“The diversity of the breeds is something astonishing.” This is Darwin in the first chapter of On the Origin of Species. He is characterizing domestic pigeons as he seeks to unravel the “mystery of mysteries,” or the origin of divergent species. “I have, after deliberation, taken up domestic pigeons. I have kept every breed which I could purchase or obtain.” He went to pigeon shows. He hung out with pigeon fanciers. “I sat one evening in a gin-palace in the Borough amongst a set of Pigeon-fanciers,” he wrote to a friend, as he collected information.1 What he finds about pigeons amazes him. He considers the English carrier, the short-faced tumbler, the runt, the barb, the pouter, and the fantail and revels in their differences. He examines beaks and heads. The English carrier is “remarkable” for the “wonderful development of the carunculated skin about the head,” which is accompanied by “greatly elongated eyelids” and “large external orifices to the nostrils.” He compares this head to that of the short-faced tumbler with a beak “almost like that of a finch.”2
The chapter is called “Variation under Domestication.” Darwin was a master of detailing slight variations. Such is the work of thinking, pondering differences and their significance. The old saw that you can’t compare apples and oranges is wrong. You can and do. After all, they are both fruits. They differ but they are also related. Yet sometimes small variations reveal more than large ones. Darwin’s work turns on small variations.
The diversity of pigeons is astonishing, but so is the diversity of all of nature, which would not be news to Darwin. “Consider,” writes the botanist Hope Jahren in her recent scientific memoir Lab Girl, that more than a hundred thousand leaves grow on a single oak tree and “no two of them are exactly the same. . . . Every oak leaf on Earth is . . . unique.”3 The idea of exuberant diversity of nature is as old as the hills, as it were, and can be found already among Greek thinkers. To be sure, the favored term was not diversity, but variety, which overlaps with it, but has a longer history and reach.
In Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept, William Fitzgerald, a classicist, follows the trajectory of variety among the Romans. He notes that in recent years the “semantic power” of “variety” has “migrated” to “diversity.” The Latin motto for the European Union, for instance, is In varietate concordia, but the English translation runs “United in Diversity.”4 Several millennia prior to the EU phrase, the variety of nature puzzled the Greek Stoics. How can one explain the plenitude of nature? Perhaps the first thinker who expressed the idea of an exuberant and variegated nature was the Stoic Chrysippus (279–206 BCE). He declared (according to Plutarch) that nature “rejoices” in variety and produces many creatures “for the sake of beauty.” Nature takes “delight in richness of colors and shapes.” Chrysippus added what Plutarch called a “strange observation,” but which does not seem strange. For the Stoic, the peacock’s tail proves that nature delights in variety. “The peacock was created on account of its tail, on account of the beauty of the tail.”5
The idea of a diverse and fecund nature can be followed through the ages. It played out in the notion of the “plurality of worlds,” which also has classical antecedents. “An infinite number of worlds exists in the universe, some of which worlds are like and some of which are unlike our own,” declared the Greek philosopher Epicurus.6 The fecundity of nature served as the argument. Nature covers everything. Why would it stop with the visible? This also becomes the logic of Epicurus’s follower, Lucretius. He refers to the fact that “seeds innumerable in number and unfathomable in sum are flying about” to suggest the existence of other worlds.7
In the modern era, voyages to the New World and Copernican cosmology redoubled the question of multiple worlds. If the Earth were no longer center of the universe, the prospect of other worlds seemed possible.8 The idea found its most elegant expression in the popular 17th-century dialogue Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds by the French publicist Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle. A philosopher and a marquise discuss the implications of Copernicus for the prospect of life elsewhere, especially on the moon. “I love the Moon,” the marquise aptly says, “for staying with us when all the other planets abandoned us.” The issue is whether life exists on the moon and beyond, and if so, what sort. The philosopher sidesteps theological hazards and argues that the fecundity of nature would hardly stop at the moon. The marquise is convinced but “perplexed by the diversity” of the inhabitants of the cosmos. I see, she says, that since Nature is “an enemy of repetition,” it makes everyone in the universe unique. “But how can one picture all that?” The philosopher has an answer. “The diversity which Nature must have placed among all the worlds” is like the diversity of faces in this world. “All faces in general are made on the same model.” But each is different. “What secret must Nature have possessed to vary in so many ways so simple a thing as a face?”9
As in nature, so in life; at least this would be argued by humanists such as Erasmus in the 16th century. If nature loves diversity, so do people. In his book on rhetoric Erasmus advises youth that good style requires variety. Nothing is more offensive or tedious than repetition, declared Erasmus. Without variation, one sounds like a cuckoo and “croaks out the same words repeatedly.” To escape this “monotony,” take a cue from nature. “Nature herself especially rejoices in variety; in such a great throng of things she has left nothing anywhere not painted with some wonderful artifice of variety.”
The mind as well needs variety, which writing must supply. “If all things continually present themselves to the mind without variation, it will at once turn away in disgust.” This is the object of studying rhetoric, to be able to write and speak in different modes. Erasmus takes as a model the Greek wrestler Milo of Croton, who apparently boasted a repertoire of moves. “It will be well” to emulate him, “making at first two variations, then three, then more and more.”
Erasmus gives an example of prose diversity with multiple versions of a simple sentence. “As an experiment,” he wants to see how many variations can be formulated for the statement: “Your letter has delighted me very much.” This sentence might not seem to offer many possibilities, but in a tour de force Erasmus wrings from it over a hundred and fifty variants that go on for pages. These start from “What you wrote has given me incredible pleasure” and “Your epistle has cheered me exceedingly,” then move on to “How should I tell you what joy titillated the spirit of your Erasmus when he received your letter,” “When I looked at your letter an extraordinary multitude of joys seized my mind,” and “No dainty so caresses the palate as your letter charms my spirit.”10
For theologically minded thinkers, and this means all up to the recent past, not simply the plurality of worlds and words, but the plurality of human actions presented an issue. The 18th-century German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, satirized by Voltaire in Candide, joined those who sought to reconcile an omnipotent God with the plurality of behavior. Why would an all-seeing divinity not populate the world with virtue of one stripe? Because variety provides more benefits than its absence, answered Leibniz, a truth valid for nature and mankind. “Nature has need of animals, plants, inanimate bodies”; it requires more than one type. So too with people. “Wisdom must vary,” stated Leibniz. The example of Midas confirms Leibniz: “Midas proved to be less rich when he had only gold.” Diversity beats uniformity. In a rare passage of eloquence, Leibnitz declares, “To multiply one and the same thing only would be superfluity, and poverty too. To have a thousand well-bound Vergils in one’s library, always to sing the airs from the opera of Cadmus and Hermione, to break all the china in order only to have cups of gold, to have only diamond buttons, to eat nothing but partridges, to drink only Hungarian or Shiraz wine—would one call that reason?”11
To survey the celebration of diversity in the modern period can be misleading. A thousand authors can be cited who rejoice in human and natural variety; and those references can be extended till yesterday—or till today. Yet the vector of modern thought pointed in the opposite direction; it led to establishing regular and uniform laws for nature and society. The laws of motion and gravity associated with Newton and Galileo stamp modern thinking; they posited patterns of universal validity or what has been called “the mathematization” of nature.12 To grasp the “book” of the universe, stated Galileo, one must understand its language and letters. “It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures.”13
The impact of such thought cannot be overstated. The philosophes of the Enlightenment saw themselves as working in tandem with the Newtons and Galileos. Voltaire celebrated Newton as almost God. After his return from England he published a book to introduce Newton to the French. The allegorical frontispiece of that book shows a heavenly shaft of light passing through Newton, bouncing off Voltaire’s lover (Madame du Châtelet, who translated Newton) before finding Voltaire at his writing desk. Philosophes like Voltaire applied to society invariable laws that had already been established for motion and gravity.
Conceptually the universal and the particular do not stand in contradiction. On the contrary. Fontenelle’s example of human faces offered a good example. All have faces but each differs. Diversity and uniformity coexist. Darwin both marveled at the variability of species and sought the law that explained it. On the Origin of Species closes on an almost poetic note that ties the diverse and the uniform together. “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth,” stated Darwin in the final paragraph to his chef d’oeuvre, “and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other . . . have all been produced by laws acting around us.”14
Though Darwin loved orchids with a “passion,” and his son recalled his father’s “great delight in the beauty of flowers,” he studied flowers to understand how they reproduced and evolved.15 Likewise, though Galileo devoted his life to studying the natural world, he derided the notion that mere aesthetic appreciation led to an understanding of nature. “A little poetic flower” does not constitute knowledge, he wrote. “Nature takes no delight in poetry.”16 Darwin and Galileo set forth laws of evolution and motion. While reconciling the universal and the particular belongs to the oldest philosophical project, in the modern era the discovery of lawful universals and their application dominate. Galileo’s Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences takes place in a Venetian arsenal and included an appendix on the paths of cannon projectiles. As one historian of science put it, “the routinization and management of gunpowder artillery” served as the crucible for the scientific revolution.17 But it is not simply warfare. The employment of uniform laws in society defines the modern period. The thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries who emphasized diversity were swimming upstream.
The object here is to consider a few thinkers of this countertrend. They championed diversity and its locus classicus—the individual—in a world they believed undercut both. Unlike today’s diversity boosters, the Humboldts, Tocquevilles, and Mills apprehended the social forces of uniformity; they were not ideologues. They prized diversity and feared its eclipse. They looked at the world with eyes wide open.
The venerable historian Arthur O. Lovejoy is a good starting point to appreciate these counter-thinkers. He noted that a belief in simplification and uniformity marked the Enlightenment. For the French philosophes, universal laws imprinted mankind and nature. However, the commitment to uniformity generated a countermovement, an accent on difference, itself a reworking of an idea of plentitude. “There have, in the entire history of thought, been few changes in standards of value more profound and more momentous,” stated Lovejoy in Great Chain of Being, than when in the late 18th century the belief arose “that diversity itself is of the essence of excellence.” This countermovement took many forms such as “the revulsion against simplicity; the distrust of universal formulas in politics; the aesthetic antipathy to standardization; . . . [and] the cultivation of individual, national, and racial peculiarities.” Lovejoy declared that, for better or worse, “the discovery of the intrinsic worth of diversity” has marked the modern period.18
To make his argument about the rediscovery of diversity, Lovejoy drew upon the German Romantics of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He turned to Friedrich Schleiermacher, a liberal theologian and philosopher, who fit Lovejoy’s bill inasmuch as he championed sentiment and variety against cold uniformity. Schleiermacher is not exactly a household name, but he looms large in liberal Protestant theology. His first book, which brought him fame, On Religion, bore the subtitle Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers.
Schleiermacher addressed himself to educated circles that disdained religion. The “cultured despisers” failed to understand the varieties of religion. Schleiermacher hammered away at the systematizers, those who reduce religion to a uniform construct. Indeed, he expressed sympathy for the polytheism of ancient Rome that was open to “divine abundance” and that aimed to overcome “narrowness and one-sidedness.” The systematizers crush all differences under a “bald uniformity.” The “dogmatizing love of system,” he wrote, “excludes all difference.” It turns Christianity into a “dead letter.” The systematizers set up a rule “so rigid that it condemns everything of another shade.” For Schleiermacher individual touch, not uniform regulations, defines religion. With a pizzazz not associated with German philosophers, Schleiermacher pronounces, “This moment is a kiss, an embrace. Without it religion is but a spinning of formulas.”19
Lovejoy did not draw upon Wilhelm von Humboldt, whom we met in Chapter Two, above, though he could bolster Lovejoy’s argument with a crucial element. Humboldt not only praised diversity but highlighted its fate and that of the individual in an age of uniformity. With Humboldt a shift takes place in that diversity becomes more than an idea, a rhetorical goal, or fact of nature; it subsists in society—or doesn’t. That is the issue. To Humboldt, modern society saps diversity; the individual begins to suffer from enervation. The specter of a pallid diversity and wan individuals troubled numerous critics in the 19th century such as John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, as we will see. For these observers, not only is the world homogenizing, singularity ebbs from its citizens.
Humboldt left his imprint in many domains, including as the co-founder of the University of Berlin. But a book of his youth, never published during his lifetime, proved his most influential contribution. The Limits of State Action tackled diversity and the individual as political issues. Humboldt wrote it in the early 1790s. He was in his mid-twenties and had just visited revolutionary Paris, but the book did not appear till 1851, when published by his brother Alexander fifteen years after Wilhelm’s death. Scholars argue over how much the French Revolution influenced this work. Humboldt seemed impressed by the revolutionary ethos and doubtful of the consequences. He saluted “the oppositional energy of the individual and his sense of freedom,” but feared what people would do with freedom.20 In Paris, he of course visited Rousseau’s grave, a lodestone for Romantics.21
The English translation of The Limits caught the eye of John Stuart Mill, who became enamored of the book. Mill used a sentence from it as an epigraph for his own classic, On Liberty. “The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges,” ran the sentence that Mill cited, “is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.” Note the priority of “diversity.” It will become Mill’s polar star.
Humboldt’s book explored the role of the state, which he wanted to circumscribe as a threat to the individual. For this reason, the book became a favorite of conservatives. A conservative publishing house has put out the most recent edition in English. But the place of the state does not exhaust the book. Mill caught its intellectual heart. For Humboldt any analysis of government must rest on the criterion as to what aids or hinders the development of the individual. “The true end of Man,” he wrote in the first sentence of the main text, “is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole.”22 The unfolding of these powers did not solely depend on a limited state, however.
Humboldt posited two conditions for individual development. This is where things get intriguing for tracking diversity and its vicissitudes. Though freedom is “the first and indispensable condition” for individual development, Humboldt suggests another condition in the second sentence of his text: “There is besides another essential [condition]—intimately connected with freedom, it is true—a variety of situations” [“Mannigfaltigkeit der Situationen”]. This is not a throwaway phrase. Humboldt propounds that to unfurl potential, the individual requires variety in habitat.
To follow Humboldt, individual diversity necessitates living diversity—diversity in real situations. Humboldt underlined the point by indicating what happens if monotonous conditions reign. With no variety, the free development of individuals suffers. “Even the most free and self-reliant of men is hindered in his development, when set in a monotonous situation.” For Humboldt, freedom and diversity complement each other. Indeed, “these two conditions, of freedom and variety of situation,” he stated, may be regarded “as one and the same.”23
Humboldt was famously a less than clear thinker, but he was clear enough here—and he returned to the issue several times. Individual growth required variety, which sustains energy and creativity. Again, Humboldt was in his early twenties when he expressed these thoughts, fresh from living in revolutionary Paris. In his letters and notes scholars find evidence that Humboldt was searching for his own path and valued diversity in personal relations with women, which might explain how he appreciated a “variety of situations.”24 For Humboldt, individual development needed something he called “Sinnlichkeit,” an amalgam of energy, force, sensuality, and instinct.25 The “whole greatness of mankind,” he believed, depended on original and vigorous individuals. Whatever facilitated individual energy he judged a plus; whatever diluted it, a negative. Diverse situations nourished this energy. But a problem arose.
Humboldt believed that variety was dwindling in modern society, which took a toll on the individual. As the world becomes less diverse, people become less energetic, less individualized, less multidimensional. Humboldt supposed that the ancients possessed “greater and more original energy and individuality” because they faced a more variegated environment than modern peoples. Uniformity weakened both environmental diversity and the individual. “Every later epoch—and how rapidly must this decline now proceed!—is necessarily inferior in variety to that which it succeeded: in variety of nature—the vast forests have been cleared, the morasses dried up and so on; in variety of human life, by ever-increasing intercommunication and agglomeration.”26
These observations join an old dispute, the so-called quarrel of the ancients and moderns, but give it a twist. The partisans of the ancients believed that the achievements of Greece and Rome towered over that of their successors; nature, creativity, and variety blossomed in classical times and faded afterwards.27 Nature aged and diversity dimmed. Of course, dissenters always popped up. In his return to Renaissance Florence after exile, the humanist Leon Battista Alberti was stunned by the city’s artistic achievements. He used to grieve over the superiority of the classics, he declared. “I believed what I had heard many people affirm, namely that Nature had grown old and tired and was no longer producing giants in body or mind.” But at last he saw in Florence genius equal to any of the past. His contemporaries, he felt, “should not be slighted in favor of anyone famous in antiquity in these arts.”28
Fontenelle weighed in and put the issue concisely. If the ancients had “more wit or capacity” than the moderns, the cause must have been a “larger and more beautiful” nature. The discord boils down to “whether the trees were larger in those times than they are today. If they were, then Plato, Homer, and Demosthenes cannot be equaled in our time.” But Fontenelle did not accept the argument. Trees today are as grand as the trees of Greece; moreover, we moderns possess better philosophy than the Greeks. Descartes gave us a “new method of reasoning” that surpasses the cloudiness of Aristotle.29
The ongoing argument circled around the vigor of nature, society, and diversity. Humboldt and his successors left much of the old quarrel behind, yet they preserved one precept, a belief that diversity and energy attenuate. This was central to Humboldt—and became the crux to Mill and Tocqueville: a creeping uniformity that enfeebled the individual.30 The theme ran through The Limits of State Action, where Humboldt raised the specter of a government that replaces “variety and character” with “national uniformity.”31
In his discussion of uniformity Humboldt referred to Rousseau’s Emile, published in 1762. Rousseau had taken up the topic when he evaluated the merits of wide travel for “young people.” It was “not sufficient to roam through various countries,” he noted. One needs “eyes” and the ability to “turn them toward the object one wants to know.” Like Humboldt, he deemed the Greeks and Romans superior to his contemporaries. “The ancients traveled little,” declared Rousseau, but “they observed one another better than we observe our contemporaries.” Herodotus and Tacitus surpass “all our modern historians” in their depictions of other countries. Those who study the ancient authors know the Greeks, the Romans, or the Persians “better than any people of our day knows its neighbors.”
But Rousseau raised something else that Humboldt pursued. The ancients not only possessed superior talent of observation, but their domain also offered a more variegated world to observe. Across Europe diversity waned. The differences between peoples, which “previously struck the observer at first glance,” declines, noted Rousseau. Formerly “each nation remained more closed in upon itself.” With “little far-flung commerce” and “less communication, less travel, fewer common or contrary interests, and few political and civil relations among peoples,” each nation developed separately. In words that Humboldt seemed to borrow, Rousseau stated that nowadays, with “the forests leveled, the marshes dried up, and the land more uniformly—although worse—cultivated,” differences between countries decline. “There is now a hundred times more contact between Europe and Asia than there formerly was between Gaul and Spain. Europe alone used to be more diverse than the whole world is today.”32 Or, as he wrote elsewhere, “Say what you like, there is no such thing nowadays as Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, or even Englishmen—only Europeans. All have the same tastes, the same passions, the same customs.”33
For Lovejoy, the rediscovery of diversity expressed one of the mind’s “constant propensities” that “for some reason” became “particularly potent at this time.”34 He offered no explanation for the renewal beyond the regular oscillations of thought. Social conditions that fueled an appreciation of diversity did not interest him. But material circumstances illuminate why “for some reason” diversity became “particularly potent” in the mid-18th century. A new commercial society was in the making; it brought in its wake not only more travel and trade among peoples, as Rousseau noticed, but a push for uniform standards—and a protest against it.35 Expanded markets needed uniformity in measure, coin, and laws. But some figures of the Enlightenment resisted. Diversity gained adherents as society turned less variegated. Montesquieu, who traveled about Europe for nine years, is a classic example.
Montesquieu’s 1748 Spirit of the Laws contemplated “the infinite diversity of laws and manners.” While Montesquieu inspired many political liberals, and is often derided for his abstractness, a devotion to differences and their fragility marks his book. He wanted laws to be rooted in the particular situation of nations—not derived from universal principles.36 Nor did he want laws to override local customs. Indeed, he condemned Peter the Great’s edicts on native dress: “The law which obliged Muscovites to cut off their beards, and to shorten their clothes . . . were instances of tyranny.”37 Montesquieu objected to the seductiveness of “the ideas of uniformity” that attract “little souls,” who find therein a “kind of perfection.” These small souls want to institute “the same authorized weights, the same measures in trade, the same laws in the state, the same religion in all its parts.” Montesquieu challenged the uniformity obsession. “And does not a greatness of genius consist rather in distinguishing between those cases in which uniformity is requisite, and those in which there is a necessity for differences?”38
That is the rub: at what point does uniformity become oppressive? When does “a necessity for differences” outweigh a necessity of uniformity? We see at the end of the 18th century calls for uniformity, both as a philosophical and economic project, the latter a condition of a new market economy; and we see a protest against it in the name of diversity and individuality. For the “uniformitarians”—to use Lovejoy’s term—philosophical and economic imperatives fed each other.
Montesquieu alludes to those seeking uniformity in “authorized weights.” The campaign for uniformity of measurement illustrates the problem inasmuch as local codes of size and coin, which varied from region to region, bedeviled the 18th century. The French scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace believed that ending diversity in measurement would lead to advances in daily life. He complained of “the prodigious numbers of measures in use . . . their whimsical divisions, inconvenient for calculation, and the difficulty of knowing and comparing them.”39 Those who supported expanded trade usually supported uniform measurements. The evangelists of uniformity moved from money, weights, and measures to time, language, and beyond. Uniformity became not simply a program, but a cause.
Arthur Young, a British agriculturalist, toured France before the Revolution and complained of the maddening scales that differed everywhere. England and Ireland are bad enough, he noted, but “in France the infinite perplexity of the measures exceeds all comprehension.” He observed that they “differ not only in every province, but in every district, and almost in every town.” Moreover, “these tormenting variations” encompass both weight and length.40 Historians confirm Young’s observation. On the eve of the Revolution, France possessed more than a thousand units of measurement, with several hundred thousand local variations.41
In the name of trade and good government, 18th-century politicians regularly pressed for uniform measurements. In his first address to the United States Congress, George Washington called on it to attend to “an object of great importance,” establishing “Uniformity in the Currency, Weights and Measures.” His secretary of state submitted to Congress in 1790 a Plan for Establishing Uniformity in Coinage, Weights, and Measures of the United States. That secretary, Thomas Jefferson, became a principal devoted to a system of standard lengths, weights, and currency. A new currency should be based on tens, he believed, with a dollar divided into a hundred parts. The decimalization of the currency proved successful, but Jefferson had less success with the rest of the program. His efforts to adopt decimals for weights and measures came to “naught,” remarks an historian.42 Today the United States stands almost alone in the world in its resistance to the metric system. “Our system is so confused we don’t even know what to call it,” grouses John Bemelmans Marciano in Whatever Happened to the Metric System?43
But France embraced decimals with a vengeance, an example of uniformity gone amuck. Very roughly, in tandem with the zeal of the French Revolutionaries, the French upped their decimalization. They began with weights and measures, adopting meters and grams—and kilometers and kilograms. But as the revolution escalated, so did the decimalization frenzy. The revolutionaries devised a new calendar, and apart from renaming the months, they established the ten-day week. Gilbert Romme, a French mathematician charged with proposing a new calendar, explained that only in a revolutionary period could the old “diversity, incoherence and inexactness” be overcome. Note the terms: diversity equals incoherence. The new plan followed the rigor of nature rather than the superstitions of the past.44 The ten-day week proved less than popular, if only because it entailed working for nine straight days rather than six.45
At the most extreme phase, the revolutionary government sought to apply decimals to time. The revolutionary National Convention decreed that, to complete the “system of decimalization,” the “day will be divided into ten parts, each part of which will have ten parts,” which will continue to the smallest unit.46 To Romme, all this made perfect sense. The decimal second equaled “the pulse rate of the average-sized healthy man, marching at a military pace.”47 However, to much of France this was perfectly inane. An historian observes, “People rebelled against the 10-hour days, 100-minute hours, and 100-second minutes.” Not only Sundays vanished but also the ten-hour day required new decimal clocks. “The horologists of France shouted the loudest in opposition, since this ill-conceived plan rendered obsolete every watch and clock ever produced.”48 Yet decimal time had its supporters. When it was the turn of Saint-Just, a devoted fan of the guillotine—itself an example of standardization of capital punishment—to experience the machine firsthand, he carried a decimal timepiece.49
The uniformity cult of the period can be glimpsed not only in ten-hour clocks but also in language. If language inspired humanists like Humboldt to prize diversity, it also reflected then and today opposing realities, forces of uniformity. Alongside the intellectual mission to found a universal language, discussed in Chapter Two, above, arose the imperative to consolidate languages, in effect to establish one national tongue. These were less philosophical endeavors than projects driven by economic, state, and sometimes revolutionary principles.
In the name of security and prosperity, the modern states monopolize language, which means reducing or eliminating competing tongues. Much of this story is not pretty, but the standard tale of oppression distorts the record. To enter mainstream society sometimes meant acquiring the dominant language and leaving another. This does not always happen with force. Many immigrants to the United States, for instance, gave up their native tongues without regret. In general, however, a language gains supremacy by economic or political power. Populations with minor languages are cowed to relinquish theirs. “A language is a dialect with a navy and army,” goes a trenchant maxim. Who first uttered it is up for debate. Little doubt exists, however, that the adage popped up following a lecture on the future of Yiddish, which is apposite.50 Yiddish lacked an army and has virtually disappeared.
Calls for language uniformity in the name of progress and reason surfaced in the French Revolution. Yiddish tangentially figures in the French story and exemplifies the tangle of progress, uniformity, and domination. For those of the revolutionary persuasion, uniformity smacked of reason and progress. During the Revolution, Abbé Grégoire, a radical priest, pushed for a “Frenchification” of France that entailed the elimination of local dialects and languages. Not coincidently, he championed the equality of Jews and blacks—and campaigned for the application of science to business and life.51 He was a founder of the “Société des amis des Noirs,” which advocated for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery. He was also a founder of the Bureau des Longitudes that sought to improve navigation with superior measurements. This Bureau has been dubbed “one the great centers of enlightened science.”52 For a man of reason, the commitments to human equality, longitudinal precision, and linguistic standardization overlapped.53
The Jews must be compelled to study French, asserted Abbé Grégoire, and to give up Yiddish. “That Tudesco-Hebraico-Rabbinical jargon which is used by the German Jews, which is intelligible only to them, and which tends greatly to increase their ignorance, or veil their deception, will doubtlessly one day be extirpated.” The ill of local languages did not only afflict Jews, however. For Abbé Grégoire, too many Frenchmen did not speak French and remained trapped in dialects. Perhaps eight million Frenchmen “can scarcely utter a few mangled words, or disjointed phrases of our language.” The state should address this problem. Governments, the good abbé declared, “do not know, or are not sufficiently convinced, of how much importance the abolishing of gibberish is to the spread of enlightenment.”54
With the revolution Abbé Grégoire assumed some power, and the opportunity arose to suppress local languages. He and his confreres considered dialects and non-French languages as counterrevolutionary. “Federalism and superstitions speak Breton; emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German; counter-revolution speaks Italian and fanaticism speaks Basque,” reported a French revolutionary to the Committee of Public Safety. Bertrand Barère, a revolutionary ally of Abbé Grégoire and author of this report, denounced “these instruments of injury and error”: “The language of a free people must be one and the same for all.” Barère called for linguistic legionnaires to be sent to each rural commune. “The instructors will be required to teach the French language and the Declaration of the Rights of Man on alternate days to all young citizens.”55
Like a contemporary social scientist, Abbé Grégoire conducted a survey. To officialdom throughout France he sent out questions on the extent of local dialects or patois. “Is the usage of the French language universal in your region?” ran the first question. “Does one speak one or several patois?”56 The implications of the questions were clear. Linguistic diversity sustained reactionary sentiments and terms. The survey served as the basis for Abbé Grégoire’s report, the title of which speaks for itself: “Report on the Necessity and Means for Annihilating Patois and Universalizing the Usage of the French Language.” For Abbé Grégoire, enlightenment, progress, and linguistic uniformity meant the same thing. To annihilate patois aids in the decline of prejudice, fosters virtues, and simplifies laws and government. “The unity of language is an integral part of the revolution.”57
The cult of uniformity found determined critics, perhaps most notably the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder—roughly coterminous with Kant; he stands as one of the most passionate champions of diversity. For this reason, he has appealed to modern-day pluralists such as Isaiah Berlin.58 Herder upsets the usual categories. Is he part of the Enlightenment or the protest against it?59 Even his contemporaries found him difficult to pin down. But his celebration of the particular and specific comes through loud and clear. In both the theoretical and material dimension, he upheld the unique against the systematizers of rationalized uniformity. He feared, according to one scholar, the “mechanization of life.”60 Berlin called him “one of the earliest opponents of uniformity.”61 A chapter in Herder’s Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1780s) breathes of an exuberant celebration of diversity that we have seen in earlier thinkers. It opened this way, anticipating Hope Jahren’s remarks: “No two leaves of any one tree in nature are to be found perfectly alike; and still less do two human faces, or human frames, resemble each other. Of what endless variety is our artful structure susceptible!”62
Like virtually all the figures of the Enlightenment, he returned often to the issue of language, its origins and diversity. In one of his earliest works, Herder defended the matchlessness of each language—including German; and this during the reign of Frederick the Great, who—as mentioned in Chapter One, above—preferred French to German. For Herder, every mother tongue should be prized. He judged the multiplicity of languages a “genuine good.” Such diversity would persist so long as scholars are not ruled by “a monarch” who would “set one language upon the throne”; and “so long as the plans for a universal language belong among the empty projects and journeys to the moon.”63 So much for Esperanto—and the other efforts to establish a universal language.
Herder hammers away at the empty, universal, and abstract systems that constrict individual experience. A soft materialistic note pervades his writings. Social conditions, not just desiccated philosophies, constrain life. Unregulated experience grows rare and, along with it, original thinking. The sense of touch, he states in his early travel diaries, has become “dormant” and other senses cannot compensate. “There is no axiom more noteworthy,” writes Herder, than that thought depends on our senses. “If the senses are crippled, the mind is crippled too.” And this is occurring. He strikes the same notes as Humboldt. “Diverse, tangible and vivid sensations” that gave rise to original men with vigorous ideas dwindle. “These ages are past for us; we live in the century of ordinary experiences, of law and orderly government, of refinement and comfort, in which we must think like others because we learn to see what they see and as they see it.”64
Herder’s more systematic work—not very systematic—responded to the criticism that he romanticized past eras. We live in an age of progress and enlightenment, Herder declared with sarcasm in Another Philosophy of History (1774). Our age exports its “liquor and luxury to the world.”65 He mimics a contemporary cheerleader: “We have no highway robbers, no civil wars, no crimes anymore!” Herder rejoins, “Given how thoroughly our lands are regimented, plastered and violated with highways, and congested with garrisons; how wise the distribution of our fields; and how vigilant our wise justice is—where on earth could a poor scoundrel ply his rough trade . . . ?” For Herder, something has been lost; there is a “diminished strength and feeling of joy with which we are left as individuals.” Uniformity increases, and originality and energy decline. “Where all the customs are the same, all equally level, right, and good, what need is there for any effort?”66
The protest against creeping uniformity surfaced among other thinkers, although the lines of influence often led back to Herder. This is true for one of the more compelling figures, Benjamin Constant, the Swiss-French liberal, who is linked to the larger-than-life figure of Madame de Staël. For decades Constant has been treated as a minor figure, but recently his star has begun to rise.67 In his European peregrinations Constant almost met Herder; he arrived in Weimar as the German philosopher died there. At that moment Constant turned to study him.68 Herder’s condemnation of arid uniformity resonated with Constant. The lines of influence ran in several directions. The theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, discussed above, took much from Herder and he, in turn, influenced Constant.69
Though Constant took inspiration from Schleiermacher and Herder, he went his own way.70 He was also less a full-time philosopher than a full-time man of daily politics; he navigated the French Revolution and Napoleon’s reign, and flourished in the Restoration, the era after Napoleon’s final defeat, when he defended liberty against radicals of the Left and Right. Today Constant and Madame de Staël, whose lives were inextricably tangled, are credited as originators of French liberalism.71 Again and again Constant affirmed his defense of individual liberty. In an 1815 preface to his writings, he proclaims that for twenty years he has professed the same ideas, “individual liberty, liberty of the press, absence of arbitrary arrest, respect for the rights of all.” Fifteen years later, shortly before his death, he affirmed his credo: “For forty years I have defended the same principle, liberty in everything. . . . By liberty I mean the triumph of individuality, as much over . . . despotism as over the masses that claim the right to subject the minority to the majority.”72
The allusion to the masses as a threat indicates the topic that would increasingly trouble liberal thinkers: not tyrants, but the masses and uniformity endangered the individual. Both Constant and Madame de Staël championed the individual against foibles of the age. While not the focus of her memoir Ten Years of Exile, Madame de Staël protests the “extraordinary mania” of French revolutionaries—and of Napoleon—for imposing the same structure everywhere. They love uniformity. Universal principles of freedom exist, she asserts, “but what matter whether the political organization is a limited monarchy like England, or a federal republic like the United States, or the thirteen Swiss cantons? It is surely not necessary to limit Europe to a single idea . . . !” She refers to Napoleon’s despotism as “that great regulated system” that imposes the one edifice throughout his empire.73
Constant formulated the most forceful response to regimented uniformity in his broadside against Napoleonic rule, The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation and Their Relation to European Civilization. The argument hinged on a distinction he employed in his most famous piece, “On the Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns.” For Constant, the ancients conquered peoples but did not seek to dominate and regulate all activities. They were “satisfied with general obedience,” and ignored the “charm” of everyday life—childhood, local customs, and gods. But the modern conquerors differ. They want to impose everywhere “the same code of law, the same measures, the same regulations, and if they could . . . the same language.” They “wish their empire to present an appearance of uniformity, upon which the proud eye of power may travel without meeting any unevenness that could offend or limit its view.” For Constant, the goal of “uniformity” drives the modern despot. For the contemporary tyrant, “it is a pity that one cannot destroy all towns to rebuild them according to the same plan, and level all mountains to make the ground even everywhere.”
Constant’s chapter “On Uniformity” in his Spirit of Conquest expanded on these points. He marvels at the paradox that the push toward uniformity found great favor with both French revolutionaries and their opponents such as Napoleon. The “two extremes” of revolutionaries and anti-revolutionaries “found themselves in agreement.” Unlike the old tyrants, the new breed pursues people “into their most intimate aspects.” The modern tyrant seeks to reduce the individual to “uniform proportions.” In the past “conquerors expected the deputies of conquered nations to appear on their knees before them. Today it is man’s morale that they wish to prostrate.” For Constant, “this obsession with uniformity” undermines human vigor and spirit that are sustained by “diversities . . . demanded by nature and consecrated by experience.” It throws men “like atoms onto a monotonous plain.” In a ringing statement, Constant declaims, “Variety is life; uniformity, death.”74
Constant harbored a special animus for Abbé de Mably, who is remembered today—if at all—as an associate of Rousseau. For Constant, Mably sought to subordinate all emotions, even love, to strict laws. “He detested individual liberty like a personal enemy.” Under Mably’s regime, “every relaxation, every need” was subject to legislation. “The monastic barracks appeared to him as the ideal of a free republic.”75 In life and letters Constant moved in the opposite direction. He and Madame de Staël worshipped a robust individuality and disdained lethargy. Early in his career Constant lamented that the individual had been squeezed between decades of royalty and anarchy. Liberty emerges in “a generation that is mutilated, fatigued, faded.”76 He wrote to a friend, “There are no more individuals, but only battalions wearing uniforms.”77
In Constant’s autobiographical novel, Adolphe, about a tragic love affair, the title character harbors “an insurmountable aversion from all hackneyed phrases and dogmatic formulae.” He seeks a profound “emotional experience” and fears being overwhelmed by a “universal apathy.” When he hears “people holding forth complacently about established and incontrovertible principles of morality, behavior, and religion,” he feels “moved to contradict them.” Adolphe mistrusts “general axioms uttered without any reservation, so innocent of any shade of distinction.”78 In an unpublished passage for the preface, Constant stated that he wanted to portray in Adolphe “one of the principal moral maladies of our century” that he identified as “this fatigue . . . this absence of force.” Lassitude undermines not only love but also religion and liberty: “Fidelity in love is a force as in religion, as with liberty. But we no longer have any strength.”79
Both Constant and de Staël praised individuality, which for them rested on an emotional foundation, a notion that showed up in Humboldt. The individual strove not simply for happiness, but for something more. De Staël celebrated an enthusiasm for life and openness. She contrasted it to fanaticism, which is exclusive and narrow. “To reach the heart of things, we need some impulse arousing us to get eagerly involved.” She feared that young people seemed “disillusioned of enthusiasm” and were entering a premature senescence.80 Constant uses a different vocabulary but makes a kindred point. The threat to ancient liberty came from tyrants, but “a different sort of danger” threatens modern liberty. Men sink into private happiness and ignore the larger world and its possibilities. Is private happiness alone our only aim? asks Constant. “No, Sirs, I bear witness to the better part of our nature, that noble disquiet which pursues and torments us, that desire to broaden our knowledge and develop our faculties. . . . It is to self-development that our destiny calls to us.”81 But passivity and conformity threaten the self.
Something must be said about the ambiguous politics of diversity, which brings us back to Arthur Lovejoy. Even as he celebrated diversity, Lovejoy was aware of a problem. He had stated—as cited above—that, for better or worse, “the discovery of the intrinsic worth of diversity” marked a grand step in modern thought. In part it was for the worse, as Lovejoy knew. He was a committed liberal. He believed in civil rights, themselves founded not on principles of diversity, but the opposite, “universal formulas” that apply to all people. Earlier in his career Lovejoy resigned from Stanford University to protest the coerced resignation of a colleague. A Stanford sociologist had earned the wrath of its matriarch, Mrs. Stanford, because of his political activities in general, and his attack on railroad monopolies, the source of the Stanford wealth, in particular.82 Later Lovejoy helped establish a professional association that defended academic freedom. A recent account of that organization—the American Association of University Professors—calls him its “primary founder.”83 But does that commitment to universal axioms conflict with diversity? With what Lovejoy terms “the cultivation of individual, national and racial peculiarities?” Lovejoy was a man of ideas; he examined how they unfolded but hardly considered their political consequences. His inaugural essay for the journal he launched, the Journal of the History of Ideas, barely mentioned the world situation.84
Yet his Great Chain of Being dates from 1936. Lovejoy was writing amid the threat of fascism, to which his phrases about “the cultivation” of national and racial peculiarities alluded. He continued in the text, “The belief in the sanctity of one’s idiosyncrasy . . . is rapidly converted into a belief in its superiority.” Evidently referring to Germany, Lovejoy, who was born in Berlin, wrote that “more than one great people . . . having first made a god of its own peculiarities . . . presently began to suspect there was no other god. A type of national culture valued at first because it was one’s own . . . came in time to be conceived of as a thing which had a mission to impose upon others.”85
Five years later Lovejoy linked the rise of fascism to the notion that he dubbed “diversitarianism,” which was a protest against the idea that “what is rational is uniform”—or what he called “uniformitarianism.” For Lovejoy “the fateful political events of our time” are partly “animated by an intense and obsessing sense of the differentness” in which each people are separate and distinct. His piece closed by affirming a “specific historical connection” between the cult of diversity and “the tragic spectacle of Europe in 1940.”86
Lovejoy put his finger on the dangerous side of “diversitarianism.” In the name of differences, it renounces a commitment to universal rights. As Lovejoy indicated, this repudiation imbued Nazi ideology. For instance, the much-quoted line “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun” turned on a denunciation of universal ideas. “Culture” equaled liberal rights. The sentence derived from a Nazi play performed for Hitler’s birthday in 1933, a few years before Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being. In the play, a veteran of World War I who had also witnessed the brief leftist German revolution of 1918 proclaims, “And the last thing I’ll stand for is ideas to get the better of me! I know that rubbish from ’18 . . . fraternity, equality . . . freedom . . . beauty and dignity. . . . No, let ’em keep their good distance with their whole ideological kettle of fish [Weltanschauungssalat]. . . . I shoot with live ammunition! When I hear the word culture . . . I release the safety on my Browning!”87
Nevertheless, despite its “ruinous uses,” Lovejoy maintained that the discovery of the inherent value of diversity is “one of the great discoveries of the human mind.”88 And so it might be. Yet its dark underbelly keeps reappearing in history. At what point does the stress on diversity bury general notions of human solidarity? At what point does it turn into an ideology that exalts segregation and discrimination? After all, American slavery became known to its defenders as the “peculiar institution”—not universal, but peculiar because of its unique ties to the American South. An architect of South African apartheid appealed to diversity as its justification: “Our policy is a policy,” he stated, “that accepts that there are differences between people and you have to recognize these differences. Differences should be celebrated.”89
In the period of the 18th and early 19th centuries these ideas of diversity, particularism, and individualism composed what has been called the counter-Enlightenment—a rejection of universalism and reason. For some scholars, these ideas amounted to less an opposition to the Enlightenment than a modification of it.90 For others, the counter-Enlightenment presaged right-wing 19th-century movements. For still others, such as the Israeli scholar Zeev Sternhell, the counter-Enlightenment, a term that may have originated with Nietzsche, contained the seeds of fascism. Herder shows up often in Sternhell’s account of the baleful effects of the counter-Enlightenment. He notes, for instance, that Hans-Georg Gadamer, a student of Heidegger, a philosopher who initially embraced the Nazis, lectured on Herder in Paris at the Nazi German Institute in 1941. Sternhell claims that, at the moment of Nazi victory, Gadamer wanted to lord over the defeated French and show the superiority of German values. In Sternhell’s view, Herder served him well. “Gadamer had totally assimilated Herder’s critique of the French Enlightenment, rationalism, and the rights of man.”91
There is something to this. But how much? Herder was very much a student of the Enlightenment even as he offered a sharp criticism of its (French) excesses. The same might be said of others who are corralled into the counter-Enlightenment, such as Edmund Burke. The Irishman is famous for his denunciation of the French Revolution, but less famous for his defense of the American Revolution and his condemnation of English misdeeds in India. Moreover, writers such as Constant and Madame de Staël boasted solid liberal credentials and, at the same time, offered criticism of “uniformitarianism.”
Yet a defense of diversity and denunciation of uniformity inform conservative thought more than liberal. Why? A short answer might be that liberals, even Marxists, see themselves as improving modern society, while (some) conservatives see themselves as resisting it. Inasmuch as this conservativism is out of step with progress, it might be more alert to its costs; and the costs encompass many features of a modern commercial society, such as uniform standards. At the same time, this conservatism easily tilts into foggy notions of past differences between peoples and nations, which Sternhell foregrounds.
In a classic work, Karl Mannheim, the German sociologist who was himself a refugee, concluded that conservative thought arose “as a political argument against the revolutionary breach with the past” and everywhere upheld tradition, nobility, and even feudalism. Mannheim spotlighted the German 18th-century conservative, Justus Möser, who today garners little attention apart from specialists.92 In his discussion Mannheim did not accent diversity, but as a theme it jumps out of Möser’s writings. Möser was a reactionary who adored his corner of Germany—its rules, traditions, customs—and railed against an impending uniformity. He is sometimes dubbed a “German Burke,” but his impact hardly compares to that of the Irishman. Mannheim signaled as archetypical Möser’s essay “The Modern Taste for General Laws and Decrees is a Danger to Our Common Liberty” (1772). In it Möser champions diversity and variety against bureaucratic simplifications. He cites Montesquieu’s comments on the topic to support his own argument that uniformity begets despotism.93
For Möser, government bureaucrats reduce everything to identical regulations and thereby subvert variety. He ridicules Voltaire, who himself ridicules the fact that someone can lose a court case in one village that he would win in a neighboring village with different rules. For Voltaire, this situation cries out for uniformity of legal codes, but for Möser the diversity is a blessing, not a curse. Voltaire can “find the same differences within two families” of one village. Uniform regulations injure the variety of nature and society. “In fact, we distance ourselves from the true plan of nature, which shows its wealth in diversity [“Mannigfaltigkeit”], and we move toward despotism, which subordinates everything to a few regulations, and in so doing lose the wealth of diversity.”94 To Möser, the links between diversity and conservatism stand out in sharp relief—in the same way, as in Abbé Grégoire, the links between uniformity and radicalism leap out.
Like many Germans, Möser was a bit of an Anglophile, and prefers, for instance, English gardens over French ones. The French garden, however tasteful with straight allées and trimmed hedges, can be sketched out in a few lines. But the English garden is Shakespearean in its thickets, ruins, and caves—in its “unending diversity.”95 As in gardens, so in art: general rules do not apply. Möser connects the aesthetic and the political. “It is a commonplace how general rules confine men of literary genius . . . [to] mediocrity unless they break through the tyranny of rules.” In the same way, the state must not be constructed in the French mode in which “one should be able to describe its essential features upon a single sheet of paper.”96 Here as elsewhere, Möser prized variety in politics. As the distinguished Renaissance historian Hans Baron put it, for Möser the word “diversity” [“Mannigfaltigkeit”] served as “a battle cry against the hated uniformity of the age.”97
Before dismissing the attack on uniformity as inevitably conservative, it must be appreciated that Constant made the same point—often with similar phrases. He also attacked Voltaire and kindred writers for “their love of symmetry.” “‘What,’ they cry out, ‘two portions of the same empire are subjected to different laws because they are separated by a hill or a stream of water! Is justice not the same on the two sides of a hill, or on the two banks of a stream of water?’” For Constant, however, two communities, although geographically close, may have “enjoyed a separate existence” and preserved “different forms,” and perhaps cannot be judged by one standard. “The freest country in our old world, Great Britain, is governed by very diversified laws.”98 Elsewhere, he writes, it is “strange” that friends of liberty have “always heatedly worked” to impose a single abstract law, stripping people of memory and imagination. It is not so strange, Constant reflects, after the realization that “local memories contain a principle of resistance that the authorities only regret and hurriedly seek to uproot.”99
The difference between Constant and counter-Enlighteners may be in the vector of their approach. Möser’s does look backward, as Mannheim indicated, to a feudal past; he feared the rise of commerce.100 But Constant looks forward to an industrial future.101 Early and late in his career Constant planned to write about the idea of human progress, which he embraced.102 If Möser and his intellectual kin are the conservatives, and Constant and his the liberals, they converged in privileging diversity and protesting uniformity. On these issues, at first glance they appear almost indistinguishable. However, they diverged in identifying the source of the ill. For the conservatives the danger emanated largely from the French Enlightenment, with its commitment to precision and homogeneity. But for the liberals the danger derived from the dynamics of a new commercial society-in-the-making.103
Constant’s lecture on the liberty of the ancients and moderns pivots on this issue. He argued that liberty differed in the classical and modern world due to distinct economic systems. The ancients depended on a slave society that gave them the leisure to participate in public life. “Without the slave population of Athens, 20,000 Athenians could never have spent every day at the public square in discussions.” Modern commerce and the abolition of slavery bring about a society in which the individual relies on his own self and activity. “Our freedom must consist of peaceful enjoyment and private independence.” For Constant this signaled many advances. “The progress of civilization” and the “commercial tendency of the age” have “infinitely multiplied and varied the means of personal happiness.” There is no going back. To draw lessons from how the Greeks—or the Persians or the Egyptians—lived misses the point. “We are modern men, who wish each to enjoy our own rights, each to develop our own faculties as we like best.” For this we need political liberty, which allows us to seek happiness and self-development. Political liberty, which encompasses “all the citizens, without exception . . . enlarges their spirits, ennobles their thoughts, and establishes among them a kind of intellectual equality which forms the glory and power of a people.”104 Yet moderns face a new problem as they seek to enfold their talents—a crush of uniformity that threatens the individual.