I HAVE BRIEFLY DISCUSSED Voltaire’s naïve political conduct at the court of Frederick II in my Voltaire’s Politics, 151–2; see also the germane volumes of Besterman’s Correspondence of Voltaire (X–XV), and Fernand Caussy: “La mission diplomatique de Voltaire (1743–5),” La Grande Revue, LXV, 2 (February 1911), 547–63. Kant makes his simple but brilliantly persuasive argument that theory and practice cannot contradict one another in “Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis,” Werke, VI, 355–98. The famous quotation from Laurence Sterne comes from Tristram Shandy, book I, chap. xxiii.
Much of the material I used to construct my argument that men of letters experienced their own recovery of nerve in the age of the Enlightenment I have of course used before, in the first chapter of this volume, and in The Rise of Modern Paganism. Here I shall confine myself to the essential titles. For Scotland, see Henry Grey Graham: Scottish Men of Letters in the Eighteenth Century (1901), Gladys Bryson: Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry in the Eighteenth Century (1945), E. C. Mossner: The Life of David Hume (1954), W. R. Scott: Adam Smith As Student and Professor (1937), and C. R. Fay: Adam Smith and the Scotland of His Day (1956), [all I, 430–1].
For England, see Leslie Stephen: English Literature and Society in the XVIIIth Century (1907), R. W. Chapman: “Authors and Booksellers,” in Turberville, ed.: Johnson’s England, II, 310–30, Alexandre Beljame: Men of Letters and the English Public in the XVIIIth Century (2d edn., 1897; tr. E. O. Lorimer and corrected by Bonamy Dobrée, 1948), J. A. Cochrane: Dr. Johnson’s Printer: The Life of William Strahan (1964), J. M. Saunders: The Profession of English Letters (1964), David M. Low: Edward Gibbon, 1737–1794 (1937), and A. S. Collins: Authorship in the Days of Johnson (1927), [all I, 431–8]. Collins, in addition, has informative material in his The Profession of Letters (1928); he has dealt with the unsolved, perhaps unsolvable question of the reading public in “The Growth of the Reading Public during the Eighteenth Century,” Review of English Studies, II, 7 (July 1926), 284–94. On this same question, see also James Sutherland: “The Circulation of Newspapers and Literary Periodicals, 1700–1730,” The Library (fourth series), XV, 2 (February 1934), 111–13. K. Ewart has analyzed a difficult and important question in Copyright (1952). The complex and on the whole heartening evolution of a free press in England is traced by Laurence Hanson: Government and the Press, 1695–1763 (1936), W. H. Wickwar: The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press (1928), and Fredrick Seaton Siebert: Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776: The Rise and Decline of Government Control (1952), especially chaps. xii–xviii. The older article by Douglas M. Ford: “The Growth of the Freedom of the Press,” English Historical Review, IV, 2 (1889), 1–12, and the book by F. Knight Hunt: The Fourth Estate, 2 vols. (1850), remain useful. I have drawn some figures and quotations from Ian Watt: The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957), which is really social more than it is literary history, especially from chap. ii. For English circulating libraries, see Hilda M. Hamlyn: “Eighteenth Century Circulating Libraries in England,” The Library (fifth series), I, 3 (December 1946), 197–222. Stanley Morison: The English Newspaper (1932) is informative; see also Walter Graham: The Beginnings of English Literary Periodicals, 1665–1715 (1926).
Among the writers Richardson is perhaps most instructive, since he was both a publisher and an author. The best studies are probably A. D. McKillop: Samuel Richardson: Printer and Novelist (1936), and William Merritt Sale: Samuel Richardson, Master Printer (1950). The sociological exploration of the new reading public has been undertaken, still rather impressionistically, by Watt, and in a long article by Leo Lowenthal and Marjorie Fiske: “The Debate over Art and Popular Culture in Eighteenth Century England,” in Mirra Komarovsky, ed.: Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences (1957), 33–112. R. K. Webb’s The British Working Class Reader, 1790–1848: Literacy and Social Tension (1955) is a serious attempt to analyze the relation of reading, class, and politics. There is a good new edition of Moritz’s Travels: translated and edited by Reginald Nettel (1965).
The French situation, like the English, has been thoroughly canvassed. To mention only the best: Lucien Brunel: Les Philosophes et l’académie française au dix-huitième siècle (1884), Jacques Proust: Diderot et l’Encyclopédie (1962), Daniel Mornet: Les Origines intellectuelles de la révolution française (1947), Pierre Grosclaude: Malesherbes: Témoin et interprète de son temps (1961), Kingsley Martin: French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1929), Ira O. Wade: The Clandestine Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France from 1700 to 1750 (1938), Maurice Pellisson: Les Hommes de lettres au XVIIIe siècle (1911), a major work, and above all, David T. Pottinger: The French Book Trade in the Ancien Régime, 1500–1789 (1958), which is indispensable [I, 434–5]. Pottinger’s book does not fully supersede his own informative articles, “Censorship in France during the Ancien Régime,” Boston Public Library Quarterly, VI, 1, 2 (January–April 1954), 23–42, 84–101. J.-P. Belin: Le commerce des livres prohibés à Paris de 1750 à 1789 (1913) takes up where Albert Bachman: Censorship in France from 1715 to 1750: Voltaire’s Opposition (1934) leaves off. Paul Dupont: Histoire de l’imprimerie, 2 vols. (1854) is excellent on the book trade, with appended documents; it can be supplemented with Gabriel Peignot’s Essai historique sur la liberté d’écrire (1832), which prints excerpts from government decrees. Paul Mellottée: Les transformations économiques de l’imprimerie sous l’ancien régime (1905) has a significant economic analysis of the book industry. The government’s opening of mail, a source of great annoyance to the philosophes and a real danger, is well discussed by Eugène Vaillé in Le Cabinet noir (1950). I have discussed Voltaire’s publishing tactics in Voltaire’s Politics, passim, especially 66–87; and in The Party of Humanity, chaps. i–iii. The critical controversy over Helvétius’s De l’esprit is best examined in D. W. Smith: Helvétius: A Study in Persecution (1965), [I, 437], and Wilson: Diderot. Dieckmann has convincingly shown that Diderot’s hesitation to publish was not caused solely by fear (Cinq leçons sur Diderot, 18–19). At the same time (and the two views are compatible) Frank A. Kafker has demonstrated the consequences of censorship for Diderot and his great enterprise in “The Effect of Censorship on Diderot’s Encyclopedia,” The Library Chronicle, XXX, 1 (January 1964), 25–6. To these may be added Douglas H. Gordon and Norman L. Torrey: The Censoring of Diderot’s Encyclopédie and the Re-established Text (1947), [I, 434]. J. Lough has suggested (“The Encyclopédie: Two Unsolved Problems,” French Studies, XVII, 2 [April 1963], 126–34), that the interference of the publisher may have been even more drastic than Gordon and Torrey have found. On social rigidity and mobility that includes the careers of writers, once again, Barber: Bourgeoisie in 18th Century France. The interesting career of Pierre Rousseau, who evaded French censors by operating from the relatively free soil of the Duchy of Bouillon, throws much light on eighteenth-century French publishing conditions; it has been explored by Raymond F. Birn in “The Journal Encyclopédique and the Old Regime,” VS, XXIV (1963), 219–40; and in “Pierre Rousseau and the ‘Philosophes’ of Bouillon,” VS, XXIX (1964). The seizure of the Académie française by the philosophes can be traced in Brunel, cited above, in Ronald Grimsley: Jean D’Alembert, 1717–83 (1962), [I, 436], in the relevant volumes of Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire, in François Albert-Buisson: Les quarante au temps des lumières (1960), which though brief and vulgarly chatty is surprisingly informative, and in the older survey by Émile Gassier: Les cinq cents immortels: Histoire de l’Académie Française, 1634–1906 (1906), especially 70–114, and the documents, 390 ff. Trois siècles de l’Académie française, 1635–1935 (1935) is a collection of essays on various aspects of its history by the forty Immortals of 1935. But a full analysis of strategies and counterstrategies, which uses the surviving records and the discreet—sometimes indiscreet—hints in the philosophes’ correspondence, remains a desideratum. In general we may conclude, as I conclude in the text, that Tocqueville’s cozy conclusion—“authors were harried to an extent that won them sympathy, but not enough to inspire them with any real fear. They were, in fact, subjected to the petty persecutions that spur men to revolt, but not to the steady pressure that breaks their spirit,” The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856; tr. Stuart Gilbert, 1955), 152–3—cannot withstand careful examination.
Biedermann: Deutschland im achtzehnten Jahrhundert, II, part I, 484 n., has the figure on the shift from Latin to German; he discusses the tribulations of German “political” journalism in I, 112 ff. Leonard Krieger: The German Idea of Freedom: History of a Political Tradition (1957), especially 43, analyzes what social consequences that journalism did have. While Albert Köster: Die deutsche Literatur der Aufklärungszeit (1925), [I, 440], is primarily a work of literary history, it discusses Prussian censorship on 207–8. Bruford’s Germany in the Eighteenth Century is explicitly directed (as its subtitle makes clear) at the “social background of the literary revival” and is particularly useful for this section. Two books, though now old, remain informative on the history of the German book trade—Karl Buechner: Beiträge zur Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels, 2 vols. (1873–4), and Johann Goldfriedrich: Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels, 3 vols. (1908–13), of which I and II are particularly relevant to the age of the Enlightenment.
For the survival of illiteracy among nobles and persistence of patronage in other countries, see J. M. Roberts: “Lombardy,” in Goodwin: European Nobility, 70; and Michael Roberts: “Sweden,” ibid., 152. That the so-called Westernization of the Russian mind under Peter the Great amounted to very little has been proved once and for all by L. R. Lewitter: “Peter the Great, Poland, and the Westernization of Russia,” JHI, XIX, 4 (October 1958), 493–506.
The literature on American freedom of the press is largely one of self-congratulation, although modern studies have introduced some complications into the picture. Leonard W. Levy’s rather astringent criticisms in Legacy of Suppression (1960) are refreshing and an essential corrective, but they remain a dissenting voice. A different view is taken by Zechariah Chafee, Jr.: Free Speech in the United States (1948). See also the standard treatment, Arthur M. Schlesinger: Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764–1776 (1958), and Livingston Schuyler: The Liberty of the Press in the American Colonies before the Revolutionary War (1905).
The question of life styles, of attitudes toward death, toward past and future, and toward civilization, has not yet been fully treated. The locus classicus for antique pessimism is in Nietzsche’s great essay, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872; tr. several times, most recently by Francis Golffing, 1956). Modern scholarly examinations of Greek antiquity have not destroyed, even if they have modified, Nietzsche’s portrait; see above all Werner Jaeger: Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, 3 vols. (1936; tr. Gilbert Highet, 2d edn., 1945), E. R. Dodds: The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), A. D. Nock: Conversion: The Old and New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (1933), H.-I. Marrou: A History of Education in Antiquity (1948; tr. G. R. Lamb, 1956), [all, I, 466–9]. For Roman pessimism, Sir Ronald Syme: Tacitus, 2 vols. (1958), and The Roman Revolution (1939), [I, 476, 479], are decisive. I have also discussed Lucretius in The Rise of Modern Paganism, 98–105; I have, on both occasions, learned much from Santayana’s Three Philosophical Poets (1910), [I, 475]. Jean Seznec: The Survival of the Pagan Gods (1940; rev. edn., tr. Barbara F. Sessions, 1953), [I, 493], has treated classical classicism as a form of nostalgia (p. 322); but Ernst Robert Curtius: European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948; tr. Willard R. Trask, 1953), [I, 477], has shown (165–6) that the ancients also defended themselves against the overwhelming pressure of ancestor worship.
For medieval attitudes, Marc Bloch: Feudal Society, is indispensable (see above, 583). Millard Meiss: Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death: The Arts, Religion and Society in the Mid-Fourteenth Century (1951), [I, 513], is a fascinating monograph. It may be supplemented by Helmut Rosenfeld: Der Mittelalterliche Totentanz (1954). Johan Huizinga’s famous The Waning of the Middle Ages (2d edn., 1921; tr. and rev. by the author and F. Hopman, 1924) has often been taken as a corrective for Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch (1860), [I, 506], erroneously so, for Huizinga and Burckhardt do not deal with the same region; besides, Burckhardt’s view of the profound, indeed tragic ambivalence of Renaissance life and attitudes toward life is far from optimistic. I have analyzed Burckhardt’s ambivalence in “Burckhardt’s Renaissance: Between Responsibility and Power,” in Leonard Krieger and Fritz Stern, eds.: The Responsibility of Power: Historical Essays in Honor of Hajo Holborn (1967), 183–98.
A book of principal importance to this section has been Erwin Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture: Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini (1964), which develops with masterly erudition the crucial distinction between retrospective and prospective attitudes toward death; chap. iv traces the gradual conversion of death into a symbol designed to terrify rather than purify. Alberto Tenenti: La vie et la mort à travers l’art du XVe siècle (Cahiers des Annales, No. 8, 1952), and his larger Il senso della morte et l’amore della vita nel Rinascimento (1957), are pioneering studies which I found most useful; I only wish there were similar studies for the eighteenth century. See also Robert Mandrou: Introduction à la France moderne (1500–1640): Essai de psychologie historique (1961), [I, 505]. Theodore Spencer: Death and Elizabethan Tragedy (1936) shows that while in the Middle Ages sudden death was feared as cutting off the possibility of pious preparation and repentance, by the time of Montaigne it was coming to be thought desirable. A. J. Krailsheimer: Studies in Self-Interest from Descartes to La Bruyère (1962), [I, 524] has interesting passages on the all-too-un-Christian love of fame in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Brémond’s chapter on “L’art de mourir,” in Histoire Littéraire, IX (see above, 594), is instructive, especially for comparative purposes.
The seventeenth century is, of course, the century when ancients battled moderns, a combat that has been much examined. The best known and in many respects the best book on the combat in England is Richard Foster Jones: Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth Century England (2d edn., 1961), a magisterial work; my only reservation is that it tends to see the Puritans as rather more modern in their ideas, let alone their consequences, than I should tend to see them. I have criticized this tendency to modernize Puritanism in A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America, passim. Jones’s “The Background of ‘The Battle of the Books,’ ” in Jones et al.: The Seventeenth Century, 10–40, is very interesting in this context. For the combat in France, the standard work is H. Gillot: La Querelle des anciens et des modernes en France (1914). I have indicated Voltaire’s view of the combat in the text; his general attitude has not been fully explored. If it is to be, the Notebooks offer rich materials; it was in one of these that he wrote, quite simply: “Those who read only the ancients are children who never want to talk to anyone but their nurses” (Notebooks, 193).
All these books lay the groundwork for an understanding of eighteenth-century attitudes toward life. Here the bulky dissertation by Robert Mauzi: L’idée du bonheur au XVIIIe siècle (1960), well surveys the field. Mauzi’s critical edition (with a long Introduction) of Madame du Châtelet’s Discours sur le bonheur (1961) is extremely illuminating. Bernard Groethuysen’s Die Entstehung der bürgerlichen Welt- und Lebensanschauung in Frankreich, 2 vols. (1927–30), [I, 545], should be contrasted with Brémond’s chapter, just cited, on the art of dying.1 Lester G. Crocker has useful indications on attitudes toward life and death, both in An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth Century Thought (1959) (chaps. i–iii) and Nature and Culture: Ethical Thought in the French Enlightenment (1963), (chaps. v and vi), [both in I, 428]; see also his article on “The Discussion of Suicide in the Eighteenth Century,” JHI, XIII, 1 (January 1952), 47–72. As should appear from the text, my interpretation of Diderot’s remark about posterity is quite different from that offered by Carl Becker in his Heavenly City, 119 ff. The remarkable correspondence between Diderot and Falconet can now be read in George Roth’s edition of Diderot’s Correspondance, V and VI. Herbert Dieckmann and Jean Seznec have made this correspondence their own; see their partial edition, Diderot et Falconet, Correspondance (1959) and their article, “The Horse of Marcus Aurelius: A Controversy between Diderot and Falconet,” Warburg Journal, XV (1952), 198–228 [I, 437]. Anne Betty Weinshenker’s excellent dissertation on Falconet, which, I said in my first volume, should be published, has now appeared—Falconet: His Writings and His Friend Diderot (1966).
The classic study of primitivism is A. O. Lovejoy and George Boas: Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity: A Documentary History of Primitivism and Related Ideas, I (1935), from which grew other studies by the authors and their numerous students; it makes the central distinction between “soft” and “hard” primitivism—the commitment to nostalgia or to cultivation. The first result of their collective studies, appearing even before their major work, was Lois Whitney: Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century (1934), which is dependable and informative, with an instructive Foreword by Lovejoy. Among other Johns Hopkins dissertations on the subject, Edith Amelie Runge: Primitivism and Related Ideas in Sturm und Drang Literature (1946), was one of the few to be printed; in its bibliography (298) it conveniently lists the others. Thomson, the poet of Newtonianism, forms a special and interesting specimen; he has been studied in Raymond D. Havens: “Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in Thomson,” Studies in Philology, XXIX, 1 (January 1932), 41–52. One fascinating early product of the Hopkins group’s studies was George Boas’s amusing and informative The Happy Beast in French Thought of the Seventeenth Century (1933). But we may go back further than this, to the writings of another Johns Hopkins scholar closely associated with Lovejoy and Boas, Gilbert Chinard, whose L’exotisme américain dans la littérature française au 16e siècle (1911) set the tone; his L’Amérique et le rêve exotique dans la littérature française au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècle (1913), [I, 485], took the story to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition, see also Geoffrey Atkinson: The Extraordinary Voyage in French Literature from 1700 to 1720 (1922); and Durand Echeverria: Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (1957), which traces French views of America [both in I, 485]; Chauncey B. Tinker: Nature’s Simple Plan (1922), and Hoxie N. Fairchild: The Noble Savage (1928). Scholars, it seems, have long been fascinated by the primitive.
There are good critical editions of Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes by Antoine Adam (1954) and Paul Vernière (1960), and of Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville by Gilbert Chinard (1935), and above all, Herbert Dieckmann (1955). I have once again found James Doolittle: Rameau’s Nephew: A Study of Diderot’s “Second Satire” (1960), helpful. G. L. van Roosbroeck: Persian Letters Before Montesquieu (1932) places Montesquieu in the tradition [all in I, 485].
Rousseau the “primitivist” has long occupied the attention of the popular writer and, fortunately, the careful scholar. George R. Havens’s critical edition of Rousseau’s first Discours (1946), [I, 485–6], which analyzes Diderot’s share in the work should be read in conjunction with Lovejoy’s justly celebrated article “The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality” (1923), in Essays in the History of Ideas (1948), 14–37. If a full study of the tension between “primitivism” and reformism in Rousseau is to be made, it will have to include his minor political writings, especially the essays on Poland and Corsica. For China, a target of long-distance admiration among the philosophes, an anti-Christian, though hardly primitivist ideal, see Virgile Pinot: La Chine et la formation de l’esprit philosophique en France, 1640–1740 (1932), Walter Engemann: Voltaire und China (1932), and, above all, the exhaustive study by Basil Guy: The French Image of China Before and After Voltaire, VS, XXI (1963), [all in I, 454–5].
The literature on the theory of progress is sizable and valuable, but to my knowledge the broad context into which I have placed the idea of progress—including the general recovery of nerve and the fortunes of literary men—has not been explored before. The standard discussion of progress remains J. B. Bury: The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry Into Its Origin and Growth (1920), which, for all its narrowness of concern and occasional superficiality, has in its easygoing way much penetrating analysis.2 Jules Delvaille: Essai sur l’histoire de l’idée de progrès jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (1910) is comprehensive but shares with other studies of progress the fault of seeking out, and finding, clues to a theory of progress everywhere. Morris Ginsberg’s stimulating essay, The Idea of Progress: A Revaluation (1953), and René Hubert: “Essai sur l’histoire de l’idée de progrès,” Revue d’Histoire de la philosophie et d’histoire générale de la civilisation (new series), II (October 15, 1934), 289–305, and III (January 15, 1935), 1–32, serve as excellent correctives. Charles Frankel: The Faith of Reason: The Idea of Progress in the French Enlightenment (1948) is a stimulating essay perhaps unduly neglected. I found R. V. Sampson: Progress in the Age of Reason (1956) a sensible survey with some apt quotations, but hardly profound. Charles Vereker: Eighteenth-Century Optimism (1967) particularly stresses the theological (or pseudo-theological) side of “redemptive optimism.” Frederick John Teggart, ed.: The Idea of Progress: A Collection of Readings (1949) is an adroit anthology. There are useful hints in Georg G. Iggers: “The Idea of Progress: A Critical Reassessment,” American Historical Review, LXXI, 1 (October 1965), 1–17. Lovejoy’s masterly The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (1936) has some very important chapters on the “temporalization of the chain of being” as an instrument for the construction of a theory of progress. That we must interpret the evidence with deliberate care becomes obvious when we find as well-informed a historian as Sir Isaiah Berlin writing: “The third great myth of the eighteenth century was that of steady progress, if not inevitable, at least virtually certain; with consequent disparagement of the benighted past …” (“Herder and the Enlightenment,” in Earl R. Wasserman, ed.: Aspects of the Eighteenth Century [1965], 82). Readers of my first volume know that I think the second part of Sir Isaiah’s statement must be modified; readers of chap. ii of this volume know that I think the first part must be rejected.
The literature on primitivism cited before naturally contains much material on progress as well. For the Christian theory of progress, which partly accompanied, partly competed with the secular idea of progress, see the pioneering articles by R. J. Crane: “Anglican Apologetics and the Idea of Progress, 1699–1745,” Modern Philology, XXXI, 3 (February 1934), 273–306; and 4 (May 1934), 349–82. Ernest Lee Tuveson makes the important point that the idea of progress had deep Christian roots in Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of Progress (1949). A subtle yet important contributing factor in Christian optimism was the illogical but powerful assumptions that Christian doctrine, though eternal and eternally valid, somehow evolved; Owen Chadwick has explored this notion with his customary astuteness in From Bossuet to Newman: The Idea of Doctrinal Development (1957). Georges Hardy has connected the church fathers with seventeenth-century Christian optimistic views of history in Le “De Civitate Dei,” source principale du “Discours sur l’histoire universelle” (1913). Norman Cohn has pursued Christian millenarianism through the Middle Ages in his brilliant but still controversial The Pursuit of the Millennium (2d edn., 1961). Theodor E. Mommsen’s important article on “St. Augustine and the Christian Idea of Progress,” JHI, XII, 3 (July 1951), 346–74, which I have cited before [see I, 495], deserves to be cited again.
While I have long pursued my own research into philosophical pessimism, I was both encouraged and helped by Henry Vyverberg’s Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment (1958), [I, 449], rich in gloomy quotations, some of which I have borrowed. A good instance of the difficulties confronting the interpreter of the eighteenth-century mood is the confrontation of Gustave Lanson’s “Le déterminisme historique et l’idéalisme social dans L’Esprit des lois,” Études d’histoire littéraire (1929), 135–63, which sees Montesquieu as an optimist, with Gilbert Chinard’s “Montesquieu’s Historical Pessimism,” Studies in the History of Culture (1942), 161–72, which sees Montesquieu as a pessimist (see Vyverberg: Historical Pessimism, 243). It is too easy to say that both are right; of course they are, but it is necessary to be more precise than this. I incline toward a pessimistic interpretation of Montesquieu’s ideas—not the absence of hope for energetic reformist activity to be sure, but a firm, rather grim conviction that all effort will leave life very imperfect indeed. Montesquieu’s pessimism is supported by Franz Neumann’s splendid “Introduction” to The Spirit of the Laws (1945), [I, 436], and René Hubert’s “La Notion du devenir historique dans la philosophie de Montesquieu,” Revue de Métaphysique et de morale, XLVI, 4 (October 1939), 587–610. Diderot is interesting and, as always, extremely complicated; see Lester G. Krakeur (Lester G. Crocker): “Diderot and the Idea of Progress,” Romanic Review, XXIX, 2 (April 1938), 151–9. For Diderot’s pessimism and warnings against philosophical naïveté, see especially his correspondence—for example his letter to Sophie Volland, October 20 (1760), Correspondance, III, 164–82, especially 171–2, and other letters to her, especially of this period; as well as Pages Contre un Tyran, in Œuvres politiques, 135–48.
One interesting and confusing aspect of the debate over progress is the cyclical theory of history. In Europe, Swift (see Ricardo Quintana: Swift: An Introduction [1955], [I, 537], 79, 153–5), and Wieland (see Wolffheim: Wielands Begriff der Humanität [1949], [I, 439], especially 29–32) are prominent representatives. For cyclical theories among colonial historians in America, see Stow Persons: American Minds (1958). Indeed, Adam Ferguson’s call for caution, uttered in An Essay on the History of Civil Society in mid-eighteenth century, remains valid: “We are often tempted into these boundless regions of ignorance or conjecture, by a fancy which delights in creating rather than in merely retaining the forms which are presented before it; we are the dupes of a subtlety, which promises to supply every defect of our knowledge.…” (quoted in Sampson: Progress in the Age of Reason, 91).
For Turgot, see the essay in Frank E. Manuel: The Prophets of Paris: Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Fourier and Comte (1962), which is lucid, learned, suggestive, though perhaps a little too intent on making the public servant into a prophet. Dakin: Turgot I have cited above, 575; useful as it is on Turgot’s public career, its account of his philosophy is less satisfactory. Alfred Neymarck: Turgot et ses doctrines, 2 vols. (1885), is a comprehensive survey. See below, 680, for Turgot’s political ideas.
Manuel’s chapter on Condorcet in his book just cited is excellent, resting on much unpublished material. J. Salwyn Schapiro’s Condorcet and the Rise of Liberalism (1934) is orderly though rather simplistic. Léon Cahen: Condorcet et la révolution française (1904), [both I, 436], shows rather convincingly (537–41) that it is highly unlikely that Condorcet committed suicide, although the evidence must remain of necessity inconclusive. Alexandre Koyré: “Condorcet,” JHI, IX, 2 (April 1948), 131–52, is excellent. See also the brief study by Alberto Cento, Condorcet e l’idea di progresso (1956).3
1 The text of this work has now been translated into English by Mary Ilford: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1968).
2 Ludwig Edelstein’s posthumous The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity (1967) came to my attention too late for me to use it; its evidence, though interesting, seems to me less than conclusive.
3 For Condorcet the “social mathematician,” see below, 66.