IN AESTHETICS, the philosophes wrote brilliant and fertile essays; in the social sciences they did more—they laid the foundations and wrote the classics. They were the pioneers in sociology, political economy, and history; we can still read Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with real pleasure, and more than pleasure, with the sense that they are part of our world. With them, and with other classics like Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs and Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society, the prehistory of the social sciences gives way to its history.
The prehistory of the social sciences had its beginning in the emergence of cultural relativism, the bittersweet fruit of travel. Whether realistic, embroidered, or imaginary, whether on ships or in libraries, travel was the school of comparison, and travelers’ reports were the ancestors of treatises on cultural anthropology and political sociology. It led to the attempt on the part of Western man to discover the position of his own civilization and the nature of humanity by pitting his own against other cultures. The essence of social science, like that of any science, is objectivity, and in the study of society, the search for objectivity was materially aided by the conviction, at first tentative and timid but growing more confident with time, that no culture, not even Christian culture—and, in the philosophes’ view, especially not Christian culture—was the privileged standard of perfection by which other, lesser cultures could be measured and patronized.
One did not need to be a philosophe to find travel literature instructive. Once again, the philosophes were sustained by a widespread attitude. In 1735, in the Preface to his translation of père Jerome Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia, Samuel Johnson praised the Jesuit traveler for his refusal to feed his readers “romantic absurdities,” and for staying instead within the realms of probability: “Here are no Hottentots without religion, polity, or articulate language; no Chinese perfectly polite, and completely skilled in all sciences.”1 One could wish that Montesquieu and Voltaire had always been as tough-minded as Samuel Johnson; the philosophes, seeking to discredit Christianity by exalting Oriental philosophers or Tahitian savages, could be credulous on principle. However, these lapses apart—and they are disturbing rather than crippling to the philosophes’ enterprise of founding the science of society—the philosophes used the abundant travel literature intelligently, keeping both their sentimental regard for the stranger and their polemical purpose within bounds. While the discovery of well-organized cultures that knew not Christ was a trauma to many, it was an opportunity for the philosophes, and not simply an opportunity for scoring points. For the social scientists of the Enlightenment, travel reports were a valued source of information, a “museum, in which specimens of every variety of human nature may be studied,”2 and, with that, a basis for general theories. Montesquieu’s inquiries into foreign civilizations, which he noted down among his Pensées, published in short essays, and wove into the texture of his masterpiece, De l’esprit des lois, was an influential instance of this new relativism: other social scientists of his time, and after him, absorbed his teachings and imitated his method. Montesquieu, in his jottings and asides, demonstrates that cultural relativism consists in part of separating what had been united: the Chinese theater may offend Western sensibilities, he writes, but not reason; the use of certain techniques in the modern drama may be contrary to custom, but not to nature.3 For Montesquieu, and for the other philosophes, the world turned out to be larger, more interesting, more varied than it had ever been; travelers proved that the range of possible beliefs, customs, institutions, and defensible human behavior was enormous. The spectacle moved Montesquieu to observe, most unclassically: “The true is not always probable.”4 This was radical, even shocking doctrine, but indispensable to the establishment of a truly comprehensive science of man and society. It is through such science alone, Condillac suggested that the statesman and the reformer can move from writing a roman to understanding and mastering reality.5
The lust for improvement was never far from the philosophes’ consciousness. Facts and theories existed for the sake of values. Doubtless the philosophes found the world interesting for its own sake; their inquiries into comparative institutions or the history of religion are pervaded by the pure air of sheer curiosity. They delighted in the new, and found the steady enlargement of their world nothing less than exhilarating. But they could rest content with private pleasure as little as with scientific detachment; in this engagement with reform, they were different from many social scientists in our own day.
They were different from twentieth-century sociologists and economists in another respect as well. Like other professions, the social sciences of the eighteenth century were beginning to define their areas and refine their methods, and to undergo a process of specialization. But even by the end of the Enlightenment, the division of labor among intellectuals was not yet very much advanced; perhaps nothing places the philosophes quite so much as the fact that they were not specialists but men of letters with classical training and philosophical competence. The versatility of their productions is testimony to their aspiration to universality. Montesquieu was a historian, political scientist, social critic, and political theorist as well as a sociologist; Adam Smith a student of rhetoric and a moral philosopher as well as an economist; Voltaire a playwright, popularizer of science, and a religious and political publicist as well as a historian. And the other things these social scientists were shaped the way they wrote sociology, economics, and history. Their most technical performances are highly literate, and, in the end, utilitarian. The philosophes were relativists to a degree unthinkable before them, but neither their professional situation nor their philosophical convictions permitted them to erect their relativism into an absolute principle. Their absolutes were freedom, tolerance, reason, and humanity.
The philosophes’ conception of social sciences, then, was dual, and in potential inner tension. The dilemma they faced in the natural sciences pursued them to the social sciences. Knowledge itself—of this they were certain—was a value; ignorance was certainly always an evil. But—and of this they were certain also—if knowledge was always a value, it was not always used well. To be sure, scientific truths, whether in physics or economics, were only themselves. Wishes were not truths; in fact, wishes often obscured the search for truth. But unfortunately, truths could be used for evil ends in evil hands: Gibbon’s analysis of the manner in which Roman statesmen manipulated popular credulity and kept their power by preaching superstitions they did not share was one instance of it; Bentham’s analysis of “sinister interests,” which explained why politicians who knew the truth failed to apply it in their policies, was another.6 The philosophes’ refusal to construct a theory of progress now turns out to be a refusal to be complacent about the effects that the accumulation of knowledge might have on the shape of life. The harmony between knowledge and improvement was not automatic, or inevitable; it was a demand that runs through the philosophes’ conception of what social science must be. In their eyes, scientific detachment and reformist involvement belonged together; the application of reason to society meant that knowledge and welfare, knowledge and freedom, knowledge and happiness must be made into inseparable allies. The philosophes were the ancestors of modern positivism, but their positivism, as Herbert Marcuse has rightly said, was “militant and revolutionary”7; it was, on principle and in practice, critical.
WHATEVER MAY HAVE BECOME OF sociology in the nineteenth century, when the discipline got its name and took a distinctly conservative and nostalgic turn, in the Enlightenment, when it was invented, it was a science designed to advance freedom and humanity. “The philosophy of the eighteenth century,” wrote Saint-Simon, “has been critical and revolutionary; that of the nineteenth century will be inventive and constructive.”8 Like other intellectual instruments devised or perfected in the eighteenth century, sociology suffered from bouts of self-confidence that its practitioners could not suppress. There were times when moral philosophers rose with unseemly haste from statements of fact to general laws, or, eager to cast their net as widely as possible, accepted facts with a credulity they would have spurned in Christians, or, imitating mathematicians, rashly imposed quantitative methods on qualitative experience. But theirs were venial rather than mortal sins, the missteps of scientists groping for the methods and the boundaries of their new science. For all this lack of clarity and lack of modesty, the aims of eighteenth-century sociology were clear enough: to substitute reliable information and rational theory for guessing and metaphysics, and to use the newly won knowledge in behalf of man.
Montesquieu, the first and the greatest sociologist in the Enlightenment, embodies this scientific reformism perhaps more strikingly than anyone else. As he insisted in the Preface to his De l’esprit des lois, he was indeed a scientist: “I have not drawn my principles from my prejudices, but from the nature of things”; and he reassured his readers that he was merely a reporter: “I do not write to criticize whatever is established in any country.” At the same time, and in the same place, he made it plain that facts, for him, were in the service of values: “I should think myself the happiest of mortals if I could help men to cure themselves of their prejudices”; indeed, “it is not unimportant to have the people enlightened.”9 His intentions, at least, were clear and pure.
His execution was something else again. De l’esprit des lois is a flawed performance; even contemporaries who admired its originality and shared its pagan philosophy tempered their praise with reservations. It is the most unkempt masterpiece of the century: short chapters, some only one sentence in length, alternate with long disquisitions, and, especially in the later books, topics appear and reappear in bewildering sequence. The work has a certain coherence imposed on it by its author’s passion for finding law behind the apparent rule of chance and general themes in the fragmented mosaic of particular facts, but the order is concealed behind digressions, abrupt shifts of theme, and rhetorical outbursts. Roughly the first third of De l’esprit des lois—doubtless the most important—deals with the nature and forms of government and the rights of subjects; the book then turns to an analysis of the impact of environment on politics and concludes with a potpourri which contains, among other things, discussions of political economy, French politics, and legal theory. No wonder Voltaire called the book “a labyrinth without a clue, lacking all method” and thought that its strength lay in particular ideas, in its “true, bold, and strong things.” Moreover, as Voltaire also complained, not without cause, Montesquieu was uncritical of the facts he had drawn from histories and travelers’ reports, and his citations were often inaccurate: “He almost always mistakes his imagination for his memory.”10 Finally, Montesquieu, no doubt unconsciously, smuggled ideology into his science: his definition of political freedom, his analysis of the British Constitution, and his advocacy of powerful aristocracies made him into a partisan in the great struggle that divided the French state in the eighteenth century rather than a neutral observer transcending his time and class. His claim that he had freed himself from his prejudices was not borne out by his performance.11
Yet whatever his ambiguous role in French politics, whatever the limitations on his vision and the defects in his scholarship—and I make this assertion after due deliberation and with due consideration for the claims of potential rivals—Montesquieu was the most influential writer of the eighteenth century. Horace Walpole, who read De l’esprit des lois as soon as it became generally available, in January 1750, called it without hesitation “the best book that ever was written—at least I never learned half so much from all I ever read”12; when he heard that Montesquieu’s reputation in France had suffered, he declared his contempt for French “literati” and reiterated his initial response: “In what book in the world is there half so much wit, sentiment, delicacy, humanity?”13 The world agreed with Walpole. The men of the Scottish Enlightenment studied De l’esprit des lois with great care and great profit. The book was read, clandestinely, in Vienna and, more openly, in the Italian states, where Genovesi, Beccaria, Filangieri, and other illuministi confessed themselves the disciples of “the immortal Montesquieu.”14 In the Germanies, Lessing and the Göttingen historical school admired and imitated Montesquieu’s cultural relativism while political thinkers absorbed his views on the British Constitution. The leading revolutionaries and Founding Fathers in America used the writings of “that great man”—the epithet is Hamilton’s15—probably more than they used anyone else’s. And it is instructive to see Catherine of Russia, who was, after all, relatively untouched by his comprehensive liberality, finding it useful to borrow Montesquieu’s prestige by proclaiming herself his devoted follower. Even the French could not finally refuse him their esteem—had not Voltaire written that Frenchmen discover everything late, but, in the end, do discover it? Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which enlisted Montesquieu among its most distinguished contributors, did much to disseminate his ideas, and Rousseau’s Contrat social is unthinkable without Montesquieu’s political sociology.
To judge from the response of his contemporary readers, much of Montesquieu’s immediate appeal lay in the quality that Horace Walpole had listed last—his humanity. The polemic against the slave trade in De l’esprit des lois, for one, struck Walpole as “glorious”16; and Voltaire found the same glory in the same polemic: “The chapters on the Inquisition,” he wrote, “and on Negro slaves, are far better than Callot. Throughout he battles despotism, makes financiers hateful, courtiers contemptible, monks ridiculous.”17 The book was, for the philosophes, a feast of reason and decency.
The real originality and lasting importance of De l’esprit des lois, however, lie in the particular relation it established between reason and decency. Montesquieu’s argument is fairly simple, and its materials are old; what was complex, and new, was his manner of combining what others had known. His system is imperfectly perspicuous, for it depends on intellectual procedures—deduction and induction—that Montesquieu neither clarified nor reconciled. On the other hand, he professes to deduce his sociological laws from first principles; on the other, his laws group particular experiences into intelligible wholes—in Montesquieu’s sociology the great contest between rationalism and empiricism was never settled. It was “Descartes and Malebranche far more than Locke,” Franz Neumann has written, “who determined Montesquieu’s scientific method”18—but the importance of Locke was not negligible. The two principles on which he constructed his system—the uniformity of human nature and the diversity produced by environment and culture—have an independent validity. But they are also at times in tension.
Whatever these tensions, his argument was, as I have said, plain enough. There are, Montesquieu reasons, certain laws of nature that apply to all men, since they are derived from “the constitution of our being.”19 But these laws find different expression in different situations; they are bent into individual shape by physical causes like climate, soil, size of the country, and by what Montesquieu calls “moral” causes like customs and religion. The task of social science is to find both the universal laws and their appropriate application to each situation. The logic of Montesquieu’s social science is the logic of cultural relativism: “There is, he believes, no universally applicable solution. There are only types of solutions.”20
The configuration of laws appropriate to a certain nation is “the spirit of the laws,”21 and Montesquieu’s book is an attempt to discover and define that spirit in all its multiformity. He begins, conventionally enough, with a classification of government by types of rulership—an enterprise as old as Plato and Aristotle, although his classification differs from theirs. He finds essentially three forms of government: republics, monarchies, and despotisms. This classification caused some dissent in his day; but it is only a prelude to what really matters: the “principles” actuating each of these forms.22 The history of political sociology begins at this point. The principle of republics, Montesquieu argues, is “virtue,” and, as there are two kinds of republics, there are two kinds of virtue: democratic republics rest on public spirit; aristocratic republics on the moderation and self-restraint of the ruling families. Monarchies for their part are animated by what Montesquieu calls “honor”—a keen awareness of status, accompanied by aspiration to preferment and titles. Despotism, finally, is actuated by fear. Montesquieu knows perfectly well that there is an admixture of each of these elements in all states; what matters is which predominates. When one principle powerfully invades a state to which it is not suited, pernicious consequences are inescapable: the right principle will be corrupted, then collapse and revolution must follow.
This is a fertile scheme. It permits Montesquieu to penetrate beyond forms to substance; to discover, behind institutions, the forces that make them cohere, persist, or falter. It permits him, further, to find the institutions appropriate to each state: a monarchy needs schools, or a family organization, quite different from those needed in a republic. And finally it permits him to address himself to the dynamic of social change: “The corruption of every government,” Montesquieu writes, in one of those one-sentence chapters that so amused Voltaire, “begins almost always with the corruption of its principles.”23 De l’esprit des lois takes a comprehensive view of political sociology: it finds room for the sociology of law and of education, and suggests a sociological view of history.
Up to this point, Montesquieu has taken the diversity of governments as given; now, in his most celebrated and most controversial chapters, he turns to the physical causes that have made this diversity possible, indeed inevitable: size, geographical situation, and climate. For all the apparent abruptness with which Montesquieu moves from the principles of government to the physiology of man, the two sections are closely related: the one supplies the ideal categories—that is, the various forms of government; the other accounts for their origins. It is here that Montesquieu depends most openly on travelers like Chardin, whose writings he had already exploited in his Lettres persanes; they now reappear to supply him both with facts and theories.
Montesquieu’s famous chapters on climate, which borrow extensively from the ubiquitous abbé Dubos, generalize a notion from physiology into a theory of human conduct. “Cold air contracts the extremities of the external fibres of the body; this increases their activity, and facilitates the return of the blood from the extremities to the heart.” On the other hand, “warm air relaxes and lengthens the extremities of the fibres, and thus reduces their force and their activity.” It follows that in cold climates, where the blood moves freely, men are courageous, generous, candid, insensitive to pain: “One must skin a Muscovite alive to make him feel.” In hot climates, on the contrary, men are timid, sensitive to pleasure, amorous: “In northern climates, sexuality—la physique de l’amour—can scarcely make itself felt; in temperate climates, love, accompanied by a thousand accessories, makes itself agreeable with things that seem at first to be, but are not yet, love; in warmer climates, love is loved for itself; it is the only cause of happiness; it is life.” These physiological differences leave their mark in the most astonishing places: “I have heard operas in England and in Italy, the same pieces with the same singers, but the same music produced very different effects in the two nations: one was so calm, the other so carried away, that it seemed inconceivable.”24 The consequences are far-reaching: different climates produce different wants, different wants different styles of life, different styles of life different laws.25 Institutions like slavery, or polygamy, or parliamentary government arise in response to climatic requirements, and some of them, like polygamy or monogamy, should actually be “left to the climate”26—here speaks the relativist. Even the Englishman’s love of liberty, which Montesquieu so admired, had its roots in the environment; it is the fruit of the impatience produced by disagreeable cold weather.
Montesquieu considers environment in a comprehensive sense: it is not merely the prevailing temperature that creates the prevailing temper, but also the geographical configuration of a country—the presence of vast plains or high mountains, the relative fertility of its soil, or the size of its territory. The wise legislator understands all these physical causes and undertakes to make laws in accordance with them. Man need not be wholly dominated by climate—he is governed, after all, by moral as well as by physical causes. But there is wisdom in restraint, and the environment sets limits beyond which the intelligent politician must not go. Bacon’s injunction that we master nature by obeying her acquires new vigor in Montesquieu’s sociology.
Montesquieu’s physiology is of mere antiquarian interest today. Even in his own time, there were some skeptics. In his essay “Of National Characters,” published in 1748, the year that De l’esprit des lois first appeared, Hume expressed his “doubt altogether” that “physical causes” have any effect on man; he did not think “that men owe any thing of their temper or genius to the air, food, or climate.”27 Voltaire for his part explicitly denied at least part of Montesquieu’s theory: “The influence he claims for climate on religion is taken from Chardin, and is no truer for all that.”28 Yet, in 1767, Adam Ferguson almost despaired of having any sociological work left to do: “When I recollect what the President Montesquieu has written, I am at a loss to tell, why I should treat of human affairs.”29 In the same year, after much reflection, Hume judged that De l’esprit des lois, though “considerably sunk in Vogue,” was still a book with “considerable Merit, notwithstanding the Glare of its pointed Wit, and notwithstanding its false Refinements and its rash and crude Positions.”30 What mattered then, and matters now, is not Montesquieu’s physiology—his false refinements and rash positions—but the nature of his enterprise, his method, and his purpose.
That purpose flowed directly from a will to understand, which was the will to give reasons for what appeared irrational, to find order in apparent chaos, and unity in variety without denying that variety. Montesquieu’s purpose, Raymond Aron has said, “was to make history intelligible,” and he realized that purpose, if incompletely, by seeking causes rather than ascribing everything to inscrutable fortune, and by grouping causes into small, manageable groups. The road to positivist sociology was thus open.31
It is worth repeating that Montesquieu was never satisfied to formulate general laws and leave value judgments to others; he was too much the classicist, too much the humanist, too much the philosophe for that. He recognized that his commitment to facts and values sometimes involved him in paradoxes and contradictions. It is touching to see him struggling with himself: thus he speaks at length, and quite coolly, about slavery, and argues that in the West at least slavery is useless and uneconomical—then he adds a little pathetically, “I do not know if this chapter was dictated to me by my mind or my heart.”32 The distinction between causal and normative inquiry was hard to maintain, even for him.
His analysis of despotism reveals both his ambivalence and his intentions. On the one hand, Montesquieu lists despotism among forms of government and assigns to it a principle as he has assigned principles to others. On the other hand, he sets off despotism from all other forms: monarchies, aristocracies, and democracies are legitimate forms, despotism is always bad. It is a “monstrous” form of government; it “takes glory in despising life.” Despotism may aim at tranquillity, but its tranquillity is only terror: “It is not peace; it is the silence of towns the enemy is ready to occupy.” Despotism enlists religion in the regime of fear—“fear added to fear”—depoliticizes its subjects, and treats men like animals by subjecting them to corruption and police brutality under capricious and unknown laws. As a sociologist, Montesquieu found it appropriate to analyze the phenomenon of despotism, to acknowledge its plausibility in vast empires and hot climates, but as a moralist he found nothing worthy in a regime whose principle was fear, whose policy was tyranny, and whose consequence was inhumanity. “Nothing I have said here,” Montesquieu suddenly and passionately bursts out in the midst of a detached analysis of the spirit of nations, “should diminish in any way the infinite distance between vice and virtue: may God forbid it!”33 The analysis of despotism was meant as a warning against it.
It is, as I have suggested, this mixture of curiosity and decency that impressed even his critics among the philosophes. De l’esprit des lois, Voltaire said, was “full of admirable things,” which “should always be precious to men,” precious because everywhere Montesquieu “reminds men that they are free; he shows mankind the rights it has lost in most of the world; he combats superstition, he inspires good morals.”34 Adam Ferguson put Montesquieu’s admirable search for harmony between science and ethics quite economically: Montesquieu, he wrote, was a “profound politician and amiable moralist.”35
Like another French philosophe—Diderot—Montesquieu was more influential abroad than at home. I have indicated the range of his empire—from America to Russia, from the Scotland of Ferguson to the Naples of Filangieri—but among all his dependencies Scotland must rank first. Hume, though critical of Montesquieu’s “abstract theory of morals” and sparing with hyperbole, thought him an “author of genius, as well as learning.”36 Ferguson treated him as a modern classic: he lectured on Montesquieu, recommended him to his students, quoted him without criticism and paraphrased him without acknowledgment; indeed, acknowledgment would have been otiose: De l’esprit des lois was the common coin of learned discussion.
There was good reason for Scotland’s receptivity to Montesquieu: his particular mixture of philosophy and science was wholly congenial to the Scottish Enlightenment, which had been developing its own tradition of secular sociological inquiry since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Francis Hutcheson, moral philosopher and student of society, had many disciples, a brilliant assembly of intellectuals—David Hume, John Millar, Adam Ferguson, Lord Kames, Lord Monboddo, William Robertson—followed, in the next generation, by Adam Smith and Dugald Stewart. All were to a degree moral philosophers, all turned under the pressure of their inquiries to the scientific study of society. The problems these Scots addressed became the classical problems of sociology: the origins of civilization, man’s place in society, the development of language, the relations of classes, the rise and fall of population and their interplay with cultivation and prosperity, and the forms of government. Their inquiries led them into the commonplace and the remote: Lord Monboddo, perhaps the most learned and certainly the most eccentric member of the clan, took a persistent and sometimes comical interest in the place of apes in the chain of created beings. But Monboddo, too, was serious: he studied apes so that he might understand man. However much their researches varied in effectiveness and direction, the intentions of the Scottish school were united in a single pursuit: to place moral philosophy on a sound, that is to say, a scientific, basis. By mid-century, the Scots could equate morals and science—Hume spoke of “Moral philosophy, or the science of human nature.”37 Scientific metaphors were always in their minds: “The great Montesquieu pointed out the road,” wrote John Millar in acknowledging the debt he owed to Adam Smith, his teacher and friend. “He was the Lord Bacon in this branch of philosophy. Dr. Smith is the Newton.”38 The comparison was trite when Millar made it in the 1780s, and its application doubtful, but it confirms the aspiration of the Scottish school toward a science of society.
The strategic figure in translating that aspiration from a philosophical fantasy to a realistic possibility was, as usual, David Hume. “There is no subject,” he warned with his characteristic skepticism, “in which we must proceed with more caution, than in tracing the history of the arts and sciences; lest we assign causes which never existed.”39 He was willing to claim that “politics admits of general truths”40; there are certain universal axioms that scholars can derive from history and observation. But these truths are provisional, and the axioms few and uncertain, for the materials of the social sciences are difficult to control—even more difficult than the materials of the biological sciences: “It affords a violent prejudice against almost every science, that no prudent man, however sure of his principles, dares prophesy concerning any event, or foretel the remote consequence of things. A physician will not venture to pronounce concerning the condition of his patient a fortnight or month after; And still less dares a politician foretel the situation of public affairs a few years hence.”41
Hume’s cautious disclaimer was at the same time an ambitious claim. “Moral philosophy has, indeed, this peculiar disadvantage, which is not found in natural,” he noted in his first work, “that in collecting its experiments, it cannot make them purposely, with premeditation, and after such a manner as to satisfy itself concerning every particular difficulty which may arise.” Men can “glean up” experiments in the science of society only “from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men’s behavior in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures.” But while this disability was specific to the social sciences, the problem of knowledge in the social and the natural sciences was in principle precisely the same. It was after all a central tenet of Hume’s epistemology that man can attain absolute certainty only through deduction, in what he called “relations of ideas,” in definitions and in mathematics, but he must remain content with high probability in all inquiries employing induction, in matters of fact. The distinction between physics and sociology, therefore, was only one of degree, involving the recalcitrance of the material. “If this impossibility of explaining ultimate principles should be esteemed a defect in the science of man,” Hume wrote, “I will venture to affirm, that ’tis a defect common to it with all the sciences, and all the arts, in which we can employ ourselves, whether they be such as are cultivated in the schools of the philosophers, or practised in the shops of the meanest artizans. None of them can go beyond experience, or establish any principles which are not founded on that authority.” The certainty men could secure in the natural sciences was smaller, the certainty they could secure in the social sciences was greater than they had hoped for. Hume’s skepticism is really a prescription for confidence: “Where experiments,” he concludes, “are judiciously collected and compared, we may hope to establish on them a science, which will not be inferior in certainty, and will be much superior in utility to any other of human comprehension.”42
The temper of Hume’s social science thus represents the critical temper of the Enlightenment: man must unmask pleasing dreams for the sake of realistic programs, fictions for the sake of reality. As his respectful but devastating critique of Locke’s political thought shows, Hume is ready to sacrifice even a beneficent fiction: the idea of an original social contract may have useful consequences, but it is unfortunately unfounded. “Reason, history, and experience shew us, that all political societies have had an origin much less accurate and regular.”43 Hume seeks to convert not merely moral philosophy, but political philosophy, into sociology.
I need hardly add that as a man of the Enlightenment, Hume, for all his skepticism and for all his inclination toward positivism, was never the merely neutral observer. Hume was not the man to get excited about social reform; if (to paraphrase Lessing) he had been offered a choice between truth and improvement, he would have chosen truth. Yet he made no secret of his preferences for cultivation, cosmopolitanism, and decency, his distaste for superstition, enthusiasm, and barbarism, and his hopes that his philosophizing would aid the one and oppose the other. “Indulge your passion for science,” he has Nature say to man, “but let your science be human, and such as may have a direct reference to action and society.… Be a philosopher; but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.”44 It is a sententious sentiment, but, since Hume was not a sententious man, it deserves to be taken seriously. It is of great interest to see Hume explicitly disputing Pope’s relativistic couplet—“For forms of government let fools contest/Whate’er is best administer’d is best.” “Though a friend to moderation,” Hume objects, “I cannot forbear condemning this sentiment.” Pope is wrong in fact: human affairs depend on more than the “casual humours and characters of particular men.”45 He is undiscriminating in theory: absolute monarchies are far more exposed to the caprice of individuals than constitutional regimes. Finally—although this is implicit rather than explicit—Pope’s extreme relativism obstructs an understanding of political laws which permit the construction of a good government. “In every respect,” whatever its form, “a gentle government is preferable, and gives the greatest security to the sovereign as well as to the subject.”46 Science, precisely by being science rather than metaphysics, creates and preserves values.
In 1767, Hume’s friend Adam Ferguson, a former chaplain, lapsed Christian, Professor of Moral Philosophy and Pneumatics at Edinburgh, published his first and, it was to turn out, his most important book, An Essay on the History of Civil Society. For some reason, still obscure, Hume did not like the Essay; perhaps its ponderous, often tedious manner reminded him a little uncomfortably of the Scottish provincialism he himself had barely escaped. But whatever the reason, his disapproval should not obscure Ferguson’s affinity with Hume: the Essay embodies and occasionally improves upon the style of sociological thinking that Hume had defined and exemplified in his essays. Like Hume, Ferguson was an enemy to fictions, and like Hume, he undertook the scientific study of society for moral reasons. Men shall know the truth—this, in sum, is Ferguson’s motive and program—and the truth shall permit them to break the traditional cycles of civilization and decay. But the truth is elusive: Ferguson punctuates his Essay with warnings against rash conjectures, easy generalizations, and mere book learning. The warnings are repetitious and seem a little insistent, but they were not without point: only five years before, Adam Smith had told his students that “the practical sciences of Politics and Morality or Ethics have of late been treated too much in a Speculative manner.”47 The very obscurity of man’s origins, Ferguson argues, has seduced modern investigators into that supreme intellectual vice—system-making. “The desire of laying the foundation of a favourite system, or a fond expectation, perhaps, that we may be able to penetrate the secrets of nature, to the very source of existence, have, on this subject, led to many fruitless inquiries, and given rise to many wild suppositions.” After all, Ferguson complains, other scientists do not follow such dubious methods: “In every other instance … the natural historian thinks himself obliged to collect facts, not to offer conjectures.” But, it seems, when he studies himself, “in matters the most important, and the most easily known,” the student of society “substitutes hypothesis instead of reality, and confounds the provinces of imagination and reason, of poetry and science”; he selects a few human characteristics, abstracts from current experience, and invents feeble fictions like the state of nature or the noble savage. “The progress of mankind from a supposed state of animal sensibility, to the attainment of reason, to the use of language, and to the habit of society, has been accordingly painted with a force of imagination, and its steps have been marked with a boldness of invention, that would tempt us to admit, among the materials of history, the suggestions of fancy, and to receive, perhaps, as the model of our nature in its original state, some of the animals whose shape has the greatest resemblance to ours.” The sarcasm is heavy and its target obvious, but Ferguson does not permit his readers a moment’s uncertainty: a footnote refers them to Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité parmi les hommes. Rousseau’s way, Ferguson insists, is not the way of science; the student of society must rest his case on “just observation.” Human nature cannot be discovered by stripping away the contributions of culture to arrive at the naked, original being: “Art itself is natural to man.”48 So, significantly but not surprisingly, Ferguson begins his History of Civil Society with an attempt to arrive at a realistic appraisal of human nature—not its origins but “its reality” and “its consequences.”49 Two years later, in his published lecture notes, Ferguson would utter the same warnings and follow the same procedure: moral philosophy must rest on a scientific basis, an empirical natural history of man, which finds its evidence in geography, psychology, the history of language, culture, and population, and rises from facts to values, from science to morals, by slow steps. Ferguson was an independent disciple; he distilled his principles from Montesquieu’s and Hume’s sociological ideas, but he was more severe, more chaste in its pursuit of ascertainable fact, that Montesquieu and even Hume had been.
The first victim of Ferguson’s empiricism is the state of nature, the second is the legislator who supposedly transforms the horde into a society. “Man is born in society,” Ferguson writes, quoting Montesquieu, “and there he remains.” There can be no doubt: “Mankind have always wandered or settled, agreed or quarrelled, in troops and companies.” The study of man and the study of society are thus wholly interdependent. What they show at the outset—here Ferguson turns to Hume—is both the unity and the diversity of man’s nature. “The occupations of men, in every condition, bespeak their freedom of choice, their various opinions, and the multiplicity of wants by which they are urged; but they enjoy, or endure, with a sensibility, or a phlegm, which are nearly the same in every situation. They possess the shores of the Caspian, or the Atlantic, by a different tenure, but with equal ease.” The claim that man has changed fundamentally by moving from the state of nature to the civil state is a total misreading of his history. If we ask, “Where the state of nature is to be found?” the answer must be, “It is here; and it matters not whether we are understood to speak in the islands of Great Britain, at the Cape of Good Hope, or the Straits of Magellan.” And, just as travel in space offers the spectacle of uniformity, so does travel in time: “The latest efforts of human invention are but a continuation of certain devices which were practised in the earliest ages of the world, and in the rudest state of mankind.”50
This uniformity is the expression of certain “universal qualities” in man, certain “instinctive propensities,” which are “prior to the perception of pleasure or pain.” Most notable among these propensities is man’s instinct for self-preservation, which expresses itself in automatic self-protection, in sexuality, and in his sociable traits. Man’s reason is equally composite: God—a singularly shadowy figure in Ferguson’s philosophy—has endowed man with reason to permit him to know and to judge. But neither the urge for self-preservation nor the capacity to reason makes man essentially into a calculating and selfish animal: hedonistic psychology is, in Ferguson’s judgment, shallow at its best and in general contrary to experience. Man is a creature of habit as much as of reason, the prey to ambition as much as the victim of conformity, and, above all, he is an active being, happiest when he exercises his powers. “Man is not made for repose,” Ferguson writes, sounding much like Diderot. “In him, every amiable and respectable quality is an active power, and every subject of commendation an effort. If his errors and his crimes are the movements of an active being, his virtues and his happiness consist likewise in the employment of his mind.” Happiness, writes Ferguson, in words that Lessing might have written, “arises more from the pursuit, than from the attainment of any end whatever.”51 The human animal is above all strenuous.
While Ferguson insists on the uniformity of man’s nature, he insists just as emphatically on the diversity of institutions and ideals, and it is here—in accounting for this diversity—that social science finds its proper employment. It is a difficult task, for “the multiplicity of forms” that the social scientist must take into account “is almost infinite.” After all, as Montesquieu had recognized, “forms of government must be varied, in order to suit the extent, the way of subsistence, the character, and the manners of different nations.” Paradoxically enough, it is precisely the propensities of human nature—the principles, that is, of its unity—that lead to the diversity of human experience. For the urge to ally oneself with some implies the urge to divide oneself from others. “They are sentiments of generosity and self-denial that animate the warrior in defence of his country; and they are dispositions most favourable to mankind, that become the principles of apparent hostility to men.” This is not a perverse pleasure in paradox: the dialectical character of human experience is for Ferguson an overwhelming fact. Civilization is natural; all civilizations are natural. But—and here we seem to hear the language of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents—all civilizations exact their price, all are a mixture of cooperation and conflict, of decay implicit in progress. To condemn all conflict indiscriminately is to read out of court half of human nature—“He who has never struggled with his fellow-creatures, is a stranger to half the sentiments of mankind.”52—and to misunderstand, and misunderstand disastrously, the positive function of conflict in culture.
Ferguson’s analysis of the nature and function of conflict is well known; it deserves to be, for its cool detachment is as impressive as it is chilling. Man, Ferguson argues, positively enjoys hostility: “Mankind not only find in their condition the sources of variance and dissension; they appear to have in their minds the seeds of animosity, and to embrace the occasions of mutual opposition, with alacrity and pleasure.” Friendship acquires its meaning from enmity; in fact, the stronger the hostility to outsiders the closer the bond of fellowship. Nor is it mere self-interest or rational calculation that brings aggression into play; here, as everywhere, hedonistic psychology fails. Aggression is natural, supremely human; it is—and this, for Ferguson, is high praise—invigorating: “To overawe, or intimidate, or, when we cannot persuade with reason, to resist with fortitude, are the occupations which give its most animating exercise, and its greatest triumphs, to a vigorous mind.” Ferguson is a minority voice in the pacific consensus of the Enlightenment, but his admiration of heroic virtues is more than a reminiscence of classical ways of thinking or a personal prejudice; it is grounded, at least to his satisfaction, in his observation and his anthropological reading. Is it not true, after all, that man’s very “sports are frequently an image of war”?53
Conflict—Ferguson returns to this point again and again—is not merely natural and pleasurable; it is also useful, in fact essential. “Without the rivalship of nations, and the practice of war, civil society itself could scarcely have found an object, or a form.” In the light of Ferguson’s psychology, the conclusion is inescapable: “It is vain to expect that we can give to the multitude of a people a sense of union among themselves, without admitting hostility to those who oppose them.” States, like individuals, need enemies: “Athens was necessary to Sparta, in the exercise of her virtue, as steel is to flint in the production of fire.”54
Ferguson’s science of man does not end here. It is not enough to analyze and then fold one’s hands, watching tyrants or corrupt politicians misuse one’s work. Precisely like the other social scientists of his time, Ferguson refuses to equate objectivity with neutrality. Whether we are “actors or spectators,” we perpetually “feel the difference of human conduct,” and are “moved with admiration and pity, or transported with indignation and rage.” These emotions, “joined to the powers of deliberation and reason,” constitute “the basis of a moral nature.”55
It is with this sense of being an engaged scholar that Ferguson delineates his virtuous man and describes the threats to flourishing civilizations. Fortunately, private happiness and public prosperity are consonant; benevolence gives pleasure not solely to the receiver but to the giver as well, and the vigorous exercise of one’s public spirit is at once a source of personal gratification and of national well-being. Activity is praiseworthy, but it “may be carried to excess,” and then it deserves censure. Similarly, while conflict is valuable, not every conflict is creditable in origins or beneficial in consequences—“the quarrels of individuals, indeed, are frequently the operations of unhappy and detestable passions; malice, hatred, and rage”56—and it should be possible to devise a kind of moral equivalent for detestable quarrels by sublimating them into praiseworthy competition.57 This kind of discrimination that the student of society should apply to activity and conflict he must apply to other forms of social experience, all for the sake of moral judgment and sound public policy.
This policy, Ferguson believed, faced one awesome difficulty: the dialectic of progress. Civilization was preferable to rudeness—of this Ferguson had no doubt. The litanies against luxury, classical in inspiration and commonplace in the eighteenth century, struck him as indiscriminate, humorless, and on the whole reactionary. One man’s luxury, he suggested reasonably enough, was another man’s necessity; what might be the source of corruption in a simple culture might well be a pleasing and even essential quality in an advanced culture. Luxury, like every other aspect of highly civilized nations, must be seen as an ambiguous gift: “The boasted refinements, then, of the polished age, are not divested of danger. They open a door, perhaps, to disaster, as wide and accessible as any of those they have shut.” A cure may bring a new disease, an advance in one field a retreat in another. The city that builds ramparts and walls protects itself but at the same time saps the martial energy of its citizens; the nation that forms disciplined armies may be safe from external aggression, but at the same time it prepares the way for a military dictatorship at home. Efficient administration may bring personal security and public honesty, but, by killing public spirit, it makes subjects “unworthy of the freedom they possess.” Again, the pursuit of wealth produces the kind of civilized refinement that makes life pleasant, advances politeness, and helps the arts to flourish, but it also turns citizens into selfish hunters after wealth, destroys all sense of community, introduces false values—“we transfer the idea of perfection from the character to the equipage”58—and, indeed, spawn the kind of moral confusion that is both sign and cause of decay.
To Ferguson’s mind, perhaps the most extraordinary instance of the paradox of progress is the division of labor. On the one hand, the division of labor is essential to social advance. Savages and barbarians are men of all trades, too worn out from their labors to improve their fortune, too scattered in their pursuits to acquire commendable skill in any single occupation. As the manufacturer, the merchant, the artist, the consumer discover, “the more he can confine his attention to a particular part of any work, his productions are the more perfect, and grow under his hands in the greater quantities.” But just as the division of labor in public affairs brings efficiency in administration and alienation from politics, the division of labor in industrial or mercantile or artistic matters brings skill and prosperity—and alienation as well. Man (as Ferguson’s admirer Karl Marx would put it) is alienated from his community, his labor, and himself; he is fragmented and mechanized: the community falls apart, divided between lowly mechanics and proud practitioners of the liberal arts, and the general increase in wealth is unevenly distributed, to the benefit of an elite and at the expense of the mass: “In every commercial state, notwithstanding any pretension to equal rights, the exaltation of a few must depress the many.”59 Thus the division of labor produces conceit and selfishness in some, envy and servility in most; it is a blessing and a curse, creating vast possibilities and great dangers. The economic problem is, for Ferguson, a social and, even more, a political problem.
Ferguson’s pages on the division of labor are a minor triumph of eighteenth-century sociology. True, they are scanty and incomplete, even for their own day—only a few years later, Ferguson’s friend Adam Smith, who had been lecturing on this subject since the 1750s, would show in his Wealth of Nations just what could be done with it. Moreover, they are hesitant: Ferguson refused to draw all the revolutionary implications of his analysis. Yet they are in their own way admirable; they are alive with the critical energy that is intent on moving beyond the formal analysis of legal rights or constitutional arrangements to social and economic realities, and courageous enough to discard bland satisfaction with modern civilization and explore its discontents. He was unwilling to become a consistent radical reformer, but he pointed to action. “An extension of knowledge,” he wrote, “is an extension of power,” and the point of power was to exercise it.60 States are not like individuals; the metaphor that likens the life of society to that of an individual is an invitation to irresponsibility. “When we are no longer willing to act for our country, we plead in excuse of our own weakness or folly, a supposed fatality in human affairs.” The fact is that the life of institutions is not fixed, and the word “fatality” is only a self-fulfilling prophecy; if men say that decay is irresistible, they will cease to resist it, and decay will follow. But “men of real fortitude, integrity, and ability” will understand not merely the limits, but the extent of their powers. “While they are destined to live, the states they compose are likewise doomed by the fates to survive, and to prosper.”61 So, in the end, Ferguson converts analysis into prescription. It was a conversion wholly characteristic of sociological thinking in the Enlightenment.
IN THE AGE of the Enlightenment, the science of sociology consisted mainly of attempts at objectivity and at making laws from comprehensive comparative surveys. The conquest of quantity, which was then, as it is now, the very symbol of science to many, was a bright fantasy among eighteenth-century sociologists, little more. Beccaria suggested the application of probability theory to finding the proper punishment for convicted criminals;62 and Condorcet sought to develop what he called a “social mathematics”63 in pursuit of a reliable system of suffrage. “The social art,” he wrote in his last book, significantly confounding art and science in a single phrase, “is a true science based, like all the others, on experiments, reasoning, and calculation.”64 Condorcet made explicit what the others believed: the more precise the information, the more effective the reform.
But sociologists found quantity elusive. Political economists, on the other hand, confidently manipulated figures and scanned tables. The eighteenth century was the age of political arithmetic; economists exploited parish registers and bills of mortality, reports on navigation and trade, with new methods and new imagination, to satisfy the “demand for precise information in numerical form.”65 But the origins of the search for precision in economic questions go back into the seventeenth century. Sir William Petty, the brilliant and versatile statistician, gave the search its name—Political Arithmetic—in the 1670s, and supplied it with a rationale. “Sir Francis Bacon,” Petty wrote, happily combining an appeal to Bacon and to medical science, “in his Advancement of Learning, has made a judicious parallel in many particulars, between the Body Natural and Body Politic, and between the arts of preserving both in health and strength: and as its anatomy is the best foundation of one, so also of the other: and that to practice upon the politic, without knowing the symmetry, fabric, and proportion of it, is as casual as the practice of old women and empirics.”66 Not all of Petty’s followers were Baconians; some of the early political arithmeticians, like Roger North, advocated clear and distinct ideas in the name of Descartes, and it was not until the end of the seventeenth century that they came to develop, or at least to urge, a cautious empiricism in the name of Newton. Among the sciences of man and society, political economy was doubtless the first to deserve the name of science, quick to leave its pioneers behind. By 1776, Adam Smith could coolly dismiss the work of a century: “I have no great faith in political arithmetic,” he announced in The Wealth of Nations.67 He, and with him the science of economics, had moved beyond it.
The ascendancy of economics over other disciplines is anything but mysterious: the raising of taxes, the value of money, the relation of trade to power were supremely practical matters that had exercised the ingenuity of statesmen for centuries. The seventeenth century was the age of reason and mathematics, and nothing was more natural than to apply reason and mathematics to pressing public questions. The “mercantile system,” the economic theory developed and systematized in that century, was partly superficial, partly wrong, partly of limited applicability, but its intent and its procedures at least approached the scientific spirit.
Mercantilism was a conglomerate of economic ideas flexible enough to satisfy the requirements of statesmen in the most varied circumstances. Its most widely practiced techniques, designed to secure what significantly came to be called a “favorable balance of trade”—the bounties for exports and duties on imports, the hoarding of bullion, the placing of restrictions on the emigration of skilled workmen, the supervision of the quality of products and the competence of craftsmen, the encouragement of population growth, the protection of domestic shipping—were intended to guarantee and enlarge power, although they did not exclude a concern for prosperity. In his famous pamphlet, England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade, written as far back as the late 1620s, Thomas Mun had already argued that sound commercial policy would benefit not merely the king, but merchants as well. In 1662, the statistician John Graunt laid it down that “the art of governing, and the true politiques, is how to preserve the subject in peace, and plenty,” and a little later Sir Josiah Child constructed an appealing and harmonious cycle: “Foreign trade,” he wrote in 1681, “produces riches, riches power, power preserves our trade and religion.”68 Mercantilists even suggested that economic power depended on the welfare of the poor as much as on the prosperity of the merchant: “The Full Employment of All Hands in the Nation,” wrote Francis Brewster in 1702, in his New Essays on Trade, “is the Surest Way and Means to Bring Bullion into the Kingdom.”69 For mercantilist thinkers, wealth was part of, and a means to, power, and had value in its own right.
But power came first. As long as power and wealth, and even power and welfare, coincided, there was obviously no need to make hard choices; but when they came into conflict it was equally obvious that welfare and wealth would give way. Whatever the rhetoric of mercantilist writers, however humane their sentiments—and their humanity was cool enough, with its utilitarianism just below the surface—their view was always that economic units are antagonistic to one another. Mercantilist policies were the continuation of warfare by other means. “All trade,” as Sir Josiah Child candidly said, is “a kind of warfare.”70
In an age of brutally competitive statemaking it could hardly be otherwise. Economists and statesmen alike conceived of power and wealth as static quantities: there are only so many resources, their total is fixed. It followed with inexorable logic that one country’s gain must be another country’s loss, that prosperity can be achieved only at the expense of someone else’s misery. “By such maxims as these,” judged Adam Smith in his devastating survey of mercantilism, “nations have been taught that their interest consisted in beggaring all their neighbours. Each nation has been made to look with an invidious eye upon the prosperity of all the nations with which it trades,” and so, “commerce, which ought naturally to be, among nations, as among individuals, a bond of union and friendship, has become the most fertile source of discord and animosity.” The mercantile system, Adam Smith said contemptuously, had sprung from the “spirit of monopoly”; it was a set of “political maxims” derived from “the sneaking arts of underling tradesmen.”
Adam Smith was too deeply engaged in his polemics on behalf of laissez faire to recognize the historic place of mercantilism: the system was not sheer wickedness or folly, but the product of its day. The philosophes’ passion for decency and shrewdness in political economy had their part in overthrowing it, but neither enlightened humanity nor enlightened social science did their work in isolation. They coincided with expanding trade and increasing productivity in a relatively peaceful period, and these commercial and industrial developments invited the conception of a dynamic world economy in which the prosperity of some was the prosperity of all. In economic thought as elsewhere, the ideas of the Enlightenment were firmly anchored in contemporary realities.
The shift from the mercantilism of the seventeenth century to the subtler economics of the Enlightenment came in slow, deliberate steps, and on a wide front; it enlisted the abbé Galiani and Pietro Verri in Italy, the school of Physiocrats in France, the Cameralists in Vienna, David Hume and Adam Smith in Scotland. Much as they differed among each other on matters of theory and of policy—there were severe protectionists among them—all contributed to making economics at once more humane and more scientific. Old slogans acquired new meaning; a mercantilist could have accepted Adam Smith’s definition of political economy as “a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator”; but he could not have gone on, as Adam Smith did, to say that this science had “two distinct objects: first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services. It proposes to enrich both the people and the sovereign.” Adam Smith’s emphasis would have offended the mercantilists’ sense of priorities. To the economists of the Enlightenment, wealth came before power, and even power—the public services—wore a less militant look than before. Adam Smith properly recognized this reversal of priorities when he declared the “sole end and purpose of all production” to be “consumption” and insisted that “the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.” This maxim, so “self-evident,” had been consistently disregarded in the “mercantile system,” in which “the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer”71—a sacrifice Adam Smith thought quite as immoral as it was unscientific.
The clarity of eighteenth-century thinking on economics has long been rather obscured by the uncertain reputation of its best-known school of economists, the Physiocrats. Quesnay, its founder, and his followers, had some formidable opponents among the advanced thinkers of the day, but their most formidable enemy was doubtless their style of writing and their exalted sense of themselves. Quesnay was a powerful person, an ideal father figure for disciples in search of authority. A prominent court physician, he did not turn to economic questions until his sixties, but once he did, he rapidly gathered around himself a group of enthusiastic and docile followers—the elder Mirabeau, Pierre Samuel Du Pont, Mercier de La Rivière, and others—who drank in his words, and called him master, father, “the Confucius of Europe,” and, more pointedly perhaps, “the modern Socrates.”72 The spectacle they presented gave abundant material to scoffers in search of material: Voltaire derided their supposed utopianism—“finding themselves at leisure, they govern the state from the corner of their hearth”73—while others dismissed them as a sect.74 Quesnay’s celebrated Tableau économique, first circulated in 1758–9, did not help matters: even Mirabeau, Quesnay’s most devoted and voluble disciple, could not understand the diagram, with its three columns of figures connected by crisscrossing lines and its laconic comments which only deepened the mystery. At least at first, despite private explanations, Mirabeau was “bogged down in the zigzag,”75 and others, who had no commitment to physiocracy, found it easy to ridicule what they took no trouble to grasp. For Adam Smith, the Tableau économique was the work of a doctrinaire and “very speculative physician” bent on prescribing a rigid diet to a country that did not need it.76 Other critics, less kindly and less patient, dismissed the Tableau as sheer nonsense. To make things worse, some leading Physiocrats, like Mirabeau, wrote badly; others, one may say, wrote too well: they were addicted to portentous phrases and an unfortunate taste for flamboyant slogans; serious critics and witty parodists agreed that physiocracy was mysticism masquerading as science.
One can hardly blame them, but they were wrong. If anything, physiocracy was science masquerading as mysticism. Their puzzling charts, their incomprehensible explanations, their provocative terminology concealed their clear—and, for the science of economics, vitally important—understanding of the economy as a system. An economy, Quesnay said, is a “general system of expenditure, work, gain, and consumption,” and such a system is open to examination. “In nature everything is intertwined,” he argued, and “the fact that these different movements are necessarily interconnected means that things can be understood, differentiated, and examined.”77 The gain for reason was enormous. “With the Physiocrats, for the first time in the history of economic thought,” writes Ronald L. Meek in his authoritative examination of the school, “we find a firm appreciation of the fact that the ‘areas of decision’ open to policy-makers in the economic sphere have certain limits, and that a theoretical model of the economy is necessary to define these limits. We are unfree, the Physiocrats in effect proclaimed, so long as we do not understand the necessities by which we are bound in our society; and we can understand these necessities, in a society as complex as ours, only if we use the methods of simplification, selection, and generalization in our analysis of it.”78 Far from being remote from the facts, the Physiocrats were too close to them: if they lacked anything, it was the scientific imagination that would have taken them from their immediate observations to the possibilities inherent in mercantile and industrial developments. Their notorious emphasis on agriculture, which did them as much damage as anything, only testifies to their immersion in French realities—Adam Smith, for one, treated it lightly as a case of the rod having been “bent too much one way,” now being bent “as much the other way” to straighten it out.79 In the France of the old regime, the problem of agriculture was the dominant problem, and the Physiocrats never lifted their eyes from their world.
For all the narrowness of their concerns, the Physiocrats developed a comprehensive set of ideas, suggestive even to those who did not share their overwhelming preoccupations. The heart of their theory was, as I have said, the sense that the economy was a system, comprehensible because it was subject to laws. “A knowledge of order and of the natural and physical laws,” Du Pont laid it down as emphatically as he could, “should serve as the basis of economics.” It is only when this “great, fundamental truth” has been recognized and accepted that prejudice will give way to science.80 These laws go beyond the work behind the backs of individuals and their conscious plans: “The whole magic of well-ordered society,” the leaders of the school said, “is that each man works for others, while believing that he is working for himself.” This economic order is part of a larger and higher order: “This magic” is revealed in “the principles of economic harmony,” which a fatherly Supreme Being has bestowed on mankind.81 Prices, values, profits—all are part of this natural, harmonious, rational scheme.
It follows—and here, in characteristic Enlightenment fashion, the humane purpose of economic analysis finally emerges—that the closer a society approximates the laws of nature, the higher its prosperity will be, the larger (to use the Physiocrats’ language) its net product. It was the primary task of society to increase its net product, and the primary task of economists to show society how to increase it. The celebrated slogans of the Physiocrats, laissez faire, laissez aller, were demands on statesmen to liberate the economy from protection—that host of outworn, long-lived taxes, regulations, and monopolies that crippled individual initiative and social growth. Laissez faire would permit agricultural prices to find their natural level, and individuals to follow their own interest, which, after all, they know better than anyone else. The old system had survived for so long, the Physiocrats thought, because it served powerful interests, and because men were all too easily victimized by habit. The new science of economics would make its way once it was known. There was really nothing mysterious about it: “The science of economics,” wrote Du Pont, “is nothing but the application of the natural order of government to society.”82 Economics was, therefore, more than a mere science of wealth; it was the science of social justice.
The grossest injustice, the Physiocrats thought, as well as the most striking irrationality in the France of their day was the burden on agricultural enterprise. The Physiocrats saw essentially three classes in society—the productive class, or agricultural laborers and entrepreneurs; the sterile class, or nonagricultural laborers and entrepreneurs, merchants, professionals; and the proprietors’ class, or the owners of land, clerical, noble, and common, who derived income from land by various means, mainly in rent. In regarding agricultural entrepreneurs and laborers as the only productive class, the Physiocrats did not wish to stigmatize the others as drones in society. “The unproductive class,” as Adam Smith correctly read physiocratic doctrine, “is not only useful, but greatly useful.”83 The Physiocrats’ argument was complex: they saw agriculture as the sole sector in the economy capable of yielding a surplus which would enhance the net product. Obviously, the Physiocrats’ call for a single tax on land rent was intimately connected with this analysis: it would sweep away imposts, free entrepreneurs to improve land and thus increase the net product, and secure income to the state from the sources that could best pay it—the owners of land—in the most rational possible way.
Physiocratic doctrine did not fare well. Philosophes who might have been its supporters were its opponents. Voltaire mercilessly lampooned it in L’homme aux quarante écus; Hume thought its advocates incurably doctrinaire: “I hope,” he wrote to the abbé Morellet, who was proposing to write a Dictionnaire de commerce, “that in your work you will thunder them, and crush them, and pound them, and reduce them to dust and ashes! They are, indeed, the set of men the most chimerical and most arrogant that now exist, since the annihilation of the Sorbonne.”84 Worse, Adam Smith, a decent controversialist, discredited the Physiocrats with deadly condescension. Physiocracy, he wrote, is “with all its imperfections,” perhaps “the nearest approximation to the truth that has yet been published on the subject of political œconomy,” but he found it necessary to add that it was “a system, which never has done, and probably never will do any harm in any part of the world.”85 What intellectual construction can survive such praise?
Among the most damaging attacks on the Physiocrats was doubtless Galiani’s Dialogues sur le commerce des blés of 1769, which Diderot helped to revise and prepare for publication; among other things, it converted Diderot, who had been for some time an admirer of the school. Galiani, “the little Neapolitan,” as Diderot affectionately called him,86 who became a great favorite among the philosophes of Paris for his wit, his cheerfulness, and his learning, attacked the Physiocrats in their most vulnerable spot—their dogmatism. If the Physiocrats understood that the economy is a system of interacting parts, Galiani understood, better than they, the complexities of that system. Galiani did not object to placing a high value on agriculture, or to free trade as such; but, as a good pragmatist, he demanded that the claims of each group and each policy be substantiated in reality. There were times when economic conditions called for government controls, others when the flow of grain could be left to the market. “The Economists,” wrote Diderot after he enlisted in Galiani’s camp, advance “general principles with the most marvelous intrepidity. But not a single one of these is not subject to an infinite number of exceptions in practice.”87 These objections were all the more cogent since Galiani himself had once been sympathetic to physiocracy, and had undergone conversion as a result of near-famine and unrest in the France of 1768: his call to practicality had a practical cause.
But in the end, what finally defeated the Physiocrats was not the flaws in their doctrine but the great economic crisis that predated, and helped to bring about, the French Revolution. The problems of the old regime were even more serious than the Physiocrats knew, and they knew much. They deserve sympathy; where failure is unavoidable, it is not discreditable. After 1776, when Turgot was dismissed, no one could have saved the old regime. What matters about the Physiocrats is not their liabilities but their assets: with all their pretentiousness and mystification, all their stubborn parochialism, they grasped what a moral science should be: secular—for their Supreme Being was as absent as a socially prominent landlord in their France, and largely a metaphor for the ideal—comprehensive, scientific at least in intent, and bent upon welfare. In addition, it is not the least of their merits to have had a hand in shaping the mind, or at least confirming the intuitions, of Adam Smith.
Between 1764 and 1766, when physiocracy was at its height, Adam Smith visited France and met its leading proponents. He was ready for them; he already shared many of their ideas, and, as his Wealth of Nations was to show in 1776, he was willing to acquire more. But he was not their disciple. He did not need to be: he had developed the leading conceptions of The Wealth of Nations—the existence of a natural order and the beneficent effects of economic freedom—a quarter of a century before. “Projectors disturb nature in the course of her operations in human affairs,” he had said in lectures as early as 1749, “and it requires no more than to let her alone, and give her fair play in the pursuit of her ends that she may establish her own designs.” He had even drawn the political consequences of this position: “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.”88 When Adam Smith expressed these views, Quesnay had not yet written a line on economics.
But others had, both in England and Scotland, and notions of an economic science, and of economic freedom, were becoming familiar. “Trade,” David Hume observed in 1742, “was never esteemed an affair of state till the last century,”89 but when he wrote, it had become an important affair for statesmen, and for theorists who wrote less for statesmen than for one another. In 1740, Joseph Massie, who assembled an impressive library of books on economic affairs—itself testimony to the development of the discipline—noted that while there were a few writers who “considered Commerce as a science,” and others who “treated it as a branch of history,” both groups had “made only light essays” on “elementary” matters. And the third class of writers, the most numerous, had indiscriminately mixed history and policy, to the benefit of neither. The time for a serious treatise was at hand.90 Adam Smith would respond to Massie’s invitation in 1776.
He had had long, sound preparation through the conversation and the writings of his friends, most notably David Hume. Hume addressed economic questions as he addressed all questions in the social sciences—as an intelligent amateur. The informality of his presentation and the lucidity of his reasoning suggested what cultivated men in his century liked to suggest—that a man of letters, any man of letters, could apply himself profitably to all subjects whatever. It was a false impression: to write Hume’s essays on economics required Hume’s intelligence, and that was rare.
When Hume published his seven essays on economics in 1752, he lacked even a proper name for them; he called them “Political Discourses,” and mixed them in with essays on demography and political theory. They are short, suggestive rather than exhaustive, and anything but systematic. But they take up, one by one, the issues central to eighteenth-century economic thought; their world is modern—the world of classical economics—and their tone hostile to the tribal philosophy of the mercantilists. The foundation of economic theory, Hume argues, drawing freely on all his thought, is psychology: “Our passions are the only causes of labour,”91 and the student of economics, like the statesman, must know these passions. The “natural bent” of men’s minds is toward consumption, maximization of income—as he put it, toward luxury; and the best system is the one that complies with this inclination. Sparta is not a model but a warning. Cultivation and prosperity, which are linked, are inestimable benefits; they make life worthwhile, and it is the task of the statesman to encourage and protect them. Fortunately, wealth and power are in general allies: “The greatness of the state, and the happiness of its subjects, how independent soever they may be supposed in some respects, are commonly allowed to be inseparable with regard to commerce; and as private men receive greater security, in the possession of their trade and riches, from the power of the public, so the public becomes powerful in proportion to the opulence and extensive commerce of private men.” As Hume notes with relief, the ancient maxim that the sovereign should consult his interest rather than the happiness of his subjects is now unenforceable: “Ancient policy was violent, and contrary to the more natural and usual course of things”; modern doctrine strives toward nature.92
Now, according to the “most natural course of things,” it is “industry and the arts and trade” that “encrease the power of the sovereign as well as the happiness of the subjects”93; a flourishing economy, resting on a high standard of living widely diffused, has beneficent effects in all spheres, including the political: “Laws, order, police, discipline; these can never be carried to any degree of perfection, before human reason has refined itself by exercise, and by an application to the vulgar arts, at least, of commerce and manufacture.”94 Significantly, Hume has kind words not merely for the vulgar arts but for the vulgar multitude as well; economists in the Enlightenment wanted the poor to have a share in the general well-being. “A too great disproportion among the citizens,” Hume reasons, “weakens any state. Every person, if possible, ought to enjoy the fruits of his labour, in a full possession of all the necessaries, and many of the conveniences of life. No one can doubt, but such an equality is most suitable to human nature, and diminishes much less from the happiness of the rich than it adds to that of the poor.”95 Such benevolence, to be sure, is at least partly utilitarian: this policy, Hume insists, “also augments the power of the state, and makes any extraordinary taxes or impositions be paid with more chearfulness. Where the riches are engrossed by a few, these must contribute very largely to the supplying of public necessities. But when the riches are dispersed among multitudes, the burthen feels light on every shoulder, and the taxes make not a very sensible difference on any one’s way of living.” Besides, radical inequality only tempts the rich to oppress the poor, which is, at the very least, uneconomic; it leads “to the discouragement of all industry.”96 On the other hand, a general prosperity, which allows peasants to become “rich and independent” and tradesmen to “acquire a share of the property,” will increase the number and power of the middle classes—“that middling rank of men”—so conducive to public order, being, as they are, the “best and firmest basis of public liberty.”97 The philosophes always enjoyed clothing their humane impulses in economic and political justifications.
As Hume recognized, this view of the good society affronted a whole catalogue of well-entrenched prejudices. There was, first of all, the fear of luxury. This, Hume argued, was quite unfounded: “the arts” do not destroy what is valuable about the “martial spirit”—the vigorous love of country and of freedom. They do not enervate “either the mind or body. On the contrary, industry, their inseparable attendant, adds new force to both.”98 Trade and industry flourish best in a world market; both draw strength from peaceful international exchange. “Foreign trade, by its imports, furnishes materials for new manufactures; and by its exports, it produces labour in particular commodities, which could not be consumed at home. In short, a kingdom, that has a large import and export, must abound more with industry, and that employed upon delicacies and luxuries, than a kingdom which rests contented with its native commodities.” In free trade everyone wins. “The individuals reap the benefit of these commodities, so far as they gratify the senses and appetites. And the public is also a gainer, while a greater stock of labour is, by this means, stored up against any public exigency.”99
That much for the fear of civilization. The fear of foreigners was equally myopic. The mercantilists strive for a favorable balance of trade, seek to hoard money, all because they are jealous of their neighbors. Hume himself was not wholly free from protectionist notions; he was too flexible, too skeptical, to trust any theory all the way. But the general direction of his thought is toward recognition of the “natural course of things.” Money, he insists, “is none of the wheels of trade: It is the oil which renders the motion of the wheels more smooth and easy”; indeed, considering one country by itself, “the greater or less plenty of money is of no consequence,” since it is, after all, simply a measure, an indicator, “the representation of labour and commodities,” serving only “as a method of rating or estimating them.”100 True, the flow of money in one direction or another may cause dislocations, and Hume veers between deflationary and inflationary moods. But his point remains: a fixation on money, so typical of the mercantilists, is absurd in theory and pernicious in practice. Money is “chiefly a fictitious value”; “all real power and riches,” after all, consist in “the stock of labour,” in “men and commodities.”101
As the value of money is largely a fiction, a favorable balance of trade is wholly so. Only nations “ignorant of the nature of commerce” will prohibit certain exports, or obstruct the outward flow of money, or place customs duties on all foreign goods. “The Author of the world,” Hume writes in an access of poetic piety, has intended nations to exchange goods “by giving them soils, climates, and geniuses, so different from each other.” There might be some reasonable import duties: certain domestic industries need to be encouraged, colonies deserve protection. But these are exceptions based on particular policies, justified by certain social or political consequences. The general rule is clear enough: let each nation contribute to the world what it can produce best. British jealousy and hatred of France have “occasioned innumerable barriers and obstructions upon commerce,” but the bargain has been an unwise one. “We lost the FRENCH market for our woollen manufactures, and transferred the commerce of wine to SPAIN and PORTUGAL, where we buy worse liquor at a higher price.” Imports, after all, bring about exports: “There are few ENGLISHMEN who would not think their country absolutely ruined, were FRENCH wines sold in ENGLAND so cheap and in such abundance as to supplant, in some measure, all ale, and homebrewed liquors: But would we lay aside prejudice, it would not be difficult to prove, that nothing could be more innocent, perhaps advantageous. Each new acre of vineyard planted in FRANCE, in order to supply ENGLAND with wine, would make it requisite for the FRENCH to take the produce of an ENGLISH acre, sown in wheat or barley.”102 What Hume derisively calls the “jealousy of trade” is thus stupid and inhumane at once. “I shall therefore venture to acknowledge,” he concludes in a magnificent peroration, “that, not only as a man, but as a BRITISH subject, I pray for the flourishing commerce of GERMANY, SPAIN, ITALY, and even FRANCE itself. I am at least certain, that GREAT BRITAIN, and all those nations, would flourish more, did their sovereigns and ministers adopt such enlarged and benevolent sentiments towards each other.”103
What is remarkable about these views is not merely their largeness and benevolence, but their shrewdness, their fund of good sense, their delight in civility, their clearsighted effort to tie economics to psychology, and, perhaps most important of all for the future of the science, their attempt to get beyond mere words to actual transactions, to the realities that lie concealed behind appearances. Adam Smith paid tribute to these qualities in his masterpiece when he hailed Hume as “by far the most illustrious philosopher and historian of the present age.”104
Hume was in his last illness when he read this compliment, but he roused himself to respond to it. “Euge! Belle!” he wrote to Adam Smith on April 1, 1776, upon the publication of The Wealth of Nations. “Dear Mr Smith: I am much pleas’d with your Performance; and the Perusal of it has taken me from a State of great Anxiety. It was a Work of so much Expectation, by yourself, by your Friends, and by the Public, that I trembled for its Appearance; but am now much relieved.” He expressed doubts on some minor points, but on the whole he was more than satisfied; the book, he wrote, “has Depth and Solidity and Acuteness.” Though requiring much attention and thus unlikely to win immediate popularity, it “is so much illustrated by curious Facts, that it must at last take the public Attention.”105
Hume’s praise was justified; his anxiety was not. Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was an instant success. It appeared in March 1776; a second edition was called for less than two years later, and the fifth edition, the last in Adam Smith’s lifetime, in 1789. When he died a year later, his fame and influence were wholly secure. Far beyond Scotland, in the German states and in the American republic, economists wrote treatises and statesmen made policies in his name.
The reasons for this power are not far to seek. The Wealth of Nations, part analysis, part prophecy, came at a supremely opportune moment; it told men what they wanted to hear and needed to know about nascent industrial society. Moreover, as Adam Smith himself candidly acknowledged with his parade of footnotes: his predecessors had done much valuable work. But this is not all. The Wealth of Nations is a thoroughly satisfying book in its own right; it is a triumph of reason and clarity, of systematized humanity.
Curiously enough, its very greatness has obstructed the sympathetic understanding of Adam Smith’s philosophy. Adam Smith was not the man of one book; nor was he simply an economist. His work demonstrates, as clearly as anything in his time, how incomplete the division of labor among intellectuals still was. He was a moral philosopher, the independent disciple of Hutcheson, the student of the Stoics and of modern natural lawyers like Grotius and Pufendorf, the attentive reader of Shaftesbury and Montesquieu. The Wealth of Nations was Adam Smith’s most important book: he worked on it longer and harder than on anything else he did. But its portrait of man as a trading animal, exercising his “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another,”106 is firmly embedded in Adam Smith’s sociology, and that sociology in a general view of man’s nature, purpose, and possibilities. The Wealth of Nations fully deserves its reputation as a signal contribution to the science of economics, but its total intention was more comprehensive than that, and wholly consonant with the philosophes’ preoccupation with moral science: it was to exhibit the nature of wealth, but, in addition to that, the possibilities of individuality in the economic system, and the relation of opulence and character.
These concerns were foreshadowed in Adam Smith’s lectures on justice, police, revenue, and arms, and in his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, when he held the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow. The Theory is a judicious survey of philosophical ethics, both its nature and its psychology; it seeks to determine what men should, and what men actually do, approve. It is an eclectic work, at once appreciative and critical of classical systems, inclined to stress benevolence as a value and sentiment as a motive, but alert to the finer shades of moral conduct and to the difficulty of translating rational principles into action: “The man who acts according to the rules of perfect prudence, of strict justice, and of proper benevolence, may be said to be perfectly virtuous. But the most perfect knowledge of those rules will not alone enable him to act in this manner; his own passions are very apt to mislead him—sometimes to drive him, and sometimes to seduce him, to violate all the rules which he himself, in all his sober and cool hours, approves of.”107 The guarantor of moral action, therefore, its essential though not its sufficient condition, is self-command, regulated by a well-developed conscience, the “impartial spectator” in man’s breast. It is this spectator, with his detachment and objectivity, who will prevent excessive pride and excessive timidity, and permit man to see through his self-deception, whether self-flattery or self-abasement. Adam Smith was a modern, moderate Stoic.
He was also something of a cosmic optimist who trusted unintended consequences. The “benevolence and wisdom” of the “divine Being” have “contrived and conducted the immense machine of the universe” in such a way that man may follow his private inclinations and obey his most powerful passions, and yet benefit the social order. By taking care of his own happiness, man is led to promote the happiness of others—this is the notorious “invisible hand” which leads men to “advance the interest of society” without intending it, without even knowing it.108 All is for the best in the only possible world that God could have made.
In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith keeps these philosophical concerns alive, but with greater subtlety than before, with far greater respect for harsh truths and for the exceptions that modify all rules, and with an impressive command of social realities. Like Diderot, Adam Smith learned much in the 1760s; like Diderot, he did not discard his essential philosophy, but complicated it.
To say that The Wealth of Nations is more than a work of economics is not to minimize the economics it does contain. Adam Smith himself unambiguously emphasized its importance in the full title he gave the book: he intended it as an inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. The plan of the work, which Adam Smith outlines in the Introduction and faithfully carries out in the text, confirms the impression that while his economics is part of a wider social science and social theory, it is economics that will hold the center of the stage here: the book begins with a study of the “productive powers of labour”—the causes of its improvement and nature of distribution; it then turns to the capital stock that regulates the number of productive laborers. These first two books contain the theoretical principles that have secured Adam Smith’s fame as an economist: the analysis of the division of labor, the labor theory of value, and his account of the accumulation of capital. Book Three then analyzes national policies that have led to the rise of cities and the decay of agriculture; in Book Four, having made his theoretical and historical survey, Adam Smith launches into his celebrated attack on mercantilism and the equally celebrated examination of physiocracy, and he concludes, in Book Five, with practical questions of economic statecraft—the sources available, and the expenditures essential, to the state. The Wealth of Nations is as perspicuous as a French garden—far more French indeed than, say, Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois, which is a Romantic wilderness compared to it. This clarity yields more than aesthetic pleasure: it gives the impression that economic relationships, economic developments, and economic policies, manifold as they are, are yet open to rational study and complete mastery.
Far from discounting the complexity of his subject, Adam Smith appears to glory in it: his famous analysis of the division of labor, which begins Book One, impressively demonstrates that economics operates within a social framework; and it demonstrates something else—the law of compensation so cherished by Hume and Wieland and the other philosophes.109 The division of labor is the source of progress and of suffering. To begin with, Adam Smith argues, it is the most significant cause of the “improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied.” The reason for this is plain: one workman could scarcely make one pin in a day, but with each doing his minute share, one drawing out the wire, another straightening it, a third cutting it, a fourth adding its point, a fifth grinding its top, still others putting on the top and putting the pins into paper, a small factory of ten men, though relatively ill equipped, could still make twelve pounds of pins—about forty-eight hundred—a day.110 What is true in pin-making is true everywhere: the specialization that the division of labor imposes vastly increases productivity by improving dexterity, saving time, and encouraging inventiveness by introducing new tools and machinery. All advanced civilizations owe their opulence to the division of labor, in which self-interest works to the advantage of society: look at the coats men wear and the ships they sail, all the combined products of many hands! And this holds for all types of this division, including the trade of town with countryside: in such trade, “the gains of both are mutual and reciprocal, and the division of labour is in this, as in all other cases, advantageous to all the different persons employed in the various occupations into which it is subdivided.” Yet there is also a darker side. “In the progress of the division of labour,” Adam Smith concedes, sounding in this quite as ready to confront grim facts as Ferguson, and even more pessimistic, “the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two.” All this has disastrous psychological consequences: after all, men’s understandings are formed by their day-to-day occupations, hence the man who has no need to use his mind or exercise his inventiveness must lose “the habit of such exertion,” and generally “becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” Adam Smith’s acount of his dehumanization is as explicit and clear-eyed as any modern account of fragmentation and alienation in industrial society: “The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life,” to say nothing of the “great and extensive interests of his country.” He loses all possible interest in politics, his patriotism is corrupted, even his body is enfeebled. “His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expence of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues.” Adam Smith was not a metaphysician avid for paradox; he reported what he so perceptively saw. “In every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.”111
Unless government takes some pains to prevent it: the reservation is critical. Broadly speaking, between the alternatives of a state-regulated economy and a free economy regulated by competition, Adam Smith vastly preferred the second to the first. His stress on the division of labor as the primary source of opulence is evidence of this choice: the division of labor was both a result and a cause of individualism. On the whole, Adam Smith found government regulation of the economy distasteful, advantageous to a few special interests alone, politically, socially and economically counterproductive. The invisible hand is still part of Adam Smith’s intellectual arsenal; he still thinks highly of the unintended consequences of selfishness. “As every individual,” he writes in a much-quoted passage, “endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value, every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed”—and here is the echo from his earlier book—“neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain; and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.”112 The fame of this passage is unfortunate; its careful qualifications—“nor is it always the worse for the society … he frequently promotes” the interest “of society …”—are clues to new discriminations: Adam Smith now sees the operation of the invisible hand as much less prominent than he had in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, much less certain in its consequences, much more in need of aid and correction by visible hands than had seemed necessary in the 1750s.
What Adam Smith now recognized was that the free play of self-interest led to enduring, often harmful conflict, did not maximize resources, and made victims; in fact, the interests of some powerful groups directly contradicted the public interest. Tradesmen and industrialists are in no way Adam Smith’s heroes: he speaks with superb disdain of the “mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind,” and he is ready to countenance public control of their viciousness, which cannot, perhaps, be corrected, but may “very easily be prevented from disturbing the tranquillity of anybody but themselves.” Merchants and manufacturers hate and fear competition; their “wretched spirit of monopoly” induces them to seek import duties, or to prevent the founding of a rival establishment in their neighborhood, or to export goods for high profits when they should be selling them for moderate profits at home. In the setting of wage scales, manufacturers and men are in inevitable and often insoluble conflict, and Adam Smith is on the side of the men, who are less powerful and far more desperate than their masters. “We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and every where in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is every where a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things which nobody ever hears of.” Sometimes masters do even worse: they combine to depress wages below current rates. If workers oppose the masters by combining in turn, their combinations are merely defensive and, Adam Smith strongly implies, wholly justified. In fact, he describes the “utmost silence and secrecy” of the masters with a mixture of relish and contempt, and notes, in language that nineteenth-century populists could have adopted without change: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” To raise prices, or depress wages unduly, is not simply a wicked proceeding, it is imprudent as well, for an economically progressive society is one characterized by “that universal opulence which extends to the lowest ranks of the people”; after all, “what improves the circumstances of the greater part”—which is to say, “servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds”—can “never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.” Characteristically, Adam Smith offers humane as well as economic reasons for his position: “It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged.” Yet economic reasons are never far from his mind: high wages pay for themselves by enabling workmen to keep their children alive, and to increase their own productivity. “The liberal reward of labour, therefore, as it is the effect of increasing wealth, so it is the cause of increasing population. To complain of it, is to lament over the necessary effect and cause of the greatest public prosperity.” Unfortunately, manufacturers and merchants do not often recognize these obvious truths: in economic affairs, there is an invisible hand—secret combination and conspiracy—that seems like a vicious caricature of the invisible hand of beneficent providence. Political institutions are, in a sense, the public expression of these private arrangements: “Civil government,” Adam Smith concludes, almost cynically, “so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”113
But precisely because the providential economic order is imperfect, government ideally has other roles to play. Of course, it was Adam Smith’s purpose to get government out of, not into, economics, and the prevailing temper of his polemic is against surviving mercantilist regulations. Nor was it merely a question of polemics; fundamental values—Enlightenment values—were involved in the issue of economic freedom, most notably man’s right to determine his own fate, his right to be treated not as the ward of a supremely wise government but as an autonomous being. “It is the highest impertinence and presumption,” he wrote, “in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the œconomy of private people, and to restrain their expence, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries.” Kant could have said the same thing. Are not the great themselves “always, and without any exception, the great spendthrifts in the society”? Is it not true that “The violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil,” for which there is probably no remedy?114 But at the same time Adam Smith did not envisage the government as wholly passive; the night-watchman state of nineteenth-century liberals was not his ideal. It was the primary task of the state to defend the country against foreign enemies, and to maintain security and justice at home, and these roles exacted certain kinds of government interference; in a clash of values between military defense and economic freedom, the latter might have to yield. Beyond this, the weak deserved some protection against the strong: the state should do something to protect ignorant consumers against fraudulent producers, defenseless laborers against all-powerful employers, slaves against their masters: like national defense, common humanity should prevail over laissez faire. Finally, the state should undertake the kind of public works—some forms of transportation, some forms of education—which are essential, yet too expensive or onerous for private enterprise to carry on. Not being a system-maker, Adam Smith was not precise—on principle; the casualness and openness of his recommendations for government action may be a flaw, but they were a policy, and a policy that flowed quite directly from the Enlightenment’s desire for flexibility and its distrust of metaphysics.
Indeed, in its total intellectual style, The Wealth of Nations is a cardinal document of the Enlightenment: it is secular in its perception of the world, devoted to facts, confident in its search for scientific generality, intent on translating knowledge into beneficent action, comfortable in its expectation that humanity and utility often coincide, yet alert to the conflict of interests and the need for intervention in behalf of values higher than those of getting and spending. Adam Smith, after all, could even see some justice in arguments for a progressive income tax. There was at least one disciple, Jeremy Bentham, who after years of rumination accused Adam Smith of a kind of sentimental aversion to government intervention; Smith, he wrote, had talked of “invasion of natural liberty” in order to forestall the kind of necessary government action to which, on pragmatic grounds, Bentham came to have no objection. For egalitarian reasons, Bentham wanted the state to take charge of public health, education, and transport, even though, on the whole, the individual knew his own interests best.115 But Adam Smith was not so remote from Bentham’s view as Bentham came to think. However political economy would change in the hands of the classical economists of the nineteenth century, with their comfortable pessimism concerning the perpetual and necessary misery of the working classes, for Adam Smith economics was not yet a dismal science.
SOCIOLOGY and political economy were young disciplines in the eighteenth century, and in shaping them the philosophes took all the risks and gathered all the glory of innovators. It was different with history. As cultivated men with long memories, the philosophes well knew that history was a genre as old as the Greeks. It needed not foundations but a revolution, and a revolution is what the philosophes made: the map they drew of the past seems today partly incomplete, partly distorted, but it is recognizable and usable—in many respects our map.
In drawing it, the philosophes were not alone. The leading historians of the age were by and large leading philosophes, but the passion for history was quite general. “I believe,” David Hume said confidently in 1770, “this is the historical Age and this the historical Nation,”116 and while non-Scots would have questioned the second half of Hume’s assertion, everyone, Scot and non-Scot alike, would have accepted the first. The eighteenth century was in fact an age of consuming interest in history. History was a craft, a discipline, and an entertainment. Addison spoke with high appreciation of the historian’s “most agreeable Talent,” which puts his readers into “a pleasing Suspense” as he unfolds his colorful tale117; half a century later, Gibbon noted that “History is the most popular species of writing, since it can adapt itself to the highest or the lowest capacity.” Gibbon’s own history, obviously suited to readers of most if not all capacities, secured a vast admiring public upon its first appearance. “My book was on every table,” Gibbon recalled about the first volume, “and almost on every toilette; the historian was crowned by the taste or fashion of the day; nor was the general voice disturbed by the barking of any profane critic.”118 Hume used similar language: history, he wrote, is “suited to every capacity.”119 Amateur historians of great individuals like Boswell diligently collected documents so that their biographies might be copious and accurate. There was a growing feeling that the past, faithfully recaptured, gave rise to worthy feelings and thoughts. In 1709, long before the invention of romantic nostalgia, Vanbrugh urged the preservation of the old manor house at Woodstock; men value ancient buildings, he argued, because “they move more lively and pleasing Reflections.… On the persons who have Inhabited them; On the Remarkable things which have been transacted in them; On the extraordinary Occasions of Erecting them.”120 Later, especially after Winckelmann’s erudite and imaginative re-creation of the history of Greek art, the interest in historical precision became nothing less than fastidious. When in the second half of the eighteenth century the Gothic Liebfrauenkirche in Frankfurt was fitted out with rococo altars, this mixture of periods displeased at least one local citizen, who complained that this lovely church had been ruined by being rebuilt in two incompatible styles.121 Historical consciousness, it seems, animated philosophers and ordinary men alike.
The prestige of historians matched the interest in history. True, Samuel Johnson thought that “great parts” are not “requisite for a historian” since in the writing of history “all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent,”122 but this crusty observation was uncharacteristic of the age, and even of Johnson. By 1752, a year after its publication, Lord Chesterfield had read Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV four times and had expressed his admiration to the author in adulatory letters. The most distinguished philosophers and poets of the age wrote history confident that as historians they were neither betraying their vocation nor lowering their dignity. Montesquieu pursued his historical studies after he had been elected to the Académie française; for him, as for the age of the Enlightenment in general, the company of Thucydides and Tacitus was respectable enough. William Robertson took delight in distinguished readers as varied as Garrick and Catherine of Russia. Between 1759 and 1777, he brought out highly accomplished and widely read histories of Scotland, Charles V, and America, but his lifelong concern with history and his impressive productivity neither compromised his prominent position in the Scottish Presbyterian Church nor slowed his majestic ascent toward the principalship at the University of Edinburgh. Robertson’s friend David Hume, who began and ended his career as a philosopher, did not abandon that career when he turned toward history; as early as 1747, while he was in the midst of philosophical and theological studies, he expressed a strong interest in “historical projects” and confessed his long-standing “intention, in my riper years, of composing some History,”123 and when he published his History of England, beginning in 1754 at the end with the Stuarts, and ending in 1762 at the beginning with early Britain, he worked on his vast undertaking without forgetting his philosophy. That, one might say, was one of its problems, but it was not a problem for Hume. Similarly, Voltaire was happy to be a historian. It is likely that one of his motives for writing the Siècle de Louis XIV (1751) and the Essai sur les mœurs (1756) was to outdo his rivals and gain fame, but then, this was one of his motives for doing everything. In his own time, Voltaire was celebrated first as a poet and playwright, and later as a humanitarian and polemicist, but thinking and writing about history helped to shape both these phases. Voltaire’s plays and poems involved him in a certain amount of historical research: the Henriade, his audacious and unsuccessful bid for immortality as an epic poet precipitated him into the history of sixteenth-century France, while his first history, the Histoire de Charles XII, published in 1731, reads much like a tragedy in prose. And later, conversely, the polemical passages in his great histories show him to be the serious historian always mindful of his self-imposed duties as propagandist for Enlightenment. Gibbon, finally, experienced the need to write history as nothing less than a vocation; it would be inappropriate to call it sacred, but it was irresistible. Gibbon might speak a little slightingly about his efforts being crowned by “the taste and fashion of the day,” but his work, and the best work of the other historians, survived the vagaries of taste and the amnesia of fashion; they were, in a word, masterpieces. Works of history, like all of men’s works, are part of history and must be judged as such; whatever defects subsequently emerged, Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV, Hume’s History of England, Roberston’s History of America, and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire were monumental achievements in their day and for their discipline; they stand, if not as proof, at least in support, of Hume’s claim that his was the historical age.
Whatever the philosophes might claim for their work and their age, their claims were not honored by their successors: nineteenth-century historicist (and not the historicists alone) judged their historical writings with extraordinary severity. Insisting that historical epochs are all different and all worthy, that they are all, in Ranke’s famous formulation, “immediate to God,” Ranke and the others refused to extend their own sympathetic doctrine to Voltaire and Hume and Gibbon: the philosophes, they suggested, had written not bad history so much as mere literature—not history at all. Had the Enlightenment not defamed scholarship, turned its back on the wealth of historical experience with its doctrine of the uniformity of human nature, and judged the past instead of entering it?
The nineteenth-century critique of the philosophes’ historical work was as partisan and time-bound as the philosophes’ treatment of Christianity—it was unsympathetic to the philosophes’ achievement and alert mainly to their failures—but like that treatment, it was not without merit. The philosophes managed their inheritance from the the seventeenth century like brilliant, willful and not wholly responsible heirs, safeguarding some of their legacy, improving some of it, and squandering the rest.
The style of historical writing the Enlightenment found in the preceding century was a curious mixture of credulity and realism, pettiness and patience, tough-minded reporting and brazen partiality. In the Renaissance, Humanists had joyfully embraced antique models in their horror at the tedium and superstitiousness of medieval chroniclers, and had begun to liberate history writing from its subservience to theology, dependence on miracles, mythopoeic schemes of periodization, and apocalyptic expectations. Yet Humanist historians had been imprisioned by the instruments of their liberation; they unearthed devices from the ancients that they might best have left buried, filling their books with sonorous, appropriate, but wholly imaginary speeches, spinning out their material into interminable narrations, and putting tiresome stress on the moral function of history. Besides, they did not completely secularize historical writing: in 1681, Bossuet published his famous Discours sur l’histoire universelle which divided the past into periods governed by religious events, and portrayed the course of human history as the realization of a divine plan. For all its touches of modernity, the intellectual world of Bossuet’s Discours was medieval, and Bossuet’s style, like his world, lived on into the eighteenth century in the historical-theological writings of Charles Rollin in France and Jonathan Edwards in America.124
The literal-mindedness and devotion of seventeenth- and even eighteenth-century historians kept alive a tribe of extreme skeptics, the Pyrrhonists, who snapped at the heels of the dogmatists with their inconvenient questions. In mid-seventeenth century La Mothe le Vayer aggressively stated the Pyrrhonist case with an essay instructively entitled Du peu de certitude qu’il y a dans l’Histoire, while some decades later the well-known Jesuit scholar Jean Hardouin turned Pyrrhonism into paranoia with his scandalous assertions that the accounts of Church councils before Trent were spurious and that nearly all classical works had been forged by medieval monks.
The Pyrrhonists were scholars—érudits—intent on using their scholarship for destructive purposes. But there were scholars among the devout historians as well, great scholars, who were the glory of their profession. The philosophes knew their work well and used it freely: the traditional portrait of the indolent philosopher-historian—Hume writing his History of England with his feet on the desk, Voltaire skimming a few authorities to lend substance to his malicious witticisms—cannot survive the testimony of the philosophes’ historical writings or of their correspondence, filled as it is with requests for books, information, criticism. Parts of his English history, Hume reported, were a “Work of infinite Labour & Study,” a labor, he added, which he did not grudge, “for,” after all, “I have nothing better nor more agreeable to employ me.”125 He read assiduously, above all the seventeenth-century English medievalists, wrote away for books, consulted the library of the British Museum as soon as it opened in 1759, and worked (though not systematically) in archives. Voltaire struggled through the compilations and dictionaries of Christian scholars: he cursed them and mocked them in comic despair, but he was intelligent and detached enough to use their work in his own, and his histories reflect his reading, much to their benefit. He read the documents collected by the Bollandists, the chronicles of medieval annalists, the accounts of recent historians, and, in his modern histories, eye-witness reports and unpublished memoirs. While he read them, as he read everything, rapidly and often carelessly, and while his labors were not, like Hume’s, infinite, they were at least persistent and wide-ranging, more persistent and wide-ranging in fact than appeared in his finished product—much to the disappointment of Robertson and other admirers, he did not cite the authorities he used.126 But he used them, profusely and proficiently.
While Hume and Voltaire worked hard at being historians, Robertson and Gibbon worked, if anything, even harder. In his long preface to the History of America, Robertson announced that he had “endeavoured to authenticate whatever I relate,” and added his credo as a historian: “The longer I reflect on the nature of historical composition, the more I am convinced that this scrupulous accuracy is necessary. The historian who records the events of his own time, is credited in proportion to the opinion which the Public entertains with respect to his means of information and his veracity. He who delineates the transactions of a remote period, has no title to claim assent, unless he produces evidence in proof of his assertions. Without this, he may write an amusing tale, but cannot be said to have composed an authentic history.” Robertson devotes the bulk of his Preface to record his efforts at making his History of America not an amusing tale—no one would accuse Robertson of being amusing—but an authentic history: he used the good offices of the British ambassador to Spain to secure him access to archives, and the aid of the chaplain of the embassy to procure rare sixteenth-century Spanish and other valuable manuscripts; he consulted or had friends consult the Imperial Libraries in Vienna and St. Petersburg, sent detailed queries about Indians to Portuguese officials and colonial governors—Governor Hutchison of Massachusetts, himself a meritorious historian, was only one of his valuable and well-connected helpers—and borrowed books from specialized libraries. Like all scholars, he had his frustrations: the Spanish archives, reputed to hold “eight hundred and seventy-three large bundles” relating to America, were closed, but he tried to gain access to them—in vain. “Conscious of possessing, in some degree, the industry which belongs to an historian,” he writes, “the prospect of such a treasure excited my most ardent curiosity.” But, he sadly adds, “the prospect of it is all that I have enjoyed.”127 The point is that he tried.
In writing his credo and expressing his sentiments as a historian, Robertson noted, he had “been confirmed by the opinion of an Author, whom his industry, erudition, and discernment, have deservedly placed in a high rank among the most eminent historians of the age.”128 That author was Gibbon, and Gibbon’s erudition is deservedly proverbial. Unlike other philosophes, he did not deplore erudition and regretted philosophic attacks on scholars. He loved books, especially scholarly books, with the passion with which other men love women or success. He was steeped in the classics—like Hume, who read over all the Greek and Roman classics to prepare his great essay on the populousness of ancient nations, Gibbon had read the ancient writers again and again—in the writings of seventeenth-century érudits, and in those of his contemporaries. His appetite for the written word was inexhaustible; he started his splendid private library with the Mémoires of the Academy of Inscriptions: “I cannot forget the joy,” he recalled many years later, “with which I exchanged a bank note of twenty pounds for the twenty volumes of the Memoirs,” nor “would it have been easy, by any other expenditure of the same sum, to have procured so large and lasting a fund of rational amusement.” And this was only a beginning.129 The footnotes to his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire record his dependence on Beausobre’s history of the Manicheans, Mabillon’s magnificent study of diplomatics, and many others, above all Tillemont’s copious and dependable histories of the early church. If the quality of Gibbon’s masterpiece declines when he reaches the sixth century, this is less a reflection of his unconquerable prejudice against medieval civilization than a tribute to Tillemont’s work, which breaks off at this point: “And here,” Gibbon records, in a characteristically ungracious acknowledgment, “I must take leave forever from that incomparable guide—whose bigotry is overbalanced by the merits of erudition, diligence, veracity, and scrupulous minuteness.”130 In this list, Gibbon summarized the ideal of the érudits, and his own.
Yet, when this has been said, it must be added that it was an ideal the other philosophes rarely realized. The kind of history they encountered when they began to write was immensely useful to them: historical piety offered splendid instances of what to avoid; historical skepticism, though excessive, remained serviceable—Pyrrhonism, Gibbon said, was “useful and dangerous”131—because, after all, previous historians had erred on the side of belief rather than unbelief; and scholarly research could be mined for recondite facts. But the philosophes were too embattled to do justice to the whole range of their predecessors’ work. They grandly patronized the érudits as learned idiots who had done some good work, mainly in spite of themselves, and who deserved nothing better than to be pillaged and denigrated by the clever historians who came after them. “History must be written by philosophers,” Grimm pronounced, “whatever our pedants say.”132 Doubtless there was real point in seeking to avoid pedantry—the major histories written by the philosophes are distinguished works of literature—but the dismissal of scholars as pedants was less a prescription for stylishness than a failure of vision; the érudits had established a valuable tradition of documentary research and scrupulous detective work that must falter if it was not kept up. The philosophes did not keep it up; even Gibbon, who never joined the popular Enlightenment sport of pedant-baiting, was only a consumer without being a producer of scholarship. It was certainly healthy to be skeptical of medieval sources or antique legends masquerading as history: “To penetrate into the obscure labyrinth of the Middle Ages,” Voltaire argued in a typical passage, “we need the aid of archives, and there are hardly any. A few old monasteries have preserved charters and diplomas which contain donations whose authority is highly suspect.”133 Such methodological talk was all very well; Voltaire’s adroit allusion to “donations,” which recalls celebrated monkish forgeries, coupled as it is with a shrewd appeal to archives, touched upon a sensitive spot in Christian historiography. As Voltaire and his fellow historians said over and over again, historians, whether fanatical monks or servile Romans, had inundated the world with fables and forgeries. But in recent decades it had been precisely the “pedants” who had discredited the fables and unmasked the forgeries; Voltaire’s contempt for Christianity kept him and his fellows imprisoned in the erroneous assumption that Christian chroniclers, Christian scribes, and Christian historical critics had lied and continued to lie, from habit or from vocation, almost from second nature. “If the philosophers are not always historians,” the young Gibbon smoothly said, “it would at least be desirable if historians were philosophers,”134 an observation that describes his own hopes and implies the conclusion that piety and history were incompatible. Later, Gibbon would bestow that grandiose title—“our philosophical historian”135—on a most obviously anti-Christian historian, David Hume. Voltaire took the same position: in several well-known passages he demanded that history be written en philosophe, he himself wrote it en philosophe, and argued that Christians, lacking that essential capacity, could not write good history: “Count Boulainvilliers,” he wrote, “is quite right when he claims that a Jesuit cannot write history accurately”136—and if even the urbane Jesuits could not write it, what of “fanatical” Jansenists or other, equally “fanatical” sectarians?
Scholarship itself was not the central issue. Some of the philosophes might express irritation with “mere” scholarship and impatience with what they were pleased to call minutiae and verminous details. They might take a high, New Historian’s line, and declare that they could not be bothered with “scrupulously examining” whether “some piece of nonsense that happened six centuries ago” took place “on the 25th or the 26th of a certain month”137—a philistine reproach to the fact-grubbing specialist that has long been the stock in trade of literary men. But their performance was often better than their ill-tempered declarations, and their ambition was nothing less than to turn history into a science—la science de l’histoire.138 History was to become one of the sciences of man, less precise than the physical sciences, perhaps, but no less scientific for all that. Conceding that in history certitude could never be so great as in logic or physics, Turgot still suggested that history be added to the “physical sciences.”139
History, the philosophes thought, could become a science because it was now subject to philosophy—that is, to method—and because it sought for the truth alone. Of course, the claim that history is a search for pure truth was an ancient commonplace, endlessly reiterated and rarely credited; the philosophes said it again, with honest conviction and a good deal of confidence. “No doubt,” Diderot wrote, “one must be truthful both in eulogy and in history.”140 Voltaire wholly agreed: “We need the truth in the smallest things.” Writing from Prussia to the Jacobite writer Richard Rolt in 1750, he said it again: “j must hunt again after my favourite game, truth, in foreign cowntries. J travel like Polibus to see the different teaters of war. J do consult both friends and ennemys.… History must be neither a satir nor an encomium.”141 Voltaire’s English spelling was uncertain, but his meaning was clear.
The scientific ideal—the historian who studies his material without praise or reproach—was in the philosophes’ mind not a utopian wish but a reality. David Hume, for one, Voltaire suggested, had realized it: Hume’s History of England was “perhaps the best ever written in any language.” And what made its merit was its impartiality: “Mr. Hume, in his History, is neither parliamentarian, nor royalist, nor Anglican, nor Presbyterian—he is simply judicial.” Partisan rage, which has for so long deprived England of a good historian, is absent here: in this “new historian we find a mind superior to his materials; he speaks of weaknesses, blunders, cruelties as a physician speaks of epidemic diseases.”142 The medical metaphor, always a favorite with the philosophes, emphatically suggests that Voltaire wanted his praises taken seriously. David Hume himself, wryly confessing to the universal unpopularity of his volume on the early Stuarts, unwittingly claimed scientific status for his work: “I thought that I was the only historian, that had at once neglected present power, interest, and authority, and the cry of popular prejudices,” but found himself “assailed by one cry of reproach, disapprobation, and even detestation; English, Scotch, and Irish, Whig and Tory, churchman and sectary, free-thinker and religionist, patriot and courtier, united in their rage against the man, who had presumed to shed a generous tear for the fate of Charles I and the Earl of Strafford.”143 This was all to the good: since the sixteenth century, unpopularity with one’s own side had been accounted a sign of historical objectivity.
What turned the philosophes against the scholars, then, was less that they were scholars than that they were Christians. But whatever the reason, it was a judgment that compromised their own hopes for turning history into a science. The philosophes were serious historians and read the érudits to better purpose than they themselves admitted, but precisely because they were serious craftsmen, their disdain for what they called pedantry prevented them from applying the kind of open-minded self-criticism they needed to detect and correct their own biases.
What I have said about the philosophes’ attitude toward scholarship applies in a rather different way to their belief in the uniformity of human nature. In itself it did not prevent them from writing good history; it was the conjunction of their psychology with their antireligious bias that produced the difficulties. To begin with, the assumption of uniformity helped to guarantee the reliability of historical assertions: “What would become of history,” David Hume inquired rhetorically, “had we not a dependence on the veracity of the historian, according to the experience, which we have had of mankind?”144 History was usable as sociology, and understandable as history, only insofar as the past was in some significant sense like the present. It is true that while the philosophes’ historical perception was wider and deeper than the perception of their predecessors—even the great Mabillon had been, after all, cloistered and confined in his historical understanding—the idea of uniformity kept the philosophes’ vision relatively flat: it encouraged them to make comparisons with the Middle Ages or Chinese civilization mainly for the sake of scoring political points. Somehow the philosophes’ historical comparisons always turned out to be invidious comparisons. Yet, as I have insisted before, the doctrine of unity in no way foreclosed the possibility of variety. If Hume found that the study of history, even remote history, taught him nothing “new or strange” about human nature, the “revolutions of human kind, as represented in history,” surprised him with their “prodigious changes,” and offered a “spectacle full of pleasure and variety.”145 It was only the fundamental passions that were uniform and universal; customs, religions, institutions, forms of social organization, and styles of life were susceptible to almost infinite, almost unimaginable variety. As Voltaire put it, agreeing with the historians of his age, while the essential principles of human life are and remain the same, mœurs and culture produce “different fruits.” While all men “are formed by their age” and “very few rise above the mœurs of their day,” ages and mœurs differ vastly one from the other; climates and even more than climates, forms of government, insure these differences.146 Saint-Evremond, modern Epicurean and proto-philosophe, had said it late in the seventeenth century, in his own urbane way: “If we were to make love like Anacreon and Sappho, nothing would be more ridiculous; like Terence, nothing more bourgeois; like Lucian, nothing cruder. Every age has its own character.”147 For the Enlightenment, the past was not a monochrome.
The philosophes’ capacity to appreciate historical individuality mirrored and produced a relativist conception of the past, a certain willingness to suspend judgment and to see other epochs from the inside. In 1751, David Hume put the still fairly rudimentary relativism of the little flock into an amusing dialogue. He describes a nation that rewards ingratitude, brutality, incest, homosexuality, suicide, and murder—and it turns out to be the classical Greeks, and he then plays the same cunning game with Frenchmen, who welcome cruelty to children as long as it is the Bastille for a disobedient son, and murder as long as it is an honorable duel. An Athenian of merit, though civilized and intelligent, would be execrated by modern Frenchmen; a modern Frenchman, though equally civilized and intelligent, would have been execrated by the ancient Greeks. It is true that fundamental moral principles have changed little, but their expression and application differ enormously. What remains, then, is to apply the internal standards that a nation would apply to itself. “Would you try a GREEK or ROMAN by the common law of ENGLAND? Hear him defend himself by his own maxims; and then pronounce.” Indeed, “there are no manners so innocent or reasonable, but may be rendered odious or ridiculous, if measured by a standard, unknown to the persons.”148 The germs of historicism are in these views: the historians of the Enlightenment were not quite so different from Ranke as Ranke and his followers liked to believe.
Hume’s historicist sentiments were neither isolated nor insignificant. “When I have summoned up antiquity,” Montesquieu wrote in the Preface of his De l’esprit des lois, “I have sought to adopt its spirit, that I might not regard as similar situations that are really different, and not overlook the difference in those that appear to be similar.”149 In the body of his book he applied this principle faithfully, warning his readers that “we must not separate the laws from the circumstances in which they were made,”150 and that “to apply to remote centuries all the ideas of the age in which we live is among sources of error the most fruitful.”151 In his first book, the young Gibbon argued that while the philosophic spirit is a gift of nature, it can be cultivated by cultivating a historicist attitude: “The study of literature, the habit of becoming in turn Greek, Roman, the disciple of Zeno or Epicurus, is extremely useful for developing and training it.” In general, the philosophes prescribed the practice, and regretted the rarity, of this kind of relativism. In 1758, Nicolas Lenglet du Fresnoy, a widely respected historian and methodologist, complained that too many of his contemporaries were writing about the past in accord with their “own standards rather than in the spirit of the age which we seek to portray. We attempt to make everything conform with our present-day habits and nature.”152 Voltaire, who knew the work of Lenglet, said the same thing: “Here,” he wrote, speaking of Muslim culture, “are mœurs, customs, facts, so different from everything we are used to that they should show us how varied is the picture of the world, and how much we must be on guard against the habit of judging everything by our customs.”153 The philosophes knew the road to historical objectivity—they knew it, mapped it, and recommended it highly to others and to themselves.
Yet, while the philosophes advocated the ideal of relativism, they generally neglected it. They were in fact uneasy about their own performance. As Montesquieu said, in an observation that the critics of Enlightenment history have often quoted: “Voltaire will never write a good history. He is like the monks who write not for the subject they are dealing with, but for the glory of their order. Voltaire is writing for his monastery.”154 Certainly the criticism is overstated: even Voltaire was often disinterested in his historical work; even Voltaire did not see the Christian Middle Ages as a time of unrelieved and undifferentiated darkness. The other philosophic historians were still more detached than Voltaire. Robertson wrote a remarkably judicious survey of medieval culture; Gibbon conceded that “the darkness of the middle ages exhibits some scenes not unworthy of our notice.”155 Among the philosophes, hostility to an era dominated by organized religion was relieved by the sheer interest in the past and delight in portraiture. Beyond this, however, Montesquieu’s remark about Voltaire carries conviction: benign condescension, isolated stabs at objectivity, and a certain inventiveness in varying the charges against the Middle Ages were the best the Enlightenment could muster in the face of its Christian past. Relativism was swamped by polemical passion.
It is this political context that made the philosophes’ insistence on judging the past—aided by their assumption that human nature was always the same—so risky. The very idea of the historian as censor or builder of morale was a heritage from classical antiquity; history had always been an adjunct to ethics or politics, it had always been called upon to point a moral, enlist loyalties, improve its readers. In the time of Voltaire and Gibbon this notion was still very much alive. In 1763, James Boswell noted in his journal, “I employed the day in reading Hume’s History, which enlarged my views, filled me with great ideas, and rendered me happy. It is surprising how I have formerly neglected the study of history, which of all studies is surely the most amusing and the most instructive.”156 This was the philosophes’ view as well; as classicists, as radicals, and as men of their time, they sought to amuse and instruct, like everyone else. Each did his work in his own way, and each history had its own mixture of scholarship and propaganda—Gibbon’s propaganda differs from Voltaire’s propaganda, the propaganda in Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs differs from that in Voltaire’s Histoire du parlement de Paris—and besides, the philosophes saw nothing wrong in their propaganda. They were confident that their treatment of Christianity was not mere vindictiveness, self-serving partisanship, or a failure of understanding, but a wholly truthful report: to omit the attack on Christianity would have been not an exercise of historical sympathy, but a suppression of unpalatable facts. Was it the philosophes’ fault if the Middle Ages had been, on the whole, a time of wickedness and stupidity? If enlightened historians found it necessary to “fall upon l’infâme,” that was because l’infâme had given them so much material to work with, and because, at the same time, history showed that to expose vice was to advance virtue, to fix the contours of unreason was to help the cause of reason. It was necessary, Voltaire told his confidant Damilaville, to “make people see how we have been deceived in everything; to show how much of what is thought ancient is modern; how much of what has been given out as respectable is ridiculous.”157 At least one of the tasks of history was to make propaganda, but it must be propaganda in behalf of the truth, and it would be effective propaganda only if it were the truth. The philosophes therefore saw no reason to be apologetic about their didacticism: “Other historians,” Diderot wrote to Voltaire, “tell us facts in order to teach us facts. You do it in order to excite in the depth of our souls a strong indignation against mendacity, ignorance, hypocrisy, superstition, fanaticism, tyranny; and that indignation remains when the memory of facts has gone.”158 This, as Diderot obscurely sensed, produced some intellectual difficulties. He celebrated Raynal’s aggressive, radical history of the Two Indies as a magnificent weapon in the hands of humanity: “Raynal is a historian of a sort we no longer see; so much the better for him and so much the worse for history. If from the beginning history had seized, and dragged by the hair, both political and religious tyrants, I don’t suppose they would have been better men, but they would have been more thoroughly detested, and their unhappy subjects would have perhaps become less patient with them.” But then a doubt arose: was such bellicose history still history? “All right,” Diderot added, “efface the word ‘history’ from his book, and be silent. The kind of book I like is the one that kings and their courtiers detest, it is the kind of book that give birth to Brutuses—give it whatever name you please.”159
The historicists would extend Diderot’s doubt into a system, and deny to history the function he had so vigorously yet so uneasily assigned to it. Yet it was not the philosophes’ commitment to moral judgment—made, after all, in the name of truth—that made for inadequate historical writing, but the kind of judgments they made. What limited the value of their history and compromised its very historical nature was the historical position in which they were compelled to write it. What the philosophes’ critics forgot was that the philosophic historians could do nothing else. It is easy to be above the battle only when the battle is over.
It was precisely their irreligiosity that enabled the philosophes to make their decisive contribution to the craft of history; their position, one might say, had the virtues of its vices. If the historical masterpieces of Voltaire and the others have faded into museum pieces, what makes them still magnificent and in any event historically important museum pieces is the vigor with which they attacked the very presuppositions of Christian history writing. The philosophes made their revolution in history by secularizing its subject matter.
Doubtless the philosophes were wrong in their persistent insinuations that Christians cannot write good history. The Christian “superstition” made room for strenuous inquiry and truthful reporting. When the Reformation brought competition for the Christian past, the efforts to unmask the lies of heretics acted as a stimulus for further research. Long before Voltaire, devout monks had understood that the truth is excellent propaganda, and the quarrels between Protestants and Catholics over the antiquity of their respective churches had called forth careful editions of documents and equally careful scholarly work in ancient languages. Even intramural conflict had its uses: stung by Jesuit charges that the Merovingian documents housed in the Benedictine monastery of Saint Denis were forgeries, Mabillon had rescued the reputation of the documents in the possession of his order, and by the way laid down his now classic rules for the study of historical documents.
At the same time, the philosophes’ charge contained a valid and important point. As long as God played an active part in the world, the historian had no way of subjecting historical events to independent critical examination. If one king prospered because he had prayed and another was overthrown because he had sinned, or (since God’s decrees were inscrutable) if a devout king was overthrown because it pleased God to overthrow him, if battles were won or lost in accord with divine interventions that had nothing to do with terrain, the morale of the troops, or the wit of generals, if empires rose and fell because it was God’s will—if, in short, the course of history was the fulfillment of a mysterious divine plan, then the historian must direct his inquiry to theological questions and equip himself with knowledge not of geography or psychology or even the course of history itself, but of the Scriptures and its commentators. The philosophes’ view that history was pervaded by struggles between virtue and vice, reason and unreason, philosophy and superstition, has come to seem naïve, but it was a purely human struggle, open to scientific inquiry and criticism. The struggle the Christian saw dominating history had its origins and pursued its course in the shadow of the supernatural. Wherever history was enacted—in the minds of men or on the fields of battle—it was somehow a reenactment of the very beginning of history, which was the seduction of Eve by the serpent; it was the working out, in myriad forms, of the war of Satan against God and His children. More than merely seeing history as justification for their particular version of Christianity, Christian historians saw it as part, and proof, of the supreme truths enshrined in religion. Events were on the one hand foretastes or repetitions of transcendent religious moments in the life of the world—the expulsion from Paradise, the Incarnation of Christ, the Second Coming—or on the other hand demonstrations of divine power, no matter which way they went: if heretics swarmed across Europe, this was a sign of God’s anger at the faithful; if they retreated, it was a sign of His good will. However gravely the philosophes sinned in converting the events of history into a usable past, Christian historians had anticipated and in every way outdone them in this dubious enterprise.
It is true that Christian historians were coming to visualize God as acting not directly, by intermittent personal appearances, but indirectly, through human instruments. But inevitably, in their histories, the most significant human shapers of history were mere marionettes; they fulfilled God’s designs without wishing to, or knowing it. Despite his attempts to portray divine action in history as indirect, the most influential, eloquent, and, to the philosophes, most provocative of Christian historians—Bossuet—regarded the Bible as more authoritative than the most reliable of secular histories, Moses as the first historian, the Creation, the Deluge, or worldly events with religious implications (like the reign of Constantine) as the decisive events in the past. Bossuet was not alone, and by his time no longer wholly typical, but the most philosophical of Christian historians were, like Bossuet, compelled to give religious—which is to say, incomplete, incorrect, inadequate, and often irrelevant—answers to questions men were beginning to ask about historical causation.
The philosophes changed all this, and their act is a decisive moment in the history of history. Barely emerged from the chrysalis of credulity, the philosophes were themselves sometimes credulous enough; they would ascribe great importance to world-historical individuals and the rational plans of statesmen rather than the confluence of historical forces, and they liked to attribute large events to trivial causes. D’Alembert traced the Renaissance to the Greek scholars whom the Fall of Constantinople had driven to Italy,160 and Voltaire took a dramatist’s delight in small incidents productive of vast consequences: the messenger who, during the disorders of 1651, reaches the Prince de Condé too late and thus plunges France into civil war is a characteristic figure in Voltaire’s histories, and in other Enlightenment histories.
But the philosophes did not make this kind of pragmatic history into a system. They had no system. The list of causes that Gibbon offers for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire—scattered through his book and revealed in isolated pronouncements and asides—is impressively diverse: as Gibbon sees it, the long period of peace induced torpor, effeminacy, and a decline in public spirit; the vast territory of the empire and the lack of real freedom froze institutions into rigidity; economic exploitation produced a populace reluctant to defend a Rome in which it had no stake—and all these conditions, reinforcing one another, made the incursions of the German barbarians and the spread of Christianity, the two decisive causes of the fall, irresistible.
Gibbon’s list of causes, like lists of causes adduced by other philosophic historians for other events, was incomplete and uncoordinated; the philosophes had no overriding explanation of historical change that would have permitted them to show how causes interacted or how they could be arranged in a hierarchy of importance. Their theory of society was too primitive, and their idea of history as sheer battle too deeply engrained, to permit them to discover a really convincing theory of development. Uncertainty marks much of their work. It is instructive to see Voltaire’s treatment of the Glorious Revolution of 1688: as he interpreted the event, it had been largely determined by the characters of James II and William III, and he offered it as a good example to those “who like to see the cause of events in the conduct of men.”161 But while this one event gave support to this particular theory of historical causation, Voltaire’s language makes it plain that he cannot commit himself to it in explaining other events. In fact, elsewhere Voltaire shows himself to be a supporter of the larger view that historical changes arise from an interaction among massive impersonal forces: in his Lettres philosophiques he traces the splendor of England to a happy congruence of prosperity, freedom, and the dominance of commercial values; elsewhere he argues that the motive power of history must be sought in changes of religion or forms of government. Other Enlightenment historians offered similar causes; in his De l’esprit des lois, Montesquieu suggests that “men are governed” by “several things”; he lists them as “climate, religion, the laws, the principles of government, the example of the past, manners, and fashions,” and adds that one or two of these causes will take prominence in the history of one society or another, depending on its general state of culture.162 The philosophes had a sense that history is more than a drama of towering individuals. Yet their sociology is likely to be impressionistic; they had no way of converting their intuitions into formal arguments. Face to face with great historical questions, the philosophes often seem to be at play; they describe an event, list some plausible causes with an air of confidence, and move on.
This cavalier evasion of analysis or, rather, this substitution of literary elegance for analysis, which is often irritating, should not obscure the magnitude of their achievement. In offering a secular alternative to the theological determinism of Christian historians (whether in its rationalist version showing God clearly at work, or its mystical version according to which God manipulates events shrouded in mystery), the philosophes, whatever the inadequacies of their own analyses, opened the possibility for an all-embracing causal understanding of historical events and historical change. Their character sketches, the great set pieces about Luther or Cromwell, and their extended comparisons between William III and Louis XIV, are often psychologically improbable; accounts of great moments in history—the decline of the Roman Empire, the ascendancy of Louis XIV, the Spanish conquest of the New World—often suffer from a certain rationalism, and a disturbing if unconscious refusal to see the issues in all their complexity. But the expulsion of God from the historical stage remained an enormous gain for historical science. History became what Lenglet du Fresnoy called érudition profane,163 with no reserved precincts, no privileged subjects, no figures exempt from criticism. Historians could now address themselves, without reserve and without fear, to what Montesquieu called “general causes, whether moral or physical.”164 God’s disappearance left a vacuum that the secular intelligence was called upon to fill.
The effect of this secularization was striking in all areas of history, but it was most notable in the philosophes’ historical treatment of religion and politics. To move from proving religion to be true to proving it to be false might seem a petty gain, but the secular attitude permitted, in fact demanded, an entirely new set of inquiries. The philosophes cheerfully conceded to the Christians that religion was indeed a powerful motive force in history, but they insisted on redefining that force in what seemed to believers a scandalously free and utterly subversive manner. Beginning with Montesquieu’s Dissertation sur la politique des Romains, continuing with Hume’s provocatively entitled Natural History of Religion, and culminating in Gibbon’s brilliant and aggressive chapters on pagan government and Christian religion in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the philosophes analyzed the psychological causes and the historical influence of the religious impulse. In the hands of these disenchanted historians, the two great sacred subjects, religion and politics, became, for all practical purposes, one; religion, the philosophic historians demonstrated, was a form of politics, and, in many cultures, politics was a form of religion. The priest concealing the “sentiments of an atheist under the sacerdotal robes,” emperors cynically exploiting the superstitions of the populace, Church Fathers persecuting one another with intolerant zeal for the sake of power, the false miracles adroitly reported and credulously believed, the base motives of emperors and bishops masquerading as generosity and piety—all these elements in Gibbon’s work described with well-placed adjectives, dramatized by carefully selected detail, and made plausible through painstaking scholarship, are more than the ebullitions of one man’s talent. They are a collective product, the triumph of the Enlightenment’s secular comprehension of the world. Gibbon piously announced that he was restricting himself in his history to “secondary causes,” to the merely “human causes” that attend the fortunes of religion in this world, presumably taking the sacred truth of Christianity for granted. He “flattered” himself, he said in mock-indignation in his Autobiography, that “an age of light and liberty would receive, without scandal, an inquiry into the human causes of the progress and establishment of Christianity.”165 Such disclaimers were intended to deceive no one. Gibbon knew, and hoped his readers would discover, that there were only human causes.
The philosophes’ secularization of historical cause enabled them to enlarge historical space. The world once circumscribed by faith grew wider, older, more varied in their hands than it had been in the hands of Christian historians. Much though by no means all of the Enlightenment’s hostility to the Jews of the Bible had its roots in this enlargement. Bossuet, Voltaire argued, had mistaken a pious retelling of Hebrew tales for the history of the world: “His socalled Universal History” is “nothing but the history of four or five peoples, and above all of the little Jewish nation, either ignored or justly despised by the rest of the world.”166 Bossuet, Voltaire reiterated in the Preface to his own attempt at universal history, the Essai sur les mœurs, “seems to have written for the sole purpose of insinuating that everything in the world was done for the sake of the Jewish nation: that if God gave hegemony over Asia to the Babylonians, it was to punish the Jews; if God had Cyrus reign, it was to avenge them; if God sent the Romans, it was, once again, to chastise the Jews. That,” he added drily, “may be; but the greatness of Cyrus and the Romans also had other causes.”167 True universal history must proceed differently; it must begin with the Oriental nations which were civilized when the West was still sunk in primitive barbarity. Voltaire carried out the program of his Preface in the body of his book: the Essai sur les mœurs opens with chapters on China, moves on to India, and then to Persia, a provocative instance showing history as philosophy preaching by examples.
In assigning such unmistakable prominence to Oriental cultures in the most ambitious of his histories, Voltaire had, as usual, several purposes in mind at once. In his pointed admiration for the religion of the Chinese and the Indians, with their advanced conception of a single deity enjoining a pure morality and demanding no superstitious worship, Voltaire was obviously aiming at his own Christian culture, with its idolatry, its incredible tales, its persecutions. In referring, just as pointedly, to the great age of Asiatic civilizations, Voltaire was throwing doubt on the Biblical account of early history, to which Christian historians still stubbornly clung. In keeping Bossuet quite explicitly at the center of his stage, Voltaire was gratifying his ambition to excel Bossuet even at his best. But whatever his polemical purposes and private urges, Voltaire was also making propaganda in behalf of universal history, of an attitude toward the past that embraced all civilizations in the world without prejudice or parochial purpose, partly at least for their own sake, and in their own place. The philosophes were certain that authentic universality became possible only through unmasking the fraudulent universality of Christian historians—that myopic parochialism masquerading as world history.
Unfortunately, in dissipating the parochialism of Christian historians, the philosophes reintroduced a parochialism of their own, for familiar reasons: their relativism was not disinterested but in the service of absolutes. In this sense at least the widespread charge against the Enlightenment, that it took the ideology of Christianity and turned it upside down, is justified; as Christians had used non-Christian nations to make a case for Christianity, the philosophes used them to make a case against Christianity.
Still, the less-than-universal universal history of the philosophes remains a significant advance over the history of their pious predecessors, in practice and in potential alike. Defective as his chapters on the Orient may be, Voltaire wrenched the center of history away from the Christian or the European world, and if, seeking to redress the balance, he introduced a new imbalance of his own, he showed how it might finally be securely established by historians better informed and less embattled than he. Voltaire’s fellow historians, it might be added, traveled as widely as he did to construct their historical universe: Robertson treated India, Spanish America, and medieval Europe with nearly as much objectivity as he treated his native Scotland; Gibbon concentrated on the Roman Empire, but he was alert to the remote world beyond its frontiers. It was an exhilarating expansion of vistas and a great act of liberation.
Not content with widening the area of historical inquiry, the philosophes moved deeply into culture itself, with unprecedented boldness and unprecedented dividends: cultural history in its modern sense is an invention of the Enlightenment. The philosophes’ impatience with trivia, their rejection of the aristocratic ideal, and their insistent secularism all played their part here. What had been covered over by superficial anecdotes, worshipful accounts of heroic individuals, and layers of devotion was now laid open to exploration and analysis, and could be incorporated into a new, comprehensible entity of historical study—culture. As the scientists of the seventeenth century had unified their world, demolishing the hierarchies of celestial and terrestrial motion and bringing all physical events into a single system, so the historians of the eighteenth century made their revolution by opening access to all historical phenomena and by placing them on the same level, into the same system. As was customary, their intentions were better than their performance—in Gibbon, and even more in Hume, culture is segregated into separate sections and the interaction of cultural phenomena—of political, economic, literary, religious forces—is far from complete, but their performance was at least a clue to future historians. Like their conquest of time or of objectivity, their conquest of culture was magnificent and revolutionary less in what they did—though, I insist, that was magnificent and revolutionary enough—than in what they said must be done, and what they made it possible for others to do.
Certainly the whole program of cultural history, if not modern cultural history itself, can be found in the pronouncements of the philosophes. “A lock on the canal that joins the two seas, a painting by Poussin, a fine tragedy,” wrote Voltaire, the most programmatic among Enlightenment historians, “are things a thousand times more precious than all the court annals and all the campaign reports put together.”168 He insisted that this kind of history was the only kind to deserve the name philosophical: “People are very careful to report on what day a certain battle took place,” he wrote in 1744, reasonably enough, “and they are right to do so. They print treaties, they describe the pomp of a coronation, the ceremony of receiving the Cardinal’s hat, and even the entrance of an ambassador, forgetting neither his Swiss soldiers nor his lackeys. It is a good thing to have archives on everything, that one might consult them when necessary; and I now look upon all these fat books as dictionaries. But after I have read three or four thousand descriptions of battles, and the terms of some hundreds of treaties, I have found that fundamentally I am scarcely better instructed than I was before. From these things I learn only events.” By reading reports on the victory of Tamerlane over Bajazet, Voltaire goes on, he did not learn to know the Tartars and the Turks; by reading the memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz, he found out only what the queen mother said, word for word, to her attendants, but this was hardly instructive. All these are “little miniatures,” which live for a generation or two, and then die forever; and it is for their sake that more important knowledge has been neglected. “I should like to learn just what was the strength of a country before a war, and if the war had increased or diminished it. Was Spain richer before the conquest of the New World than today?” Why did the population of Amsterdam grow within two hundred years from twenty thousand to two hundred and forty thousand? How did the arts and manufacturing establish themselves in one country, and move from one to another? These are the questions historians should ask, but have failed to ask: “I read the annals of France in vain: our historians are silent on these details.” Voltaire had recourse to the popular antique cliché from Terence to make his revolutionary point: “None of these historians has taken for his motto, Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto. Yet it seems to me that one must skillfully incorporate this useful kind of knowledge into the tissue of events.”169 In the famous programmatic opening words of Le siècle de Louis XIV, Voltaire said it again, briefly: “It is not merely the life of Louis XIV that we claim to write; we have set ourselves a larger objective. We want to attempt to paint for posterity, not the actions of a single man, but the spirit of men in the most enlightened century that ever was.”170 The book itself seeks to realize the program of this daring first paragraph: it reduces court anecdotes to four short chapters, opens its account of the political and military events of the reign of Louis XIV with a survey of Europe, and, quite symmetrically, concludes that long section of the book with another survey of Europe during the last year or two of the king’s reign; it then disposes of its anecdotes and moves into domestic affairs, the sciences, the arts, and literature, to conclude with a polemical section—some chapters on religious quarrels, and on the Jesuits’ penetration of China. “But if God had wanted China to be Christian, would he have been content with putting crosses in the air? Would he not have put them into the hearts of the Chinese?”171 These are, strikingly enough, the last sentences in a book ostensibly devoted to the reign of a French king; a reminder that for a historian as professional as Voltaire, in the age of the Enlightenment, political concerns, indeed political obsessions, were never very far from the surface.
It is this element—politics—that gave Enlightenment history its flavor, made possible its radical achievements and saddled it with its difficulties. In the other social sciences of the eighteenth century, the inclination of the philosophes to translate description into prescription raised no strenuous intellectual difficulties; sociology and political economy, after all, were what we have come to call “policy sciences,” whose very purpose it was to convert facts into values. For the philosophes, history was a policy science as well, but it was also, as they rather obscurely saw, something different; it was a discipline in which too much insistence on policy would compromise the science.
Yet, to repeat, they could not escape their situation. Near the end of his life, frightened by the “disorders in France,” Gibbon professed his admiration for Burke’s antirevolutionary philosophy, and, characteristically enough, sought to blame others for what he too had been responsible for. “I have sometimes thought of writing a dialogue of the dead in which Lucian, Erasmus, and Voltaire should mutually acknowledge the danger of exposing an old superstition to the contempt of the blind and fanatic multitude.”172 Gibbon, it is true, had never addressed the multitude, but his notorious chapters on early Christianity in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had been part of the great and unappeasable debate of the eighteenth century. Not even Gibbon—and if not Gibbon, then who else?—could avoid the realities of his time, or the force of Rousseau’s observation that everything is at bottom connected with politics.
1 “Preface” to Father Jerome Lobo: Voyage to Abyssinia, quoted from James L. Clifford: Young Sam Johnson (1955), 147.
2 Sir James Macintosh: The Law of Nature and of Nations (1798), quoted in J. W. Burrow: Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social History (1966), 12. While Sir James has history in mind here, for the social scientists of the eighteenth century what applied to history applied to all other social sciences as well.
3 For instances of this kind of relativism, see Charles Jacques Beyer: “Montesquieu et le relativisme esthétique,” VS, XXIV (1963), 171–82, especially 178–9.
4 Pensées, in Œuvres, II, 158.
5 Traité des systèmes, in Œuvres, I, 208–9.
6 See The Rise of Modern Paganism, 154–9.
7 Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941), 341.
8 Quoted in “Introduction,” Henri de Saint-Simon: Social Organization, The Science of Man and Other Writings, ed. Felix Markham (1952), xxi.
9 “Préface,” De l’esprit des lois, in Œuvres, I, part 1, lx–lxi.
10 “A, B, C,” in Philosophical Dictionary, II, 500, 502.
11 See below, chap. ix, section 2.
12 Walpole to Horace Mann, January 10, 1750. The Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Mrs. Paget Toynbee, 16 vols. (1903–5), II, 419.
13 Walpole to the same, February 25, 1750. Ibid., 433.
14 This is Beccaria’s name for him; see Dei delitti e delle pene (1764; ed. Franco Venturi, 1965), 10.
15 The Federalist, No. 9 (ed. Jacob E. Cooke, 1961), 52.
16 To Horace Mann, February 25, 1750. Letters, II, 433.
17 “A, B, C,” in Philosophical Dictionary, II, 500. For a more detailed discussion of Montesquieu’s humanitarianism, especially as embodied in book XII of De l’esprit des lois, see below, 410–13, 427–33.
18 “Introduction,” Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws (edn. 1949), xxxiv.
19 De l’esprit des lois, book I, chap. ii, Œuvres, I, part 1, 5.
20 Franz Neumann: “Introduction,” The Spirit of the Laws, xxxii.
21 See De l’esprit des lois, book I, chap. iii, Œuvres, I, part 1, 9.
22 As most commentators have noted, Montesquieu’s classification differs from the classical model. Montesquieu groups together aristocracies and democracies under republics, while Plato and Aristotle had separated them; and he lists despotism as a separate form, while to the classical theorists it was a corruption of a good form of government. But what is essentially new about Montesquieu’s classification is his introduction of the principles that underlie the forms.
23 De l’esprit des lois, book VIII, chap. 1, Œuvres, I, part 1, 149.
24 Ibid., book XIV, chap. ii, Œuvres, I, part 1, 305–9.
25 Ibid., book XIV, chap. x, Œuvres, I, part 1, 315–17.
26 Ibid., book XVI, chap. xi, Œuvres, I, part 1, 360.
27 “Of National Characters,” Works, III, 246.
28 “A, B, C,” in Philosophical Dictionary, II, 502.
29 History of Civil Society, 65.
30 To Hugh Blair, April 1, 1767. Letters, II, 133.
31 See Raymond Aron: Main Currents in Sociological Thought, I, Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, Tocqueville … (1960; tr. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver, 1965), 14–16.
32 De l’esprit des lois, book XV, chap. viii, Œuvres, I, part 1, 334.
33 Ibid., book III, chaps. ix, viii; book V, chap. xiv; book XIX, chap. xi, Œuvres, I, part 1, 34–6, 78–84, 418.
34 “A, B, C,” in Philosophical Dictionary, II, 508–9.
35 History of Civil Society, 65.
36 Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, in Works, IV, 190, 191 n.
37 These are the opening words of Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in ibid., IV, 3 (italics mine).
38 An Historical View of the English Government from the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the Revolution in 1688, 4 vols. (1787; 4th edn., 1818), II, 429–30. I owe this reference to my former student David Weissbrodt.
39 “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,” Works, III, 176.
40 “That Politics May be Reduced to a Science,” ibid., III, 101.
41 “Whether the British Government Inclines More to Absolute Monarchy, or to a Republic,” ibid., III, 122.
42 “Introduction,” Treatise of Human Nature, xxii–xxiii. See above, chap. iii.
43 “Of the Original Contract,” Works, III, 450.
44 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ibid., IV, 6.
45 “That Politics May be Reduced to a Science,” ibid., III, 98 n., 98. In one of his political dialogues, Wieland takes issue with the same couplet. Gespräche unter vier Augen, in Werke, XLII, 166. It is quoted in The Federalist, No. 68 (ed. Jacob Cooke), 461; and see below, 494.
46 “That Politics May be Reduced to a Science,” Works, III, 105.
47 Adam Smith: Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. John M. Lothian (1963), 37.
48 History of Civil Society, 1–5, 5 n., 3, 6.
49 Ibid., 26. See above, chap. iv, section 1.
50 Ibid., 7–9.
51 Ibid., 10–11, 210, 49.
52 Ibid., 64, 62, 24.
53 Ibid., 20–4.
54 Ibid., 25, 59.
55 Ibid., 33.
56 Ibid., 24.
57 Forbes: “Introduction” to ibid., xix.
58 Ibid., 231–3, 221, 252.
59 Ibid., 180–6.
60 See David Kettler: The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson (1965), 132.
61 History of Civil Society, 279–80.
62 See Dei delitti e delle pene, chap. xxix, on imprisonment.
63 Quoted in Gilles-Gaston Granger: La Mathématique sociale du Marquis de Condorcet (1965), 2.
64 Esquisse, 255.
65 T. S. Ashton: An Economic History of England: The Eighteenth Century (1965), 1.
66 Quoted in Paul F. Lazarsfeld: “Notes on the History of Quantification in Sociology—Trends, Sources and Problems,” in Harry Woolf, ed.: Quantification: A History of the Meaning of Measurement in the Natural and Social Sciences (1961), 155.
67 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776; ed. Edwin Cannan, edn. 1937), 501.
68 Both quoted in Jacob Viner: “Power versus Plenty as Objectives of Foreign Policy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” World Politics, I, 1 (October 1948), 12, 15.
69 Quoted in Charles Wilson: England’s Apprenticeship, 1603–1763 (1965), 234.
70 Quoted in William Letwin: The Origins of Scientific Economics: English Economic Thought 1660–1776 (1963), 44.
71 Wealth of Nations, 460–1, 397, 625.
72 Thomas P. Neill: “Quesnay and Physiocracy,” JHI, IX, 2 (April 1948), 154 n.
73 L’Homme aux quarante écus, in Œuvres, XXI, 308.
74 “With the Physiocrats,” Ronald L. Meek has said, “for the first time in the history of economic thought, we come face to face with that curious sociological phenomenon which we call a ‘school’ if we sympathize with it and a ‘sect’ if we do not.” “Introduction,” The Economics of Physiocracy (1962), 27.
75 This is what Quesnay candidly told Mirabeau; see ibid., 115.
76 Wealth of Nations, 638.
77 Article “Corn” in Diderot’s Encyclopédie; in Meek: Economics of Physiocracy, 82; and Dialogue on the Work of Artisans, ibid., 204.
78 Ibid., 370.
79 Wealth of Nations, 628.
80 Quoted in Neill: “Quesnay and Physiocracy,” 165.
81 Quesnay and Mirabeau: “Rural Philosophy,” in Meek: Economics of Physiocracy, 70.
82 Quoted in Neill: “Quesnay and Physiocracy,” 164. For the consequences of these ideas for political theory, see below, 493–6.
83 Wealth of Nations, 633.
84 Hume to Morellet, July 10, 1769. Letters, II, 205.
85 Wealth of Nations, 642, 627.
86 Diderot to Grimm, February 9, 1769. Correspondance, IX, 22.
87 Arthur M. Wilson: “The Development and Scope of Diderot’s Political Thought,” VS, XXVII (1963), 1885. For earlier expressions on physiocracy, see Diderot to Damilaville (June or July 1767). Correspondance, VII, 75–80; and the fascinating transitional statement to Falconet (May 1768), ibid., VIII, 27–46, where Diderot argues that while most Physiocrats might be enthusiastic missionaries and fanatics, Mercier de la Rivière at least should probably be exempted from this charge.
88 “Introduction,” Wealth of Nations, xliii.
89 “Of Civil Liberty,” Works, III, 157.
90 Quoted in Letwin: Origins of Scientific Economics, 219.
91 “Of Commerce,” Works, III, 293.
92 Ibid., 295, 288–9, 291.
93 Ibid., 292–3.
94 “Or Refinement in the Arts,” Works, III, 303.
95 “Of Commerce,” ibid., 296–7.
96 Ibid., 297.
97 “Of Refinement in the Arts,” ibid., 306.
98 Ibid., 304.
99 “Of Commerce,” ibid., 295.
100 “Of Money,” ibid., 309, 312.
101 “Of Interest,” ibid., 321, 315, 319.
102 “Of the Balance of Trade,” ibid., 343, 336.
103 “Of the Jealousy of Trade,” ibid., 348. See above, 40–1.
104 Wealth of Nations, 742.
105 Letters, II, 311. The letter that immediately precedes this one in Hume’s collected correspondence is the one thanking Gibbon for volume I of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was Hume’s last spring, but what a spring!
106 Wealth of Nations, 13.
107 The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; edn. 1966), 349.
108 Ibid., 264–6.
109 See above, 100–6.
110 Wealth of Nations, 3–5.
111 Ibid., 356, 734–5.
112 Ibid., 423.
113 Ibid., 460, 428, 68–9, 128, 11, 78–81, 674.
114 Ibid., 329, 460.
115 T. W. Hutchison: “Bentham as an Economist,” The Economic Journal, LXII, 262 (June 1956), 299.
116 To William Strahan (August 1770). Letters, II, 230.
117 Spectator, No. 420; III, 574.
118 Autobiography, 175.
119 My Own Life, in Works, III, 4.
120 Quoted in Pevsner: The Englishness of English Art, 50.
121 See Voelcker: Die Stadt Goethes, 296.
122 Recorded by Boswell: Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763 (1950), 293.
123 Hume to Henry Home (1747). Letters, I, 99. And Hume to the same (1747). Ibid., 109.
124 See The Rise of Modern Paganism, 75–8.
125 Hume to Andrew Millar, March 22, 1760. Letters, I, 321. This letter (322–4) contains an instructive list of books that Hume wanted Millar to get for him.
126 See Momigliano: “Gibbon’s Contribution to Historical Method,” 46–7.
127 “Preface,” The History of America, in The Works of William Robertson, 12 vols. (1820), VIII, i–xvii passim.
128 Ibid., XIV. Robertson goes on to observe that it was Gibbon who had suggested that he publish the catalogue of the Spanish books he had used, a suggestion that Robertson adopted.
129 Autobiography, 121; see The Rise of Modern Paganism, 369.
130 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, V, 132 n; see The Rise of Modern Paganism, 370.
131 Momigliano: “Gibbon’s Contribution to Historical Method,” 44.
132 Quoted in Carl Becker: The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932), 91.
133 Quoted in J. H. Brumfitt: Voltaire Historian (1958), 133.
134 Essai sur l’étude de la littérature, in Miscellaneous Works, IV, 66.
135 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, VII, 215; that this notion was a commonplace in the age of the Enlightenment is evident from Hume’s casual and minor essay “Of the Study of History” (Works, IV, 388–91), in which he makes great claims for the philosophical importance of history.
136 Essai sur les mœurs, II, 540.
137 Voltaire to the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha, September 27 (1753), Correspondence, XXIII, 203; see Brumfitt: Voltaire Historian, 134.
138 Remarques pour servir de supplément à ‘L’Essai sur les mœurs,’ in Essai sur les mœurs, II, 900. It is important to keep in mind that Voltaire did not conceive of this science in any dogmatic way; he was too sympathetic to Pyrrhonist doubts about the past to become a doctrinaire positivist.
139 Tableau philosophique des progrès, in Œuvres, I, 310–11.
140 Diderot to Madame d’Épinay (September 1771). Correspondance, XI, 183.
141 Le siècle de Louis XIV, in Œuvres historiques, 878 n.; Voltaire to Richard Rolt, August 1, 1750. Correspondence, XVIII, 108.
142 Quoted in Mossner: Life of David Hume, 318.
143 My Own Life, in Works, III, 4–5.
144 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in ibid., IV, 73. There is an apparent circularity here: the assumption of uniformity prepares the historian to find in history the uniformity he is looking for, which, in turn, guarantees the correctness of his assumption. But this is only apparent: for Hume, experience was primary, providing highly probable evidence that man’s nature was in fact uniform through time and place.
145 For my earlier use of these quotations, see above, 168–9.
146 Essai sur les mœurs, I, 774, and II, 416.
147 Quoted in Vyverberg: Historical Pessimism, 31.
148 A Dialogue, in Works, IV, 289–305; quotation on 294.
149 “Préface,” De l’esprit des lois, in Œuvres, I, part 1, ix. In a pensée, Montesquieu notes: “To judge the beauties in Homer, it is necessary for us to place ourselves into the camp of the Greeks and not into a French army.” Œuvres, II, 42.
150 De l’esprit des lois, book XXIX, chap. xiv, chapter heading, Œuvres, I, part 1, 281.
151 Ibid., book XXX, chap. xiv, Œuvres, I, part 1, 315.
152 Plan de l’histoire générale et particulière de la monarchie française, I, ix–x, quoted in Lester A. Segal: “Nicolas Lenglet Du Fresnoy (1674–1755): A Study of Historical Criticism and Methodology in Early Eighteenth Century France” (Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation, 1968), 39–40.
153 Essai sur les mœurs, I, 259–60.
154 Pensées, in Œuvres, II, 419.
155 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, VII, 210; see The Rise of Modern Paganism, 209.
156 Boswell’s London Journal (under February 20, 1763), 197.
157 Quoted in J. H. Brumfitt: “History and Propaganda in Voltaire,” VS, XXIV (1963), 272.
158 (November 28, 1760). Correspondance, III, 275; see The Rise of Modern Paganism, 188.
159 Quoted in Hans Wolpe: Raynal et sa machine de guerre: ‘L’Histoire des deux Indes’ et ses perfectionnements (1957), 43–4.
160 R. G. Collingwood has used this particular piece of naïveté (in his The Idea of History [1946], 80) to convict the Enlightenment of lacking the historical conception of origins or processes. He has at least a point: see Condillac: “Often the slightest causes (moyens) are the principle of great revolutions.” Traité des systèmes, in Œuvres, 208. But as I have shown in The Rise of Modern Paganism, 277 n., both Gibbon and Voltaire had a far more sophisticated interpretation of the origins of the Renaissance than d’Alembert.
161 Siècle de Louis XIV, in Œuvres historiques, 768.
162 De l’esprit des lois, book XIX, chap. iv, Œuvres, I, part 1, 412.
163 Lester A. Segal: “Lenglet Du Fresnoy,” 89.
164 Considérations sur les Romains, in Œuvres, I, part 3, 482.
165 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, II, 2, 32, 175.
166 Quoted in Brumfitt: Voltaire Historian, 32.
167 Essai, I, 196.
168 Brumfitt: Voltaire Historian, 46.
169 Nouvelles considérations sur l’histoire, in Œuvres historiques, 46–8.
170 Œuvres historiques, 616.
171 Ibid., 1109. The text of Le siècle de Louis XIV is, of course, followed by those famous catalogues, which include lists of the royal family of France, sovereigns of Europe, and short biographies of “celebrated” writers and artists.
172 Autobiography, 203.