semitic streak as well—that is because their war against theocracy aimed to unseat the most efficient essentializer of them all, the lawgiving theos. It is not that writers like Gibbon and Voltaire did not really believe that Islamic meant stagnation and theocracy— they did. Witness Diderot’s account of the early Christians and Saint Gregory, who “had inherited the barbaric zeal that enlivened him against arts and letters. If it had been left to this pontiff, we would be in the circumstances of the Muslims, the whole of whose reading was reduced to the Koran.”91 But their critique in this vein, like the critique of Jewish cultural/religious irrendentism, is less evidence of a developing Euro-supremacist project than it is a critique of a human tendency qua human tendency, mollified or exacerbated by sociopolitical context. This is especially true where the critique was also meant for Europe itself, as in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. Gibbon emphasizes that the three Near East-conceived monotheisms should be analyzed together (5:383). Rousseau’s admiration for the censorious Caliph was a part of the intellectual matrix in which Gibbon felt the need to admonish The talents of Mahomet are entitled to our applause, but his success has perhaps too strongly attracted our admiration. Are we surprised that a multitude of proselytes should embrace the doctrine and the passions of an eloquent fanatic? In the heresies of the church, the same seduction has been tried and repeated from the time of the apostles to that of the reformers. (5:419)

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Luckily for Europe, her apostles and reformers have by and large lacked the talents of “that extraordinary man” (5:400): It is not the propagation but the permanency of his religion that deserves our wonder: the same pure and perfect impression which he engraved at Mecca and Medina is preserved, after the revolutions of twelve centuries, by the Indian, the African, and the Turkish proselytes of the Koran. If the Christian apostles, St. Peter or St. Paul, could return to the Vatican, they might possibly inquire the name of the Deity who is worshipped with such mysterious rites in that magnificent temple: at Oxford or Geneva, they would experience less surprise; but it might still be incumbent on them to peruse the catechism of the church, and to study the orthodox commentators on their own writings and the words of their Master . . . From the Atlantic to the Ganges, the Koran is acknowledged as the fundamental code, not only of theology but of civil and criminal jurisprudence; and the laws which regulate the actions and the property of mankind are guarded by the infallible and immutable sanction of the will of God. (5:420–1) The prophet’s success, the civilization’s curse, this “permanency,” this “pure and perfect impression . . . infallible and immutable” like the Theos itself. It was spurred on by a book abounding, for Voltaire, in “incoherent rhapsodies” and “crowded with contradictions, absurdities, and anachronisms”; but the same author admits, “If ever power threatened the whole earth with subjection, it was that of the caliphs; for they possessed the right of the throne, and of the altar; of the sword, and of the spirit; their orders were received as oracles, and their soldiers were so many desperate enthusiasts” (WV, 24:51, 62). This echoes what we have already seen these Enlightenment historians say or imply about the theocratic elements native to European civilization. “May the Encyclopedia,” Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s “Prospectus” to the same announced, “become a sanctuary, where the knowledge of man is protected from time and from revolutions.”92 In his article “Encyclopédie” Diderot called up, like Gibbon, a catastrophic imaginary: “The most glorious moment for a work” like their own “would be immediately subsequent to some great revolution which had halted the advance of science, interrupted artistic activity and plunged some part of our hemisphere once again into darkness.”93 And yet the lives of the Encyclopédistes did not evince the Platonic dream of the Academy as a “sanctuary” apart from politics: Diderot specifically resisted, at great personal risk to himself, Voltaire’s suggestion that the philosophes retreat to a safe and self-enclosed community (Kleve, near the German-Dutch border) under the protection of Frederick the Great, as he had resisted Voltaire’s previous pleas to move the harried Encyclopédie project to his countryside estate.94 Rousseau sought a sanctuary where humans would be protected from cognitive turbulence. Diderot and d’Alembert sought the opposite: “May the history of the human mind and its productions continue from age to age until the most distant

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centuries . . . Therefore, let us do for centuries to come what we regret that past centuries did not do for ours.” There was considerable anxiety in most Enlightenment accounts of the advance of knowledge. Diderot and d’Alembert finished the above passage by imagining an ancient Encyclopedia, and then imagining its destruction: “and if that manuscript alone had escaped from the famous Library of Alexandria, it would have been capable of consoling us for the loss of others.”95 The discourses on the past, present, and future of human knowledge that so gripped the European mind across the eighteenth century were as much as pleas for political responsibility as “narratives of progress.” The civilizations Europe leapfrogged were not just pitiable opportunities for self-congratulation; they warned of the social and political possibilities that spring up in even optimistic cultures—as evidenced by their tumultuously self-exiled compatriot, admirer of Sparta over Athens, Caliph over scientist. As Turgot—who once “while intendant of Limoges . . . tried to dispel the popular belief that the purple flower of the potato was a version of deadly nightshade by eating it in public and making peasants sit next to him to observe that he was not poisoned”96—declared in essays with titles like “A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind” (1750) and “Plan of the Discourses on Universal History” (1751), and whose influence on Condorcet, a disciple, is clear, Woe betide those nations, then, in which the sciences . . . are confined within the limits of existing knowledge in an attempt to stabilize them. It is for this reason that the regions which were the first to become enlightened are not those where the sciences have made the greatest progress.97 Though modern science engrains the possibility of perpetual advance, in human history progress remains the exception rather than the rule. More typical is what occurred in Egypt, where “superstition . . . made the dogmas of the ancient philosophy the patrimony of the priestly families, who by consecrating them enchained them and incorporated them”; or in China where “the very care which the Emperors took to regulate research and to tie up the sciences with the political constitution of the state, held them back forever in mediocrity.”98As for Islam, the efforts of the prophet and subsequent authorities do not stand as a hortatory example: it is yet one more “religion, which does not allow any laws other than those of religion itself ” and “opposes the wall of superstition to the natural march of improvement. It has consolidated barbarism by consecrating that which existed when it appeared, and which it adopted through national prejudice.”99 Of course stability surely has its virtues, and restlessness its melancholy connotations. Change, as Turgot’s heirs would find, could be unwelcome to its own erstwhile propagandists. Turgot’s fall, and replacement by Necker in 1776, pushed the philosophes who had placed so much faith in his tenure further toward the position that the French monarchy was unreformable from within. One of Turgot’s disciples, whose plans for reform bridged monarchical and republican regimes, would fare even worse among his contemporaries.

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Encyclopédisme contra Rousseauisme: The Case of Condorcet Any new mistake is criticized as soon as it is made, and often attacked even before it has been propagated . . . it has become impossible to prevent their being openly discussed, to disguise the fact that they can be attacked and rejected, or to maintain them against the progress of truth . . . all these means of accelerating, assisting, ensuring the forward march of the human mind mist be numbered among the blessings brought by printing. Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind Condorcet’s political theory tells a different story than Rousseau’s. His Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind is a rejection, even a reversal, of Rousseau’s second Discourse. The Sketch is not a thought experiment or metaphor but rather a blueprint for further research in the manner of the Encyclopédie. Progress is neither preordained nor guaranteed—it requires the “eternal vigilance” Jefferson saw as the only guarantor of liberty. D’Alembert taught his protégé that “Barbarism lasts for centuries” and “is our natural element; reason and good taste are only passing.”100 Thus the persecution of Condorcet during the Terror is not as ironic as Enlightenment detractors have made it out to be. In his “Reception Speech at the French Academy” (Feb. 1782) Condorcet declared it “no longer in the power of men to extinguish the torch lit by genius. Only a global catastrophe could bring back the shades of darkness” (SW, 5101). He recognized that progress is arrested by reversals, and is especially endangered by the wish to direct, halt, or even annul development within a top-down closed system. The future, for Condorcet, might be made less chaotic than his picture of the past (SHP102, 4, 8) because of the cognitive possibilities of modern science, and especially the developing mathematics of probability. But probability is just that; Condorcet’s dream, contra the caricatures of the Enlightenment preaching a perfectly rational heaven on earth103, is really just that of chaos and unpredictability more rationally managed for the safer development of all. Against Rousseau, “we shall demonstrate how nature has joined together indissolubly the progress of knowledge and that of liberty, virtue and respect for the natural rights of man”; the relationship, however, is not automatic but relies upon proper political structures (10, 24). Condorcet follows d’Alembert’s argument that blanket denunciations of knowledge as decadence keep us from the truly important task, the separation of truth from appearance: “our indolence and the decadence of good taste should be attributed to the passion for wit and cleverness and to the abuse of philosophy, rather than to the multitude of dictionaries.”104Condorcet was not particularly interested in the trajectory of the prelapsarian savage. He starts with humans already in possession of a language with which to communicate their needs, and a small number of moral ideas which serve as common laws of conduct;

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Since the story does not begin in atomism, it will not end there. Condorcet says “new combinations of ideas” advance the human species; a world without them is not possible let alone desirable.105 Social formations facilitate these “combinations” with greater or lesser ease: the transition to agriculture “encouraged the growth of the population and . . . favored progress; acquired ideas were communicated more quickly and were perpetuated more surely” (5–6). Condorcet does not wholly disagree that in historical development estimable characteristics were lost. We understandably admire “the simple, hardy virtues of agriculture peoples” from a distance, and idealize “the morals of heroic times.” Yet this must not prevent us from valuing “that need for new ideas and new feelings which is the prime mover in the progress of the human mind,” nor “that taste for the superfluities of luxury which is the spur of industry”; both are outgrowths of “that spirit of curiosity which eagerly penetrates the veil nature has drawn across her secrets” (32). Condorcet’s appeal to antiquity differs from Rousseau’s, and tells a more complicated story than an Enlightenment “return to Paganism.”106 Condorcet praises Greek democracy in the epistemological rather than the political sense. What he values from a historical perspective is a democratic-egalitarian attitude toward the data of the natural world. Aristotle had “the courage and imagination to see that this method could be applied to everything attainable by human intelligence, since human intelligence, always using the same faculties, must always be subject to the same laws.” But “this method” faltered by lacking modern experimental empiricism (55, 61). Political greatness, far from being threatened by cognitive change as in Rousseau, is actually dependent upon it, if greatness is to persist over time and avoid stagnation. Condorcet fears the hobbling of cognitive advance by preordered and closed systems; those that entail a priestly caste are especially dangerous. When “laws are tied to religion, the right to interpret them becomes one of the strongest bulwarks of priestly tyranny.” Thus his Turgot-like interpretation of China, where “the sciences, being subject to absurd prejudices, are condemned to an eternal mediocrity; and where even the invention of printing has remained entirely useless for the progress of the human mind” (66, 38). Greek political structures are praiseworthy in that they circumvented the problem somewhat: It was impossible in Greece for the sciences to become the occupation and preserve of any one particular caste. The task of the priests was limited to the offices of religion. As a result genius could display itself to the full without submitting to pedantic regulations or to the hypocritical system of a seminary. All men had an equal right to know the truth. All could search for it and disseminate it to all in its entirety. (42) The “decadence” of knowledge does not enter, as with Rousseau, via methodologies like comparison and extrapolation, but rather from the introduction of

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cognitive structures that pervert these processes. Christianity engenders “disdain for the humane sciences” and fear “of doubt and inquiry”; it wants “to avenge itself against the outrages of philosophy, that confidence in one’s own reason which is the bane of all religious beliefs.” This does not involve unqualified praise of what Christianity superseded, for Condorcet implies that the Christianity inherited some of its tendencies: “We can reproach the Greek and Roman scholars and even their scientists and philosophers with a complete lack of that spirit of doubt which submits facts and proofs to severe rational scrutiny” (72, 75). Though Paganism and Christianity should be contrasted, both lacked “a knowledge of the natural world that can furnish new truths and destroy accredited errors in the sciences” as well as “the increased activity of trade which has given new wings to industry and navigation and, by a necessary chain of influence, to all the sciences and to all the arts” (104). What else was missing? Experimental science, yes, but there is a pre-Baconian invention Condorcet gives pride of place and thinks predetermined modern scientific growth: the printing press. “Incomparable invention!” Turgot declared, . . . which rescues from the power of death the memory of great men and models of virtue, unites places and times, arrests fugitive thoughts and guarantees them a lasting existence, by means of which the creations, opinions, experiences, and discoveries of all ages are accumulated, to serve as a foundation and foothold for posterity in raising itself ever higher!107 Stylistically this is French eighteenth-century mode of scientific éloge; but Rousseau’s “hatred” of books is to be contrasted not necessarily with love of books, but rather with a regard for the promise of their exponential reproduction (76). Technological limitations before printing gives excess of authority to the small number of books humans’ limited time and energy can pass on—this was fine for Rousseau, who said he needed little beyond Plutarch, but Condorcet fears that other books entirely would be reverenced. The printing press makes the spread of knowledge relatively independent of political coercion. So while Rousseau was not entirely wrong to worry about the entwining of learning and domination, he backed the wrong horse, for Condorcet, in praising face-to-face surveillance at the expense of the written word. A new sort of tribunal had come into existence . . . which no longer allowed the same tyrannical empire to be exercised over men’s passions but ensured a more certain and more durable power over their minds; a situation in which the advantages are all on the side of truth . . . effective because the forces that created it operated with equal strength on all men at the same time, no matter what distances separated them. In a word, we have now a tribunal, independent of all human coercion, which favors reason and justice, a tribunal whose scrutiny it is difficult to elude, and whose verdict it is impossible to evade. (100)

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Dissemination of knowledge occurred before printing, but the decentralization of the post-Gutenberg era makes possible a collective Archimedean point for judgment, the “tribunal, independent of all human coercion” that allows theoretically unlimited cognitive growth. This structure links printing with science: the “progress of the physical sciences . . . in which neither birth, nor profession, nor position are thought to confer on one the right to judge what one is not in a condition to understand,” maps out a path for humans to “preserve themselves . . . from a too great submission even to the authority of learning and fame” (164). Printing hedges against the cognitive extinction-level-event; it “can never be completely corrupted. It is enough for there to exist one corner of the free earth from which the press can scatter its leaves” (102); so it is “impossible to imagine . . . a political event that would annihilate at one blow all the lands to which knowledge has now been spread” (SW, 15). Thomas Spragens identifies in Condorcet, with some justification, “a striking lacuna . . . he does not consider the extraordinary utility the communicative media might have for a repressive regime . . . he thinks solely in terms of negative opposition, of censorship, not in terms of deliberate perversion of the medium, of indoctrination.”108 Will the cognitive decentralization of printing protect humankind from its own worst political tendencies in the long run? The Encyclopédistes thought humanity needed not only their tome but also what might be called the encyclopedic outlook in perpetuity. In their cognitive politics “different forms of government . . . determine the principal types of knowledge which are to flourish under them” (104–5). Like the Enlightenment historians Condorcet praised the Reformation only insofar as it, like mass printing, provided a methodological insurance against the misuse of knowledge. The spirit that animated the reformers did not lead to true freedom of thought. Each religion allowed, in the country where it dominated, certain opinions only. However, as these diverse beliefs were opposed to each other, there were few opinions that were not attacked or upheld in some part of Europe. (SHP, 110) Condorcet imbibed the new economic thought of the second half of the eighteenth century109—its association of openness and competition with growth was paralleled, he thought, in the intellectual realm. The post-Luther human mind was not free, it still partook of the cognitive problems inherent in religion, but the Reformation performed an important service despite itself. Aside from necessitating the pragmatic tolerance of the politiques, it modeled the decentralization of cognitive power. Reformed Christianity “continued to corrupt men’s minds with religious prejudices; but it did not bend them any longer under the yoke of priestly authority. It still produced fanatics, visionaries, and sophists; but it no longer produced slaves to superstition” (119). The important point is that there is no centralization of cognitive authority within the polity. The concatenation of Reformation, printing, and modern science spared Europe what Condorcet sees in the Chinese and Islamic empires:

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we need not fear these same dangers in the rest of Europe, where knowledge cannot be concentrated in any hereditary caste, or exclusive corporation. Occult or sacred doctrines which create an immense interval between two portions of the same people can no longer exist. (SW, 107) It is telling that, his own liberty imperiled by Robespierre’s enforcers, Condorcet, in the “Fragment on the New Atlantis” (1793, but unpublished until 1804), fantasized about a scientific polity, “the general association of the scientists of the world in a universal republic of sciences, the only such republic the project and utility of which would not be a puerile illusion” (287). As a biographer puts it, Condorcet valued science to the extent that it was careful to avoid any notion of corporate induction into a closed craft. For the academicians, science was an open activity never to be restricted to a group of initiates; they recruited their fellow-members not on the principle of any formal criterion of eligibility but on the basis of demonstrated competence alone.110 Modern science’s specializations of knowledge are more concrete than those of the days of Talmudic interpretation or religious vision, non-rational interjections of the sacred into the secular. But does modern knowledge, however rational and publicizable, have its own, perhaps quite intense, hierarchical tendencies? That modern natural science and liberal democracy have (more or less) progressed together does not ensure that their animating cognitive models are entirely (or even at all?) symbiotic.111

The Heavenly Cities of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers: Condorcet’s Utopianism against Rousseau’s The Condorcet remembered in political science today is the anticipator—perhaps one the originators—of the science side of the equation, the marriage of empiricist induction and mathematical models to political questions. Thus Condorcet’s position in the area of political study that looks skeptically, even angrily, at the trend toward statistical quantification—political theory—is not what it could be.112 Ian Hacking reminds us that this debate’s foundations occurred in different times; times when the scholarly community was in clearer agreement about the intellectual and institutional threats to reason. The concept of probability that arose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “is Janus-faced. On the one side it is statistical, concerning itself with stochastic laws of chance processes. On the other side it is epistemological, dedicated to assessing reasonable degrees of belief in propositions quite devoid of statistical background.” Before, the term had “chiefly meant the approvability of an opinion”; it did “not mean well supported by evidence. It mean[t] supported by testimony and the writ of authority.” The emergence of probability, on this reading, was “a token of the loss of certainty that characterizes

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the Renaissance, and of the readiness, indeed eagerness, of various powers to find a substitute for the older canons of knowledge.”113 Sometimes Condorcet was breezy in his insistence that science would with ease incorporate all moral and political studies. Since “the moral sciences are founded on facts and reasoning, their certainty will be the same as that of the physical sciences”—all we must do is “learn to distinguish what is proved from what is not proved” (SW, 19, 14). He allowed, though, that what differentiates the process of “social mathematics” from “pure” mathematics or physics is the subjective element introduced by emotion and self-interest. “Ridiculous applications of calculation to political questions have doubtless been made” (67), Condorcet wrote in the “Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Theory of Decision-Making” (1785). They seem ridiculous to humans who doubt their emotion-laden behavior is expressible by abstract data, and they might even be ridiculous, since it is the same emotionally laden humans, no more enlightened than is possible given time, place, and disposition, making the inferences. But there is nothing inherently absurd or self-defeating about the process. Even in the French Enlightenment Condorcet was “unique in the extent to which he combined active involvement in social and political affairs with an institutional commitment to science and a professional acquaintance with its methodology.”114 The difference between “social mathematics” and previous sciences is that the latter, lacking explicit human content, could be more safely relied upon for objectivity: In meditating on the nature of the moral sciences, one cannot indeed help seeing that, based like the physical sciences upon the observation of facts, they must follow the same methods, acquire an equally exact and precise language, attain the same degree of certainty. All would be equal between them for a being foreign to our species, who would study human society as we study that of the beavers or the bees. But here the observer himself forms part of the society that he observes, and the truth can have only biased or prejudiced judges . . . physical truths are generally recognized as soon as they are discovered, because physicists alone are generally involved in examining and judging them. It is not the same with moral truths. Everybody believes he has the right to an opinion regarding them and the words they employ are those of ordinary language, with the result that everyone believes he can understand them without seeking to find therein the precision of scientific terms. (6, 20) Unavoidably, there is elitism above, distrust of those encouraged by too public an argument about morality to mistake their own pre- or nonscientific views as self-validating. In the “Application of Mathematics” essay Condorcet observed, “it can be dangerous to give a democratic constitution to an unenlightened people. A pure democracy, indeed, would only be appropriate to a people much more enlightened, much freer from prejudices than any of those known to his-

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tory” (49). Like Rousseau, Condorcet was only a conditional supporter of what he called democracy, though the conditions are inverted. He agreed “that when laws are not the consequences of fixed principles and real, well-proven truths,” their power “is then founded on habit and not on reason”—but “it is precisely with substituting the empire of reason for that of habit that one must be concerned” (58–9). As in Rousseau’s Corsica, political limitations suggest a representative arrangement. For Condorcet, “the advantage of entrusting the responsibility for pronouncing upon the laws to a more or less numerous assembly of representatives depends upon the manner in which enlightenment is distributed in each country,” such that “there can be cases in which it would be disadvantageous to increase the number of these trustees of the general reason” (61). Condorcet was an interested observer of the American Revolution, and interacted with several of the founders who spent time in France.115 Could large and diverse polities reasonably balance authority and freedom within a democratic system? He disagreed with Rousseau’s calling such an experiment unworkable outside a citystate or rustic island republic, but he agreed that participation would have to be curtailed proportionally. In “On the Influence of the American Revolution on Europe” he said participation “in a populous society . . . must, of necessity, be virtually negligible for the majority of the inhabitants.” In fact, “in terms of public happiness, a republic with tyrannical laws can fall far short of a monarchy” (74). Condorcet agreed with Voltaire and Diderot that the prerevolutionary parlements “barbarized” justice—because they were tools of feudal dominance and local vendetta, not because they were tools of a centralizing monarchy (d’Alembert called them more destructive than the Jesuits).116 The widespread popularity of the charlatan Franz Anton Mesmer in France, including among the educated, probably sharpened Condorcet’s distrust of the demos’s ability to internalize science and reason.117 His forceful argument for women’s equal rights, “On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship” (1790), concluded on a note gender-egalitarian only in its mistrust of the masses: “Whatever form of constitution may be established, it is certain that in the present state of civilization among European nations there will never be more than a very small number of citizens able to occupy themselves with public affairs” (101). That said, Condorcet did not ultimately settle on an Enlightenment Platonism, rule by a cognitive elite for the general welfare—there is no convincing straight line between him and the “scientific priesthood” of a later French positivist like Comte.118 The violence and chaos of the Revolution bred in Condorcet a “deep fear of anarchy”119—but his report “On the Principles of the Constitutional Plan Presented to the National Convention” (1793), written as the Terror was taking shape, recommended “short duration of public offices, frequent elections, and the various modes of remonstrance regulated by law” as the only workable answer, the “effective means of guaranteeing liberty” (158). In the long run, such an arrangement would only be workable if tied to effective public education. Condorcet’s essay on “The Nature and Purpose of Public

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Instruction” (1791) is, along with the Sketch, the great document of his political philosophy—more important and more revealing than the writings on “social mathematics” that have lent him his reputation as a godfather of positivism. The foundations for this remarkable document were laid by Condorcet’s Encyclopédiste mentors’ attacks on the monopoly privileges religious corporations held over education in ancién regime France. D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie entry “Collège” (3:634–7) indicted the educational regime of scholasticism and associated it with religion’s “wish to compel children to occupy themselves solely with this subject and thus neglect their other studies, by which they might have one day made themselves useful to their country.” He really went for the jugular in “Frères de la Charité,” ostensibly describing “a religious order instituted in the sixteenth century, which dedicated itself solely to serving the poor and sick.” While praising the good Samaritan work, d’Alembert sharply turns to criticizing the role of religious orders in education, or indeed, anywhere in public intellectual life. Would it be going too far to allege that this occupation is the only one that suits the religieux? Indeed, to what other work would be able to apply them? . . . Apply the religieux to the instruction of youth? But these same corporate prejudices, these same community or party interests, should only make us fear the education they would provide as either dangerous or at the very least puerile; might it even sometimes serve them as a means of governing, or as an instrument of ambition, in which case they would be more harmful than necessary? Do the monks occupy themselves with writing? But in which genre? History? The soul of history is the truth; men so loaded with fetters must be nearly always ill at ease to tell it, oft en reduced to conceal it, and sometimes forced to disguise it . . . Matters of taste? To treat such matters successfully demands commerce with the world, commerce denied the religieux. Philosophy? She wants liberty, and the religieux have none of it. The high sciences, like Geometry, Physics, etc.? They require the full mind, and consequently can only be cultivated feebly by those devoted to prayer. The best of this sort of men, the Boyles, Descartes, Newtons, etc., did not come out of cloisters. (7:301) There is little hope for a modern or modernizing state that reserved intellectual privileges for such hands, however magnanimous their operators. This was the era of the educational manual; surely Condorcet noticed the explosive popularity of Rousseau’s Émile. Condorcet also gave education a central role in resolving, or at least managing, the dilemmas of modern society. But Condorcet saw education as a potential force for mass enlightenment, rather than the solitary, master-to-pupil training of a diffident hero-legislator. All Rousseau could tell the Poles was, “good education has to be negative. Prevent vices from arising, you will have done enough for virtue” (SC, 191). Condorcet rejected the dream of creating timeless enclaves within a world elsewhere fallen into movement and

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change. In that sense Rousseau’s dream was Platonic—witness his naming Plato’s Republic “the finest treatise on education ever written” (E, 8).120 The creation of a trained and time-exempt encampment is a political doctrine, as Plato knew. For Condorcet, a society does not get to choose about the arrival of “vices,” due to the unavoidable fact of change over time. The question is how to most wisely manage change—arresting it is not an option. A nation always governed by the same maxims, a nation not prepared by its institutions to adapt to the changes that are the inevitable result of the revolutions brought by time, would see its ruin springing from the from the same opinion and practices that had assured its prosperity in the past . . . On the other hand, a nation prepared by general instruction to obey the voice of reason, escaping the iron yoke which habit imposes upon stupidity, will profit by the first lessons of experience and at times even anticipate them . . . nations advancing through the centuries require an education that is constantly being renewed and corrected—following the march of time, sometimes anticipating it, but never opposing it. (SW, 114–15) Change itself is random—but the possibility of direction, and thus a normative outlook toward development, enters in the application of higher-order cognition to change: only then is progress the special province of our species. Change will come to even the most confidently static polities—and Rousseauian valuation of that stasis will leave them sorely unable to respond effectively. For Condorcet, Rousseau’s enforced rusticity was precisely what would weaken democracy, not anchor it. Egalitarian rusticity simply cannot last; cognitive stratification will out, like it or not. The polity that knows how to channel this, rather than the polity that seeks to suppress it via austere virtue, endures over time. D’Alembert questioned Rousseau’s idea that virtue, however defined, should pass judgment on knowledge at all: Letters certainly contribute to making society more pleasing; it would be difficult to prove that because of them men are better and virtue is more common. But one can question whether even ethics has that privilege . . . even assuming that we might be ready to yield a point to the disadvantage of human knowledge, which is far from our intention here, we are even farther from believing that anything would be gained by destroying it. Vices would remain with us, and we would have ignorance in addition.121 The Rousseauian equation of advancing knowledge with advancing decadence can be dismantled absent the counterargument that advancing knowledge and improving morals are automatically proportional. The term “luxury” was easily abused, Hume said, “a word of an uncertain signification” which “may be taken in a good as well as a bad sense . . . innocent or blamable, according to the age, or country, or condition of the person.”122 Condorcet found no assurance that, even given optimally

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democratic education, rustic egalitarianism was replicable in a complex, knowledgebased society: . . . offer each and every man the means of acquiring an education commensurate with his mental capacities and the time he can devote to his instruction. No doubt, a greater difference will result in favor of those endowed with greater talent and those to whom an independent fortune allows the liberty to devote a larger number of years to study. But if this inequality does not subject one man to another, if it strengthens the weakest citizen without giving him a master, it is neither wrong nor unjust. It would indeed be a fatal love of equality that feared to extend the class of enlightened men and to increase their enlightenment. (SW, 108) The idea that mass democracy demands public education became a commonplace, whether in the sense of transitioning post-aristocratic societies into meritocracies or in the more ambitious sense of universalizing the mental cultivation theretofore an exclusive province of the leisured. Condorcet did not promise that hierarchy would be eliminated in a post-aristocratic society, even one with mass education. But intellectual hierarchies are more fluid than those where transmission occurs by blood. And intellectual fluidity produces a positive feedback loop that was not available to hieratically organized societies. Condorcet separated education from religion, asserting secular authority over clerisies in a way that the Rousseau of the Social Contract would have recognized: “the function of ministers of religion is to encourage men to fulfill their duties; but the claim to decide exclusively what these duties are, would be the most dangerous of clerical usurpations.” But the problem about exclusivity-tending bodies possessing cognitive authorities would remain even after the old clerical privileges had been expropriated. Here Condorcet turned from Rousseau, from the certainty, structure, and closure of Émile. His cardinal rules: 1. Public authority has no right to link the teaching of ethics to the teaching of religion. 2. Public authority has no right to authorize the teaching of opinions as truths. 3. Consequently, the public authority must not entrust teaching to perpetual bodies. 4. The public authority cannot establish a body of doctrine to be taught exclusively. (SW, 127–8) These rules are necessary because natural science does not incorporate all other areas of learning. Matters of social, political, and moral importance introduce affective distortions into pure materialistic positivism (SW, 129)—a danger in everyone, not just the stubborn or unenlightened. The Enlightenment—where “truth was

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articulated as a destination”123—saw a flowering of probability theory and statistical mathematics in part for this reason: the Humean doubt about satisfactory inductive inference. Probability theory struck even some of the advanced guard of the French Enlightenment as suspect—D’Alembert publicly split with Condorcet when the latter argued that human knowledge could only be probabilistic, even if a strict rationalist determinism still held for the things-in-themselves analyzed by the human intellect.124 For Condorcet, “It is by [probability] alone that the final blows can be dealt both to superstition and pyrrhonism, to the exaggeration of credulity as to that of doubt” (SW, 194). Probability was to be the link between the evolutionary uncertainty of a purely Baconian empiricism, and the authority needed for a stable and legitimate political system: “legal doctrines molded the conceptual and practical orientation of the classical theory of probability at the levels of application, specific concepts, and general interpretation,” historian Lorraine Daston writes. They “were heavily indebted to seventeenth-century legal notions of contract.”125 The mutability of knowledge about politics or morals is greater than its equivalent in physics or astronomy, and more likely to be a permanent. The open society requires that this mutability be recognized and cultivated—but the temptations against this are strong. Sieyès’ “Essay on Privileges” (1788) tartly observed, “The monastic spirit . . . has greater influence in society than is generally imagined.”126 Rousseau’s suggestion that the reader “look for the age at which you would wish your species had stopped” (D, 133) is a religious dream, a timeless City of God purged of the evils of the City of Man. Here is the “heavenly city” whose attempted reproduction on earth some have incorrectly attributed to the Enlightenment as a whole.127 Its most enduring human institution is not Rousseau’s band of simple Swiss mountaineers—who he practically admitted were imaginary128—but the society ruled by a one-time transmission of eternal rules from the divine to the human, and/or stage-managed by a cognitively privileged priestly caste. Rousseau showed how his sentiment could be transferred to a theocracy, and not just the Genevan one: hence the Caliph’s admired auto-da-fé. Such imperious diffidence toward the advance of knowledge is hubris disguised as humility. In the hands of virtue-obsessed politicians, it devoured other people’s children, including liberal luminaries like Lavoisier and Condorcet.129 The latter warned the National Assembly that while a nation may teach its laws, and the reasons or obeying them until they are altered, it may not mandate patriotic adoration—“then it is essentially the creation of a kind of political religion that is being advocated,” while “The goal of instruction is not to make men admire legislation that is fully completed, but to render them capable of evaluating and correcting it” (SW, 131–2). Perhaps men like Condorcet and his teachers did not sufficiently understand and may indeed have helped produce the sort of “political religion” rushing into the void left by their assault on the Church. But a you-reap-what-yousow response to Condorcet’s (probable) suicide in the midst of Jacobin persecution is unfair.130 Even before forced into hiding Condorcet pled with Paris to recognize that the revolution had become “a religion, and Robespierre is leading a sect

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therein . . . He is a priest and will never be other than a priest.”131 One assumes Condorcet would have thought Émile better off with Rousseau than with the Jesuits. But Rousseau’s ward was hoodwinked nonetheless. He fell prey to manipulation by “those so-called philosophers . . . who propose to lay hold of the first moments of an individual’s existence to indoctrinate him with ideas that time will be unable to destroy,” clearly equating such “philosophers” to Ignatius Loyola. Et tu, JeanJacques: “how they can be so certain that what they believe is, or always will be, the truth? . . . Are they more certain of their political truths than the fanatics of all sects believe themselves to be of their religious chimeras?” (SW, 133–4) Rousseau’s social contract was a secular contract in that it joined in the Enlightenment project of expropriating—in all possible senses—the clerisy. For Condorcet, it was not that Rousseau went too far but that he did not go far enough. The radical reevaluation of society with which Rousseau thundered upon the scene should have led him to embrace society’s perpetual reevaluation, not just a reconstruction along rejuvenated Mosaic or Spartan lines. After his public feud with Rousseau, Diderot—theretofore, among the philosophes, the friendliest to his ex-friend’s Spartanism—confessed to Catherine the Great, “Lycurgus created armed monks; his legislation was a sublime system of atrocity.” What resulted was “the most fearsome ferocious beasts”132—with hindsight’s privilege one hears the famous complaint about Napoleon’s armed missionaries. The secular contract is a structure for a kind of “permanent revolution” within reasonably stable and legitimate authority—such that the very least we might say to posterity, along with d’Alembert, is that we have given something beyond mere stability to the future. It rejects Rousseau’s admonition, “Discontented with your present state . . . you might perhaps wish to be able to go backward; And this sentiment must serve as the Praise of your earliest forebears, the criticism of your contemporaries, and the dread of those who will have the misfortune to live after you” (D, 133). As Condorcet recognized, the temptation to shut development down, to reintroduce a closed system, will be powerful long after the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

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In what would have struck the Paris salons as provincial East Prussia, a notoriously fastidious philosopher watched the developing French events—soon enough, European events—with ambivalent excitement. A lecturer on ethics and nebulae, anthropology and aesthetics, Immanuel Kant eventually would set himself the grand philosophical task of systematically anatomizing that curious thing so many in previous generations had appealed to change their collective world: reason. “From the very outset of modern epistemology,” Thomas Spragens reminds us, “reason was considered to be of more than purely academic interest. Reason was not a purely an intellectual capacity; it was a political force.”133 Though chiefly remembered for these mammoth epistemological efforts, Kant also wrote scattered, unsystematic essays on religious and political matters later in life, a part of his corpus for many years undervalued. Thankfully, that judgment has been overturned.

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It was in his political and religious writings that Kant provided the most systematic and self-contained extant account of the “secular contract” as the political philosophy governing the Enlightenment. It is this achievement that I explore in the next chapter.

Notes 1. Thomas A. Spragens, Jr., The Irony of Liberal Reason (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 72. 2. The classic account is Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Doubleday, 1955). See also Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989), xv, 114–7, 185, 291, 478–9, 518. 3. Phillip Blom, Enlightening the World: Encyclopédie, the Book that Changed the Course of History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 143. 4. Frank A. Kafker, The Encyclopedists as a Group: A Collective Biography of the Authors of the Encyclopédie (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996), 68. 5. Baruch Spinoza, The Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1995), 279. 6. Baron D’ Holbach, The System of Nature or Laws of the Moral and Physical World, trans. H. D. Robinson (New York: Burt Franklin, 1868), 180. 7. Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 230. 8. Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (London and Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1981), 59. 9. Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 673, 247. 10. Diderot’s Letters to Sophie Volland, trans. Peter France (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 89. 11. “Spinoza,” in Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections, trans. Richard H. Popkin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1991), 294–5, 300. 12. Pierre Bayle, Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet, trans. Robert C. Bartlett (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), §105. 13. EH = John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). 14. Bayle, Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet, §172. 15. “On Suicide,” in David Hume, Selected Essays, ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 316–21. 16. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine and Man a Plant, trans. Richard A. Watson and Maya Rybalka (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), 37. 17. Wilson, Diderot, 63, 93, 430. See also Thomas L. Hankins, Jean d’Alembert: Science and the Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 99; and Science and the Enlightenment (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 47, 169. 18. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), 3–4. 19. Jean Le Rond D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. Richard N. Schwab (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merill, 1963), 83.

158 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

THE SECULAR CONTRACT Quoted in Blom, Enlightening the World, 78. Holbach, System of Nature, 79–80. Gay, The Enlightenment, II, 526–8. SC = Rousseau, The Social Contract. See Schulman, “The Twilight of Probability: Bayle, Locke and the Toleration of Atheists,” Journal of Religion, 89 (July, 2009). Joshua Mitchell, Not by Reason Alone: Religion, History, and Identity in Early Modern Political Thought (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 47. E.g., Eldon J. Eisenach, Narrative Power and Liberal Truth: Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, and Mill (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2002), 79: “this assumption of a fundamental conflict between reason and revelation is more our problem than Locke’s.” David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 45–7. Ibid., 48–9. Pensées Philosophiques, §48 in Denis Diderot, Oeuvres, 5 vols., ed. Laurent Versini (Paris: R. Laffont, 1994), I, 34–5. Diderot, Political Essays, 82–5 (Nakaz III). Ibid., 126 (Nakaz LXXIV). Ibid., 124 (Nakaz LXXII). Ibid., 84 (Nakaz III). Ibid., 189 (Histoire des Deux Indes, XIV, 2). Ibid., 188 (Histoire des Deux Indes, XIV, “Introduction”). “Refutation of Helvétius,” in Diderot’s Selected Writings, 297–8. Ibid Hippolyte Adolph Taine, The Origins of Contemporary France, ed. Edward T. Gargan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974), chap. 1, esp. 22. Paine, The Age of Reason, 85. Schama, Citizens, 560. Malone ed., Correspondence, 150–1 (2/28/1815). A dissenting view places Rousseau into a tradition of doubt about all the emancipatory dreams of modernity—see Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), chap. 2. “De l’État de nature, ou Examen d’un écrit de Jean-Jacques Rousseau” (orig. 1795) in Joseph de Maistre, Against Rousseau, ed. and trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 19. See Garrard, CounterEnlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2006), 66–7; Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 86; and Selected Writings and Speeches, ed. Peter J. Stanlis (Chicago, IL: Regnery Gateway, 1963), 515; or Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, ed. Carl Niemeyer (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 184, 188. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §258. Wilson, Diderot, 254. J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952), 23, 45. For a short and clear-headed discussion of this matter see Francois Furet’s essay “Rousseau and the French Revolution,” in The Legacy of Rousseau, ed. Clifford Orwin and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), chap. 8.

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47. Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 61–88. 48. See Jacques Barzun, Classic, Romantic, and Modern (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 18–35. 49. Gay, The Enlightenment, II, 529–52, quote at 529. See also Gay’s discussion of Rousseau in The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (New York: Knopf, 1964), chap. 8. 50. See Arthur M. Melzer, “The Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment: Rousseau and the New Religion of Sincerity,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 90, No. 2 (June, 1996), 344–60. 51. See John Hope Mason, “Forced to be Free,” in Rousseau and Liberty, ed. Robert Wokler (New York: St. Martin’s Press), chap. 6. 52. See “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns,” in Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, ed. and trans. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 309–28. 53. Gay, The Enlightenment, II, 552. 54. Mark Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 2. 55. Talmon, Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, 18. 56. RSW = Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France (London: Penguin, 1979). 57. E = Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979). 58. D = Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, trans. and ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 59. Tracy B. Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), 103. 60. Antony Black, “Christianity and Republicanism: From St. Cyprian to Rousseau,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 91, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), 653–4. See also John T. Scott, “The Theodicy of the Second Discourse: The ‘Pure State of Nature’ and Rousseau’s Political Thought,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 86, No. 3 (Sep., 1992), 696–711. 61. Garrard, Counter-Enlightenments, 27–8. 62. Maurice Cranston, Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712–1754 (New York: Norton, 1982), 14–15. 63. Barzun, Classic, Romantic, Modern, 21. 64. For an argument that the figure of the legislator is actually a warning against such a superhuman figure see Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 94, 161–2; the other side is argued by Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 128. 65. See David A. Wisner, The Cult of the Legislator in France, 1750–1830: A Study in the Political Theology of the French Enlightenment (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1997). 66. Abbé de Mably, Observations on the Greeks (London: R. Baldwin, 1776), 19–20. 67. Wilson, Diderot, 181. 68. The Collected Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001), 9:55. 69. Maistre, Against Rousseau, 78.

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70. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 254. See also Mark Cladis, Public Vision, Private Lives: Rousseau, Religion, and 21st-Century Democracy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 6. 71. Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World, 452. 72. William Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 60. 73. Cranston, Jean-Jacques, 144–6, 164. 74. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 4. 75. Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, 12. 76. Collected Works, 9:53. 77. Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, 4 volumes, trans. Stanley Godman (New York: Vintage, 1951), III, 74. 78. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theatre, trans. Allan Bloom (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 17. 79. Ibid., 59. 80. Abbé de Mably, Observations on the Government and Laws of the United States of America (London and Amsterdam, 1784), 25. 81. Geneva was hardly the rustic democracy of Rousseau’s idyll: see Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 55. 82. See Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 183–4; and Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776– 1871 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), chap. 3. 83. See The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 84. Collected Works, 11:126. 85. Ibid., 11:127–8. 86. Ibid., 11:132. 87. Israel, A Revolution of the Mind, 3–4. 88. “Enlightenment Fears, Fears of Enlightenment,” in What’s Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question, ed. Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hans Reill (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 116. 89. Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, 104–5. 90. Letters of David Hume, II, 310 (18 March 1776, #516). 91. Pensées Philosophiques, §44 in Diderot, Oeuvres, I, 31–2. 92. Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, 121. 93. Diderot, Political Writings, 24. 94. Ian Davidson, Voltaire in Exile: The Last Years, 1753–78 (London: Atlantic, 2004), 174–6. 95. Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, 122. 96. T. C. W. Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe, 1648–1815 (London: Allen Lane, 2007), 155. 97. Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics, ed. and trans. Ronald L. Meek (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 46. 98. Ibid., 47. 99. Ibid., 83. 100. Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, 103.

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101. SW = Marquis de Condorcet [Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat], Selected Writings, ed. Keith Michael Baker (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976). 102. SHP = Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, trans. June Barraclough (Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1979). 103. The classic account is Carl Becker’s The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1932). 104. Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, 107. 105. For a recent evolutionary defense of this idea see Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), esp. 1–84. 106. See Gay, The Enlightenment, volume 1. See also Yack, Longing for Total Revolution, 35–50, for an instructive comparison of Rousseau’s appeal to antiquity with Montesquieu’s. 107. Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics, 44. 108. Spragens, The Irony of Liberal Reason, 59. 109. See Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), for a placement of Condorcet alongside Adam Smith. 110. Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 11. 111. For a contemporary examination of this see Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 3–4, 48. 112. There are attempts to bridge this gulf: see, e.g., David W. Bates, Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), chap. 4. 113. Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas About Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference, 2nd ed. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 12, 23–5. 114. Ibid., ix. 115. See David Williams, Condorcet and Modernity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 23–4. 116. Wilson, Diderot, 598; Williams, Condorcet and Modernity, 16; and Ronald Grimsley, Jean D’Alembert (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), chap. 9, esp. 209. 117. Baker, Condorcet, 76–7, and also Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Unversity Press, 1968). 118. But for an entertaining if loose account that makes Condorcet the link between Turgot and the Saint-Simonians, Fourier and Comte see Frank E. Manuel, The Prophets of Paris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). For placement in an even larger utopian tradition see Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World, chaps. 19–20. 119. Williams, Condorcet and Modernity, 29. 120. For an interesting argument that Rousseau represented a Platonic-idealist reaction to the materialism of Hobbes and Spinoza see David Lay Williams, Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2007). See also Laurence D. Cooper, Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche: the politics of infinity (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2008), 135–204. 121. Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, 104. 122. Hume, Political Essays, 105.

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123. Bates, Enlightenment Aberrations, ix. 124. See Baker, Condorcet, 171–80. 125. Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 6, 29. 126. Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Political Writings, ed. and trans. Michael Sonenscher (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2003), 82. 127. For a psychoanalytic reading along these lines see Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue, 108. 128. See Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 62. 129. On the Jacobin purge of the old regime’s scientists see Margaret C. Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 134–41. 130. An influential example is Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 120–2, 167. 131. Quoted in Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006), 237. 132. Quoted in Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue, 116. 133. Spragens, The Irony of Liberal Reason, 54.

5 Paradise Won Immanuel Kant’s political writings exemplify the intersection of social contract and secular contract theory at their dual zenith. While philosophers have continued to do interesting exegeses of Kant’s writings on religion and theology1 the subject has largely been ignored within political theory, and the specifically political implications of Kant’s critique of religion remain underexamined.2 I present the Kant who writes of Socrates in one of his letters: “Socrates intended nothing less than a political revolution with his attempted transformation of religion.”3 So it could be in the Enlightenment. Roger Sullivan’s convincing argument “that Kant’s ethics is as much a political as a moral theory”4 is applicable to his philosophy of religion. This lacuna is particularly noticeable given the continuing search for a contemporary relevance in Kant’s political philosophy, his limited resurrection via the contractarianism of Rawls, the “discourse ethics” of Habermas, or the “democratic peace theory” in international relations. My position on Kant’s relevance is related to that recently developed by Elisabeth Ellis: “Kant concerns himself less with the strictures of ideal justice than with the institutions that might promote human progress” and offers “dynamic theory of transition toward more perfect governance.” Emphasizing the pragmatic bent of Kant’s political theory, Ellis points out that Kant “recommends that existing institutions be judged according to whether they are consistent with the continued possibility of progress, rather than by direct comparison with some set of ideal norms”; however, “Scholarly attention to Kant’s political philosophy has focused on his theory of the ideal state, at the expense of the far more interesting account of transition via the mechanism of publicity.”5 Kant’s is a political philosophy whose principal task is the integration of the social contract with progressive (or evolutionary) temporality. But Ellis does not explore the anti-theocratic foundation Kant shows is a necessary buttress for such politics. Kant’s place in the social contract tradition of Western political theory is related to his role in its secularization. If William Galston’s instinct that Kant “is in an important sense the completer of liberalism”6 is correct, the how and the why still require exploration, exploration that may prove discomforting to those who wish to effect an accommodation between liberalism and public-sphere religion. 163

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Beyond the Social Contract: Kant’s Regime of Perpetual Revision and Cognitive Growth Kant marries social contract thinking to a teleology of knowledge and freedom. An orderly society, contractual or not, is insufficient for this purpose, and though humans entered society for partially Hobbesian reasons,7 they in doing so started down a path that extends beyond social peace. Social peace, whether contractual or otherwise participatory, cannot be the sole basis for judging society, because what makes humans human are precisely the possibilities beyond that horizon. Kant’s dismissal of the bon sauvage idylls that trickled into Europe from the Americas and Tahiti—“an Arcadian, pastoral existence of perfect concord, self-sufficiency and mutual love” where “human talents would remain hidden forever in a dormant state”8—follows in this vein. He argues that even such a utopia would be worthless if its denizens could give no reason for their existence—in other words, if the ideational aspect of humanity was missing. This demand parallels the thoughtexperiment structure of Kant’s social contract theory. To assume that we have to give a reason for our existence, even if such a reason may not actually exist, should lead us to think in terms of improving the material and cognitive course of the species. If there is a God, its direct influence in human affairs ended as quickly as it began, and we have been left to ourselves. “At most,” as Yiramihu Yovel reads Kant, “God helps us to help ourselves.”9 There is a human nature that is unchanging, but that nature includes the abilities of non-animal (or perhaps supra-animal) cognition, which constructs an evolving legal superstructure over the moral base. It is this ideationally progressive aspect, and not only Kant’s deduction of categorically imperative justice, that transforms the “pathologically enforced social union” into the “moral whole.” A secularization of the Christian Golden Rule into the Kantian categorical imperative (i.e., one must always act as if one’s actions were to become the basis of universal rules) was already familiar. Hume, who Kant cited as a moral awakener, had proposed, “in common life, we have, every moment, recourse to the principle of public utility, and ask, What must become of the world, if such practices prevail?”10 Kant’s social contract “is in fact merely an idea of reason” that oblige[s] every legislator to frame his laws in such a way that they could have been produced by the united will of a whole nation . . . if the law is such that a whole people could not possibly agree to it (for example, if it stated that a certain class of subjects must be privileged as a hereditary ruling class), it is unjust.11 Ideally this maximizes happiness, but happiness is not the only purpose of social existence: that was the empty perfection of Kant’s barbarian idyll. Happiness as stable contentment bows before humanity’s teleology of progressive knowledge. Either the happy individual or the happy society might see progressive knowledge as irrelevant or even destructive. Kant asks,

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what if the true end of providence were not this shadowy image of happiness which each individual creates for himself, but the ever continuing and growing activity and culture . . . whose highest possible expression can only be the product of a political constitution based on concepts of human right, and consequently an achievement of human beings themselves?12 Kant imagines human society not only as a social contract formed to resolve “unsocial sociability”; it is also a secular contract defending evolutionary knowledge and freedom from unchanging and allegedly infallible divine edicts. The secular contract aspect cements socialized humanity in its teleology, preventing regression to the sad happiness of the bon sauvage. No society may contract for future generations, except at the level of universal and eternal law, which for Kant involves not the divine edicts of any historically situated monotheism but rather maximized human freedom. The noblest nobleman “cannot pass on his merit to his descendants.”13 The same goes for politics: Since birth is not an act on the part of the one who is born, it cannot create any inequality in his legal position and cannot make him submit to any coercive laws except in so far as he is a subject, along with all the others, of the supreme legislative power. Thus no member of the commonwealth can have a hereditary privilege as against his fellow subjects; and no one can hand down to his descendants the privileges attached to the rank he holds in the commonwealth . . . 14 But the problem and solution have their equivalent at the ideational level. His essay “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’ ” (1784) contains a related thought experiment: But should not a society of clergymen, for example an ecclesiastical synod or a venerable presbytery . . . be entitled to commit itself by oath to a certain unalterable set of doctrines, in order to secure for all time a constant guardianship over each of its members, and through them over the people? I reply that this is quite impossible. A contract of this kind, concluded with a view to preventing all further enlightenment of mankind forever, is absolutely null and void, even if it is ratified by the supreme power, by Imperial Diets and the most solemn peace treaties. One age cannot enter into an alliance on oath to put the next age in a position where it would be impossible for it to extend and correct its knowledge, particularly on such important matters, or to make any progress whatsoever in enlightenment. This would be a crime against human nature, whose original destiny lies precisely in such progress. Later generations are thus perfectly entitled to dismiss these agreements as unauthorized and criminal . . . it is absolutely impermissible to agree, even for a single lifetime, to a permanent religious constitution which no one might publicly question. For this would virtually nullify a phase in man’s

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Just as the civil constitution may not saddle unborn generations with the ballast of feudal rank, society itself may not cripple the intellectual freedom of the future by enshrining theocratic guidelines about knowledge and morality. For Kant, “no people can decide never to make progress in opinions relating to its faith (i.e. in Enlightenment)”—but of course as Kant knew, scriptural monotheisms all have, at their core, something like this proscription.16 Roughly a century earlier John Locke argued for religious freedom and (partial) disestablishment on more pragmatic modus vivendi grounds. He outlined a neutral-tending state that would tolerate diverse religious beliefs while confining its own powers to what can be judged the secular public good. Unlike religion, which by definition is interested in the care of souls, politics entails “a society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing their own civil interests”; these are “life, liberty, health, and indolency of body; and the possession of outward things, such as money, lands, houses, furniture, and the like.”17 This echoes the contractarian viewpoint of the Second Treatise: “the community comes to be umpire, by settled standing rules, indifferent, and the same to all parties” (§87). Locke began his Letter Concerning Toleration by calling intolerance inimical to Christian doctrine itself, but toleration also grows naturally from his contractual politics: “because no man can so far abandon the care of his own salvation, as blindly to leave it to the choice of any other, whether prince or subject, to prescribe to him what faith or worship he shall embrace.”18 The contradiction between the secular terms of “civil interest” and the eternal terms of the interests of the soul makes transferring power rational for the former but not the latter. But as we have seen (see Chapter 3), the consent-based premises of Lockean politics are in conflict with the at least temporarily despotic structure of the family—circumstances of birth, Kant reminds us, never being the stuff of choice. Locke’s “Conjugal society is made by a voluntary compact between man and woman” toward “its chief end, procreation” (§78). The rights of children are held in trust until they reach the age of intellectual majority. Locke’s human, like Kant’s, “cannot by any compact whatsoever, bind his children or posterity”; “a child is born a subject of no country or government,” and after coming of age “he is a free man, at liberty what government he will put himself under; what body politic he would unite himself to” (§116, §118). Given certain circumstances, of course, making religious membership purely voluntary may be easier than making national membership purely voluntary. But how are such circumstances produced? Locke avoided the problem with sleight of hand, simply declaring religious affiliation contractual against all available evidence: “Nobody is born a member of any church; otherwise the religion of the parents would descend unto children, by the same right of inheritance as their temporal estates . . . than which nothing can be imagined more absurd.” How could

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Locke call absurd what in fact obtained for most humans for most of history? This is a normative reconstruction of religion, not a description of its logic. It led Locke at his most extreme to insist that there was no difference between a religious congregation and any other sort of secular congregation, in a passage that must have sounded positively blasphemous to many contemporaries: “Some enter into company for trade and profit: others, for want to business, have their clubs for claret. Neighborhoods join some, and religion others.”19 So thorough an invasion of religion by contract clearly goes beyond modus vivendi liberalism: Locke’s “absurd” position that the religion of the parents descends to the children disappears at the cost of considerable social upheaval. Progress, not modus vivendi, is the engine propelling these ideas about the illegitimacy of cognitively binding the future. Kant’s political theory also addresses the conflict between contractual sociopolitical stability and society’s tendency to change over time. He especially insists on this point as it relates to religions. “Religious immaturity is the most pernicious and dishonorable variety of all,” he claims, flattering Frederick the Great that “Under his rule, ecclesiastical dignitaries, notwithstanding their official duties, may in their capacity as scholars freely and publicly submit to the judgment of the world their verdicts and opinions, even if those deviate here and there from orthodox doctrine.”20 Kantian “freedom of thought” is defined as “the opposite of that moral constraint whereby some citizens . . . set themselves up as the guardians of others in religious matters, and succeed in outlawing all rational enquiry.”21 An evolutionary concept of knowledge is needed for the teleological workings of reason itself: “reason does not itself work instinctively, for it requires trial, practice and instruction to enable it to progress gradually from one stage of insight to the next.” This will entail “a long, perhaps incalculable series of generations, each passing on its enlightenment to the next,”22 which is not reconcilable with the idea of a once-only transmission from God to man via scripture or prophetic interpreters. The top-down model—whether it is literally the heavens legislating down to earth, or priests and kings managing society—must go. Enlightenment shall “spread upward towards the thrones”23 rather than top-down to the people, as with Rousseau’s legislator or Plato’s elite caste of divinity-interpreters. Section 10 of “The Contest of the Faculties”24 on the other hand emphasizes a top-down rather than bottom-up model, based on education. What Kant seems to have had in mind, all told, was enlightenment spreading upward and downward from a middle consisting of an independent intelligentsia. He speaks of his “inborn duty of influencing posterity in such a way that it will make constant progress.”25 There can be reversals, but the basis for perpetual progress is cognitive, with the proviso that the knowledge should never be too abstracted from human usage. “All cultural progress,” for Kant, “has the goal of applying the acquired knowledge and skill for the world’s use.” Even a progressive self-knowledge is premised upon utility: since “the human being is his own final end,” it remains “pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself.”26

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The a priori scaffolding for what goes on in this free public space of evolutionary knowledge is built from antireligious guidelines. The beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason warns that though the current “age is the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit” nevertheless “Religion through its holiness . . . commonly seek[s] to exempt” itself. But it does not merit “that unfeigned respect that reason grants only to that which has been able to withstand its free and public examination.”27 “The ultimate consequence” of allowing religious inspiration to circumvent public reason “is that inner inspirations are inevitably transformed into facts confirmed by external evidence . . . superstition must ensue . . . reduced to a legal form so that peace can be restored.”28 Past the social contract, the secular contract is needed to prevent a society from, in the interests of peace, contracting to a once-only act of divinity or spiritual inspiration via sacred text or a hieratic order. At one point Kant suggests, “for its own sake reason does not need religion at all.”29

Kant Expels Us from Eden It is therefore sufficient to us to know that we are free, and that we can be so notwithstanding God’s decree . . . Spinoza, letter to William de Blyenbergh The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the supreme being for man. It ends, therefore, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all those conditions in which man is an abased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being . . . Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: An Introduction” For Kant, anything anchored in theology cannot survive modern science and the critical project. He dismisses theocentric/scholastic education in the Critique of Pure Reason with a memorable (and still relevant) j’accuse: “one cannot refuse to satisfy me when I demand that one should at least explain how, and by means of what illumination, one is justified in confidently soaring above all possible experience through the power of mere ideas.” Kant follows Spinoza’s declaration that “while we are speaking philosophically, we ought not to use the language of theology.”30 The theology criticized here is not just recondite Thomist disputation, the familiar angels on the head of a pin. Kantian housecleaning includes the Theos itself, as “no experience can ever be congruent to it . . . one can never procure enough material in experience to fill such a concept . . . what bridge can reason build so as to reach it?” Kant decides that “all attempts of a merely speculative use of reason in regard to theology are entirely fruitless and by their internal constitution null and nugatory” and that “the principles of reason’s natural use do not lead at all to any theology.”31 Social contract theorists generally told stories about the origins of human societies that stood in opposition to the narrative found in the Old Testament. Kant does them one better. He reinterprets the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis to make the

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secular contract, and humanity’s freedom from inalterable divine edicts, inherent in the origins and thus the purposes of human society itself. Spinoza, in a letter to William de Blyenbergh, said “Adam’s resolve or determinate will to eat of the forbidden fruit . . . considered solely in itself, contains in itself perfection to the degree that it expresses reality.” We should not “say that Adam’s will was at variance with God’s law, and was evil because it was displeasing to God.”32 The “Conjectural Beginnings of Human History” (1786), Kant’s allegorical “history of freedom’s first development,”33 begins with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, but Kant strips the story of its theological import and makes it a secular thought experiment: . . . one must begin with man as a fully formed adult, for he must do without maternal care; one must begin with a pair, so that he can propagate his kind; and one must begin with only a single pair, so that war does not arise . . . I put this pair in a place secured against attack by predators, one richly supplied by nature with all the sources of nourishment, thus, as it were, in a garden, and in a climate that is always mild.34 The abstracted dyad lives as peacefully, and pointlessly, as the human animals of the Tahitian idyll. Not God but their senses tell them not to eat or drink certain substances, and to generally stay within the boundaries of current knowledge and experience. “But reason soon began to stir and sought . . . to extend [its] knowledge of the sources of nourishment beyond the limits of instinct,” which sets off a chain reaction of new desires that ends in “a whole swarm of unnecessary, indeed even unnatural, propensities that go by the name of voluptuousness,” in “anxiety and unease.”35 But then the tone shifts, away from Rousseau’s Second Discourse, away from Biblical transgressors expelled from paradise into toil and evil. The next step is “the reflective expectation of the future. This ability not merely to enjoy life’s present moment but to make present to himself future, often very distant time is the distinguishing characteristic of man’s superiority,” albeit his “most inexhaustible source of cares and troubles.”36 This self-imposed exile from Eden implies radical separation of humanity from divinity: “The history of nature, therefore, begins with good, for it is God’s work; the history of freedom begins with badness, for it is man’s work.”37 But humanity’s “work” is to use freedom to transpose badness back to goodness; only this goodness will be very different from the Edenic idyll. Kant’s conclusion: Such a picture of man’s history . . . points out [1] that he must not blame providence for the evil that oppresses him; [2] that he is also not justified in ascribing his own transgressions to an original sin committed by his original parents, through which a tendency to similar transgressions was inherited by their descendants . . . [3] that, instead, he must admit what they did as his own act, and must completely credit to himself the guilt for all evil that arose

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Genesis has been reinterpreted to prove that humans were never meant to live in Eden, and should not desire it even were it a possibility. Kant’s “original sin” is not sin but the first genuine act of obedience. Hegel gave a similarly Kantian riposte to Rousseau’s state of nature, which “implies that education will be regarded as something purely external and associated with corruption”; it is instead “liberation and work toward a higher liberation”; the Edenic state “disregard[s] the moment of liberation which is present in work”—work understood cognitively as well as physically—and “savagery” is really “unfreedom.”39 Kant uses the Biblical story of human banishment to himself banish monotheism’s obedience-obsessed God: “For a God who desires merely obedience to commands for which absolutely no improved moral disposition is requisite is, after all, not the really moral Being the concept of whom we need for a religion.”40 That God is a philosophical error, a symptom of an immature stage in the development of the species: “holy tradition with its appendages and statutes and observances, which in its time did good service, becomes bit by bit dispensable . . . when man enters his adolescence, it becomes a fetter.”41 It must be replaced by the new, abstract, non-dictatorial Deist God of the Enlightenment for humanity to embrace its teleology and enshrine intellectual progress within the framework of the social contract. Now humanity judges its Gods, not vice versa: “The concept of God . . . is to be found only in reason as its exclusive source, and it cannot first enter our minds either through inspiration or through any external communication, however great the authority from which the latter may come.”42 God’s earthly representatives follow in turn. Kant reinterprets the Christ story in a fashion that must be considered blasphemous: Now if it were indeed a fact that such a truly god-minded man at some particular time had descended, as it were, from heaven to earth and had given men in his own person, through his teachings, his conduct, and his sufferings, as perfect an example of a man well-pleasing to God as one can expect to find in external experience (for be it remembered that the archetype of such a person is to be sought nowhere but in our own reason), and if he had, through all this, produced immeasurably great moral good upon earth by effecting a revolution in the human race—even then we should have no cause for supposing him other than a man naturally begotten . . . And the presence of this archetype in the human soul is in itself sufficiently incomprehensible without our adding to its supernatural origin the assumption that it is hypostasized in a particular individual. The elevation of such a holy person above all the frailties of human nature would rather, so far as we can see, hinder the adoption of the idea of such a person for our imitation.43 Jesus of Nazareth may have been a relevant moral teacher, though Kant’s language suggests that he probably should not even be accounted that. “I am a Christian,”

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as Thomas Jefferson put it in a letter to Benjamin Rush (4/21/1803), “in the only sense in which [Jesus] wished any one to be . . . ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other.”44 But Kant goes even further than Jefferson’s “Abstracting what is really His [Jesus’] from the rubbish in which it is buried.”45 Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor insisted that even if a meek and murdered God didn’t exist, the church would have had to invent him. Kant, preferring distressing freedom to comforting domination, implies that even if Jesus never lived (that is at least implied above), any rational person could invent him, and invent him in a better form than the character narrated by the Gospels and mimetically maintained by Christian rites. The apotheosizing of such an individual actually hinders, on Kant’s account, his serving as a moral example, because admitting any one-time intervention of the divine into the human undermines the rational basis for moral action: “the good principle has descended in mysterious fashion from heaven into humanity not at one particular time alone but from the first beginnings of the human race.”46 Like many in the Enlightenment Kant singled out Old Testament Judaism for critique in terms of the theological-political problem (Judaism as “a collection of mere statutory laws upon which was established a political organization . . . they relate merely to external acts”47), implying that many of Christianity’s problems are vestiges of religious tribalism. But his mood was not one of Christian-rationalist self-congratulation. Kant questions the empirical basis of miracles and notes the problems belief in them causes the social and political order.48 In a letter to Johann Casper Lavater he suggests belief in miracles fit the early period of Christianity, but now, in an age of secularization and rationalization, “the scaffolding must be taken down,”49 a continuation of the critique of Hobbes and Spinoza (for the latter of whom, as one scholar puts it, “Prophecy may have been a necessary stage in the historical drama of human emancipation, but it now stands as a barrier to self-government and autonomy”50). Events after Jesus’ death are off limits: “The more secret records, added as a sequel, of his resurrection and ascension, which took place before the eyes only of his intimates, cannot be used in the interest of religion within the limits of reason alone.”51 When Kant proposes that “Rational religion and Scriptural learning” be ceded to “properly qualified interpreters and trustees of a sacred document,”52 the context of his intellectual system as a whole reveals the upshot: no document is sacred. The idea of “sacred” is effectively null and void. He wrote to J. G. Hamann that civilization would reach “the point where critical knowledge of old languages, philological and antiquarian erudition, constitute the foundation on which that religion” shall be known. The philologist, rooting around “in the archives of antiquity, will drag the orthodox (they may look as sour as they please) like children wherever he wants.” Of theologians: “respect for those demagogues will be totally finished and they will have to take instruction from the literary people on what they have to teach” (Kant had a personal reason to advocate the expropriation of the theological faculties, given the attempted censoring of Religion).53 Previous “Scriptural Expositors” are handled harshly: “with a hierarchy forcing itself upon free men, the dreadful voice of orthodoxy was raised,” and they “divided the Christian world into embittered parties

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over creedal opinions on matters of faith.”54 The claim that “in the end religion will gradually be freed from all empirical determining grounds”55 is ironic since elsewhere Kant implies that no known religion has empirical determining grounds. In a Kantian Enlightened world faith in the Bible becomes “faith” in Biblical scholarship conducted by the general rules of publicity frame intellectual and scientific debate.56

The Politics of Kantian Deism Yet what the greatest secular power cannot do, spiritual power can—that is, forbid thought itself and really hinder it; it can even lay such a compulsion—the prohibition even to think other than it prescribes—upon those in temporal authority over it . . . Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone In “Toward Perpetual Peace” (1795) Kant anticipates the convergence of human religions (“There is only one (true) religion; but there can be faiths of several kinds”57) toward universal Deism. It is the same model of providential conflict he finds in inter- and intra-state relations: distrust and war eventually lead, despite themselves, to compromise and association.58 But are the same mechanisms at work? Let us heed Kant’s own warning that “it is quite absurd to expect enlightenment from reason and yet to prescribe to it in advance on which side it must come out.”59 Writing to Moses Mendelssohn in approval of the latter’s Jerusalem (1783), Kant calls their dual Enlightenment project the “great reform that is slowly impending, a reform that is in store not only for your own people [i.e. the Jews] but for other nations as well,” a reform after which “mankind will finally be united with regard to the essential point of religion. For all religious propositions that burden our conscience are based on history, that is, on making salvation contingent on belief in the truth of these historical propositions.”60 Kant puts one in mind of Jefferson’s prognostication of universal Unitarianism: “We should all then,” he told Adams (8/22/1813), “live without an order of priests, moralize for ourselves, follow the oracle of conscience, and say nothing about what no man can understand, nor therefore believe.”61 A common Enlightenment hope, shared even by the radicals: “Couldn’t we say,” mused Diderot, “that all the religions of the world are mere sects of natural religion, and that the Jews, the Christians, the Muslims, the Pagans even, are only naturalism’s heretics and schismatics?” Diderot’s “natural religion” was more overtly Spinozist than Kant’s Deism, but the message was similar: “Christianity began; Judaism began; there is not a religion on earth of which this date is unknown, excepting natural religion; thus it alone will not end, and all the others will pass.”62 Salvation’s contingency on belief in “historical propositions” may have nothing to do with Kant’s religion or morality (or Diderot’s or Jefferson’s), but Kantian “faith” was peculiar then and remains peculiar now. A biographer points out that those who knew Kant during his life generally did not believe he had stayed loyal to Protestantism.63 The intellectual climate of Kant’s upbringing was one where “During the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century, philosophy at Konigsberg was not

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much more than the handmaiden of theology . . . The hectic fever of Pietism threatened to kill off philosophy altogether, or so it seemed to some.”64 Kant projected exclusivist faiths into a future dustbin of history, which has not occurred, but what is important in Kant’s writings on the theological-political problem is the exhortation, not the prediction. The descriptive claim, “a religion which rashly declares war on reason will not be able to hold out in the long run against it,”65 may or may not prove out. But the normative claim is that violent rearguard actions against reason and progress in the name of the divine will be socially and politically harmful. For Kant, our epistemological position toward these matters has serious political consequences. He demarcates “true faith” or “ethical commonwealth” from heretofore existing religious faiths because the cognitive rules governing the latter have been destructive of the political order, and have hampered human development. Only universal religion “purified of the stupidity of superstition and the madness of fanaticism” enables freedom, both within itself and in relation to the secular state: the internal relation of its members to one another, and the external relation of the church to political power . . . a republic (hence neither a hierarchy, nor an illuminatism, which is a kind of democracy through special inspiration, where the inspiration of one man can differ from that of another, according to the whim of each).66 The epistemological foundations of religious experience are directly tied to the political forms it encourages. Since Kant’s a priori principles are general and sensible enough to be recognizable by all, only “incidental regulations” embroil us in theological-political conflict. Such “indifferent things,” as Locke had called them, must bow before secular reason. In fact the “ethical commonwealth” is divorced from political structures altogether: its constitution is neither monarchical (under a pope or patriarch), nor aristocratic (under bishops and prelates), nor democratic (as of sectarian illuminati). It could best of all be likened to that of a household (family) under a common, though invisible, moral Father . . . a voluntary, universal, and enduring union of hearts.67 Unlike its malformed religious predecessors, this ethical commonwealth does not mimic an available political form—even the Reformation’s democratization of hitherto hierarchical-authoritarian faith was insufficient, because the entity democratized was still non-rational inspiration that violates publicity. Kant’s reputation as a loyal Protestant has been exaggerated.68 The terms, he suggests, are essentially meaningless: If a church which claims that its ecclesiastical faith is universally binding is called a catholic church, and if that which protests against such claims on the

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Kant’s Anthropology affirms that his answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” hinges around reorienting religious beliefs: “it is enlightenment to distinguish the symbolic from the intellectual (public worship from religion), the temporarily useful and necessary shell from the thing itself.”70 Kant’s evisceration of theology reaches in to pull the rational kernel from the mystical shell. It is hard to imagine religious people then or now reading these works and taking comfort in the “thing itself.” The political essays and Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone represent a systematic attempt to destroy all the bases ever given for religious authority, hieratic, scriptural-interpretive, or revelation-based. Religion is internally driven to impose upon the domain of rational politics. It is the concept of revelation, previous to its content, that mars religion: But if we admit statutory laws of such a will and make religion consist of our obedience to them, knowledge of such laws is possible not through our own reason alone but only through revelation, which, be it given publicly or to each individual in secret, would have to be an historical and not a pure rational faith in order to be propagated among men by tradition or writ . . . a church dispenses with the most important marks of truth, namely, a rightful claim to universality, when it bases itself upon a revealed faith. For such a faith, being historical . . . can never be universally communicated so as to produce conviction.71 It is the cognitive structure of religion that is the political problem. Softer targets— the rapacious priest, the credulous peasant—are secondary. What is “living” in Kant’s political philosophy is his marriage of social contract theory to the settling of the theological-political problem. More definitively, and more confidently, than he arranges his confederation of republics, Kant insists on the secular nature of human society and the necessity of accumulating testable and debatable knowledge over time. Freedom trumps the good name or traditional legitimacy of any one faith: Should Christianity ever reach the point where it ceases to be worthy of love (which could well come about if instead of its gentle spirit it were armed with dictatorial authority), then dislike and resistance must govern man’s attitude toward it, for there is no neutrality . . . when it comes to moral matters.72 No neutrality when it comes to moral matters: the believer Kant countermands would surely agree, defending the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God against any and all heresies, of which Kant’s deism is certainly one. The return of “dictatorial authority” in the above presumably means the wielding of power by some priestly

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or ministerial hierarchy—but there is a deeper problem. “Dictatorial authority” is inherent in monotheism, whether mediated by a leadership caste or not, because faiths refuse to accept that their “different historical confessions” and “different religious books” are epiphenomenal. A holy scripture’s freezing of moral or political knowledge renders it dangerously ill-equipped to deal with a changing cognitive environment; it must rely on competing ad hoc reinterpretations of the original message, all unverifiable and unfalsifiable, and as likely to spur violence as democratic consensus-building.

From Critique to Crisis: The Enduring Structure of Counter-Enlightenment Thought Not least among the tasks now confronting thought is that of placing all the reactionary arguments against Western culture in the service of progressive enlightenment. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia Counter-Enlightenment, like Enlightenment, is heterogeneous—but one can find enduring elements across its many permutations. Its founders, around the turn of the nineteenth century, defended God-ordained hierarchical order, with church and throne collaborating in benevolent authority.73 Reactionaries like Joseph de Maistre and Louis Bonald drew a straight line from the philosophes—who “made all things unnatural by always speaking about nature . . . abandoned civilized man in favor of . . . the animal or of the savage,” who created “strange systems that were invented by the love of paradox and welcomed by a taste for the new”74—to the Jacobin terror. Interestingly, however, counter-Enlightenment gradually became associated, at least at its most incisive and intellectually influential, with an purportedly secular and progressive intelligentsia of the very kind reactionaries originally associated with the Enlightenment. These critics regarded the totalitarian movements of their time much like Maistre, Bonald, and others regarded the Jacobinism of the French Revolution—without the buttress of authoritarian Church (or Maistre’s reason-defying cognates: “prejudices . . . a complete common or national reason . . . political faith . . . patriotism”75) as an alternative, although it is arguable that Martin Heidegger sought an existentialist equivalent in his embrace of Nazism. Michel Foucault, for example, accused the “classical age” (scientific-industrial revolution, Cartesian metaphysics, Enlightenment critique of the legal system) that produced the very critical position he filled for enabling severe discipline and domination. “Couldn’t it be concluded that the Enlightenment’s promise of attaining freedom through the exercise of reason has been turned upside down,” he asked, “resulting in a domination by reason itself, which increasingly usurps the place of freedom?”76 It was a mistake, Foucault’s predecessors in the Frankfurt School argued, to see fascism as simply the most brutal and technology-friendly outgrowth of counter-Enlightenment—vitalist, irrationalist, proudly authoritarian.77 “The prime cause of the retreat from enlightenment into

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mythology is not to be sought so much in the nationalist, pagan, and other modern mythologies manufactured precisely in order to contrive such a reversal, but in the Enlightenment itself,”78 argued Marx Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. The rationalist-scientific worldview cannot coherently moralize about itself; all it ultimately offers is a tool kit for domination. Enlightenment preaches rebellion against authority but is itself authoritarian, and fascism’s promise of a world recharged by irrationality and will-to-power is actually a reflection and reification of the thing rebelled against. “Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictator toward men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them.” The “old inequality—unmediated lordship and mastery” was dissolved, but the Enlightenment succored an even more powerful domination “in universal mediation, in the relation of any one existent to any other.”79 Looking back on the Enlightenment from a twentieth century mired in war, Frankfurt School jeremiads like Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) associated the Kantian categorical imperative not with egalitarian modern democracy but with the Marquis de Sade and his eroto-megalomaniacs. (As philosopher Susan Neiman quips, “Perhaps one ought to denounce [Bach] for tormenting harmony by subjecting it to the precision of rule.”80) This critique has been quite influential, even if its register has become less apocalyptic (except perhaps in environmentalism). The eminent philosopher Charles Taylor’s recent Enlightenment exegesis finds “the spirit of totalitarianism” in secular reason, “a code which brooks no limit.”81 Enlightenment was criticized for atomizing nature and making everything interchangeable with everything else, mere material for productive exchange and human domination. Actually it was Horkheimer and Adorno and their allies who frequently lost the ability to suitably differentiate and add moral meaning to the landscape of scattered cognitive bits that rational analysis has made of the world. When Hollywood and the Gulag become roughly equivalent emanations of the same crisis, the reader might be forgiven for thinking that it is precisely these authors whose method involves beating everything they see into the same mournful pulp. Horkheimer and Adorno demarcated themselves from the Enlightenment by embracing its spirit of critique while refusing scientific or methodical rationalism. The latter was described in exceptionally bleak terms: it “evaporates the content in thoughts,” produces “the claustrophobia of a systematized society,” and even the “coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz.”82 This was paradoxical. Perhaps Adorno was correct to see Auschwitz (or Kolyma) as such an intense catastrophe that one must indict in terms broad enough not to trivialize it. On the other hand, are not these Rorschach terms—bourgeois ratio, the “systematized society,” and so on—so vague that they themselves approach triviality? His reductio ad absurdum comes in the form of a complaint about “cars and refrigerators”: “which driver is not tempted, merely by the power of his engine, to wipe out the vermin of the street, pedestrians, children and cyclists? The movements machines demand of their users already have the violent, hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment.”83

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Despite the authors’ claim in the Dialectic that Kant’s attempt to ground morality in reason failed, could a Kantian not adequately explain the difference between, say, using one’s car to more expeditiously visit an elderly relative, and using it to mow down innocent bystanders? And Adorno’s postmodernist (avant la lettre) solutions, slippery entities like “nonconceptuality, individuality, and particularity . . . diversity not wrought by any schema . . . full, unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflection”84 should not satisfy us with the tautological defense that a desire for them to be less slippery is the whole problem. To say that Sade is not only a likely but in fact the only honest result of the Enlightenment’s answering “disenchantment” by trying to ground morals rationally was reactionary and irresponsible. Sade’s confusion of freedom with unlimited self-assertion would have certainly been understood as such by Kant. Horkheimer and Adorno claimed to be preserving a modified enlightenment by making enlightenment “consider itself,” but they never explained how morality could be grounded if not rationally and at least somewhat publicly.85 Are the various concepts brought in as alternatives—“mystery . . . Substance and quality, activity and suffering, being and existence . . . inherent powers . . . the unassignable . . . discontinuity”86—any less manipulable by despotic authority than science is? If the publicity and universality suggested by Kant is discarded, the worry must be that the only plausible remaining option is some form of arbitrary morality: the non-transparent, “enchanted” nature of the religious/ancestral edict, or the voluntarism of charismatic supermen (to use Max Weber’s categories). Some use machines to manufacture corpses and others use them to mass-produce medicine—does this signify some existential dilemma within instrumental reason? Or does it signify precisely the confusion of human terms (means/ends, objects/subjects) that Kant ruled out? If Enlightenment reasoning about the natural world, wherein discrete units obey universal cognitive rules (i.e., are “atomized”) is abandoned, what shall replace it? A comparison with Heidegger, the eminence grice of the twentieth century’s secular Counter-Enlightenment, demonstrates the dangers in this prejudice against scientific rationalism being as mundane as possible— being, that is, an unprecedentedly good way of producing verifiable knowledge about the material world, independent of ideology.87 Here the demand that science be something beyond “the settled comfort of a safe occupation, serving to further a mere progress of information,” that it serve “the fundamental happening of our spiritual being as part of a people” takes on a more menacing air.88 In his essay “The New Failure of Nerve” (1943) Sidney Hook questioned “the notion that Fascism is the consequence not of economic conditions, nationalist tradition, and disastrous political policies inside Germany and out, but of the spread of positivism, secularism, and humanism.” If that was the case, “Why Fascism should then have arisen in such strongly religious and metaphysical countries as Italy and Germany and not in such scandalously heretical and positivist countries as England and America,”89 remained unexplained. The secular Counter-Enlightenment confused form with content, or at least too easily allowed that the one predetermines the other. The idea that science, procedural

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rationalism, and abstract categorization can be used to control others morphed, almost without comment, into the rather different idea that domination is the only possible outcome. Where “ ‘Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements”90 (Foucault)—understood as form and not content—then the substance of modern science and reason becomes unimportant. Harmful medical judgments (calling homosexuality mental illness, for example) are no more and no less defensible than helpful medical insights. Foucault deemed the very idea that “madness” could be opposed to reason fatally authoritarian. But should the imposition of a “madness” category to punish eccentricity lead to blanket dismissal of there being such a thing as unreason? That the reason-unreason dichotomy is abusable is not evidence that proposing such a dichotomy—the “caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason”—is de facto illegitimate. And stripping judgment from science and reason and returning it to the ground-floor realm of “naïve knowledges, located down low on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity . . . local popular knowledges . . . disqualified knowledges”91—would this really be the more humane approach? Foucault’s appeal to “local popular knowledges” against the allegedly centralizing reason in post-Enlightenment West was never specified very clearly. When it was specified at all, its content was worrisome. Foucault a kind of “insurrection of subjugated knowledges”92 at work in the Iranian Revolution, an episode in his career as public intellectual that has been increasingly scrutinized.93 Revolutionary Shi’a Islam “in that year of 1978, was not the opium of the people precisely because it was the spirit of a world without spirit.” Foucault saw in the Islamic revolt against the secularizing Shah “an absolutely collective will”; previously he had “thought that the collective will was like God, like the soul, something one would never encounter . . . we met, in Tehran and throughout Iran, the collective will of a people. Well, you have to salute it, it doesn’t happen every day.” When the revolution began to devour its children, Foucault backtracked by insisting that the Islamic nature of the kangaroo courts and public executions rendered them in part forgivable on the grounds that “They don’t have the same regime of truth as ours, which, it has to be said, is very special, even if it has become almost universal.”94 To friend and foe alike the normative stances of Foucault and the Frankfurt School may have looked quite different than contemporaneous, openly reactionary positions like those of neo-Thomism. Actually the jeremiads are suspiciously similar. Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument that Kant’s philosophy leads in a straight line to Nietzsche’s embrace of instinct and violence is virtually identical to Horkheimer and Adorno’s, with Nietzsche in Sade’s place. MacIntyre too thinks “the Enlightenment’s project to provide a rational foundation for and justification of morality” was “deeply incoherent,” and the “project of providing a rational vindication of morality had decisively failed,” leaving us unmoored and existentially adrift.95 The form of Enlightenment reason supposedly left it with either bad content or no content. MacIntyre recalls premodern teleological cosmology with nostalgia, blaming

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the moderns and philosophes for its passing. But Kant is no less of a teleological thinker than were the Thomists.96 It is just that the substance of the telos has changed—for the better. The idea that human life’s purpose, to the extent that it has one, is to live by epistemological rules, and within sociopolitical structures, which facilitate the progressive interest of the knowledge, well-being, and freedom of the species over time is not a teleology that should feel inadequate next to Aristotelian or Thomist alternatives. Even if modern individualism were nothing but what a historian has described as “people doing what they wish to do in the presence of further and further relaxations of constraints such as limited income, community sanctions, and restricted markets for information”97 would it not still be worth passionately defending? Foucault did not embrace Islamism or any other systemic rejection of “disenchanted” modernity, at least not for himself. But the Secular CounterEnlightenment’s desire for ersatz religion was always strong, from Heidegger to the present. Adorno’s vague yearning for total transcendence, “the standpoint of redemption . . . as it will appear one day in the messianic light,”98 is just one example. Is there any reason to expect that an “insurrection” against Enlightenment systems of knowledge will not result in systems of knowledge as bad as or worse than the ones they replace? Despite Foucault’s famous prophecies—“man will disappear . . . the absolute dispersion of man . . . one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea”99— this Nietzschean disciple would in practice lead us back to something human, all-too-human. The most likely answer is re-enchantment by the most available re-enchanters: Ayatollah-like bringers of spirit to a world without spirit. 100 A philosophy developed in revulsion at the mechanized death-machines of World War Two seems to be at something of a loss when its heirs confronted our equivalent of atavistic totalitarianism.101 The latter’s defining marker is hardly lack of spirit. We do not live in a world where “abandoning Western rationalism has no discouraging political implications.”102 In the concluding chapters I shall examine and criticize the advance of theocratic politics connected with fundamentalist Christianity in the United States and radical Islam in Western Europe. I will then criticize the academic mainstreaming of Counter-Enlightenment while Enlightenment values are under serious theocratic attack, and in doing so propose resurrecting strongEnlightenment secular liberalism.

Notes 1. See Kant’s Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered, ed. Philip J. Rossi and Michael Wreen (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion, ed. Stephen Palmquist and Chris L. Firestone (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), and Stephen Palmquist, Kant’s Critical Religion (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000). 2. An absence notable in many otherwise enlightening works on Kant: Arthur Ripstein, Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

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University Press, 2009); Allen W. Wood, Kantian Ethics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Howard Williams, Kant’s Critique of Hobbes: Sovereignty and Cosmopolitanism (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003); Katrin Flikschuh, Kant and Modern Political Philosophy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Kimberly Hutchings, Kant, Critique and Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 1996); Susan Meld Shell, The Rights of Reason: A Study of Kant’s Philosophy and Politics (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1980) and The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation, and Community (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996); William Galston, Kant and the Problem of History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1975); Hans Saner, Kant’s Political Thought: Its Origins and Development, trans. E. B. Ashton (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1973); Kevin E. Dodson, “Autonomy and Authority in Kant’s Rechtslehre,” Political Theory, Vol. 25, No. 1. (Feb., 1997), 93–111; and Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Kant, Politics, & Persons: The Implications of His Moral Philosophy,” Polity, Vol. 14, No. 2. (Winter, 1981), 205–21, as well as the collections Kant & Political Philosophy: The Contemporary Legacy, ed. Ronald Beiner and William James Booth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Essays on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Howard Williams (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992); Kant’s Practical Philosophy Reconsidered, ed. Yirmiyahu Yovel (Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic, 1989). Susan Neiman’s The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), chap. 4, discusses the place of Kant’s philosophy within the Spinozism/Deism controversy but says little about the political importance of his writings on organized religion and theology. Patrick Riley’s Kant’s Political Philosophy (Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield, 1983) leaves the issue unexplored despite the author’s promising statement at the beginning that he was introduced to Kant via Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, which Riley calls a “remarkable summa of Kant’s practical thought” (viii). Onora O’Neill’s essay “Within the Limits of Reason” in Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls, ed. Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman and Christine M. Korsgaard (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 170–86, gives an incisive philosophical analysis of the Religion, but without arguing political salience. There is a somewhat politically oriented discussion of Kant’s views on religion in Roger Sullivan’s Immanuel Kant’s Moral Theory (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 261–75, but the author settles on the problematic conclusion that Kant retained a “fundamentally religious orientation” embracing “the God of traditional Christian apologetics” (274). Similarly, Roger Scruton (Kant [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982], 78–9) finds Kant’s theory to be “one of the first attempts at the systematic demystification of theology” but still says “Kant accepted the traditional claims of theology, and even tried to resuscitate them under the obscure doctrine of the ‘postulates of practical reason.’ ” Thus far Kant’s anti-religious and anti-theocratic political philosophy has found its best expression in Yirmiyahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), chaps. 2 and 5; and William James Booth, Interpreting the World: Kant’s Philosophy of History and Politics (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 48–51. 3. Kant to Friedrich Plessing, February 3, 1784, in Immanuel Kant, Correspondence, ed. and trans. Arnulf Zweig (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 212. 4. Sullivan, Immanuel Kant’s Moral Theory, 258.

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5. Elisabeth Ellis, Kant’s Politics: Provisional Theory for an Uncertain World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 3, 6, 9, 13. Ellis has expanded upon these ideas in Provisional Politics: Kantian Arguments in Policy Contexts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). Another argument about Kant’s interest in managing political change is Howard Williams, “Metamorphosis or Palingenesis? Political Change in Kant,” The Review of Politics, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Autumn, 2001), 693–722. 6. Galston, Kant and the Problem of History, 26. 7. See Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 137 (Metaphysics of Morals, §44). 8. Ibid., 45. 9. Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History, 96. 10. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983), 34. 11. Kant, Political Writings, 79 (Conclusion to “Theory and Practice” essay). 12. Ibid., 219 (“Review of Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind”). 13. Kant, Political Writings, 153 (Metaphysics of Morals, “General Remarks on the Legal Consequences of the Nature of the Civil Union” D). 14. Ibid., 76 (“Theory and Practice,” II.2). 15. Ibid., 57–8. 16. Ibid., 151 (Metaphysics of Morals, “General Remarks on the Legal Consequences of the Nature of the Civil Union” C). 17. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. James Tully (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983), 5. 18. Ibid., 3–6. 19. Ibid., 7–8, 30. The actual nature and political valence(s) of Locke’s religious beliefs has divided interpreters. For the view that Locke took a theistic position toward political obligation see Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations of Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); W. M. Spellman, John Locke (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 1, 4; Joshua Foa Dienstag, “Serving God and Mammon: The Lockean Sympathy in Early American Political Thought,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 90, No. 3 (Sep., 1996), 497–511; Kirstie M. McClure, Judging Rights: Lockean Politics and the Limits of Consent (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); John Dunn, Interpreting Political Responsibility: Essays 1981–1989 (Oxford: Polity, 1990), 11; Mark E. Button, Contract, Culture and Citizenship: Transformative Liberalism from Hobbes to Rawls (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), chaps. 2–3; Mitchell, Not by Reason Alone: Religion, History, and Identity in Early Modern Political Thought (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), chap. 2; and Eisenach, Narrative Power and Liberal Truth: Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, and Mill (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2002), 71–106. In opposition are Thomas L. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 2, 133; Michael P. Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 288; Strauss, Natural Right and History, 202–51; Caton, The Politics of Progress: The Origins and Development of the Commercial Republic, 1600–1835 (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1988), 203–20. 20. Kant, Political Writings, 59 (“What is Enlightenment?”).

182 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

THE SECULAR CONTRACT Ibid., 247 (“What is Orientation in Thinking?”). Ibid., 42–3 (“Universal History,” Prop. 2). Kant, Political Writings, 51 (“Universal History,” Prop. 8). See Ibid., 188–9. Ibid., 88–9 (“Theory and Progress,” III). Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. and trans. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A xi, footnote. Kant, Political Writings, 248 (“What is Orientation in Thinking?”). Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper, 1960), 3. Baruch Spinoza, The Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1995), 166. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Bxxxii–xxxv, A621/B649, A637/B665, A639/B667. Spinoza, The Letters, 132–5. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 49. Ibid., 49–50. Ibid., 50–1. Ibid., 52 (second emphasis mine). Ibid., 54. Ibid., 59. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §§187, 194. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 117. Ibid., 112. Kant, Political Writings, 245 (“What is Orientation in Thinking?”). Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 57. Jefferson, Writings, 1122. Ibid., 1431 (To William Short, 10/31/1819). Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 77. Ibid., 116. Ibid., 79–83. Kant, Correspondence, 152–3 (April 28, 1775). Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 95. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 119n. Ibid., 104. Kant, Correspondence, 148–9 (April 8, 1774). See his letters to Fichte (February 2, 1792), to the theological faculty of Konigsberg (August 1792), to Friedrich Wilhelm II (October 12, 1792), and to Johann Kiesewetter (December 13, 1793), in ibid., 402–3, 425–6, 486–8; and 471. Ibid., 121. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 112. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 98. See Kant, Political Writings, 114n.

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59. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A747/B775. 60. Kant, Correspondence, 204 (August 16, 1783). 61. Barden ed., Ye Will Say I Am No Christian”: The Thomas Jefferson / John Adams Correspondence on Religion, Morals, and Values (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2006), 87–8. 62. De la Suffisance de la Religion Naturelle, §§25 and 18 in Diderot, Oeuvres, 5 vols., ed. Laurent Versini (Paris: R. Laffont, 1994), I, 60–2. 63. Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 2–3, 12, 39, 54. 64. Ibid. 67, 69. 65. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 9. 66. Ibid., 93. 67. Ibid. 68. See, e.g., Roger Sullivan’s argument that Kant retained pietist sympathies in Immanuel Kant’s Moral Theory, 6–7 and chap. 18. 69. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 100. 70. Kant, Anthropology from a Practical Point of View, 85. 71. Ibid., 100. 72. Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, 103 (“The End of All Things”). 73. See Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French CounterEnlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3–54; and Garrard, Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2006), 16–73. 74. “The Family in Society” from Législation primitive (1802), in Louis de Bonald, The True & Only Wealth of Nations: Essays on Family, Economy & Society, trans. Christopher Olaf Blum (Naples, FL: Spaienta Press of Ave Maria University, 2006), 18. 75. From Étude sur la souveraineté (1794) in Maistre, Against Rousseau, ed. and trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 87–9. 76. Michel Foucault, Power, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: New Press, 2000), 273. 77. As does, for example, Isaiah Berlin: see “Joseph De Maistre and the Origins of Fascism,” in Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (New York: Vintage, 1992), 91–174. For a historical argument that the development of fascism signaled incomplete, rather than too-complete, modernization see Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 78. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 2002), xiii–iv. 79. Ibid., 4–6, 9, 12. 80. Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 192. 81. Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 50–2. 82. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 15, 24, 363. 83. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 2005), §19. 84. Ibid., 8, 13.

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85. See Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), esp. 73. 86. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 5–7. 87. See Caton, The Politics of Progress, 13. For the political valences of the Enlightenment promotion of scientific methodology see The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 88. “The Self-Assertion of the German University” in Martin Heidegger, Philosophical and Political Writings, ed. Manfred Stassen (New York and London: Continuum, 2003), 5. 89. Sidney Hook, The Quest For Being (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1991), 93. Also see his essay “In Defense of the Enlightenment,” in Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 195–207; and Alfred Cobban, In Search of Humanity: The Role of the Enlightenment in Modern History (New York: George Brazilier, 1960). 90. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972– 1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 132. 91. Ibid., 82. 92. Ibid., 81. 93. See Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 94. Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977– 1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 1988), 218, 215, 223. 95. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 118 96. Charles Taylor argues this well in his otherwise sympathetic response to MacIntyre: “Justice After Virtue,” in After MacIntyre: Critical Perspective on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. John Horton and Susan Mendus (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1994), 16–43, esp. 28. 97. Eric L. Jones, Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 194–5. 98. Adorno, Minima Moralia, §153. 99. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 385–7. 100. A point made dramatically by Raymond Tallis, Enemies of Hope: A Critique of Contemporary Pessimism—Irrationalism, Anti-Humanism and the Counter-Enlightenment (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), esp. 158, 201. 101. The association between radical Islam and totalitarianism is drawn polemically by Christopher Hitchens, “Against Rationalization,” The Nation, October 8, 2001; and, in more academic tones, Walter Laqueur, Fascism: Past, Present, Future (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 147–61; Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: Norton, 2003); and Niall Ferguson, “A World Without Power,” Foreign Policy, July/August 2004. See also Michael Burleigh, Blood & Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism (New York: Harper, 2009), chap. 8. 102. Richard Rorty, “The Continuity between the Enlightenment and ‘Postmodernism’,” in What’s Left of Enlightenment?, A Postmodern Question, ed. Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hans Reill (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 20.

6 Slouching toward Geneva Instead of thinking only about the authoritarian and autonomous, we should pay attention to yet another kind of personality, namely, the person who recognizes what is authoritative. If we are to describe this in terms of a line of growth or life projectory, the movement is from the authoritarian, through the autonomous, to the acknowledgment of the authoritative. Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square Because there is nothing in this world that is of any consideration in comparison with eternity. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration In 2006, as tension over Iran’s nuclear program simmered, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote a letter to George W. Bush, a rambling 18-page note lacking in specific demands. There was little concerning the nuclear program except a few bromides about every country’s right to the wonders of modern science (a sentiment rarely heard from the guardians of the theocratic revolution outside this context). There was little about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute except a reiteration of Ahmadinejad’s doubts about the veracity of the holocaust. There were scattered chastisements about the North-South income gap, the tiers-mondisme that had energized the Iranian Revolution at its outset. Ahmadinejad’s most emotive concerns involved the religious organization of society—not just Iranian society, all human society. Eschewing the fiery “Great Satan” and “Westoxification” rhetoric of his predecessors, he spoke to President Bush as, essentially, one theocrat to another. “If Prophet Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, or Jesus Christ were with us today,” he asked, “how would they have judged [our] behavior? Will we be given a role to play in the promised world, where justice will become universal and Jesus Christ (PBUH) will be present? Will they even accept us?” Ahmadinejad taunted Bush that the latter had betrayed Christian principles, imploring the American president to join him in reversing modern secularization and returning the world to God. “The Almighty has not left the universe, and humanity, to their own devices . . . there is a higher power at work and all events are determined by him.” He see-sawed between appealing 185

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to Bush as a fellow political theist and insisting on Islam as the one true faith, to which the rest of the world must convert. Invoking Christ, Ahmadinejad reminded Bush that Muslims, too, consider Jesus a holy prophet: We believe a return to the teachings of the divine prophets is the only road leading to salvation. I have been told that your excellency follows the teachings of Jesus (PBUH) and believes in the divine promise of the rule of the righteous on Earth . . . We also believe that Jesus Christ (PBUH) was one of the great prophets of the Almighty. He has been repeatedly praised in the Koran. Jesus (PBUH) has been quoted in the Koran as well: [19.36]. And surely, Allah is my Lord and your Lord, therefore serve him; this is the right path. The passage in question (one doubts Ahmadinejad chose it absent-mindedly) actually denies the Immaculate Conception and insists that Christians must convert to Islam or be damned: “when the fateful day arrives, woe to the unbelievers! . . . Our decree shall be fulfilled while they heedlessly persist in unbelief. For We shall inherit the earth and all who dwell upon it.” This language, stripped of Islamic specifics, would have been quite familiar to the evangelicals who twice gave Bush his office: “come to believe in and abide by these principles, that is, monotheism, worship of God, justice, respect for the dignity of man, belief in the Last Day,” and “we can overcome the present problems of the world . . . the result of disobedience to the Almighty and the teachings of the prophets.” This “belief in the Last Day” that the Iranian president and many American evangelicals hold is probably unlikely to accord with “respect for the dignity of man” in the long term (it is hard to think of a more thorough disqualification for public office than the belief that there is no future). But for fundamentalists like Ahmadinejad, modern secular society has robbed humans of dignity, not provided it. In that sense apocalypse would actually be preferable to bland ongoing compromise and coexistence. Most palatable, though, would be a new compromise on mutually theistic terms. Thus the letter’s conclusion pled, not for a solution to the Palestinian problem, not for nuclear rights, but to mutually crush secularism: Liberalism and Western style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the Liberal democratic system . . . We increasingly see that the people around the world are flocking toward a main focal point—that is the Almighty God . . . My question for you is: ‘Do you not want to join them?’ . . . Whether we like it or not, the world is gravitating toward faith in the Almighty and justice and the will of God will prevail over all things. Ahmadinejad urged Bush to accept the zeitgeist, perhaps believing the latter already desired to do so. He was candid: it is not that liberal democracy works for you but

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not for us, it does not work for anyone, and all should join in hastening its demise. This child of the first modern theocratic revolution possesses no small degree of bravado and bluster, but his premises are recognizable and not entirely far-fetched. Ahmadinejad obviously did not expect President Bush to concur in his prepostmortem on liberal democracy, but neither did anyone expect Bush to respond to the letter by affirming, proudly, the publicly secular character of modern Western societies and the founding of the United States by rationalist Deists. Why? The United States has always been given to outbreaks of religious fervor, but there may prove to be something different about the one that rose to national prominence in the 1970s, was key in electing Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and George W. Bush in the 2000s (“In the 2000 U.S. presidential election . . . religion was by far the strongest predictor of who voted for Bush and who voted for Gore— dwarfing the explanatory power of social class, occupation, or region”1), in turning the House of Representatives hard right in 1994, and in making John McCain accept Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008. Journalist Michelle Goldberg says the movement she calls “Christian nationalism” is qualitatively different from other religious revivals. Like America’s past Great Awakenings, the Christian nationalist movement claims that the Bible is absolutely and literally true. But it goes much further, extrapolating a total political program from that truth, and yoking that program to a political party. It is a conflation of scripture and politics that sees America’s triumphs as confirmation of the truth of the Christian religion, and America’s struggles as part of a cosmic contest between God and the devil. It claims supernatural sanction for its campaign of national renewal and speaks rapturously about vanquishing the millions of Americans who would stand in its way.2 It is in fact the most radical group within the Christian right, usually called “Dominionism” or “Reconstructionism,” that has been, despite a Calvinist-theocratic viewpoint blatantly at odds with most Americans’ values, the intellectual spine of the movement and the energizing core of its long march through the institutions.3 Dominionists represent a small minority even within Christian fundamentalism yet “in the average Christian bookstore, the section on Christian political activism is dominated by Recontructionist literature.”4 Reconstructionist intellectuals like R. J. Rushdoony, Gary North and D. James Kennedy admonished pre-Reagan conservative Christians for ignoring their faith’s built-in political program, excoriating the evangelicals of the 1960s and 1970s for retreating into an apolitical sanctuary. Today’s mainstream religious right may not embrace the Reconstructionist program in all its theocratic literalism, but on the whole the Reconstructionist view that Biblical Christianity provides a political program and not just an eschatology has prevailed, even among those who imbibe rapture literature.5 The religious right has often taken an “elite” or “liberal” media to task for allegedly portraying them as rural boobs. It is just as arguable that America’s mainstream media has misunderstood American religious fanaticism and inadvertently served

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the latter’s agenda. GOP electoral setbacks, however minor, have been used to proclaim the death of the religious right several times now. The prurient televangelist scandals of the 1980s were misinterpreted as signaling the demise of the whole endeavor. More recently the Tea Party movement has been seen as something novel, with its don’t tread on me rhetoric and focus on free market economics— yet the content of its rage against President Obama (and against “progressivism” in general) clearly parallels radical right-wing fundamentalism as it has existed at least since the 1970s. If reports of these interrelated movements’ powers can be exaggerated, reports of their deaths have been as well. The United States is threatened by disciplined pro-theocratic forces which, though unable to turn such a large, diverse, and historically authority-averse country into a Christian Iran, could certainly turn sections of it into a reasonable facsimile, de facto or de jure. A large-scale penetration of political institutions by the Christian right means the end of progressive liberal democracy.6 It can be theoretically reconciled with “Democracy” and “freedom” only if one accepts the consistently Orwellian manipulation of those terms by the movement’s spokespeople. It will be a considerable impediment to rational planning about our common future.

To Save Us All from Satan’s Power He that shall oppose himselfe . . . for things superfluous, is guilty of the warre that thereupon is to follow. Hobbes, Leviathan The political theology of the Christian right is often divided into two general groups, related to their respective eschatologies. Rapture or tribulation theology, represented by the popularity of Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth (1972) and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind (1995–) series, posits imminent end times during which the saved will be hastened to heaven in advance of a long period of strife and antichrist rule on earth. Reconstructionism or Dominionism, on the other hand, posits the necessity of a thousand-year rule of the righteous on earth to bring about Christ’s return. The latter program, outlined most influentially in twentiethcentury America by R. J. Rushdoony and his disciple Gary North—who accused his compatriots of having “forgotten that righteous civil government is a means of evangelism,” “forgotten about this tradition of evangelism through law”7—would seem to be the politically relevant one, requiring a greater degree of human voluntarism, the imposition of theocracy to realize God’s plan’s for humankind. In fact there is considerable overlap between the goals and rhetoric of the two belief systems and it is legitimate to refer to a single movement, despite inner divisions or theological inconsistencies. Whatever the success of Lindsey’s or LaHaye’s millennialist writings reveals about their readers, the rapture meme does not seem to have kept evangelical Christians out of politics, as Dominionists feared. The “inevitable cultural retreat”8 North predicted would follow upon Hal Lindsey’s

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popularity has not occurred, and the Christians North called sellouts have become a political force to be reckoned with. They agree with him about their country’s “need to be reformed by godly men who are reconstructing social institutions in terms of God’s revelation of His standards in His law.”9 Sara Diamond lists the “policy goals” of the Christian Right: For starters, abortion would be illegal. Homosexuals would be, if not invisible, then certainly unprotected from all types of discrimination. Children would pray in the schools, which would be run privately or by local school districts, with no government-mandated curricula. The entertainment media would voluntarily eliminate profanity from the airwaves and movie scripts. The range of ideas and images accessible in bookstores, libraries, magazines, and art exhibits would be sharply curtailed.10 Those are the goals of the mainstream Christian right. They may dovetail with some Americans’ non-theological sense that there was a decline in the moral quality of American life and culture after the 1960s. But fundamentalism cuts deeper than these familiar policy demands. It teaches a revisionist and paranoid view of American history over the past 400 years that resembles the anti-Catholic nativist groups of the nineteenth century and the John Birch Society of the mid-twentieth.11 The mainstream aspirations of 1988 presidential candidate Pat Robertson and groomed K-Street operative Ralph Reed led them to seek a divorce of the Christian Coalition and its sibling organizations from the post-John Birch radical right, but they largely failed.12 Pat Robertson’s account of history and geopolitics in his bestselling The New World Order (1991) reflects the conspiratorial fantasies of this “paranoid” line of American politics famously traced by Richard Hofstadter.13 That human history plays out a cosmic struggle between good and evil is to be expected from theology— Robertson names names. Even Republican president George H. W. Bush serves “a tightly knit cabal whose goal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer and his followers.”14 A seemingly central modern event was the formation of the Bavarian Illuminati by Adam Weishaupt in the late eighteenth century. In league with other secret societies like the Freemasons, international banking interests like the Rothschilds and Aby Warburg, and (most strangely) the epigones of John Ruskin and Cecil Rhodes, this cabal has caused virtually all the wars and financial crises of modern times, tirelessly seeking a global socialist state wherein the religion of secular humanism replaces all others. Tim LaHaye’s jeremiad on American public schools similarly identifies “a conspiracy . . . to destroy traditional Judeo-Christian moral values” hatched by “the Illuminati, Bilderbergers, Council on Foreign Relations, and more recently, the Trilateral Commission.”15 (This sort of thing has become familiar again via Glenn Beck and his followers’ secret-handshake invocations against “progressivism” and Woodrow Wilson.) It gets weirder, and more sectarian. Robertson, Rushdoony, LaHaye, and Francis Schaeffer all give a central role to the Unitarian Church and/or the writers

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of the Humanist Manifesto (1933), the latter serving as the former’s discipleship in aiming to fundamentally alter the terms of American culture and even world order.16 Humanism set about, in LaHaye’s account, “destroying our culture, families, and country—and one day will destroy the entire world.”17 The Civil War was not about slavery but rather the successful attempt of northern Unitarian elites to economically and culturally subjugate the Calvinist south, “accordingly plundered by American and foreign financial and industrial interests.” Its signal change was in the cultural and not the racial order: “Prior to the Civil War . . . the character of American life was not collectivistic or individualistic. It was Christian, familist and personal; a sense of community, personal and familist, generally prevailed.”18 By locating the emergence of this shadowy, Unitarian-Humanist movement in early nineteenth-century America, Revolutionary France, or Masonic Europe, LaHaye, Robertson, and Rushdoony avoided potentially embarrassing questions about the Enlightenment setting of America’s founding. For Rushdoony America’s “origins are Christian and Augustinian, deeply rooted in Reformation, medieval and patristic history”; its founding was “a Protestant feudal restoration.”19 Gary North, however, in one sense the most honest of these ideologues, concedes that the founding era was fatally compromised by Deism and other Enlightenment heresies. America’s true character is the lost Puritan world of small-scale religious establishments. The Constitution’s framers were “at best nominal Christians” so one must question “the soundness of the Constitutional settlement from a Biblical point of view.” A familiar story: decent ordinary citizens are betrayed by Godless elites. The ratification of the U.S. Constitution was, North says, a Masonic coup d’etat. The religious roots of America’s founding celebrated by evangelicals “are not hidden roots; they are missing roots.” North calls the Federalist papers “propaganda devices to persuade the voters retroactively to sanction the coup of 1787.” The entire Constitutional Convention was a power grab “by a small group of men [who] had long-since rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. The voters were Christians; the Convention’s leaders were . . . Unitarians.”20 Generally inoffensive people like Humanist Manifesto signatories John Dewey and Julian Huxley make limited sense as the advance guard of Satan. So the definition of the term “humanism” is stretched to cover every murderous dictatorship of modern times, Hitler’s and Stalin’s included. Rushdoony suggests Nazi and communist persecution of religious groups will be replicated in America: “Nazi Germany moved to the logical conclusion of humanistic thought more than a generation earlier than other nations of the West.”21 Humanism is “one of history’s most savage and intolerant faiths.”22 D. James Kennedy alleges, “the humanist ethicist has not even demonstrated that genocide, massacre or torture are ethically wrong.”23 Tim LaHaye provides diagrams in his books to illustrate this creed’s fruits. One entitled “The Religion of Secular Humanism” features a tree: its roots include Babylonianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism; its leaves crime, divorce, violence, VD, rape, and suicide. Another draws concentric circles around Humanism’s core, and in the outermost “lifestyle” layer we find: child pornography, incest, depression, terrorism, genocide, inflation, witchcraft,

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and Keynesian economics.24 Through Humanism “thousands of parents have already lost their children’s intellects to atheistic educators, sensual entertainers, liberal clergy . . . and a host of other anti-God, amoral influences.”25 LaHaye’s book defending the traditionalist patriarchal family includes a cartoon of an octopus labeled “secular humanism” with its tentacles wrapped around a television set, a school, a church, and Congress; the author compares his speaking out against this creed with Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn’s struggle against Soviet communism.26 Marvin Olasky, adviser to the George W. Bush administration and coiner of “compassionate conservatism,” got the Christian right’s ear blaming the “militant anti-Christian belief engulfing society” due to secular humanism for “the AIDS epidemic, the dissolution of the family, the abortion holocaust, growing economic weakness, the crisis of judge-made law, teen pregnancy, widespread financial fraud.”27 Why this emphasis on the Unitarians and American Humanist Association, groups any reasonable observer would have to consider politically puny—nonentities, even –compared to the organizational penumbras of the Christian Right? Consciously or not, Rushdoony, Robertson, LaHaye et al. have recast the old role of the Papacy in extremist Protestant demonology with the figure of the secular humanist: internationally organized, politically and culturally subversive, probably in league with Satan. Richard Hofstadter pointed out that such conspiratorial fantasies project inner desires for the power in question: thus, for example, the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan set up a suspiciously elaborate hierarchy and ceremonial pageantry. The Christian right has replicated what it alleges to be the tactics of the tentacular humanist conspiracy. As neoconservatives set up a scholarly parallel universe of foundations and think tanks in the 1970s and 1980s to counteract liberal academia, Christian right organizations set up a “Council for National Policy” (modeled on the Council on Foreign Relations) that functions as a GOP kingmaker.28 LaHaye, much of whose pre-fantasy novel career was financed by the cult leader Sun Myung Moon,29 recommended forming an American Christian Liberties Union armed with combative lawyers to fight the existing ACLU, calling the latter “the most harmful organization in American history.”30 At the extreme end was Bill Bright, founder of the Campus Crusade for Christ, who formed Christian students into cell groups to fight alleged communist and left-wing conspiracies. LaHaye praised Bright for “spearheading the training of thousands of Christians who are storming the spiritual wastelands of college campuses, leading students by the tens of thousands to Christ.”31 A blatant reconstruction of the fascist or Bolshevist organizational mindset can be found in the “Shepherding” phenomenon, an extreme program for Christian living indistinguishable from other cults.32 Christian fundamentalism’s fantastical self-image as a besieged and persecuted group, so out of sync with the reality of its extensive and well-financed political influence, evinces Hofstadter-style transference. Sara Diamond notes the ease with which people within the Christian Right view themselves as outsiders even as they wield political strength disproportionate to their numbers . . . that they are

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The Christian right’s attitude toward its relationship with political power is Janusfaced. Ralph Reed told the Republican Party that fundamentalist voters were responsible for their takeover of Congress in 1994. But far from signaling that their movement was a burgeoning monolith, the lesson of such electoral victories, Christian Coalition field director Guy Rodgers claimed, was that low voter turnout meant elections are swung by as little as 15 percent of the vote: a strategy memo observed, “It only takes 11% of the electorate to gain a seat in the House or the Senate. It only takes about 9% to gain a governorship. And it takes a mere 7% to gain an average mayoral or city council post.”34 The fact that fundamentalist ideologues like Focus on the Family’s James Dobson resorted to outsize metaphors of Diocletian-level persecution and electoral holy war—in 1990 Dobson announced the coming of a “Civil War decade” to replace the waning Cold War35—reveals that after years of preaching the American majority stood centrist, moderately to positively disposed toward abortion rights and gay rights. The latter is particularly galling. Decades ago Tim LaHaye found homosexuals “already far too influential to assure the moral sanity of the next generation.”36 Dobson, whose earliest claim to fame was as a psychologist advising parents to beat their children and pets, who made his fortune selling videos of the confession he offered to Ted Bundy, and who operates from a heavy militarized Colorado compound, recently told an Oklahoma rally that gay marriage “will destroy the earth.”37 Christian right intellectuals share, albeit on more apocalyptic terms, the neoconservative notion that a “new class” of social engineers infiltrated American political institutions and forced anti-majoritarian (or, if majorities happen to approve, then anti-Constitutional) legislation on decent ordinary citizens. Rather than pressing the impeachment or referendum recall of judges, or the Congressional override of judicial review, the religious right has for the most part pursued the new class’ own courts and/or executive branch bureaucracies. One illustrative example is that of David Hager, a Bush fils appointee to the FDA’s reproductive health advisory committee. The author of As Jesus Cared for Women, which recommends scriptural readings to treat PMS, Hager almost jettisoned OTC status for the morning-after pill despite its being vetted by the FDA. He later told evangelical students at Kentucky’s Asbury College, “God took that information, and he . . . influence[d] the decision . . . what Satan meant for evil, God turned into good.” Courts have increasingly legitimated, on freedom of conscience grounds, the refusals of pharmacists to refill prescriptions for contraception, of police officers to guard abortion clinics, and of nurses to treat gay and lesbian patients.38 Bush policy adviser Marvin Olasky is on record: what God reveals to us in the Old and New Testaments provides the framework for all learning. That’s the source from which we draw true understanding of the nature of humanity, the meaning of history, the legitimate values of society, and the place of biological creatures in the creation.39

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Despite its frequently attested religious exceptionalism among the OECD nations, the Unites States has experienced and is experiencing some version of the secularization trend.40 But the power of organized and disciplined fundamentalists rules out expecting any necessary correspondence between public attitudes and public policy. Circa the 2000s, few in the media seemed astonished when, at Confronting the Judicial War on Faith, congressmen and Senate staffers shared the stage with men who advocate the execution of sexual deviants and the replacement of democracy with the bloody strictures of the Old Testament.41 The ultra-Calvinism of Rushdoony and North, not just the familiar brand of Falwell or Robertson evangelism, has its foot in the mainstream door. What do they have in mind? North seeks an American recreation of “Puritan covenant theology: a sovereign God who rules hierarchically through human representatives in terms of His revealed law.”42 In his self-consciously Calvinist Institutes of Biblical Law Rushdoony proposes applying the death penalty for breaking the second commandment (i.e., no graven images), adultery, prostitution, sodomy, sex before marriage, adultery after it, apostasy, blasphemy, sacrifice to false gods, “being a wizard” and “being a false prophet or dreamer.” Hitler and Stalin were alleged to have exposed the genocidal outcomes of “humanism,” but Rushdoony and North do not blanch at a decidedly genocidal Theos—the God who approved “the extermination of the Canaanites, their fertility cults, and their religious prostitution.”43 God “holds whole societies responsible” for any immorality practiced within them, “which is why He wiped out the Canaanites.” Law and politics must police the sexual encounters of consenting adults, because God “promises visible, external, national judgment on whole societies that violate his moral laws . . . on sexually deviant societies.”44 Tim LaHaye’s God “first explained to Adam and Eve how to think so they could lead successful, fulfilled, obedient, and happy lives” (though under Satan’s influence these first of too many Humanists rebelled); he is “all powerful, holy in character, yet lovingly interested in every detail of human life” (though the author admits it “difficult to conceive of a God so powerful that He could create more universes than we can count—yet is interested in each facet of our lives”). And the pinnacle of this God’s love will be to destroy the earth He lovingly created as well as much of its human population.45

Kulturkampf and Spite The Court has mistaken a Kulturkampf for a fit of spite. Justice Scalia’s dissent to Romer v. Evans (1996) The modern Court’s negotiation of church-state issues in America leaves few satisfied. But nothing compares to the anger of the Christian right, an anger

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which—especially after the failure to overturn Roe v. Wade—frequently flirted with the advocacy of anti-judge violence or open resistance to the government.46 The pose of legitimate Lockean revolt had its intellectual coming-out in the 1990s, after abortion rights survived Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). In fact, the majority in Casey upheld every provision save one (a spousal notification rule) of Pennsylvania’s 1982 “Abortion Control Act,” with only Justice Blackmun deeming the entire Act invalid. This did not afford the Court respite from fulminations about judicial imperialism. The “theocon” journal First Things published a special issue entitled “The End of Democracy?” that the editors prefaced asking “whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime,” citing a lecture of Justice Scalia’s suggesting Christians “should not support a government that suppresses the faith or one that sanctions the taking of an innocent human life.”47 (Scalia later prayed with Reverend Rob Schenck, a co-founder of the radical anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, the day after the Bush v. Gore decision stopped the 2000 election48). Hadley Arkes concluded, “the courts are making the political regime unlivable for serious Christians and Jews.” Charles W. Colson—indicted Nixon administration operative converted to fundamentalism in prison—said “events in America may have reached the point where the only political action believers can take is some kind of direct, extrapolitical confrontation of the judicially controlled regime.”49 The First Things symposium was spurred by the upholding of abortion and physician-assisted suicide. In a sense “End of Democracy?” was the wrong title. It is true that the euthanasia case involved judicial invalidation of a state referendum banning the practice; but overall the tone of the symposium was that of “Here I stand, I can do no other,” antecedent to democratic outcomes. No one proposed support of abortion or euthanasia rights should they win majority votes. Robert P. George’s essay “The Tyrant State” reinterpreted American jurisprudence in light of a 1995 Papal encyclical.50 Colson’s essay “Kingdoms in Conflict” barely spoke the language of participatory democracy at all, citing St. Paul, the Old Testament prophet Daniel, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and John Knox.51 This was “originalism” of a different sort than Scalia’s or Bork’s. Throwing down the gauntlet, Colson wrote that if “Christians corporately determine that our present government has violated its God-given mandate,” the Church should “declare her independence, disavowing any moral legitimacy indirectly or unofficially provided for the state in the past . . . in effect, bringing the state under the transcendent judgment of God.” James Dobson agreed “that rulers may forfeit their divine mandate when they systematically contravene the divine moral law . . . our judiciary has, by act and intention, stepped out from under the moral law upon which governing authority depends.”52 Such language was met with nervous disapproval among more mainstream (and often non-Christian) conservative intellectuals like Gertrude Himmelfarb, Midge Decter, William Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and David Brooks. But the argument quickly reverted to a narrow one of proper public tone. No serious self-examination by secular neoconservatives as to who they had allied themselves with in the pursuit of political power occurred.

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As Hegel—prompter of the fast-dwindling optimistic wing of neoconservatism via Francis Fukuyama—had warned, if we “act as if [religion] were the essentially valid and determining factor in this [political] context . . . we thereby expose the state, as an organism within which lasting differences, laws, and institutions have developed, to instability, insecurity, and disruption.” The theocratic mind “repudiates all political institutions and legal order on the inner emotions, and as incommensurate with the infinity of these”; its natural response is to nurse a sense of grievance and hence also of self-conceit, and to find in one’s godliness all that is required in order to see through the nature of laws and of political institutions, to pass judgment on them, and to lay down what their character should and must be.53 And the neoconservatives were complicit in the extremist Jeremiad tone employed by the theoconservatives. Irving Kristol had not long before lamented “the clear signs of rot and decadence germinating within American society . . . no longer the consequence of liberalism but . . . the actual agenda of contemporary liberalism.”54 A book written by Judge Bork around the same time spoke the language of secession and/or violent cultural purification. He foresaw the “coming of a new dark ages” when all that the dwindling ranks of the moral can do is “seek sanctuary” in “small islands of decency and civility in the midst of a subpagan culture.” But perhaps there were other preemptive options: “Asked about how to diminish illegitimacy, a woman who worked with unmarried teenage mother replied tersely: ‘Shoot Madonna.’ That may be carrying censorship a bit far, but one sees her point . . . ”55 A bit far. (Tim LaHaye explains, “Among emissaries of Satan, there are probably no greater emissaries of Satan than some of the leaders of the rock music field . . . there is something Satanic about rock music.”56) This veering back and forth from the language of democratic populism to the language of embattled moral minority marks the unresolved tensions between the Christian right and mass politics. It is obviously untrue that majoritarian democracy will often produce outcomes amenable to the agenda of Colson or Dobson (let alone hardcore Dominionism)—thus the invocation of a higher law. And yet the same position, when not tethered to Papal encyclicals or the Book of Leviticus (perhaps instead to the writings of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson?), can be and has been used by the hated Courts to overturn illiberal democratic results.

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The view that post-1945 Establishment Clause/Free Exercise Clause jurisprudence is a mess is widely shared. Yet despite Scalia’s description of a court stumbling from case to case ad hoc with no coherent guiding principles, one general trend can be noticed. Secularists have been winning minor battles while losing the broader war. While symbolic cases involving public crèche displays and moments of silence painted the Supreme Court as irredeemably anti-religious in the eyes of Christian

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movement conservatives, Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between church and state was chipped away at in more meaningful ways, specifically in terms of the socioeconomic entanglement between religion and the state.57 And despite Christian right rhetoric of unelected liberal judges waging Kulturkampf against ordinary American believers, it is Justice Scalia who has been by far the most prone to speak the language of culture war. In part this owes to his idiosyncratic, and often quite enjoyable, style, but it remains telling that he and like-minded jurists were the model embraced by President George W. Bush and other mainstream channelers of the Christian Right’s agenda. Scalia’s dissents—even sometimes his majority decisions and concurrences—spout disdain at that now-familiar nightmare specter: a shady establishment of legal elites scoffing at the legitimate morals of ordinary folk. Scalia’s dissent to Edwards v. Aguillard (1987)—which ruled that a Louisiana statute “Forbidding the teaching of evolution when creation science is not also taught undermines the provision of a comprehensive scientific education”—lamented the “instinctive reaction that any governmentally imposed requirements bearing upon the teaching of evolution must be a manifestation of Christian fundamentalist repression,”58 as if the association of creationism with the religious right’s agenda were not fairly well-established. His dissent to Lee v. Weisman (1992), which ruled that prayers at a high school graduation violated the Establishment Clause, referred to secularist jurisprudence as an “instrument of destruction,” a “bulldozer of . . . social engineering.”59 His partial dissent to Planned Parenthood v. Casey warned potentously, and quite unnecessarily given the general tenor of his argument, of the “vast new class of abortion consumers and abortion proponents” created by Roe v. Wade’s “eliminating the moral opprobrium that had attached to the act.” Upholding Roe was an act of “Czarist arrogance” toward the morally inclined masses who “protest our saying that the Constitution requires what our society has never thought the Constitution requires.” He admonished, in what might now be called a Palin-esque idiom, that “The people know that their value judgments are quite as good as those taught in any law school—maybe better.”60 Another of Scalia’s most spirited dissents was to Romer v. Evans (1996), which struck down an Amendment to the Colorado constitution specifically denying civil rights protections to homosexuals. He was outraged by majority’s implication that a constitutional Amendment singling out a group of people for a lack of access to civil rights channels was motivated by anti-homosexual prejudice. It was actually “a modest attempt by seemingly tolerant Coloradoans to preserve traditional sexual mores against the efforts of a political powerful minority to revise those mores through use of the laws.” The Court unfortunately found “opposition to homosexuality as reprehensible as racial or religious bias.” Not so: opposition to homosexuality should be “resolved by normal democratic means,” means stymied by a “resolution favored by the elite class from which the Members of this institution are selected.”61 Scalia claimed, as he often does, to inhabit the legal high ground by not choosing sides in a culture war better resolved by political means. But much of what he wrote plainly implied that the Court took the wrong side: “I had thought that one

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could consider certain conduct reprehensible—murder, for example, or polygamy, or cruelty to animals—and could exhibit even ‘animus’ toward such conduct.” The rest of the court’s inability to equate disliking homosexuals with disliking murderers was due to their disconnection from ordinary Americans. When the Court takes sides in the culture wars, it tends to be with the knights rather than the villeins—and more specifically with the Templars, reflecting the views and values of the lawyer class from which the Court’s Members are drawn.62 Only dedicated anti-democratic elites, in collusion with a civil rights lobby with “high disposable income” and “political power much greater than their numbers, both locally and statewide” could “frustrate Colorado’s reasonable effort to preserve traditional American moral values”63. Scalia truly reached fever pitch protesting Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which struck down a Texas anti-sodomy statute and reversed Bowers v. Hardwick (1986). He expanded the scope of behavior to which consensual sodomy could be legitimately compared, now including “bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity . . . recreational use of heroin,” suggesting that reversing Bowers now precluded legislation against any of those behaviors. Does a political order acting rationally, and not on the basis of the Book of Leviticus, have no resources with which to distinguish the social effects of masturbation with those of incest and polygamy? Why would the Court press such a “massive disruption of the current social order”?64 The answer is, of course, hinted at in the question— genial demeanor notwithstanding, they are our Jacobins. From a secular liberal’s perspective, the astonishing thing about this record of jurisprudence was not, as Scalia alleged, the neglect of stare decesis in Lawrence but rather the explanation offered for Bowers in the first place. The Justices who upheld a Georgia statute criminalizing sodomy in 1986 sought no further for their reasoning than that “Proscriptions against that conduct have ancient roots,” whereas “To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching.” (Although Justice Powell noted in passing that the 20-year sentence allowed by the Georgia statute might “create a serious eighth amendment issue.”) Critics have pointed out how the slippery slope argument made by Scalia can easily be turned on its head: “A state that can ban homosexuals solely because of their purported deviation from religiously grounded moral law and the Scriptures of a particular religious tradition, however widely that tradition is shared, can ban Jews and can ban Baptists.”65 Justice Blackmun’s eloquent dissent accused the court of having completely abandoned the standard of secular justification previously set forth in Lemon v. Kurtzman (1972): The legitimacy of secular legislation depends . . . on whether the State can advance some justification for its law beyond its conformity to religious

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Blackmun closed his dissent by pointing out that “depriving individuals of the right to choose for themselves how to conduct their intimate relationships poses a far greater threat to the values most deeply rooted in our Nation’s history than tolerance of nonconformity could ever do.”66 While fundamentalists fulminated over losing largely symbolic battles over (hardly ever prosecuted) sodomy laws and prayers before football games, they won where it counts far more: the de-secularization of America’s schools. Justice Rehnquist’s dissent to Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), which struck down a moment of silence in Alabama’s schools, complained, Whether due to its lack of historical support or its practical unworkability, the Everson ‘wall’ [that is, the Court’s use of Thomas Jefferson’s ‘wall of separation’ metaphor in Everson v. Board of Education of the Township of Ewing (1947)] has proved all but useless as a guide to sound constitutional adjudication.67 But that much-disputed “wall,” like the three-pronged “Lemon test” (statutes must have a secular legislative purpose, their principal or primary effect must be neither to advance nor inhibit religion, and they must not foster an excessive entanglement between religion and government68), did little to prevent a series of decisions legitimating the religious right’s cause of sectarian schooling, and legitimating church-state entanglement more generally. “History supports the Supreme Court’s broad view that government aid to religion, even without preference to any church, violates the establishment clause,” writes legal scholar Leonard Levy in his exhaustive demonstration that “Congress rejected a narrow or nonpreferentialist intent,” placing a ban “not just on establishments of religion but on laws respecting them, a fact that allows a law to fall short of creating an establishment yet still be unconstitutional.”69 But in Bowen v. Kendrick (1988) the Court struck down a challenge to the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA), which, in providing federal funding to research and education on teenage sexuality, mandated the involvement of religious organizations. Justice Blackmun noted in his dissent that Congress had given “religious groups a central pedagogical and counseling role without imposing any restraints on the sectarian quality of the participation.”70 To little avail: the dual track of accommodation in non-symbolic matters and non-accommodation in symbolic ones continued. Blackmun’s dissent to Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District (1993), which ruled that federal funding provisions for sign-language interpreters

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also applied to sectarian schools, said, “Until now, the Court never has authorized a public employee to participate directly in religious indoctrination.”71 Mitchell v. Helms (2000) signaled a more sweeping teardown of Jefferson’s wall, though in practice it simply upheld a chapter of a 1981 law providing for sectarian schools to receive public funding. Even Justice O’Connor, who concurred in the decision, warned that “we have never held that a government-aid program passes constitutional muster solely because of the neutral criteria it employs as a basis for distributing aid,” and worried about “the plurality’s conclusion that actual diversion of government aid to religious indoctrination is consistent with the Establishment Clause.”72 Justice Souter took the decision to mean that “religious schools could be blessed with government funding as massive as expenditures made for the benefit of their public school counterparts, and religious missions would thrive on public money.” Souter’s vision is worth reproducing: Adopting the plurality’s rule would permit practically any government aid to religion so long as it could be supplied on terms ostensibly comparable to the terms under which aid was provided to nonreligious recipients. As a principle of constitutional sufficiency, the manipulability of this rule is breathtaking. A legislature would merely need to state a secular objective in order to legalize massive aid to all religions, one religion, or even one sect, to which its largess could be directed through the easy exercise of crafting facially neutral terms under which to offer aid favoring that religious group. Short of formally replacing the Establishment Clause, a more dependable key to the public fisc or a cleaner break with prior law would be difficult to imagine.73 When Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002) upheld vouchers, Souter said “every objective underlying the prohibition of religious establishment is betrayed by this scheme . . . something has to be said about the enormity of the violation . . . in the matter of educational aid the Establishment Clause has largely been read away.”74 And the re-Christianization of education may be only one of the many changes in store if the influence of judicial “fundamentalists” or “originalists” like Scalia and Thomas continues to achieve Supreme Court majorities. As legal scholar Cass Sunstein points out, the adoption of Constitutional Law as understood by many of these ideologues could legitimate at a state level sexual and racial discrimination, the imposition of poll taxes and the reversal of one person one vote; states could establish religions, regulate speech, and ban not only abortion and sodomy but contraception outright.75

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Catholic right-wing jurists embraced by Protestant fundamentalists as a judicial vanguard: an ecumenicalism, of sorts, though how permanent a one I could not

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speculate. Ignatius Loyola’s famous paean to brainwashing children is not foreign to the Protestant side of our religious right. The schools are the central institution in a hoped-for Christian reconstruction of the United States. The Dominionist plan is simple: “shut down all taxpayer-financed schools.”76 For Rushdoony “what is needed badly is the disestablishment of the schools—the separation of school and state.”77 “Christians complain about taxation,” Gary North writes, “but they have tithed their children to the state.”78 More mainstream evangelicals support government-funded school choice. There is no one type of religious school, of course, and many have posted impressive results. On a broader cultural level, though, there is much to worry about should a large-scale transfer of public funds, not to mention public confidence, occur between a faltering public school system and its increasingly religious alternatives. If asked about the issues that divide public schools and their religious counterparts, most would probably think of evolution first. But there were trends at work in the flight to fundamentalist schools other than wanting creationism taught or standards of morality and achievement upheld. Undoubtedly resistance to integration was a major, if not the major, factor in the development of an alternative Christian private school system. Jerry Falwell first made his name as an enemy of integration on Biblical grounds, founding his Lynchburg Christian Academy as a “private school for white students”; only when such an ideology became too unpalatable did his animus shift to homosexuality and abortion.79 When the Supreme Court struck down Bob Jones University’s ban on interracial dating, Bob Jones Jr. said, “We’re in a bad fix in America when eight evil old men and one vain and foolish woman can speak a verdict on American liberties.” His son Bob Jones III agreed: “We’re mourning the death of freedom—religious freedom. It’s been murdered by the Supreme Court today. I have pity for the heathens who sit on the Supreme Court, pity for their damned souls and blighted minds.”80 Beyond racial integration, there was a resistance to liberalizing social trends more broadly. Public schools and Universities came to occupy a special place alongside the heathen Court in the Christian right’s demonology of a decadent, pro-gay, anti-family secular humanist agenda. Frank Peretti’s Darkness novels, a popular precursor to Left Behind, “feature legions of soul-stealing demons who like to congregate near public schools, progressive churches, new age retreat centers and think-tanks, and especially universities . . . demons control university professors, who train misguided educators and future leaders, while also shaping reprehensible public school curricula.”81 There is a chicken-egg problem in the Christian right’s indictment of a morally decadent society demanding a theocentric solution. On nearly every cultural indicator that fundamentalists cite when they speak of America’s moral decay, their strongholds do the worst. “Middle America,” that traditionalist redoubt resisting the coastal lotus-eaters and immoralists, is little more than a volkisch myth. The “red states” (to use the popular ca. 2000s terminology, though it oversimplifies) have higher rates of murder, teenage pregnancy, divorce and illegitimacy than the blue states.82 The “states with the highest violent crime rates also fall into the highest

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bracket for fundamentalist believers” while “seven of the states with the lowest fundamentalist church membership rest in the bottom third for crime rate”—and atheists, who make up around 15 percent of the U.S. population, are less than one percent of its prison system.83 The high level of pornography addiction among evangelicals dedicated to its extirpation is an open secret within the movement. The communities where abstinence education and “purity balls”—where teenage girls dance with their fathers as if they were on dates and then pledge to stay chaste until they marry—are most widespread have higher levels of STD’s and a lower average age for loss of virginity than the rest of the country.84 Perhaps fundamentalist religious cultures arise in response to bleak cultural circumstances, especially if a mixture of unregulated capitalism and a lapsed safety net has produced a high degree of inequality and economic uncertainty.85 Whatever the chicken and whatever the egg in the exceptional regions of American exceptionalism, the data recommends skepticism toward evangelical claims about the moral necessity of religion for the social order. And in some highly troublesome areas fundamentalist religion is the disease and not the cure. Children in fundamentalist environments are not only at higher risk for teen pregnancy, but physical abuse and incest as well. One study found that the “three characteristics of families at high risk for sexual abuse . . . directly correlate with fundamentalist ideals.” These include a “patriarchal family structure” plus an environment where “sex [is] considered sinful, which confuses the distinction most make between acceptable and unacceptable sexual behavior,” such that “sexual activity within families becomes hidden behind a curtain of secrecy no one wants to talk about.”86 Another study found the rate of sexual abuse by biological fathers in fundamentalist homes to be higher than that of stepfathers in the population at large87 (stepfathers are generally around one hundred times more likely to physically or sexually abuse their children than are biological fathers). Within the ranks of the religious, the risk of spousal and child abuse rises in accordance with the conservatism and rigidity of the denomination.88 The Catholic Church’s scandalous protection of its child-raping priests is well known, but similar omertà cultures have developed in smaller scale fundamentalist religious communities across the country, where the government has effectively ceded sovereignty in exchange for empty promises that congregations will police themselves. The U.S. has allowed women and children to live de facto under a rule of law pretty indistinguishable from what they would face de jure under the Taliban.89 It is not hard to see why such outcomes follow upon the inculcation of Biblical or Quranic literalism more than from some allegedly amoral cocktail of Dewey, Freud, and cable television. Human sexuality needs no help from Jehovah to be girt round with fear and taboo, to be implicated as equally in brutal as in loving emotions. No Theos can help us here, and there is considerable evidence that he—incorporating many characteristics of the abusive/incestuous father, hyperconcerned, hyper-censorious, and creepily proprietary about the erotic lives of his children—is a lot more trouble than he’s worth. Monotheism’s major texts exemplify Neolithic social structures where daughters and wives were the literal

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property of fathers and husbands. As LaHaye puts it, “God intended man to be the provider, protector, leader, and priest for his wife and family”; “It is essential to family harmony that the wife submit to her husband’s leadership for the Lord’s sake,” and that he “trains [his family] to obey [God’s] principles.”90 Those “principles” represent a world where a woman’s sexuality was to be not only harshly policed by her kin, but could also be traded as currency by them. At the same time that they mandate continual procreation, they are to varying degrees draconian anti-sexual screeds, distrusting the orgasm as a mechanism for pleasure or release of tension. Hence, perhaps, American fundamentalism’s heady mix of macho-man militarism and suppressed (if hardly concealed) homoeroticism, so reminiscent of Germany’s Weimar-era radical right. And hence the appeal of the virile, muscular “Warrior Jesus,” so much closer to the Muhammad of the Qu’ran than to the Christ of the gospels. Whether the current anti-Muslim xenophobia of the American far right is ideologically genuine or politically opportunistic, along many dimensions of worldview this does appear to be the narcissism of small differences.

The Intellectual Framework of Monotheist Theocracy . . . the gruesome appearance of a protracted suicide of reason . . . sacrifice of all freedom, of all pride, of all self-confidence of the spirit . . . enslavement and self-derision, self-mutilation . . . Enlightenment is infuriating. Slaves want the unconditional; they understand only tyranny, even in morality. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil It is often said that religious fundamentalism is a reflection of modernity as much as it is a rejection of it, and while this commonplace can be overworked, it explains the theocracy’s frequent recourse to totalitarian rhetoric of real liberation. Just as the founders of the Ba’ath Party tried to Arabize blood-and-soil German fascism, the influential Islamist intellectual Sayyid Qutb sought to Islamicize the Leninist plan for a “vanguard . . . marching through the vast ocean of Jahiliyyah [ignorance of divine guidance] which has encompassed the entire world . . . it should keep itself somewhat aloof from this all-encompassing Jahiliyyah and should also keep some ties with it.”91 Maulana Maududi, Pakistani Islamism’s preeminent intellectual, was strongly influenced by Alexis Carrel, a philosopher-propagandist for Vichy France, and impressed by European totalitarian movements generally.92 Maududi founded the radical Shiite Jamaat-e-Islami party in 1941 on Leninist lines. Ali Shariati, a major intellectual influence behind the Iranian revolution, had studied in Paris and had been influenced by Fanon, Sartre, and Che Guevara; he wrote pamphlets entitled Red Shi’ism and What is to Be Done93 and lashed out against “capitalism armed with science and technology—a new magician bewitching humanity into new captivity amid the massive pitiless wheels of mechanism and technobureaucracies.”94 Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan Al-Banna was an admirer of Hitler and Mussolini, and rhapsodized violent self-sacrifice in a manner thus

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recognizable: “Death is an art and the most exquisite of arts when practiced by the skillful artist . . . death in the path of Allah is our highest aspiration.”95 American fundamentalists have spoken in similar terms. A loose network of religious lawmakers, captains of industry and dedicated foot soldiers often referred to shadowily (including among its own) as “The Family” or “The Fellowhip”—tribute-payers and/or overt members have included Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, both President Bushes, Edward Meese, James Watt, William Rehnquist, Clarence Thomas, and countless U.S. Congresspeople—describes itself as an elite “core” tasked to recreate the world. Prayer groups referred to as “cells” have met in the Pentagon and Defense Department. The Family does not officially associate itself with any grassroots Christian evangelical movement, or even any recognizable theology, but to most analysts its outlook seems essentially similar to Dominionism/Reconstructionism. Official literature outlining the group’s program lists among its organizational models the Mafia, Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Osama Bin Laden—understand them, its tutees are told, and you will understand the “total Jesus” of the Fellowship. “Hitler, Lenin, and many others understood the power of a small core of people” is a typically nonjudgmental line from a document distributed to the inner circle.96 The content of their politics bears little relationship to Nazism or Leninism, of course; but their choice of organizational models mirroring (allegedly) the revolutionary ethos of the first century’s apostles is telling, and troubling. This is a return to the principles of a rather different “founding era” than that appealed to by the Tea Party and its media boosters. Here the similarities with jihadism are overt. Sayyid Qutb—whose brother radicalized Osama Bin Laden at university in Jeddah97—sought to reintroduce the puritanical ethos of seventh-century Islamic warriors into decadent modern societies, to “equip the soul with emotions, perceptions and experiences similar to those that accompanied the revelation of the Qur’an,” the “war against one’s own sinful tendencies and against the outer enemy.”98 In outline this should be familiar to observers of the American Christian right: let us reclaim an original purity from infectious corrupting influences. Maududi, like Qutb, looked back to the Golden Age of the Caliphate, praising its “singleness of purpose . . . its sole aim was to propagate the Unity of Allah, disseminate good and eliminate the forces of evil and infidelity.” It was “a united, cohesive polity . . . there was no social disorder whatsoever.”99 Qutb says that longterm coexistence with non-Muslim society is impossible because privatization of religion is itself a “jahili” perversion. In any case “Islam is unique in its ability to provide guidance for the entire range of human activity.” Thus Islamism “does not separate spiritual and secular life, for what seems to belong to the citizen and to Caesar is in reality God’s property.” Proper religiosity “is comprehensive and covers all aspects of life just as capillaries and nerves direct themselves to all parts of the body.”100 Organic metaphors proliferate: “Islam . . . is intended to penetrate into the veins and arteries of a vital society”; it is not “merely a belief,” it is “a way of life . . . it is the duty of Islam to annihilate all . . . obstacles in the way of

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universal freedom.” One must not abide “a society in which God’s . . . domain is restricted to the heavens and His rule on earth is suspended,” i.e., a modern society that separates church and state. To believe the latter represents progress is misguided: Islam is “the only civilized society, and the jahili societies, in all their various forms, are backward”; despite such backwardness “a slight influence” from “Western sources” will “pollute the clear spring of Islam.” Thus the Muslim citizen ultimately “cannot accept any mixing with Jahiliyyah . . . Either Islam will remain, or Jahiliyyah: Islam cannot accept or agree to a situation which is half-Islam and half-Jahiliyyah.” Qutb’s only conciliation is that Muslims can utilize the infidel “to learn abstract sciences such as chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, medicine, industry, agriculture, administration (limited to its technical aspects), technology, military arts and similar sciences and arts”101 Qutb promised the overthrow of all existing societies to the extent that they are non-Muslim or unwilling to grant Islam a preeminent place, but the West played the central villain’s role. His autobiographical account cited encountering libertine American women while studying abroad as a spur to his radicalization; discomfort with female sexuality imbues much of this writing. Maulana Maududi’s advice to pious Muslim women implored, “purify the atmosphere of your homes,” in particular “the outrageous elements of modernity that have crept into our homes under the British influences.”102 Fear of contamination, replete with medical analogies, is related to the premium placed on female virginity and chastity, and the disgust with libertarian societies that offer other values. More than half the laws passed in Iran in 1981 codifying Qur’anic legal authority concerned sexual matters.103 Westernization means “moral depravity and adultery,” part and parcel “of the permissive society where women freely mix with men.”104 Qutb thought “sensual enjoyment and sexual satisfaction lead to a . . . morass of nervous and psychological disease, sexual perversion, constant anxiety, illness and lunacy, frequent crime, and the lack of any human dignity in life.” The West has forged a world wherein “mankind is wretched and is tired of bearing the burden of its materialistic civilization and luxury,” where “intellectual and sexual perversion are eating away the body of ” civilization.105 Islamism represents “a stable concept of fundamentals and values,” an alternative to a “Europe . . . cut loose from the moorings of belief ” lingering at its “miserable end, faintly disguised by a false glow and deceptive gleam that conceal[s] misery, confusion, decadence, and degeneracy.”106 Qutb’s redescription of freedom as submission to theocracy remains evocative. Theocracy will bring humans “into submission to God” and thereby “free them from servitude to other human beings . . . deliver them from the clutches of human lordship and man-made laws, value systems and traditions so that they will acknowledge the sovereignty and authority of the One True God and follow His law in all spheres of life.”107 Secular philosophers like Kant who also saw freedom as resistance to instinctual desire stressed self-emancipation: rational rules the human community legislates for itself. The theocratic equivalent becomes “escape from freedom”108 into the arms of the all-knowing and all-powerful father, an escape not only from the intolerability of desire but also the intolerable uncertainties of

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having to order our own affairs: “This religion is really a universal declaration of the freedom of man from servitude to other men and from servitude to his own desires . . . it is a declaration that sovereignty belongs to God alone and that He is the Lord of all the worlds.” To Qutb “the implementation of the Shari’ah” meant “actually freeing people from their servitude to other men to bring them into the service of God.”109 This was a common trope among Islamist intellectuals. Maududi wrote, “A Muslim’s concept of freedom is to shake off the yoke of every created being in order to serve Allah alone.”110 Social authority is deconstructed in order to reconstruct the most absolute authority imaginable. How easily freedom and slavery are blurred in this vision was revealed by Qutb’s discussion of the status of non-Muslims under Islamic rule, hard to parse and worth our attention: It is not the intention of Islam to force its beliefs on people, but Islam is not merely ‘belief.’ As we have pointed out, Islam is a declaration of the freedom of man from servitude to other men. Thus it strives from the beginning to abolish all those systems and governments which are based on the rule of man over men and the servitude of one human being to another. When Islam releases people from this political pressure and presents to them its spiritual message, appealing to their reason, it gives them complete freedom to accept or not to accept their beliefs. However, this freedom does not mean that they can make their desires their gods, or that they can choose to remain in the servitude of other human beings, making some men lords over others. Whatever system is to be established in the world ought to be on the authority of God, deriving its laws from Him alone . . . Indeed, Islam has the right to take the initiative. Islam is not a heritage of any particular race or country; this is God’s religion and it is for the whole world. It has the right to destroy all obstacles in the form of institutions and traditions which limit man’s freedom of choice. It does not attack individuals nor does it force them to accept its beliefs; it attacks institutions and traditions to release human beings from their poisonous influences, which distort human nature and which curtail human freedom. It is the right of Islam to release mankind from servitude to human beings so that they may serve God alone, to give practical meaning to its declaration that God is the true Lord of all and that all men are free under Him.111 The above suggests that people are both free to reject Islam and are not; that Islam both forces itself upon the world and does not; and that “rights” belong not only to individuals who may want to reject the religious claims of others (a form of interpersonal coercion Qutb does not worry about), but also to those very same imperial idea-structures. The resolution of these conflicts is farmed out to the Theos, whose decision Qutb expects he knows in advance. Supposedly pro-tolerance passages in the Qu’ran are dispensed with thus: “Islam, being the last divine path for humanity, has an essential right to establish its own system on earth so that all humanity can enjoy its

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blessings, while every individual enjoys the liberty to follow his chosen creed, for ‘there is no compulsion in religion.’ ”112 Rushdoony’s rereading of a famous New Testament passage is even more direct: “Paul reduces the state and Caesar from lordship to servitude to God, to a diaconate. The state’s calling and duty is to be a terror to evildoers and to be God’s minister . . . Too often, however, the church has seen Romans 13 has a blank check for the state.”113 But the blank check for the state remains—it simply must readapt itself to an older code of laws. Take Ayatollah Khomeini’s description of his Islamic “republic” as “constitutional”: “not . . . in the current sense of the word, i.e., based on the approval of laws in accordance with the opinion of the majority” but “constitutional in the sense that the rulers are subject to . . . conditions that are set forth in the noble Qur’an and the Sunna of the Most Noble Messenger . . . in Islam the legislative power and competence to establish laws belongs exclusively to God Almighty.”114 Qutb moves fluidly from ascribing rights to individuals to ascribing them to groups to ascribing them to God—an asymmetrical conflict. The first aspect of divinity is absolute rule, whence arises the right to legislate for His worshippers, to ordain paths for their lives, to prescribe values on which their lives should be based. It is not possible to bear witness that there is no god other than God without recognizing that God alone has the right to ordain the path which human life should follow, and without attempting to establish that path, and none other, in human life.115 The most allegedly tractable passages in holy texts count for little when subjected to the Orwellian reinterpretations of fundamentalists—and it will not do to dispose of the problem by saying that they have “misinterpreted” or “distorted” said texts, which just begs the question. America’s Dominionist thinkers saw in the Enlightenment a “fertile ground for a radical statism and a radical anarchism.” Since Enlightenment Deism, but even going back to the Aristotelian metaphysics that Christianity never successfully purged, “God became the absentee landlord of the spiritual universe.”116 “Anarchism” here describes any social order not based on Old Testament theocracy; “statism” describes any polity that expropriates the localized control of paternalistic households and churches. Benjamin Constant’s freedom chez les modernes is, on this view, simultaneously permissive and oppressive, or rather oppressive because it is too permissive. “The kind of freedom commonly claimed by men in our day,” Rushdoony says, “is not the freedom of the creature but the freedom of would-be Gods.”117 Secular society, Tim LaHaye alleges, “is becoming too totalitarian and too permissive.”118 Rushdoony and North insist that theology survives science and secularization, one way or another: “every state or social order is a religious establishment.” While “the state as a religious establishment has progressively disestablished Christianity” and professed neutrality, it “in fact established humanism as the religion of the state,” masking this through “deception on the part of the courts.” But separation is unwanted and impossible: “The question is

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simply, which religion will undergird law and society?”119 The absentee landlord seeks his birthright: plantation overseer. With, of necessity, a great deal of authority farmed out to his quislings—witness Khomeini’s description of the bailiwick of the Imam, “a viceregency pertaining to the whole of creation, by virtue of which all the atoms in the universe humble themselves before the holder of authority.”120 It simply will not do for political theorists to treat religious fundamentalism as chiefly an issue of a majoritarian democracy’s inclusiveness.121 Fanatics who have outlined a blatantly unfree theocratic model for politics have penetrated the American corridors of power, while speaking the language of pluralism and democracy only to those who require it. At other times they speak the fascist/Bolshevik language of chosen minorities molding the world in their image, with a terrorized population occasionally allowed a plebiscite to ratify the rule of church-approved politicians. The solicitude about founding principles and the Constitution is entirely fraudulent; politicians and judges who do not fall into Scriptural lines are to be simply removed (if not, more ideally, imprisoned or executed). In the meantime there is to be one moral/legal system for the chosen, and another for the heathen. This is the real story behind the spectacles of confession, contrition, and expiation so common in our political pageantry. It is a far more serious matter than the familiar exposure of hypocrisy that elicits the familiar liberal schadenfreude—the gay-baiting pastor caught at the truck stop, the Christ-fearer tied to Jack Abramoff, the family values politician with multiple divorces, and so forth. Exposure of hypocrisy means nothing in a movement whose baseline purpose is to bring people into its fold simply on the basis of their affirming blind faith in its premises, whatever their most recent behavior. There is no necessary issue of hypocrisy at all within a belief structure where Satan and his temptations have a perpetual explanatory veto. This is why James Dobson’s simultaneous vituperation against homosexuals and embrace of a “born-again” Ted Bundy earned him nary a raised eyebrow among the faithful. Christian Reconstructionism is not, and never was, about the day-to-day moral decency of society; it has much larger goals, toward which the pursuit of power trumps all else. It is our stealth version of Locke’s proviso for intolerability, the position “that Faith is not to be kept with Hereticks.”

Notes 1. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 197. 2. Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (New York: Norton, 2006), 6. 3. See Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (New York: Free Press, 2006), 19, 22–3. 4. Sara Diamond, Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1989), 136. 5. Fred Clarkson, Eternal Hostility: The Struggle between Theocracy and Democracy (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1997), chap. 4.

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6. That a large step in this direction has already occurred, and that the G.O.P. is essentially a fundamentalist Christian party, is the message of Max Blumenthal’s gripping piece of reporting Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party (New York: Nation Books, 2009). A similar judgment is handed down by ex-Republican strategist Kevin Phillips in his American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (New York: Viking, 2006). See also Jeff Sharlet, C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010). 7. Gary North and Gary DeMar, Christian Reconstruction: What It Is, What It Isn’t (Tyler, TX: Institute For Christian Economics, 1991), 37. 8. Ibid., 70. 9. Gary North, Is the World Running Down?: Crisis in the Christian Worldview (Tyler, TX: Institute For Christian Economics, 1988), 243. 10. Sara Diamond, Not by Politics Alone: The Enduring Influence of the Christian Right (New York: Guilford, 1998), 7. 11. For a good overview see David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). 12. On the John Birch Society origins of the New Right see Diamond, Spiritual Warfare, 54; Goldberg, Kingdom Coming, 10–1, 160–5; Clarkson, Eternal Hostility, 86–7; Blumenthal, Republican Gomorrah, 18–19; and Martin Durham, The Christian Right: The Far Right and the Boundaries of American Conservatism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). 13. See Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963) and The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965). 14. Pat Robertson, The New World Order (Dallas, TX: Word Publishing, 1991), 37. 15. Tim LaHaye, The Battle for the Public Schools (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1983), 46. 16. See Francis Schaeffer’s influential A Christian Manifesto (Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1981), esp. 20–4, 53, 62; and, for an explanation of nearly all of American history as the playing-out of a cultural war between Calvinists and Puritans on one side and Unitarians and Humanists on the other see R. J. Rushdoony, The Politics of Pornography (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1974), 123–5. 17. Tim LaHaye and David Noebel, Mind Siege: The Battle For Truth in the New Millennium (Nashville, TN: Word Publishing, 2000), 35. 18. R. J. Rushdoony, This Independent Republic: Studies in the Nature and Meaning of American History (Nutley, NJ: The Craig Press, 1964), 71, 79–80. 19. Rushdoony, This Independent Republic, 7. 20. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, TX: Institute For Christian Economics, 1989), 261–2, 413–42, 461, 535. 21. R. J. Rushdoony, Christianity and the State (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1986), 39, 51, 96. 22. R.J. Rushdoony, Law and Liberty (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1984), 52. 23. D. James Kennedy, Reconstruction: Biblical Guidelines for a Nation in Peril (Fort Lauderdale, FL: Coral Ridge Ministries, 1982), 3–4. 24. LaHaye, The Battle for the Public Schools, 91, 247. 25. LaHaye and Noebel, Mind Siege, 47.

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26. Tim LaHaye, The Battle for the Family (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1982), 31, 33. 27. Herbert Schlossberg and Marvin Olasky, Turning Point: A Christian Worldview Declaration (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1987), 7. 28. Hedges, American Fascists, 138–41; Goldberg, Kingdom Coming, 11–12. 29. Diamond, Not by Politics Alone, 72; on the extensive ties between Moon’s Unification Church and the American religious right see Clarkson, Eternal Hostility, chap. 3. 30. LaHaye, The Battle for the Public Schools, 205. 31. LaHaye and Noebel, Mind Siege, 220. 32. Diamond, Not by Politics Alone, 61. 33. Ibid., 5. 34. Ibid., 4, 79; Clarkson, Eternal Hostility, 20–2. 35. Diamond, Not by Politics Alone, 1–3. 36. Tim LaHaye, The Battle for the Family (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1982), 200. 37. Goldberg, Kingdom Coming, 66. 38. Ibid., 150, 156; Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 257. 39. Schlossberg and Olasky, Turning Point, 66. 40. See Steve Bruce, God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), chap. 11. 41. Goldberg, Kingdom Coming, 157. 42. North, Political Polytheism, 133, 249. 43. R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, NJ: The Craig Press, 1973), 76–8, 394–402. 44. Gary North, Unconditional Surrender: God’s Program For Victory (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1983), 262, 283. 45. LaHaye and Noebel, Mind Siege, 47, 57–8. 46. Goldberg, Kingdom Coming, 160. 47. The End of Democracy? The Celebrated First Things Debate With Arguments Pro and Con, ed. Mitchell S. Muncy (Dallas, TX: Spence Publishing Company, 1997), 3, 8. 48. Sharlet, The Family, 258. 49. Ibid., 39–40, 44. 50. Ibid., 53–62. 51. Ibid., 45–9. 52. Ibid., 49, 81–2. 53. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §270. 54. Irving Kristol, “My Cold War,” The National Interest, Spring 1993. 55. Robert H. Bork, Slouching toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: ReganBooks, 1996), 63, 143. 56. LaHaye, The Battle for the Family, 195–6. 57. See Noah Feldman, Divided by God: America’s Church-State Problem—And What We Should Do about It (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005), 212, 217. 58. 482 U.S. 578, 634. 59. 505 U.S. 632. 60. 505 U.S. 833. 61. 517 U.S. 636. 62. 517 U.S. 644–52.

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63. ibid. 64. 539 U.S. 590–2, 602. 65. Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case against Religious Correctness (New York: Norton, 1996), 129. 66. 478 U.S. 192–7. 67. 472 U.S. 107. 68. 403 U.S. 613. 69. Levy, The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill, NC and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), xvii, 111, 118. 70. 487 U.S. 626, 641. 71. 509 U.S. 18. 72. 530 U.S. 839–40. 73. 530 U.S. 885, 901n, 912–913. 74. 536 U.S. 711, 717. 75. Cass R. Sunstein, Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong for America (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 63–5. 76. North, Is the World Running Down?, 212. 77. Rushdoony, Law and Liberty, 138. 78. North, Unconditional Surrender, 183. 79. See Blumenthal, Republican Gomorrah, 21, 26. 80. Paul F. Parsons, Inside America’s Christian Schools (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987), 122. 81. Glenn R. Shuck, Marks of the Beast: The Left Behind Novels and the Struggle for Evangelical Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 58. 82. Hedges, American Fascists, 46. 83. The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America, ed. Kimberly Blaker (New Boston, MI: New Boston Books, 2003), 98, 136. 84. Blumenthal, Republican Gomorrah, 68, 157. 85. See Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular, 4–5, for a theory that religious devotion correlates with economic uncertainty. 86. The Fundamentals of Extremism, 55. 87. Ibid., 56. 88. Ibid., 57, 92. 89. See the disturbing analysis in Marci A. Hamilton, God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 12–49, 66–77. 90. LaHaye, The Battle for the Family, 144–5, 211. 91. Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (Cedar Rapids, IA: Unity, 1980), 12. 92. Malise Ruthven, A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America (London and New York: Granta, 2002), 68–9. 93. See Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, trans. Anthony F. Roberts (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2002), 34, 37; and Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies (New York: Penguin, 2004), 122, 145. 94. Ali Shari’ati, Marxism and Other Western Fallacies: An Islamic Critique, trans. R. Campbell (Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press, 1980), 39. 95. Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 209. 96. See Sharlet, The Family, 1–55, 254–5, 380, and C Street, 8, 16–17, 88.

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97. Ruthven, A Fury for God, 198–9. 98. Sayyid Qutb, Basic Principles of the Islamic Worldview, trans. Rami David (North Haledon, NJ: Islamic Publications International, 2006), 3. 99. Maulana Maududi, Selected Speeches and Writings, 2 vols., trans. S. Zakir Aijaz (Karachi: International Islamic Publishers, 1981), I, 85. 100. Sayyid Qutb, Islam and Universal Peace (Indianapolis, IN: American Trust Publications, 1977), 3. 101. Qutb, Milestones, 39, 75, 93–4, 108–9, 116, 130. 102. Maududi, Selected Speeches and Writings, I, 66. 103. Ruthven, A Fury for God, 123. 104. Qutb, Islam and Universal Peace, 32, 34. 105. Sayyid Qutb, This Religion of Islam (Riyadh: International Islamic Publishing House, 1967), 25, 97. 106. Qutb, Basic Principles of the Islamic Worldview, 77, 87. 107. Qutb, Milestones, 45. 108. See Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1941); many of Fromm’s thoughts about totalitarianism can be usefully transferred to fundamentalist religion. 109. Ibid., 57–9. 110. Maududi, Selected Speeches and Writings, II, 3. 111. Qutb, Milestones, 61, 75. 112. Qutb, Basic Principles, 13. 113. Rushdoony, Christianity and the State, 100. 114. Ruhollah Khomeini, Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations, trans. Hamid Algar (London: KPI, 1985), 55. 115. Qutb, This Religion of Islam, 15–6. 116. Rushdoony, Christianity and the State, 2, 15–7. 117. R. J. Rushdoony, Intellectual Schizophrenia: Culture, Crisis and Education (Philadelphia, PA: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1961), 115. 118. Tim LaHaye, Faith of Our Founding Fathers (Brentwood, TN: Wolgemunt & Hyatt, 1987), 189. 119. Rushdoony, Christianity and the State, 7, 84. 120. Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, 64. 121. E.g., Jeffrey C. Isaac, Matthew F. Filner, and Jason C. Bivins, “American Democracy and the New Christian Right: a critique of apolitical liberalism,” in Democracy’s Edges, ed. Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordon (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chap. 13.

Conclusion Academic Counter-Enlightenment and the Recline of the West The legacy of the Enlightenment project—which is also the legacy of Westernization—is a world ruled by calculation and willfulness which is humanly unintelligible and destructively purposeless . . . The most fundamental Western commitment, the humanist conception of humankind as a privileged site of truth . . . which re-emerges in secular and naturalistic form in the Enlightenment project of human self-emancipation through the growth of knowledge, must be given up. John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake Toward the end of his life the great social theorist Ernest Gellner identified a triangular struggle for the contemporary mind. In the first corner was scriptural or religious fundamentalism; in the second postmodernism, meaning epistemological skepticism and moral relativism; the third he dubbed “Enlightenment Secular Fundamentalism,” his own position.1 “What are the sins of the Enlightenment Puritan?” Gellner asked elsewhere. “His doctrine is a little too thin, too abstract, too far removed from the earthly and the concrete to be of much appeal to masses or to sustain anyone in a genuine crisis.”2 “Whereas religion and nationalism have always attracted” the masses, Conor Cruise O’Brien concurred, “the Enlightenment tradition has always been one of . . . an intellectual elite, within a social elite . . . Unlike religion and nationalism, the Enlightenment tradition has little or no emotive power.”3 I believe that this need not be so—but if it were? As to the need for comfort in a crisis, or meaning in an indifferent universe, one might sympathize, but also ask, at what cost? Maybe “people feel sure,” John Stuart Mill wrote, “not so much that their opinions are true, as that they should not know what to do without them.” Mill’s response: “The usefulness of an opinion is itself a matter of opinion: as disputable, as open to discussion, and requiring discussion as much, as the opinion itself,” which is even to say that “The truth of an opinion is part of its utility,”4 utility understood in the progressive Millian sense. We are often told that the “revenge of God,” the somewhat unexpected revitalization of political religion in recent decades, indicates that the “Enlightenment project” 212

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has failed, or was always destined to fail.5 Typically, here, a (questionable) factual position is confused with a normative one. By definition, to the extent that theocracy advances, Enlightenment retreats. But in that case it would be just as sensible to think we have failed the Enlightenment as to think that it has failed us.

Stockholm Syndrome: Intellectual Abdication in the Face of Theocracy Theocracy is thus the form of state that best corresponds to imaginative-emotive life . . . Not reason, but religion, teaches the multitude to love one’s neighbor. Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion Human nature, made wretched by its wandering in the desert, has begun to weary and return to God. Sayyid Qutb, This Religion of Islam Is this just a new chapter in the old debate about gesellschaft versus gemeinschaft, the enchanted, folk-ish units of rooted peoples versus the abstract, disenchanted contractual arrangements of modernized, bureaucratized, industrialized societies?6 Political theory now calls this conflict communitarianism and/or multiculturalism versus liberalism. Liberalism is problematized from left and right: it imperiously fails to recognize difference and the role particularistic group identities play in citizens’ lives, it is an overly mechanistic and rationalist arrangement that robs humankind of its raison d’être—life within interpersonally rich, value-creating communities. The right-leaning version of the attack more honestly recognizes that institutionalized communitarianism or multiculturalism would likely reprivilege authoritarian religious communities, perhaps with ethnic or nationalist flavorings—straight gemeinschaft. Such right-wing endorsements are not terribly surprising. Reading a straightforward dismissal of modernity—“an age over-impressed with its own accomplishment and liable to those illusions of intellectual grandeur which are the characteristic lunacy of post-Renaissance Europe”7 (Oakeshott)—one knows where one stands. More surprising is the complicity of sectors of the left-liberal intelligentsia, especially in Academe’s Humanities, or adjacent to it. Building on the Frankfurt School, Foucault, and others, many political theorists have argued that the puncturing of secular liberalism is basically a progressive or left-wing project, a sign of decentralization, greater inclusion, expanded toleration, and increased participation.8 We are told to abandon the “illusion which hides from view the imperial culture embodied in most liberal constitutions.”9 At their most honest, partisans of Multiculturalism allow that their ideas “may well leave within the wider society a number of cohesive but oppressive communities: islands of tyranny in a sea of indifference . . . the decentralization of tyranny is to be preferred.”10 But most left-liberals (some might only self-identify as “left” or “radical”) promise that recognition of particularistic group claims, including religious ones, will actually make

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liberal societies freer, more open and tolerant. They will reintroduce “suppresse[d] complex registers of persuasion, judgment, and discourse . . . in[to] public life.”11 The accusation that the investiture of power in non-transparent groups claiming suprarational or divine inspiration could negate many of liberalism’s hard-won freedoms, oppressing (even re-enslaving) women and children in particular, is often seen as little more than exhumed colonial condescension.12 The “politics of difference” or “politics of recognition” that entered academic political theory in the 1980s claimed to alert us to the ways in which liberal constitutionalism ignores the ground-level experiences of marginalized groups and reifies oppressive social structures; typically this was a left-wing position.13 But its proponents have often ignored ground-level conditions in the United States and Western Europe, where the politics of recognition have long since cemented an unholy (so to speak) alliance with theocratic resistance to modernity. Today even a self-professed Marxist cultural critic accuses secularists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens of “bloodless rationality” and “bloodless scientism,” calls liberalism “a bloodlessly contractual view of human relations” with “a doctrinal suspicion of doctrine” and “an impoverished sense of human communality,” and expresses sympathy for Islamist complaints about “a culture of mindless hedonism, sexual obsession, and moral shallowness”; “If the British or American way of life really were to take on board the critique of materialism, hedonism, and individualism of many devout Muslims,” he proposes, “Western Civilization would most certainly be altered for the good.”14 It is not just that, stripped of its authorship, this could easily be mistaken for the language of American neoconservatism15—some of it could be mistaken for the language of fascism. People “give different names, to one and the same thing, from the difference of their own passions,” as Hobbes reminds us; “they that approve a private opinion, call it Opinion; but they that mislike it, Haeresie; and yet haeresie signifies no more than private opinion; but has onely a greater tincture of choler” (L, 73). Let us take two signpost battles of this contemporary kulturkampf, both of an international character, as revealing for (among other reasons) the reactions they brought out in scholars and public intellectuals tasked with protecting open discourse: the Rushdie Affair of 1989 and its grisly sequel, the Danish cartoon controversy of 2006. The philosopher Charles Taylor wrote that Westerners’ support for Salman Rushdie during the furor over The Satanic Verses might, “because of their colonial past” be considered “crude and insensitive.”16 For Taylor the issue was one of cultural sensitivity rather than the incompatibility of theocratic edicts with modern, free secular states. Even though the controversy involved the attempt of a foreign dictatorship to suborn the murder of a British citizen, accusations of “imperialism” flew in the opposite direction. Taylor even claimed that toleration of Rushdie-an irony and playfulness toward religious tradition was itself a postChristian anomaly: I personally abhor the attempts to repress blasphemy. But I don’t fool myself that this has nothing to do with my being a Christian. And I wouldn’t be

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surprised if a Muslim saw an attempt on my part to convince him/her that our definitions are universally correct as another way of imposing the standards of Christendom, i.e., as an effort at conversion, rather than the defining of an impartial principle.17 He may indeed have been fooling himself. The above is surprising news to two classes of people at least: the many theocratic Christians who have attempted to police what they consider heresy, and also the many non-Christians (Muslims among them) who defended Rushdie’s right to publish imaginative literature, and who would probably have little trouble coming up with a secular or for that matter a Buddhist rationale. Taylor ended on an even more surprising note of literary criticism: “The Satanic Verses is an anti-paradigm of what we need. It is a profoundly Western book.” (Are novels supposed to give us “what we need”? What would that be, precisely?) Rushdie, who allegedly “developed in a relatively selfsatisfied Western literary world,” had “lost touch altogether with the possibility that religious symbols, stories, dogmas, might mean something very different to those who espouse them than they do to the rejecters.” The final verdict: “Rushdie’s book is comforting to the western liberal mind, which shares one feature with that of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the belief that there is nothing outside their world-view which needs deeper understanding, just a perverse reflection of the obviously right”.18 An article by political theorist Daniel O’Neill suggested that the positions taken by “multicultural liberals” like Will Kymlicka, Michael Walzer, and Taylor on the Rushdie controversy did not match their theories.19 What strikes me is the frequent impression one gets rereading this material that a lot of these theorists did not want to take a position at all. Of course everyone denounced the fatwa and in the end affirmed our right to publish “blasphemous” novels . . . sort of. But for Taylor, it was Rushdie and his Western supporters who committed the real crime. To describe the mind that supports the modern, open society as a mirror image of Ayatollah Khomeini’s is to render multiculturalism a meaningless, content-less politics of semantic games. Substantive discussion about modernizing and opening up Islam is aborted via ritualistic repetition of the canard that secular humanism is just another oppressive religion. Meanwhile, we are cautioned against seeing seemingly more oppressive creeds—one, for instance, where clerical-political entrepreneurs can incite mass rioting and murder with relative ease—as monolithic and homogeneous. How many militant secular humanists in North America or Europe have suggested the mass pulping of Bibles or Qur’ans? The figure is zero. Even more ironic in this context is the fact that Rushdie is precisely the sort of hybridized citizen supposedly promoted by multicultural political theories. When the chips were down, though, he was too “profoundly Western.” Not too far down the road from Taylor’s critique is the discomfiting position that Rushdie got what he deserved. Among other things the Rushdie affair revealed the ugly tribalism brewing underneath multiculturalism’s surface language of compromise and pluralism. Rushdie’s crime was not simply that he had transgressed

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sacred boundaries; it was, insult to injury, that he had done so as an apostate. His was the successful process of multicultural hybridization (in a “self-satisfied . . . literary world” though it may have been) correctly seen as a threat to tribal desires for cultural and creedal hermeticism. As Edward Said pointed out, the conflict could have led in the opposite direction, toward greater awareness of the grim situation of transgressive writers in Muslim lands.20 Just a few contemporary examples aside from Rushdie, and Rushdie’s murdered or wounded translators, included: . . . the Egyptian novelist Alaa Hamid, sentenced to eight years imprisonment in December 1991 for a satire on the lives of the prophets; ten Indians condemned to six years’ jail in the United Arab Emirates in October 1992 for participating in a theatrical production deemed blasphemous . . . the Bangladeshi novelist Taslima Narin, ordered to be arrested in June 1994 for ‘offending religious feelings’ in a fictional work which described a Muslim’s rape of a Hindu girl . . . [and] a non-Muslim Nigerian journalist, Isioma Daniel . . . in her case not by a clerical body but by an Islamist state government in northern Nigeria . . . “Like Salman Rushdie, the blood of Isioma Daniel can be shed,” the deputy governor of Zamfara state, Mamuda Aliyu Shinkafi, declared. It was a “religious duty binding on all Muslims” to kill her; Islam “prescribes the death penalty on anyone, no matter his faith, who insults the Prophet,” announced the minister of information.21 Algerian Islamists had sought during the 1990s to “ban all teaching” because education was itself “a hindrance to the tasks of jihad,” burning schools and murdering recalcitrant teachers by the hundreds. In 2001, as a sort of reductio ad absurdum, a Pakistani professor was sentenced to death for blasphemy because he had proposed in a lecture that the Prophet’s parents could not have been Muslims, since Muslims did not yet then exist.22 The Rushdie Affair might have led to a reaffirmation of strong liberalism, liberalism as not just modus Vivendi but as progressive anti-theocracy protective not only of individual freedoms but also of an imaginatively rich public sphere—or at least, should one doubt the book’s literary merits, a public sphere not submitted to vetting on the basis of an antique sacred text and its self-appointed interpreters. Competing accounts of individual or group “pursuits of the good” will not coherently adjudicate these conflicts; such paradigm cases—which may be to our future cultural conflicts what the Calas or Dreyfuss affairs were to earlier ones— demonstrate that. An account ledger of the pursuits of the good involved just produces confusion: the fulfillment of a Rushdie able to express himself creatively; the fulfillment of a Muslim minority knowing their identity was respected and their theos unangered; the perhaps more banal consumerist good of those allowed or deprived the novel’s pleasures . . . but enough. Although John Stuart Mill’s “permanent utility of man as a progressive being” can sound just as vague, it is actually, in the end, a much better tool for evaluating the theocratic demands that continue

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to intrude upon modern secular democracies. Properly elucidated, a BurkeanMadisonian contract-between-generations married with the Bacon-Encyclopédie notion of progressive knowledge and the Kantian teleology of increasing human freedom can argue, satisfactorily, why the suppression of one book to protect the integrity of an older one, however supposedly sanctified, is nonsensical, and how this is anterior to arguments about happiness, or about interethnic discord, or about communal pursuits of the good. (It should be said that there were, thankfully, political theorists who took an unequivocating pro-Rushdie position.)23 An epistemological-progressivist view of society contracting with itself across generations destroys the notion that certain texts, or historical figures, stand magically outside of the march of secular human time, where information is revisable and cognitive claims are falsifiable. There is no sense in which religious authority’s contribution to the self-worth of an individual or group offsets its stultifying effect on others, including those yet to be born. If we do not make this concept anterior to the happiness/fulfillment/self-worth of person or persons X at time-slice Y, then we end up in the absurd position of arguing that the censoring of an accomplished novelist’s work by whoever claims the communally invested power to do so (and, in Rushdie’s Britain as in Rousseau’s Geneva, we will often find religious leaders claming this role) is actually a fortifying example of ground-level democracy at work. Throughout the Rushdie affair professional multiculturalists like Bhikhu Parekh, a political philosopher who served on Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality at the time, described things like book-burnings and death threats in terms of a lack of Western civility on these matters. The lesson of the turmoil was that liberalism, not theocracy, “displays a deep and rarely acknowledged paternalist, even authoritarian impulse.”24 About the Muslim enragés Parekh chided, “Neither [the book’s] author nor its publisher seem to have taken them seriously enough to engage in a dialogue.” But who, really, by any reasonable definition of the social adjustments required in modern free societies, lacked the ethos of compromise in this matter? Not the book-burners: their act of faith “was more an act of impatience than of intolerance”; it was the pro-Rushdie British press that “got emotionally unhinged and lost its balance.”25 What Muslim responses suggested “impatience rather than intolerance”? It was the language of intolerant tribalism, superseding the borders of the nation supposedly lacking in the dialogic spirit, that showed through: “it is time now for the Ummah to stand up for the honor and dignity of its Faith, of its Beloved Messenger of God . . . and of his family and his companions.” Rushdie was “A selfhating Indo-Anglian, totally alienated from his culture, who has also learnt that it is possible to make money by selling self-hate,” “vermin,” a “traitor” whose agenda dovetailed with “Zionist orientalists.”26 He was a turncoat “paid by a fatigued culture in exchange for [his] performance as a master of literary gimmicks and as a provider of culture shock.” The author of the preceding did not think it a fault not to have read the book: “I do not have to wade through a filthy drain to know what filth is.”27 The leader of the Islamic Council of Europe called The Satanic Verses “an exercise in scandalous vilifications and blasphemous statements causing gross

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provocations to all the followers of Islam and polluting the minds of Western readers and the younger generations against Islam, its Book, its Prophet and its religious leaders and sources of guidance,” a “vicious and slanderous book . . . an affront not only to Muslim faith and conscience, but to the good sense of the entire civilized world”; “Commitment to freedom is fundamental, but commitment to truth is more fundamental.” Muslims “shall never tolerate vilification of our religion and obscene and blasphemous attacks on our prophet . . . we will not rest until this mischief is undone.”28 The major part of Muslim rage over the book—this would also be the case with the Danish cartoons—was not about cementing a more polite method of cultural interchange, as Parekh and others implied. It was a straightforward declaration that Islam’s theocratic edicts apply to secular liberal democracies with Muslim populations. It was not a mismanaged petition for tolerance but a promise of intolerance to come. Subsequent trends regarding Muslim populations in Western Europe suggest that the Rushdie affair was grievously misunderstood. The lesson was not that Western governments failed the cause of integration by neglecting the non-confrontational dialogue proposed by professional multiculturalists like Parekh. If anything, the lesson was that the tendency of Europe’s governing class to rule through the dubious intermediary of Imams and other self-appointed Muslim community spokesmen would be quite literally baptized by fire—and not just once. Years later Parekh treated the cartoon controversy in much the same fashion. Here was another situation “aggravated by the intransigence of the offending parties” that “could have been resolved with a measure of good sense.” Instead both sides, publishers and jihadists, spoke “in abstract and absolutist terms that left no room for compromise . . . Since no one had learned the lessons of the Rushdie affair, all involved repeated its mistakes.”29 True enough. A remarkable editorial published by a star American academic intellectual in the New York Times revealed how little had changed between Rushdie’s apostasy and the Danish blasphemy.30 After public torching of Danish flags and embassies, fire-bombing of Western franchises in Muslim lands, and death threats pronounced upon the cartoonists and their supporters, Stanley Fish, Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University, accused Flemming Rose (the editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten that first published the pieces) of having the truly obnoxious beliefs revealed by the controversy. Rose was “an adherent of the religion of letting it all hang out, the religion we call liberalism.” In this soggy and pointless faith, “What is important is not the content of what is expressed but that it be expressed . . . The first tenet of the liberal religion is that everything (at least in the realm of expression and ideas) is to be permitted, but nothing is to be taken seriously.” Fish did not come out and declare that Imams should be allowed prior restraint over publishing in liberal societies, but he did imply that the true believers have both the moral and the intellectual advantage. To the various retaliatory cartoons published in Arab presses, and to these presses’ long history of printing vile invective against other religions, Fish responded, “The difference is

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that those who draw and publish such cartoons in Arab countries believe in their content; they believe that Jews and Christians follow false religions and are proper objects of hatred and obloquy.” Liberalism, on the other hand, does not care or even know what it believes, so we must give our grudging respect to the rioting fundamentalist mobs: I would bet that the editors who have run the cartoons do not believe that Muslims are evil infidels who must either be converted or vanquished. They do not publish the offending cartoons in an effort to further some religious or political vision; they do it gratuitously, almost accidentally. Concerned only to stand up for an abstract principle—free speech—they seize on whatever content happens to come their way and use it as an example of what the principle should be protecting. The fact that for others the content may be life itself is beside their point . . . This is itself a morality—the morality of a withdrawal from morality in any strong, insistent form. It is certainly different from the morality of those for whom the Danish cartoons are blasphemy and monstrously evil. And the difference, I think, is to the credit of the Muslim protesters and to the discredit of the liberal editors. Liberalism is boring: no match for the auto-da-fé. Fish’s article is, probably intentionally, toward the outrageous end of the spectrum. Yet nobody should be all that surprised that a star professor of the Liberal Arts at an elite American university compared violent fundamentalist mobs favorably to those who wanted the freedom not to defer to millennia-old religious edicts. Fish’s conclusion sounds extreme owing to its flippant candor; that said, the Bush administration basically echoed it, apologizing to the offended Muslims and insisting that religions are not to be disrespected. Fish at least boiled the situation down with a directness that many of his colleagues avoid. The standard response was, of course, not to openly side with the embassy-burners and “Behead those who insult Islam” / “Europe you will pay— your 9/11 is on its way” placard-holders; it was to change the subject. The most popular strategy: one insists that one has a more nuanced understanding of the matter than, say, the average worried Western citizen. She appears too quick to associate modern civilization with the open society, and associate backwardness with theocratic censorship, clerical intimidation, and mob violence. When, for example, the Grand Mufti of Al-Alzhar University in Cairo, a supposedly liberal Muslim, declares the publication “one of the most serious crimes ever committed” and demands that the Danish government suppress the newspaper and imprison the editors, she sees fairly simple battle lines being drawn. When hundreds are killed around the world, she sees a turn of events almost designed to validate the more insensitive among the cartoonists. When she hears the E.U. Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security propose that European media submit to a voluntary code of conduct—“the press will give the Muslim world the message: we

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are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression, we can and we are ready to self-regulate that right”—and a Danish newspaper editor tell his country’s major publications to pool together a collection to fund a mosque in Copenhagen, in atonement for the Danes’ poor treatment of Muslims, she thinks: they’re weak, and scared, and this is only the beginning.31 That is not what is said, perhaps it is what cannot be said, across large sections of our universities, where the attraction of European Muslims to jihadism is more typically something like “react[ion] to the identity that has been imposed on Muslims . . . the analogue of Western orientalist essentializing.”32 Then the task becomes that of “undoing the discursive-intellectual binary that lines up Christianity, secularism, reason, tolerance, free thought and speech on one side, and Islam, fundamentalism, submission, intolerance, restricted thought and speech on the other”; of “challeng[ing the] antimony between secular criticism and religious censure, in which the former is associated with freedom, truth, and reason and the latter with intolerance, obscurantism, arbitrary dictum, and coercion.” The unsophisticated intuition toward “binary orders” represents “a Western conceit of the self-owning individual presumably free from all forms of coercion, including those potentially entailed in religion, commerce, love, belief, and comportment.”33 Defenders of the open society evince the “limit of the normative imagination when it is constrained by established juridical protocols on free speech,” whereas the important point—more important than said legal freedom from clerical persecution, won for contemporary academics by so many brave generations?—is “to try to clarify why so many Muslims were outraged, and why something other than an attack on free speech by religious populations was at issue” and to “consider the injustice of . . . hegemonic secularism.” We shall “combat [the] structural injury, emblematized by events like the Danish cartoons, inflicted on religious and racial minorities.” Then we may come to understand that we are dealing with a different conception of subjectivity and belonging . . . to see that what is at stake is not so much a question of whether speech should be free or prohibited as a way of conceiving a mode of living outside of self-identity and self-ownership.34 This stealthily oppressive juridical order of free expression can even be described as the “form of dominion [that] has given birth to some of the very aspects of Western civilization to which Islamic radicalism is a pathological reaction” such that “the civilized and the barbarous, the enlightened and the irrational, are by no means the simple antitheses they may appear.”35 Our above worried citizen is made to feel that expressing pride in [her] national identity and cultural ideals is akin to racism, even as Third World immigrants risk life and limb to abandon their own cultures and come to the West—and, once there, loudly proclaim the superiority of the culture they abandoned and the depravity

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of the culture that has welcomed them, all the while protected by laws that characterize any criticism of non-Western cultures as “racism.”36 Martha Nussbaum, a solidly progressive public intellectual with little patience for postmodernism, has written that “the secular humanist view is at bottom quite illiberal” because it takes “a dismissive and disrespectful stance to religion” whereas religion deserves “deference” for the suspiciously circular reason that it “is extremely important to religious people, as a way of searching for the ultimate good”; this deference also “surely involves the role religions play in transmitting and fostering moral views of the conduct of life.”37 In no other sphere are we accustomed to granting a cognitive structure deference simply because it seeks to reproduce itself. The insistence that secular humanism is unduly repressive often goes hand in hand with another stock response in these debates, which takes the form of a reminder that religious or cultural identities are open and contestable, “sites of contestation and heterogeneity, of hybridization and cross-fertilization, whose boundaries are inevitably indeterminate.”38 Monique Deveaux writes of “political theorists’ embrace of a more fluid and complex understanding of cultural identities . . . cultural identity has come to be viewed as a dynamic and changing phenomenon, and cultural practices and arrangements are recognized as sites of contestation.”39 Such statements seem accurate on their face, but it remains unclear what practical value they hold. Religions, like cultures, can of course change over time, but the question of how they change seems just as important as the observation that they change. Scriptural monotheisms by their own cognitive structure should not really need to change at all, buttressed as they are by an unmoving Theos and the holy text serving as ultimate court of appeal. To speak of the “critical resources” and “sites of contestation” available within religions as if they are perpetual sources of liberalization is misleading.40 In the latter half of the twentieth century the most effective contestations of religious traditions have come from markedly illiberal movements for fundamentalist renewal. A hard look at the Qur’an and Hadith is just as likely to produce new generations of Bin Laden’s and Zarqawi’s as it is Islamic liberals, since numerous passages in the text quite clearly legitimize Al-Qaeda-brand jihad.41 Yet with depressing regularity, commentators of all stripes piously tell us that some jihadist group or other has perverted the “true meaning” of Islam or the Qur’an in justifying their depredations—as if said commentators had any better evidence for that true meaning than the jihadists themselves. The latter are typically better armed with quotations and lineages of clerical opinion. All of this is not to say that there could not be liberalizing interpretations that act from within religious traditions. It is to say that the perverse nature of the average cognitive structure of religious faith should not lead us to automatically expect such interpretations to occur or beat out their rivals. Worse, despite the lip service our intellectuals have given to pluralism and contestation, they have not tended to

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like its bravest face. Consider this backhanded compliment, from a tract purporting to defend the Enlightenment: It is completely intolerable in a liberal democracy to have women oppressed by men and prevented form acting on their own initiative. Regrettably Hirsi Ali’s activism took a more radical turn that led her to a wholesale condemnation of the Muslim religion; this in turn has undermined her impact on devout Muslim women.42 Sorry, no: this “regret” simply will not work. The author’s own freedom, such as it is, was built over centuries by the fortitude of those who were willing to condemn their surrounding belief systems wholesale, and who did so despite any qualms about the hurt feelings they might engender. Reminding one’s readers of the complexity and nuance of a given situation is not always a virtue, nor is it a political philosophy. Sometimes things just aren’t that complicated. Either the Qur’an and its clerical interpreters have a running cultural veto over the modern societies in which Muslims live, or they do not. Either liberalism protects the freedom to publicly break religious taboos, or there is no freedom, at least not as we have rightfully come to understand it. The antiRushdie or anti-cartoon Muslim spokespeople typically grasp this point perfectly well, unlike the academics who continue to speak in the name of their sensitivities. The tendency to blame secular reason when confronted by fundamentalist mob violence, while insisting that secularism is an oppressive fundamentalism anyway, has come to sound like the stereotypical series of nervous excuses made by the abused spouse, cut, perhaps, with some jargon from postmodernism. An accomplished political theorist takes the 9/11 attacks to require “public discussion of how the many varieties of Islamism are challenging and extending the discursive sphere of political resistance,” cites political Islam as a “powerful source of critical debate in the struggle against the undemocratic imposition of a new world order by the United States, and against the economic and ecological violence of neoliberalism . . . eschewing usury and redistributing wealth, reflecting Islam’s tenets of social justice,” and has this to say about the issue of the veil: When educated women defy norms by choosing to wear the burqa, they are refusing visual identification with the Westernized elite whom they are expected to join. Far from slipping back to the archaic past, these women may be seen as expressing democratic solidarity with the non-elite Muslim men and women whom the material benefits of modernity Western-style have never reached—at the same time performing their own feminist critique of the culture industry’s reification of women’s bodies.43 Solicitude toward Islamist sexual mores, coming from the left (and recall Eagleton above), is nothing short of astonishing—somewhere between tragedy and farce. By any reasonable reckoning the general position of women in the Islamic world,

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especially in the North African and Near-Eastern regions from which Europe has drawn most of its Muslim immigrants, is a moral disaster. Rape is almost impossible to prosecute, except insofar as the woman is blamed for it. Patriarchal violence, sexual and physical, is exponentially more vicious, and routine, than Western feminists used to say it was in our days of the penned-up 1950s housewife. No culture industry “reification” is necessary to objectify the female body here—it is often held, literally, to ransom, and risks butchering (sometimes at the hands of a brother or father) for any rebellion. It should be noted that the sword (or shroud) bearing inscriptions from Leviticus and Revelation rarely inspires this brand of intellectual affection. The Islamist threat to Western liberalism, an equally dire if not direr problem, has resisted honest academic appraisal because the issue dovetails with otherwise justifiable concerns about antiracism and anti-imperialism.44 But that terminology has ceased to make much sense, if indeed it ever did. Islam is arguably the most successfully imperial idea-structure in the history of the world. It has continued to keep and gain adherents during a long period of dismal cultural eclipse— Spain translates more foreign books in a year than all the Arabic-speaking countries have translated since the reign of Caliph Mamoun in the ninth century. Half of Arab youths polled want to emigrate from their countries. Outside of fossil fuels, the entire Arab world exports less than Finland does45 —alongside its westward and eastward neighbors. After the Cold War political scientist Samuel Huntington (in)famously guessed that “The twentieth century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxism-Leninism” would prove “a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.”46 It is similarly possible that Western imperialism in Asia and Africa will prove a relatively brief phenomenon when compared with Islamic imperialism in these areas, and perhaps even in Europe itself. (We have a strangely selective memory as to who has practiced the “colonialism” or “imperialism” in this relationship)47 Radical Islam now imperiously advances under the rubric of anti-imperialism and anticolonialism just as expansionist communist powers did in the twentieth century. While it is premature to speak of “decline” à la Spengler, we may yet speak of the secular West as being in “recline”: enjoying its affluence, its technologies and liberties, but wrongfully blasé about their fragility, and about the forces that seek to undermine them. Arguments that it is “the arrogance of the West’s project of global domination . . . which has triggered a backlash in the form of radical Islam,”48 or that “the secular derives much of its meaning from an imagined opposite in Islam, and, as such, veils the religious shape and content of Western public life and its imperial designs,”49 despite claiming to open up hermetic discourses, or explode binaries, are in fact thoroughly average among our elite thinkers and educators. It is time for other voices to be heard. For too long there has been a dispiriting

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tendency, in the words of one historian, to “give an impoverished account of liberalism and then complain about the impoverishment of liberalism.”50 And if attacks on liberalism generate untoward political outcomes, one can always then turn around and blame the victim for causing them in the first place.51 But even a casual glance around the world as the twenty-first century advances suggests that the “politics of community” seriously poised for power are far from healthy. From this perspective, the academic tendency to attack the alleged flaws in public secularism while either neglecting or hedging on a critique of religion may someday prove to have been a serious intellectual abdication. That said, culpability for the collapse or steady erosion of liberal values would lie just as much with the liberal inability to present a vigorous defense of its creed, the hesitancy to fight anything except a rearguard action. My aim in this book has been to elucidate a different path to normative liberalism, one that can offer a more vital defense of secular liberal modernity based on its genesis in the scientific revolution and Enlightenment. It is a groundwork, and much construction remains to be done. We seek a recovery of the intergenerational, pro-growth, cognitively accumulative tradition of liberalism.

The Lost Treasure of the Liberal Tradition: Cognitive Growth and Strong Secular Humanism The 1990s saw the beginnings of a more vigorous defense of liberalism than had generally been on offer in previous debates, debates that had revolved around the legitimacy or lack thereof in appeals to “neutrality.”52 Theorists like Ronald Beiner, Patrick Neal, William Galston, and Stephen Macedo argued that it was simply a mistake to attribute a lack of public purpose or moral vision to liberalism, let alone to praise such blankness as liberalism’s signal virtue. For Galston, liberalism’s “distinctiveness lies not in the absence but, rather, in the content of its public purposes . . . it embraces a view of the human good that favors certain ways of life and tilts against others.”53 Macedo promotes “a tough-minded version of liberalism,” a “liberalism with spine”: We need to circumscribe liberalism’s aims appropriately, but then we need to take liberalism’s educative aims seriously and face up to the fact that no version of liberalism will make everyone happy. Liberty should be the core principle of our regime, yet we must recognize that a single-minded preoccupation with liberty could undermine our ability to perpetuate free institutions. A prudent solicitude for the system of individual liberty does not counsel a stance of laissez-faire, but rather a willingness to intervene (gently and indirectly where possible) to promote shared liberal values and civic virtues. Moreover, Liberalism is misconceived if it is thought of as simply an attempt to draw boundaries around people with prepolitical conceptions of the good life

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and beliefs about religious truth. Rather, another aim of a liberal civic order should be to promote patterns of belief and actions that are supportive of liberalism, to transform people’s deepest commitments in ways that are supportive of liberal politics.54 Yes—but the next question would be: why, exactly, should we wish to promote liberalism’s “values” and “educative aims”? Ronald Beiner mourns the “philosophical diffidence” that serves as the “common thread joining the various versions of liberalism in our time.”55 For Beiner, whatever a liberal regime’s tolerationist instincts, there remains a distinctive liberal way of life, characterized by the aspiration to increase and enhance the prerogatives of the individual; by maximal mobility in all directions, throughout every dimension of social life (in and out of particular communities, in and out of socioeconomic classes, and so on); and by a tendency to turn all areas of human activity into matters of consumer preference; a way of life based on progress, growth, and technological dynamism. This is excellent; yet Beiner’s further gloss that “liberalism itself instantiates one particular vision of the good, namely, that choice in itself is the highest good,”56 while perhaps a defensible reading of certain strains in contemporary liberalism, is ahistorical. It suggests that the development of liberalism in the matrix of Enlightenment political theory and its coevolution with the attempt to figure out how the emergent edifice of modern science speaks to human thought and choice in general, has largely been read away as a nonstarter for these present debates. Similarly, Patrick Neal may be right to suggest that “autonomy is in fact the good to which contemporary liberalism is fundamentally committed and . . . liberalism would benefit from openly affirming this rather than continuing to cloak it, even if unwittingly, under the illusory guise of neutrality,”57 yet he does not ask what the development of autonomy as a normative concept was ever supposed to produce. Thus the question of where liberalism goes, content-wise, after such avowals becomes confusing. Beiner, surprisingly, goes backward, reverse-leapfrogging the Enlightenment entirely and settling, like Hannah Arendt or Leo Strauss, in the polis, calling for a “shift from a Kantian discourse of rights and individual autonomy to an Aristotelian discourse of virtues and character formation.”58 Neal retreats from his declaration that liberalism should come out and say what it wants to the position that it should want less than what it wants: it “should abandon the pretense of being neutral or merely political and learn to live with the chastened and minimalist politics of the modus vivendi model,” what John Rawls suggested but failed to produce.59 I have great respect for the work of these theorists; but too much is being held back. My concern is encapsulated by Galston’s and Macedo’s avowed retreat from any partnership between liberalism and science. “Comprehensive liberals could shout ‘Charge!’ and rush to defend science, autonomy, individuality, and John Deweyism as the paths to the whole truth about

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the human good,” but Macedo hopes they resist this “disturbingly totalistic” temptation toward “liberalism as holy war.”60 Galston dismisses claims from science on somewhat circular grounds: The notion that scientific rationality is what our public culture has ‘in common’ cannot survive even casual inspection. Nor is it the case that religious alternatives to scientific rationality can be shown to be ‘irrational’ through an appeal to any common ground that would be recognized as authoritative by the faithful.61 This just begs the question(s): could not scientific rationality stand as a selfcorrecting cognitive structure that may be called upon to trump whatever a public culture commonly believes at any given time? And is the refusal of “the faithful” to recognize science’s authority a sign of the latter’s deficiencies, or the former’s? All of this too bears comparison, despite the softened tone, with the mid-century pessimism of Arendt and Strauss: left- and right-Heideggerianism, perhaps. Heidegger overtly, albeit vaguely, recommended a return to Theos late in his life: The uprooting of man has already taken place. The only thing we have left is purely technological relationships. This is no longer the earth on which man lives . . . everything essential and everything great originated from the fact that man had a home and was rooted in tradition . . . Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poetizing, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of foundering (Untergang); for in the face of the god who is absent, we founder.62 Others for whom this “God” was to be found in the ancient polis or ancient philosophy were no less apocalyptic about such “technological relationships” alienating “the earth on which man lives.” Arendt began and ended her The Human Condition (1958) with melancholia about the effects of modern science on politics. The complexity and yet obvious efficacy of quantum-era science leaves us in a world where we “will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do.” Worrying that “knowledge (in the sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good,” Arendt raised the specter of our (d)evolution into “helpless slaves . . . thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.” Adjusting the general culture to science would produce “a way of life in which speech is no longer meaningful.” Reveling in the “uncritical and apparently unbothered optimism of a steadily progressing science,” man “had removed himself from the earth to a much more distant point than any Christian otherworldliness had ever removed him.” Since the procedures of modern science occur “from the standpoint of the universe” rather than “the web of human relationships,” they lack “the revelatory character of action”—that discontent with their implications

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bookends the work suggests that, à la Heidegger or the Frankfurt School, the march of instrumental scientific reason framed Arendt’s striking announcement, “It is quite conceivable that the modern age—which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity—may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.”63 Strauss made equally vast accusations in his book about Thomas Hobbes (orig. 1936): . . . it seemed necessary, when traditional metaphysics were replaced by modern natural science, to base the new moral and political philosophy on the new science. Attempts of this kind could never succeed: traditional metaphysics were . . . a proper bases for a philosophy of things human; modern science, on the other hand, which tried to interpret nature by renouncing . . . all conceptions of purpose and perfection, could, therefore, to say the least, contribute nothing to the understanding of things human, to the foundations of morals and politics.64 Hobbes, Strauss argued, never needed the science/Galileo scaffolding in the first place, and his attachment of it to the Leviathan is a synecdoche for modern thought’s direst mistake. Strauss’ heirs have been more measured, but still harsh; one reads that an “attempt to elevate this narrow and misleading conception of scientific rationality into a universally applicable norm has been positively destructive of many essential aspects of human culture.”65 What if we were to reengage the relationship between liberalism and modern natural science—especially as advances in neuroscience and bioengineering are forcing and will keep forcing us to ask these questions? This need not be seen as a radical claim. It is actually only in the past 50 years (at most) that political and moral philosophers have thought it prudent to bracket science and the search for cognitive advancement from political discussions in favor of entities like “neutrality” and individual “pursuit of the good.” What this does not owe to the centrality of John Rawls and his critics, it owes to a selective deployment of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Here Mill is the theorist of the harm principle, of people pursuing the good in their own way under the umbrella of the neutral state, rather than the card-carrying philosophe pressing humankind in its advance from theological to empirical and evolutionary knowledge, pressing cognitive expansion and the progressive utility of the species. We need not stop talk of such things as private pursuit of the good—we need not even abandon in all cases an ideal of public neutrality or impartiality. Still, given current conditions, I suggest resurrecting secular contract liberalism: liberalism as anti-theocracy. From this perspective, not all “comprehensive doctrines” (to use Rawlsian terminology) are created equal, which cannot avoid having implications for public policy. Rawls’s “public reason” was a useful concept, but it demands not only an anatomy of reason but also an explanation of why reason is a public good. There is much that even the most aggressively relativistic political and moral

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philosophers would not accept simply as the outgrowth of a faith or, more nebulously, a culture. Racism is the most available contemporary example. Religious faith does not equal racism, and the former has sometimes worked heartily against the latter. But we must ask difficult questions about the similarity of monotheistic religious faiths to theories of racial supremacy and similarly harmful delusions. In history and in practice, the evidence that religious faith functions at bottom as a particularly virulent superstructure for the human species’ (likely biologically influenced) instinct toward for in-group/out-group separation is strong. Adam Smith was unfair in his accusation that “False notions of religion are almost the only causes which can occasion any very gross perversion of our natural sentiments in this way”66—clearly other ascriptive notions do similar work. But it is a mistake to think that disasters of the latter sort, whether race-, nation- or ideology-based, somehow recommend religion as a kind of moral repository. Susan Blackmore describes what religion looks like as a meme, or a replication-oriented cognitive structure: “a good example of a mechanism that decreases within-group differences, while increasing between-group differences and rates of group extinction,” because “conformity is encouraged, forbidden behaviors are punished, differences between believers and unbelievers are exaggerated, fear or hatred of people with other beliefs is nurtured, and migration to a different religion made difficult or impossible.”67 Allen Buchanan is right that liberalism must take very seriously the “affective, as well as cognitive, disabilities” caused by such worldviews.68 The tradition of explaining religion that employs vague language about the personal search for meaning points to something real. But it does not explain nearly enough. Religion cannot possibly function in this way most of the time. As Bertrand Russell pointed out, echoing an Enlightenment critique, “With very few exceptions, the religion that a man accepts is that of the community in which he lives, which makes it obvious that the influence of environment is what has led him to accept the religion in question.”69 “Whoever does not keep by choice the religion in which he was educated,” Diderot argued, “can no more glory in being Christian or Muslim, than in not being born blind or lame. It is luck, not merit.”70 Even if we limit our survey to community-defying converts, or those who perform Cartesian mind-clearings prior to affirming their faith, the problem of religion’s peculiar epistemological immunity remains. Should human reaction to the various daunting problems of a finite and self-conscious life be granted pretty much any conclusion? Moreover, should the conclusion be granted prima facie “respect” when it involves a Deity because it is then alleged to be dispositively important to those who experience it? “In other matters no sensible person will behave so irresponsibly or rest content with such feeble ground for his opinions and for the line he takes,” Freud observed. “It is only in the highest and most sacred things that he allows himself to do so.”71 We would never allow this tissue of excuses for attitudes of racial supremacy. And yet cognitive structures that typically devolve into in-group/out-group separations just as hateful as those of racism, and often suspiciously similar to it, have been given far too wide a berth by the very political and moral philosophers who should be seeking their disappearance.

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Universalizing religions are as guilty as any others, and actually can by virtue of their aspirations carry aggression to more genocidal extremes: both Christianity and Islam often replicate, on their own terms, Hinduism’s politics of caste or Judaism’s “chosen people” self-conception. Does anything about, for instance, American evangelicals’ division of the world into saved and unsaved, replete with identifying “marks,” merit our respect? A critic describes the popular Left Behind series: Not only do evangelical readers get a foretaste of the delights that await them, but they also get the pleasure of imagining the suffering of those who sneer at their religious ideas. Readers, for example, can discover in graphic detail just what will happen to those obstinate neighbors who refuse to attend Sunday School with them.72 Dealing with Theos, as opposed to with ethnos, we for some reason become less wary of what Hume wryly dubbed “the arbitrary choice of one people, as the favorites of heaven; and that people the countrymen of the author.”73 But monotheism pushes the problem across borders. So Henri Ramadan (brother of Tariq) told his Geneva flock, “Whatever their race or color, men can really become human only if they choose to conform to this divine will.”74 Bluntly, these views are poisonous: they increase the amount of suffering in the world, and will continue to do so as long as they are grouped into a family of metaphysical positions that one is supposed to respect. They divide citizen from citizen; they tear apart families. Whatever the decency of any specific believer, such cognitive structures represent efficiently organized cruelty. Better “to leave God out altogether and honestly admit the purely human origins of all the regulations and precepts of civilization”—Freud again. “Along with their pretended sanctity, these commandments and laws would lose their rigidity and unchangableness as well.”75 Of course, liberalism with spine will not become intolerant of religion in the sense of persecuting it. A more vigorous liberalism would ask that “tolerance” not mandate apologies for credulity, nor the feigning of respect for those who maintain Neolithic belief systems in modern societies, nor the ritual declaration that there is all that wide a space in which faith and reason can continue to coexist frictionlessly. For example, “By the Enlightenment standards on which our constitutional settlement was based,” Stephen Holmes argues, “a community’s attempt to compel scientific outcomes congenial to its nonrational attachments should probably be described as a form of self-injury.”76 Strong liberalism says that the system of epistemological justification produced by the scientific revolution and Enlightenment (and the information of their heirs, like Darwinism) limit the legitimate claims of belief systems to toleration. That is what makes religious faith illegitimate as a justification-mechanism for modern politics and laws. For secular contract liberalism, politics is and will always be about a decent degree of modus vivendi and tolerance, but it is not only about these things. It is also about “utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being,” the

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encyclopédiste line of John Stuart Mill that has been insufficiently carried forward by his most influential modern heirs in political and moral philosophy. Instead let us return to David Hume’s hope for a unifying human science—or what Edward O. Wilson, reimagining such a hope after the Darwinian revolution, more recently dubbed “consilience.”77 Something like this was suggested at the high tide of the Enlightenment by authors like Chastellux, Condorcet, and Volney: “It is high time to prove, that morality is a physical and geometrical science, and, as such, susceptible, like the rest, of calculation and mathematical demonstration.” This would become, with time, “a science as precise and exact as those of geometry and mathematics.”78 The assurance of such language strikes the contemporary reader as naively utopian, and a lot of it was, but the basic Enlightenment idea that the methods and content of modern science could be brought to bear on ethical questions remains valuable. What Jennifer Herdt calls the Humean imperative to “replace Providence with a wholly non-theological concept which can play a similar role in assuring the connection between morality and human flourishing without, however, reducing morality to a hidden expression of self-interest,”79 updated with intervening developments in the sciences, is, roughly, the proper basis for a truly modern political theory. I agree with the philosopher Herbert Simon that If the humanities are to base their claims to a central place in the liberal curriculum on their special insights into the human condition, they must be able to show that their picture of that condition is biologically, sociologically, and psychologically defensible.80 Seeking collective cognitive progress and increasing species self-knowledge over time will not impress those for whom structures of knowledge are structures of oppression, for whom the drive to cognize is the will to power, or for whom this striving for “consilience” reeks of the passé grand narrative. But what George Kateb called the “postmodernist connivance with superstition”81 becomes less and less defensible as it becomes more and more outlandish to claim that the great ideological danger to modern humanity is the “unified human subject,”82 or somesuch, and not, say, the angry theological fantasies of those who have or seek nuclear capabilities.

*

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An ebb tide in twentieth-century Enlightenment scholarship/polemic pulled us toward specious claims about “posterity” as it allegedly obsessed the philosophes. The case was made that the Enlightenment remained fundamentally religious in orientation because posthumous reputation was its secular equivalent of life after death.83 Like Carl Schmitt’s more modish branch of secularization theory-cumcritique (i.e., that modernity’s central political concepts are secularized theological ones84) this analogy purports to expose a hidden continuity. The more reasonable

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interpretative stance would be to emphasize the change: the stripping away of divinity, the privileging of the material and measurable. In any case, to take the issue of “posterity” as the philosophes understood it and reduce it to posthumous reputation is to grossly miss the forest for the initials carved into the trees. There is no denying that the egoism of overachievers, and the desire for recognition of creative people, infused a Voltaire or a Diderot, but this simply marks them human, not religieux manqués. Their overarching concern with posterity was not that their statues would stay polished, but rather that they would be remembered for bettering the intellectual, cultural, and moral condition of their civilization—and be remembered for it because they had done it. Take a less enduring name, that of the Chevalier de Jaucourt, tireless Encyclopédie aide and author of 40,000 of its articles, including half of its last ten volumes. Before joining Diderot, Jaucourt spent 20 years working on a medical dictionary projected to run to six folio volumes. Tragically the manuscript went down with its ship en route to publication in Amsterdam, after which Jaucourt, devastated, decided he could not start from scratch and instead offered his surviving notes and drafts to Diderot’s enterprise. In the Encyclopédie’s second volume Jaucourt’s contributions were introduced as “the precious debris of an immense work, perished in a shipwreck, & of which he wanted to make sure that at least the little that was left would be of some use to his country.”85 Here was a local, purely natural example of the catastrophic destruction of knowledge that, as we saw in earlier chapters, obsessed these men of letters. Their concern about posterity was less megalomania or sublimated solipsism than it was a proprietary attitude toward the future. “Being animated by curiosity and self-esteem,” Jean d’Alembert wrote, “we try . . . to embrace the past, the present, and the future all at the same time. We wish simultaneously to live with those who will follow us and to have lived with those who have preceded us.” Thus “the origin and study of History,” but also the attempt to write the history of the future, “uniting us with past centuries through the spectacle of their vices, their virtues, their knowledge, and their errors” and transmitting “our own [virtues and defects] to the centuries of the future.”86 Is such a stance unjustified? As the philosophes saw it, if they did not spread their ideas widely and efficiently enough then other, less attractive intellectual factories would win out instead, and they had good reason to believe this. If your ghost has nothing to say to the future, other ghosts will surely speak in its place. An encyclopedia, said Diderot, accumulates knowledge to pass it on to those who will come after us; so that the achievements of past ages do not become worthless for the centuries to come, so that our descendants, in becoming better informed, may at the same time become more virtuous and content, and so that we do not leave this earth without having earned the respect of the human race.87 The Encyclopédie was dreamt up at least in part as an alternative to the Jesuit Dictionnaire de Trevoux, which had itself been produced as a sacred alternative to

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heretical Protestant/Deist compilations like Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire. Diderot, d’Alembert, and Voltaire all had bitter experience of Jesuit dominance over education, and the stifling conformity that resulted when a corporate body interested in self-perpetuation, and divinely self-justified, was ceded special cognitive rights by the state. An odd value confusion in recent political thought: “communitarians” and their offshoots were said to be concerned with togetherness, solidarity, the bonds that make us irreducibly social animals; “liberals” were said to be abstracters, reductionists, ideologists for deracination, self-interest, the individual, and so on. People who self-define in either category often perpetuate this, but the Enlightenment thinkers whose “project” is sometimes said to be on trial in these debates would have thought this a strange opposition. Why is it solidaristic or communityminded to seek the freezing of social arrangements, or to make sure traditions are not corroded by outside influence? Why is freedom of thought and expression, including the right to blaspheme against such a tradition, thought to be an outgrowth of deracinated individualism, when it could actually be thought of as our duty to others? What sort of human togetherness is served, really, by indulging those who sound pious alarms against variety and mobility? Surely one of the most important human bonds that exists is the bond between humans over time. So we circle back upon our introductory problematic. How does the social contract achieve stability, but also a reasonable progress, over time? Consider Friedrich Hayek’s post-Darwinian revision of Edmund Burke’s contract-across-generations position. Hayek uses evolutionary theory to legitimate adherence to tradition and even to religions whose contents are most likely false: “we may owe to these religions the preservation—admittedly for false reasons—of practices that were more important in enabling man to survive in large numbers than most of what has been accomplished through reason.”88 The evolved complexities of the social order come from multiform actions of dead generations, and thus we owe them, or at least owe the process, a degree of deference—though Hayek expresses this insight in considerably more utilitarian a language than did Burke. But something about paying our respects to intergenerational transmission tends toward hallowing the past at the expense of the future. (One is put in mind of George Bernard Shaw’s query to Japanese hosts: “Why not worship your descendants?”) Hayek frequently reiterated that, strange bedfellows aside, he was no conservative. He worried that “the admiration of the conservatives for free growth generally applies only to the past. They typically lack the courage to welcome the same undesigned change from which the new tools of human endeavors will emerge.” The stable and progressive social contract is in Ernest Gellner’s words “conditional on . . . the eschewing of conceptual package deals, which evade falsification without seeming to forbid criticism”; “Quite literally,” to Gellner, the position must be “that nothing is sacred. Decent cognitive comportment, the observance of proper epistemological rules, cast a secularized world as their own inescapable shadow.”89 Or as Freud boiled it down: “Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction.”90

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The Divinity meme has had an astounding longevity. It is no paper tiger. A religion which has as its foundation a single event, and in fact tries to make the turning-point of the world and of all existence out of that event that occurred at a definite time and place, has so feeble a foundation that it cannot possibly survive, the moment men come to reflect on the matter —on this matter even the great Schopenhauer was insufficiently pessimistic.91 Compared to “secular religions” like Marxism or Freudian psychoanalysis, which lasted only several generations after the deaths of their founders, Middle-Eastern monotheisms have consistently been able to recharge themselves. But however much they served the social contract, as Hayek or Max Weber suggested, in certain developmental periods, it remains that they contain no internal criteria for telling us when we have outgrown them—unlike Marxism, say, whose own promise of economic rewards was mugged by reality. Perhaps we have not and perhaps we never will—I do not dare play prophet, either in promising religion’s “long withdrawing roar” (that roar still fills the air) or in promising Armageddon should we fail to spread atheism. Perhaps my secular humanism is at bottom just a version of the “sense of duty to oneself ” that one political theorist has recommended as an infusion of “honor” into liberal utility and self-interest.92 The belief I share with John Dewey that “the reverence shown by a free and self-respecting human being is better than the servile obedience rendered to an arbitrary power by frightened men”93—to God the heavenly father as much as to God the earthly Pharaoh—could be no more, in the end, than a pseudo-metaphysical statement about what constitutes human dignity. Well, so be it. The secular humanist should be unashamed in at least this one instance to repeat those enduring words of a lapsed monk: Here I stand, I can do no other.

Notes 1. Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (New York: Routledge, 1992), esp. 76. 2. Ernest Gellner, Anthropology and Politics: Revolutions in the Sacred Grove (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 7. 3. Conor Cruise O’Brien, On the Eve of the Millennium (New York: Free Press, 1995), 155–6. 4. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 25. 5. The most admirably straightforward polemicist for this position is the political theorist John Gray: see his Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (New York: Routledge, 1995) and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2007). 6. The classic analysis, Ferdinand Tonnies’ Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) has been reprinted as Community and Civil Society, ed. Jose Harris, trans. Jose Harris and Margaret Hollis (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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7. Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (London: Methuen, 1962), 18. For recent academic defenses of a theocratic (in some sense) solution to modern problems see Robert P. George, The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2001); Robert P. Kraynak, Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2001); and Daniel J. Eleazar, “Recovenanting the American Polity,” in A Nation Under God?: Essays on the Fate of Religion in American Public Life, ed. R. Bruce Douglass and Joshua Mitchell (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), chap. 4. 8. See, e.g., Sheldon Wolin, “The Liberal/Democratic Divide: On Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” Political Theory, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Feb., 1996), 97–119. 9. James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 7. 10. Chandran Kukathas, “Cultural Toleration,” in Ethnicity and Group Rights, ed. Ian Shapiro and Will Kymlicka (New York: NYU Press, 1997), 89. 11. William Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 20. 12. See the debate surrounding Susan Moller Okin’s essay “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?,” in Okin et al., Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, ed. Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard and Martha C. Nussbaum (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 13. An influential and exemplary text is Iris Marion Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). 14. Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, & Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 42, 65, 72, 154. 15. E.g., Dinesh D’Souza, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 (New York: Doubleday, 2007) or Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2006). 16. Charles Taylor et al., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 63. 17. Charles Taylor, “The Rushdie Controversy,” Public Culture, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Fall 1989), 118–22. 18. ibid., my emphasis 19. Daniel I. O’Neill, “Multicultural Liberals and the Rushdie Affair: A Critique of Kymlicka, Taylor, and Walzer,” The Review of Politics, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Spring 1999), 219–50. 20. See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 306–10. 21. David Selbourne, The Losing Battle with Islam (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2005), 131. 22. See ibid., 132–5. 23. See Brian Barry, Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 283; and Jeremy Waldron, Liberal Rights: Collected Papers 1981–1991 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 134–42. 24. “The Rushdie Affair: Research Agenda for Political Philosophy,” in The Rights of Minority Cultures, ed. Will Kymlicka (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 317. 25. Sacrilege versus Civility: Muslim Perspectives on the Satanic Verses Affair, ed. M. M. Ahsan and A. R. Kidwai (Leicester, UK: Islamic Foundation, 1991), 116–7. 26. M. H. Faruqi, “Publishing Sacrilege is Not Acceptable,” in ibid., 141–7. 27. Syed Shahabuddin, “Yes, Mr. Rushdie, We Shall Not Permit Literary Colonialism, Nor Religious Pornography,” in ibid., 152–5.

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28. Khurshid Ahmad, “An Affront to Civility,” in ibid., 189–92. 29. Bhiku Parekh, “Same Difference? The Danish Cartoons and the Rushdie Affair,” Catalyst, March 9, 2006. 30. Stanley Fish, “A Cartoon in 3 Dimensions; Our Faith in Letting It All Hang Out,” New York Times, Op-Ed section, 2/12/2006. 31. Bruce Bawer, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 42–7; and Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 205–9. Frightening general surveys of the success radical Islam has had in Western Europe can be found in Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within (New York: Doubleday, 2006); Zachary Shore, Breeding Bin Ladens: America, Islam, and the Future of Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Quintan Wiktorowicz, Radical Islam Rising: Muslim Extremism in the West (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2005); and Lorenzo Vidino, Al Qaeda in Europe: The New Battleground of International Jihad (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2006). I have dealt with the specifics in greater detail in “Stockholm Syndrome: Radical Islam and the European Response,” Human Rights Review, Vol. 10, No. 4 (November, 2009), 469–92. 32. Jocelyn Cesari, When Islam and Democracy Meet: Muslims in Europe and in the United States (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 108. 33. Wendy Brown, “Introduction,” in Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (Berkeley, CA: Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2009), 14–5. 34. Judith Butler, “The Sensibility of Critique: Response to Asad and Mahmood,” in ibid., 101–5, 118–19. 35. Eagleton, Reason, Faith, & Revolution, 94. 36. Bruce S. Thornton, Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow-Motion Suicide (New York: Encounter Books), 46. 37. “Religion and Women’s Equality: The Case of India,” in Nancy Rosenblum ed., Obligations of Citizenship and Demands of Faith: Religious Accommodation in Pluralist Democracies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 343, 348. 38. Steven Lukes, Liberals and Cannibals: The Implications of Diversity (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 34; see also Ronald F. Thiemann, Religion in Public Life: A Dilemma for Democracy (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1996), 134. 39. Monique Deveaux, Gender and Justice in Multicultural Liberal States (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1. 40. Here I agree with J. Judd Owen, Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism: The Foundational Crisis of the Separation of Church and State (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), esp. 165. 41. See the spirited critique in Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: Norton, 2005), chap. 4, or in the writings of the apostate Ibn Warraq, especially Why I Am Not a Muslim (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995). 42. Tzvetan Todorov, In Defence of the Enlightenment, trans. Gila Walker (London: Atlantic Books, 2009), 73. For a passionate argument that European liberals who are more comfortable with Tariq Ramadan than with Hirsi Ali have sorely lost their way, see Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2010). 43. Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Religion and Critical Theory on the Left (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 42, 47–50. Though they are not concerned with Islam specifically, see also the language of feminist anti-Enlightenment in the essays by Nancy

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45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58.

THE SECULAR CONTRACT Fraser and Jane Flax in Postmodernism and the Re-reading of Modernity, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). For stirring J’accuse’s on this score see Pascal Bruckner, The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt, trans. William R. Beer (New York: The Free Press, 1986); Unni Wikan, Generous Betrayal: Politics of Culture in the New Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Nick Cohen, What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way (London: Fourth Estate, 2007). Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, 188–9. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 209. For correctives see Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 13; Philip Jenkins, God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 104–5; Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 2, 20; and Mary R. Habeck, Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 6. Eagleton, Reason, Faith, & Revolution, 142. Brown, “Introduction,” in Is Critique Secular?, 10. Mark Hulliung, Citizens and Citoyens: Republicans and Liberals in America and France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 15. For examples of political theorists who blame liberalism itself for anti-liberal excesses see Spragens, The Irony of Liberal Reason, esp. vii–viii, 5–6, 13–14; Eric Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution, ed. John H. Hallowell (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1975), 20; Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), esp. 24; and Benjamin Barber, “Liberal Democracy and the Cost of Consent,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy Rosenblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), esp. 56, 61. For an able critique of this discourse see Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). That a central goal of liberalism is public neutrality was influentially argued by Ronald Dworkin, “Liberalism,” in Public and Private Morality, ed. Stuart Hampshire (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 113–43; and Bruce A. Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980). William Galston, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 3. Macedo, Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 5, 205. See also the debate between Macedo and Richard Flathman in Political Theory, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Feb., 1998), 56–89. Ronald Beiner, Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit: Essays on Contemporary Theory (Toronto and Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 62. Ronald Beiner, What’s the Matter with Liberalism? (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 22, 25. Patrick Neal, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 6. Beiner, What’s the Matter with Liberalism, 39. Another example of this move is Peter Berkowitz, Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), esp. 22.

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59. Neal, Liberalism and its Discontents, 8, 88–9. For critiques of Rawlsian “public reason” that purport to expose its covert foundational premises, see Veit Bader, “Religious Diversity and Democratic Institutional Pluralism,” Political Theory, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2003), 265–94; James Bohman, “Public Reason and Cultural Pluralism: Political Liberalism and the Problem of Moral Conflict,” Political Theory, Vol. 23, No. 2 (May, 1995), 253–79; J. Horton, “Rawls, Public Reason, and the Limits of Liberal Justification,” Contemporary Political Theory, Vol. 2, No. 1 (March, 2003), 5–23; and Andrew P. Murphy, “Rawls and a Shrinking Liberty of Conscience,” The Review of Politics, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Spring, 1998), 269–76. 60. Macedo, Diversity and Distrust, 139–47, 185. 61. Galston, Liberal Purposes, 13, 112. 62. “Only a God Can Save Us: Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin Heidegger,” in Heidegger, Philosophical and Political Writings, ed. Manfred Stassen (New York and London: Continuum, 2003), 24–48. 63. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 3–4, 320, 323–4. 64. Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: Its Basis and Genesis, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair, ix–xi 65. Spragens, The Irony of Liberal Reason (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), vii, 64–5. 66. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982 [1759]), 251. 67. Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 200. 68. Allen Buchanan, “Political Liberalism and Social Epistemology,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Apr., 2004), 97. 69. Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Touchstone, 1957), v. 70. Pensees Philosophiques, §37 in Denis Diderot, Oeuvres, 5 vols., ed. Laurent Versini (Paris: R. Laffont, 1994), I, 29. 71. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 41. 72. Glenn R. Shuck, Marks of the Beast: The Left Behind Novels and the Struggle for Evangelical Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 17. 73. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), 90. 74. Pierre-André Taguieff, Rising from the Muck: The New Anti-Semitism in Europe, trans. Patrick Camiller (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2004), 28. 75. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 53. 76. Holmes, “Gag Rules or the Politics of Omission,” in Constitutionalism and Democracy, ed. Jon Elster and Rune Slagstad (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 54. 77. E.O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). 78. Constantin-François Volney, The Law of Nature, or Principles of Morality, Deduced from the Physical Constitution of Mankind and the Universe (London, 1796), vi, 37–8. 79. Jennifer A. Herdt, Religion and Faction in Hume’s Moral Philosophy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press), xii.

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80. Herbert A. Simon, Reason in Human Affairs (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), 33. 81. George Kateb, Patriotism and Other Mistakes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 6. 82. Good criticisms of this tendency can be found in Richard Wolin, The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 9; and Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 124–5. 83. Most famously in Carl Becker’s The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1932). For a more recent example see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 352. 84. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 36–52. A good critique of the “terminological metastasis” insuch secularization concepts is made by Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). 85. Phillip Blom, Enlightening the World: Encyclopédie, the Book that Changed the Course of History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 107–9. 86. Jean Le Rond D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. Richard N. Schwab (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merill, 1963), 34–5. 87. Denis Diderot, Political Writings, trans. and ed. John Hope Mason and Robert Wolker (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 21–2. 88. Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (London: Routledge, 1988), 56–7, 75. 89. Ernest Gellner, Relativism and the Social Sciences (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 56, 88–9. 90. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 67. 91. “On Religion” §82, in Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), II, 393. 92. Sharon R. Krause, Liberalism with Honor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 29. 93. John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1934), 7.

Index Blake, William 126 Bolingbroke, Lord 49, 53 bolshevism 202–3, 207 Bonald, Louis 175 Bork, Robert 194–5 Bruno, Giordano 141 Buchanan, Allen 228 Burke, Edmund 3, 93–5, 126, 217, 232 Bury, J. B. 48 Bush, George H.W. 189–92, 203 Bush, George W. 185–7, 191, 196, 203

Adams, John 94, 104–7 Adorno, Theodor 175–9 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud 185–6 Al-Banna, Hassan 202 Alembert, Jean le Rond d’ 12, 49, 119–20, 123–4, 134, 138, 140–5, 151–3, 155, 231–2 Ali, Ayaan Hirsi 222 American revolution 78–82, 95–8, 151, 190 Arendt, Hannah 3–4, 225–7 Argens, Marquis d’ 84–5 Aristotle 91, 146, 179, 206 atheism 6–8, 19, 24–5, 36–7, 48, 82–3, 98, 100, 117–23, 128–30, 201, 233

Calvin, John 72, 130–1 Casanova, José 4 Cassirer, Ernst 9 Catherine the Great 123–5 Chastellux, Francois-Jean de 230 China (Enlightenment view of) 144, 146 Christianity American founding and 98–107 American fundamentalism 185–93, 199–203, 229 collapse of Roman empire and 55–65 Condorcet and 147 Diderot and 116–17 Hobbes and 24–7 Kant and 168–75 Rousseau and 127–31 Churchill, Winston 40 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 126 Colson, Charles 194–5 communitarianism 213–14, 232 Comte, Auguste 151 Condorcet 12, 105, 127, 144–56, 230 Connolly, William 134

Bacon, Francis 11, 17–23, 25, 33, 38, 43, 53, 90, 118, 127, 134, 140, 147, 155, 217 Barlow, Joel 90, 106–7 Bayle, Pierre 24, 82, 118–19, 232 Beck, Glenn 189 Beiner, Ronald 224–6 Bentham, Jeremy 93–4 Bible 201–2, 206 Hobbes on 25, 27, 32–3 Jefferson 170–1 Kant on 168–72 Locke on 121 Montesquieu on 83 Spinoza on 36, 39, 41–2 Bin Laden, Osama 203, 221 Black, Antony 130 Blackmore, Susan 228 Blackmun, Harry 194, 197–8

239

240

INDEX

Constant, Benjamin 127, 206 counter-enlightenment 175–9, 213–14, 226–7 crusades 67–70 Danish cartoon controversy 218–20, 222 Daston, Lorraine 141 Dawkins, Richard 214 deism 24, 83, 88, 100, 118, 123, 127–30, 170, 172–5, 190, 206 Descartes, René 20–1, 25, 38, 51, 114, 120, 228 Deveaux, Monique 221 Dewey, John 190, 201, 233 Diamond, Sara 189, 191–2 Diderot, Denis 9, 12, 24, 29, 33, 68, 74, 84, 98, 108, 115–25, 132, 142–4, 151, 156, 172, 228, 231–2 Dobson, James 192, 194–5, 207 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 27, 171 Ellis, Elisabeth 163 Encyclopédie 11, 22, 33, 49, 52, 68, 89, 104, 114–25, 140, 143–5, 148, 152, 217, 231–2 English civil war 25, 30, 32–3, 50–1, 90 Fallwell, Jerry 200 Fanon, Franz 202 fascism 176–7, 190–1, 202–3, 207, 214 Ferguson, Adam 49, 54 Ferguson, Niall 96 feudalism 11, 55–65 Filmer, Robert 90–1 Fish, Stanley 218–20 Forbes, Duncan 53 Foucault, Michel 36, 175, 178–9, 213 Frankfurt school 175–9, 213, 227 Frederick the Great 143, 167 French Revolution 93–4, 151, 175 Freud, Sigmund 91, 201, 228–9, 232 Fukuyama, Francis 195 Galileo 22, 31, 141, 227 Galston, William 163, 224–6

Garrard, Graeme 8 Gaus, Gerald 8–9 Gay, Peter 8–9, 73, 126–7 Gellner, Ernest 63, 115, 212, 232 George, Robert P. 194 Gibbon, Edward 9, 11, 19, 49–75, 104, 127–9, 141–3 Goldberg, Michelle 187 golden rule 25, 34, 164 Gray, John 212 Gress, David 7 Grotius, Hugo 32 Guevara, Che 202 Habermas, Jurgen 9, 12, 163 Hacking, Ian 149 Hamilton, Alexander 78–82, 96 Hampshire, Stuart 37 Hampson, Norman 8 Hardt, Michael 36 Hartz, Louis 107 Hayek, Friedrich 7, 232–3 Hecht, Jennifer Michael 6 Hegel, G.W. F. 3, 7, 50, 56, 58, 59, 92, 126, 170, 195 Heidegger, Martin 175, 177, 179, 226–7 Helvétius 125–6 Herdt, Jennifer 230 Himmelfarb, Gertrude 7–8 Hitchens, Christopher 214 Hobbes, Thomas 5, 11, 17–43, 51, 54–7, 63, 82, 90, 92, 127, 129–30, 134, 164, 171, 188, 214, 227 Hofstadter, Richard 189, 191 Holbach, Baron d’ 81, 98, 116, 120 Holmes, Stephen 96, 229 Hook, Sidney 177 Horkheimer, Max 176–9 Hufton, Olwen 5 Hulliung, Mark 87 Hume, David 7, 8, 9, 11, 21, 23, 42, 49–75, 79–80, 88, 92, 106–8, 119, 123, 128, 142, 153, 155, 164, 230 Huntington, Samuel 223 Huxley, Julian 190

Index Islam 86–7, 144 in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall 141–3 Iranian revolution 178–9, 185–6, 204, 206 in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters 84–7 radical Islam 178–9, 185–6, 202–7, 214–23 Rousseau and 132 Israel, Jonathan 6, 36, 117, 140–1 Jacob, Margaret 118 Jaucourt, Chevalier de 231–2 Jefferson, Thomas 3, 8, 11, 79, 81, 82, 85, 89–91, 93–107, 125–6, 145, 171–2, 195 Jesuit order 151, 231–2 John Birch Society 189 Kames, Lord 85 Kant, Immanuel 3, 5, 11, 12, 20, 53, 82, 91, 103, 156–77, 179, 204, 217 Kateb, George 230 Kennedy, D. James 187, 190 Khomeini, Ayatollah 206–7, 215 Kymlicka, Will 215

241

magna charta 64 Maistre, Joseph de 126, 133, 175 Malcolm, Noel 28 Mansfield, Harvey 1 Marx, Karl 38, 59, 73, 126, 168, 233 materialism 34–6, 115–24 mathematics (Enlightenment political thought and) 29, 33–4, 149–51, 230 Maududi, Maulana 202–5 McCain, John 187 McGraw, Bryan 2 Mendelssohn, Moses 172 mesmerism 151 Mettrie, Julian Offray de la 119–20 Mill, John Stuart 98, 212, 216, 227, 229–30 Miller, William Lee 80, 107 Mills, Charles 7 Mitchell, Joshua 121 Montesquieu 6, 9, 12, 78, 82–9, 120, 123, 125, 128, 134, 138, 142 multiculturalism 213–15, 217–18 Murphy, Andrew 100

LaHaye, Tim 188–93, 195, 202, 206 Lavoisier, Antoine 105, 140, 155 Leibniz, G.W. 24, 83, 118 Levy, Leonard 80 Lienesch, Michael 106 Lilla, Mark 6 Lindsey, Hal 188 Locke, John 7, 32, 41, 51, 54–5, 63, 71, 90–3, 95, 97, 100, 118–23, 134, 166–7, 173, 185, 194, 207 Loyola, Ignatius 156, 200 Luther, Martin 68, 72–3, 148

Neal, Patrick 224–6 Necker, Jacques 144 Negri, Antonio 36 Neiman, Susan 6, 176 Nemours, Dupont de 81, 125–6 neo-conservatism 191, 194–5, 214 Neuhaus, Richard John 185 Newton, Isaac 22, 83, 118 Nietzsche, Friedrich 38, 126, 129, 178–9, 202 Nixon, Richard 203 noble savage 164–5, 169 North, Gary 187–91, 193, 200 Nussbaum, Martha 221

Mably, Abbé de 49, 132, 138–9 Macedo, Stephen 224–6 Machiavelli 25, 30, 37, 43, 83 MacIntyre, Alasdair 178–9 Madison, James 2, 3, 11, 71, 79–82, 89, 93–107, 195, 217

Oakeshott, Michael 213 Obama, Barack 188 O’Brien, Conor Cruise 212 O’Connor, Sandra Day 199 Olasky, Marvin 191–2 O’Neill, Daniel 215

242

INDEX

Paine, Thomas 3, 94–6, 101, 103–4, 107, 125 Palin, Sarah 187, 196 Parekh, Bhikhu 217 Pateman, Carole 1, 7 Plato 22, 91, 94, 115–17, 143, 151, 153, 167 Plutarch 133, 147 Popkin, Richard 25 Popper, Karl 17, 20, 21, 31 Porter, Roy 7–8 postmodernism 177, 212, 220–1 Priestley, Joseph 104–6 printing press 147–8 public debt 96 public education 101–3 151–6, 198–200 Qutb, Sayyid 202–6, 213 Rawls, John 3, 5, 9–12, 163, 227 Raynal, Abbé 124, 133 Reagan, Ronald 187, 203 Reed, Ralph 189, 192 Reformation 11, 60, 67–75, 148, 173 Rehnquist, William 203 Renan, Ernest 3 Robertson, Pat 189–91 Robertson, William 11, 49, 56–8, 62–4, 66 Robespierre 149 Roman Empire 11, 19, 56–65, 127 Rorty, Richard 49 Rossiter, Clinton 98 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 2, 6, 7, 11–12, 33, 55, 82, 83, 90, 107, 114, 120, 126–44, 146, 151–4, 167, 169–70, 217 Royal Society 22 Rushdie affair 214–18, 222 Rushdoony, Rousas John 187–91, 193, 200, 206 Russell, Bertrand 228 Ryan, Alan 24 Sade, Marquis de 176–8 Said, Edward 216 Sartre, Jean-Paul 202

Scalia, Antonin 193 Scanlon, T. M. 5 Schaeffer, Francis 189 Schmitt, Carl 230 scholasticism 19, 28, 168 Schopenhauer, Arthur 233 secret societies (in Christian fundamentalist ideology) 189–90 Selden, John 24 Shaftesbury, third earl of 54 Shariati, Ali 202 Shaw, George Bernard 232 Sieyès, Abbé 125, 155 Simon, Herbert 230 Skinner, Quentin 34 Smith, Adam 19, 49, 51, 54–7, 59, 62–3, 72, 81, 85, 91, 99, 228 Smith, Steven B. 37–8 Smith, Steven D. 8, 10 Socrates 115–17, 163 Souter, David 199 Spengler, Oswald 223 Spinoza, Baruch 11, 21, 35, 36–43, 50, 116, 118–19, 168–9, 171–2 Spragens, Thomas 21, 148, 156 Starobinski, Jean 134 Strauss, Leo 23–4, 133, 213, 225–7 Strong, Tracy 129 Sullivan, Roger 163 Sunstein, Cass 199 Tacitus 133 Taine, Hippolyte 125 Talmon, Jacob 126 Taylor, Charles 6, 176, 214–15 tea party movement 188, 203 Thomas, Clarence 203 Thomism 178–9 Toland, John 100 Tuck, Richard 24, 32 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques 89–90, 106, 144, 147 unitarianism 189–90 U.S. Supreme Court 193–200 Bowen v. Kendrick 198

Index Bowers v. Hardwick 197–8 Bush v. Gore 194 Edwards v. Aguillard 196 Lawrence v. Texas 197 Lee v. Weisman 196 Lemon v. Kurtzman 197–8 Mitchell v. Helms 199 Planned Parenthood v. Casey 194, 196 Roe v. Wade 194 Romer v. Evans 196–7 Wallace v. Jaffree 198 Zelman v. Simmons-Harris 199 Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District 198–9 utilitarianism 85, 95, 102–3 Vaughan, Geoffrey M. 23 Vico, Giambattista 24

Volney, Comte de 230 Voltaire 6, 11, 49, 52, 55, 57–8, 60–2, 65–6, 68, 70, 72, 106, 118, 120, 125–6, 128, 134, 137–8, 142–3, 151, 231 Waldron, Jeremy 5 Walzer, Michael 215 Weber, Max 4, 40, 177, 233 Whelan, Frederick 67 White, Hayden 49, 52 Wilson, Arthur 118, 126 Wilson, Edward O. 230 Wilson, Woodrow 189 Wolin, Sheldon 25 Wood, Gordon 101–2 Yovel, Yiramihu 164

243