THERE ARE CHAPTERS on the philosophes’ political ideas in all general treatments of the Enlightenment, notably Cassirer: Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Valjavec: Geschichte der abendländischen Aufklärung (1961), Cobban: In Search of Humanity, Diaz: Filosofia e politica nel settencento francese (1962), Mornet: La Pensée française au XVIIIe siècle [all I, 424–7]. For France itself there is, in addition to Diaz and Mornet, especially Kingsley Martin: French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1929), [I, 435], and the man-by-man survey, economical but generally just, by Henri Sée: L’Évolution de la pensée politique en France au XVIIIe siècle (1925). The monographic and biographical literature on Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Lessing, and others, of course has much on their political thought. This chapter and the two succeeding ones try to show that I do not find these treatments wholly satisfactory; what I have tried here has been to do for the Enlightenment as a whole what I did in 1959 for Voltaire, in my Voltaire’s Politics: to place the political ideas of the Enlightenment into their environment.
Our suffering century has looked back, with mingled anxiety and hope, to plans for peace in past centuries. Elizabeth V. Souleyman: The Vision of World Peace in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France (1941) has become the standard survey; more general are Sylvester John Hemleben: Plans for World Peace Through Six Centuries (1938) and Arthur Ch. F. Beales: The History of Peace (1931). On the closely associated idea of organization for pacific purposes, see Jacob ter Meulen: Der Gedanke der internationalen Organisation in seiner Entwicklung, 1300–1800, 3 vols. (1917–40), and Arthur Nussbaum: A Concise History of the Law of Nations (1958). Peace is canvassed from an equally pacific position but a different angle of vision in Alfred Vagts: A History of Militarism: Civilian and Military (rev. edn., 1959). War as an institution and instrumentality of foreign policy is, of course, a leading theme for political historians of the eighteenth century; Sir George Clark: War and Society in the 17th Century (see above, 663), although it concentrates on the preceding century, is a stimulating introduction to the problem. And see Edmund Silberner: La guerre dans la pensée économique du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (1939).
For individual lovers of peace, see Merle L. Perkins: The Moral and Political Philosophy of the abbé de Saint-Pierre (1959) and the same author’s Voltaire’s Concept of International Order, VS, XXXVI (1965), both orderly and informative monographs. See also Jean Daniel Candaux: “Charles Borde et la première crise d’antimilitarisme de l’opinion publique européenne,” VS, XXIV (1963), 315–44. Kant’s “pacifism” is at the center of Carl Joachim Friedrich’s Inevitable Peace (1948). Rousseau’s important comments on Saint-Pierre are conveniently brought together in Œuvres, III, 563–682, equipped with splendid notes and introductory remarks. See also the interesting monograph, including the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, and others, on the subject, by Kenneth N. Waltz: Man, The State and War (1959); for Rousseau, see Stanley Hoffmann: “Rousseau on War and Peace,” American Political Science Review, LVII (June 1963), 317–33.
For obvious reasons, the subject of slavery is receiving a great deal of attention from historians now, most of it welcome, not all of it disinterested. These titles are only a sampling. I learned much from Kenneth M. Stampp: The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956), which revises much previous work. Though dealing with the United States alone, it provides a general setting for, and judicious opinions on, a historic crime. See also, amid a rapidly growing literature, the early pages of John Hope Franklin: From Slavery to Freedom (1948).
I encountered David Brion Davis: The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966) near the end of my researches; the book is a valuable survey of ideas on slavery from antiquity through the eighteenth century. In addition to confirming my estimates of the philosophes’ position, it sharpened my perception of the distinction between humane and economic arguments for abolition. Winthrop D. Jordan: White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (1968) came too late for me to use it. Edward D. Seeber: Anti-Slavery Opinion in France during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century (1937) does what its title promises: it concentrates on opinions; so does C. L. Locke: France and the Colonial Question: A Study of Contemporary French Opinion, 1763–1801 (1932). See also Vincent Confer: “French Colonial Ideas Before 1789,” French Historical Studies, III, 3 (Spring 1964), 338–59. These should be supplemented by such informative monographs as Gaston-Martin: Nantes au XVIIIe siècle, II, L’Ère des Négriers (1714–1774) (1931); Gaston-Martin: Histoire de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises (1948); André Loisy: Le rôle économique du port de Bordeaux (1922); and Jacques d’Welles: Monsieur le marquis de Tourny, intendant de Guyenne à Bordeaux et son époque, 1743–1751 (1963). For two of the most significant French philosophes concerned with this question, that is, before Condorcet and the amis des noirs, see again Shackleton: Montesquieu, passim, and Russell Parsons Jameson: Montesquieu et l’esclavage: étude sur les origines de l’opinion antiesclavagiste en France au XVIIIe siècle (1911); and, for Raynal, again Hans Wolpe: Raynal et sa machine de guerre, a valuable monograph [I, 437]; and Dallas D. Irvine: “The Abbé Raynal and British Humanitarianism,” Journal of Modern History, III, 4 (December 1931), 564–77, useful mainly to show the number of the British editions of the Histoire des deux Indes. For excerpts, topically arranged, from Raynal’s Histoire, with an Introduction, see Gabriel Esquer, ed.: L’anticolonialisme au XVIIIe siècle (1951). Finally, Shelby T. McCloy offers a brief but helpful survey of conditions and opinions in two chapters of his Humanitarian Movement in Eighteenth-Century France (above, 592), “Antislavery Sentiment Prior to 1789,” and “Exit Slavery and the Slave Trade,” which takes the story into the Revolution.
For Britain, see Frank J. Klingberg: The Anti-Slavery Movement in England: A Study in English Humanitarianism (1926); and Klingberg: “The Evolution of the Humanitarian Spirit in Eighteenth-Century England” (1942), now in Schuyler and Ausubel, eds.: The Making of English History, 450–61; as well as the short authoritative essay by R. Coupland: The British Anti-Slavery Movement (1933), and, also by Coupland: Wilberforce (1923). On a pioneering eighteenth-century abolitionist, E. C. P. Lascelles: Granville Sharp and the Freedom of Slaves in England (1928) is most instructive. For literary evidence—but that alone—Wylie Sypher: Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the XVIIIth Century (1942) has collected a good deal of material. Eric Williams: Capitalism and Slavery (1944) soberly examines the economic realities of the trade; K. G. Davies: The Royal African Company (1957) analyzes the slave-trading monopoly and its career in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Richard Pares did some splendid studies on the history of the West Indies, notably War and Trade in the West Indies, 1739–1763 (1936), and his last work, “Merchants and Planters,” The Economic History Review, supplement No. 4 (1960). For slave-trading cities, C. M. MacInnes: A Gateway of Empire (1939) is good on Bristol; and see W. E. Minchington: The Trade of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century (1957). C. Northcote Parkinson: The Rise of the Port of Liverpool (1952), though marred by some puerile obiter dicta, has excellent statistics and quotations from contemporary sources; see also Averil Mackenzie-Grieve: The Last Years of the English Slave Trade, Liverpool, 1750–1807 (1941).
General Histories of the criminal law have a tendency to be too general, almost breathless. Carl Ludwig Von Bar et al.: A History of Continental Criminal Law, tr. Thomas S. Bell et al. (1916), for all its usefulness, suffers from this brevity. In contrast, Leon Radzinowicz: A History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration, 3 vols. (1948–56), especially I, The Movement for Reform (1948), is informative and precise, and helpful not for Britain alone. In addition, I used Sir Frank MacKinnon: “The Law and the Lawyers,” in Turberville: Johnson’s England, II, 287–309. Though old, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen’s History of the Criminal Law of England, 3 vols. (1883), still repays study. James Heath: Eighteenth Century Penal Theory (1963) offers an anthology of legal ideas on the reform of the criminal law, with crisp introductions. Two of Coleman Phillipson’s Three Criminal Law Reformers (1923) are Bentham and Romilly. For Bentham’s theory of law, once again the classic work by Elie Halévy: The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism is decisive.
The standard histories of French law are on the whole satisfactory; see especially A. Esmein: Histoire de la procédure criminelle en France (1882). Albert Du Boys: Histoire du droit criminel de la France depuis le XVIe siècle jusqu’au XIXe siècle, 2 vols. (1874), has interesting comparisons with law in other states; see also Robert Anchel: Crimes et châtiments au XVIIIe siècle (2d edn., 1933). I refer the reader to my Voltaire’s Politics, chap. vi, “Ferney: The Man of Calas,” which discusses in detail Voltaire’s involvement in legal cases and his polemics; the bibliography contains additional titles. David D. Bien: The Calas Affair: Persecution, Toleration, and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century Toulouse (1960) intelligently places the most celebrated of French causes célèbres into social perspective.
Beccaria still awaits his definitive biographer. For now, see Cesare Cantú: Beccaria e il diritto penale (1862), and Carlo Antonio Vianello: La vita e l’opera di Cesare Beccaria con scritti e documenti inediti (1938). Franco Venturi has a fine biographical article in the Dizionario Biografico Degli Italiani, VII (1965), 459–69; and his edition of Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene (1965) is splendid—it contains an informative Introduction and a collection of documents illustrating the reception of Beccaria’s treatise in the Italian States, France, and elsewhere. The text of this edition, with much abbreviated apparatus, has been translated into French by M. Chevallier (1965). There is a complete edition of Beccaria’s Opera, 2 vols. (1958), edited by Sergio Romagnoli. Among monographs, see Marcello T. Maestro: Voltaire and Beccaria as Reformers of Criminal Law (1942), an unimaginative but accurate comparison of two great reformers. Coleman Phillipson: Three Criminal Law Reformers, just cited, has a full essay on Beccaria, which deals with his life, environment, and influence. Although I made my own translation, I consulted the accurate recent version of On Crimes and Punishments (1963), by Henry Paolucci. These works all refer to Beccaria’s enormous influence at home and abroad; for America, see Paul M. Spurlin: “Beccaria’s Essay on Crimes and Punishments in eighteenth-century America,” VS, XVII (1963), 1489–1504; and David Brion Davis: “The Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment in America, 1787–1861,” American Historical Review, LXIII, 1 (October 1957), 23–46.