I THINK IT IS now apparent that politics presented the Enlightenment with a dilemma of heroic proportions. The philosophes stood for reform; they stood, at the same time, for freedom in its many guises—freedom of thought, speech, and the press, freedom to participate in the shaping of public policy, to pursue one’s career and realize one’s talents. Reform and freedom were for them two faces of a single hope: freedoms were among the reforms to be accomplished, reforms were among the happy consequences of freedom. But the realities tore this alliance apart: with the overpowering presence of the illiterate masses and the absence of the habit of autonomy, freedom and reform were often incompatible. Libertarians seemed to have no way of initiating reforms; the most effective among the royal reformers were self-willed paternalists who made improvements in their own way and for their own sake. The road to the realization of the philosophes’ political program thus led through the devious and embarrassing detours of repression and manipulation that were a denial or a mockery of the world they hoped to bring into being; the very methods used to distribute the fruits of enlightenment seemed calculated to frustrate enlightenment itself.
One way of escaping the dilemma was to deny that it was there, or that it was grave: this is the tendency of Voltaire’s conformist pronouncement about Prussia and Russia. Voltaire implied with his casual but pointed silences that the ordinary Prussian or Russian was so far below being a political animal that there was no need to take him into account except as the passive recipient of humane enactments. Voltaire did not want Frederick to have his recruits beaten to death, but it did not occur to him that Frederick might train them to be voters.
This was a comfortable kind of theory, a complacent empiricism content to take things as they were. It was also, and for these reasons, a wholly inadequate escape from the philosophes’ dilemma, one that made Voltaire himself, in his better moments, quite uneasy. A more courageous way out was proposed by some of the radicals of the Enlightenment, notably Diderot and Rousseau, who generalized their observation of Frederick II into opposition against absolutism as such. Both tried to dissolve the incompatibility of freedom and reform by insisting that reform without freedom was no reform at all. Rousseau placed his distrust of beneficent paternalism into the heart of his political theory in the Contrat social, while Diderot made it a prominent theme of his political writings in the 1770s. “One of the greatest disasters that could befall a free nation,” Diderot wrote to Catherine, “would be two or three consecutive reigns of a just and enlightened despot.”1 Such despots, were they the best of men, would “habituate the nation to blind obedience; in their reigns the people would forget their inalienable rights; they would fall into a fatal trust and apathy; they would no longer experience that continual uneasiness that is the necessary guardian of liberty.”2 Such despots were like good shepherds who reduce their subjects to animals; they would “secure them a happiness of ten years for which they would pay with twenty centuries of misery.”3 If England had had three Queen Elizabeths in succession, Diderot told Catherine, the country would have fallen into slavery.4
These observations amounted to the recognition of the power that means have over ends; what Rousseau and Diderot were saying in effect is that men who are treated as children will always remain children. But the dilemma remained: the illiterate were illiterate; no administrative machinery, however ingenious, could transform silent subjects into self-reliant citizens. There was only one realistic way of accepting the world of the present without sacrificing the possibilities of the future—education. This was the logic of enlightenment: if most men are not yet ready for autonomy, they must be made ready for it. The great political dilemma of the Enlightenment could be resolved only through time.
If eighteenth-century rulers refused to see, or refused to act on, this logic, that was only human. Education formed an indispensable part of their reform schemes: peasants needed to be instructed in the use of new implements, merchants and manufacturers to be acquainted with new techniques or products, public servants to be trained to new tasks. But civic education was something else again. After all, like all good education, good civic education aimed at making the educator unnecessary, and this required a degree of self-abnegation that the princes—all but one—could not muster.
The only ruler who understood the logic of Enlightenment and almost realized it in his state was Archduke Leopold of Tuscany, the prince I have already had occasion to describe as the most consistent and most enlightened reformer of the age. From the year of his accession, 1765, Leopold had imposed on his astonished and often reluctant subjects one progressive reform after another: unprecedented freedom of commerce, reconstitution of local government, improvements in the police and the military establishment, and a radical, humane legal code. As he proceeded, his enactments began to disclose a certain inner logic. They impressed him as parts of a large, coherent purpose: the gradual but comprehensive civic education of the Tuscan people. All earlier reforms, he wrote in 1782, had served the purpose of “awakening in men’s hearts the feeling of an honorable civic freedom, and the habits of devotion to, and zeal for, the public good.”5 In 1779, Leopold acted on this insight, and began to draft a constitution that would be at once the climax of and the reward for that education. He put into his successive drafts all that he knew: what he had learned about Tuscany in his inspection trips, about political theory from the philosophes, about political possibilities from the American Revolution. Even his aversions played a part in these drafts: he abhorred what he called the “despotism” of his brother Joseph II (which he took to be the opposite of the Physiocrats’ “despotisme légal”),6 and he determined to avoid all its traits in the Tuscan regime of the future.
Despite superficial resemblances with traditional mixed constitutions, Leopold’s drafts were thoroughly modern. They emphatically insist on the natural rights of the citizen and the constitutional duties of the ruler, on his continuous accountability. As he later summed up his principles: “I believe that the sovereign, even if hereditary, is only the delegate of his people”—a view radically different from Frederick II’s famous dictum that the king is the first servant of his people. Frederick meant to say that the king is the hard-working dutiful master of the political machine; Leopold, that the ultimate power lies with the nation. “Every country should have a constitution or a contract between the people and the sovereign which limits the authority and the power of the latter.” If the sovereign breaks this law, “he has in effect renounced his position,” and all “obligation to obey him” ceases. In other words, “the executive power belongs to the sovereign, but the legislative power belongs to the people”—constitutionalism pure and simple. In another pointed departure from Frederick’s practice, Leopold laid it down that “the sovereign cannot interfere, directly or indirectly, in civil or criminal proceedings, or change its forms or its penalties,” and all arrests and convictions must follow due process. Even taxes, that most sensitive of all questions, were a matter to be resolved amicably between the ruler and his people. After giving a precise annual accounting and reporting on the state of public finance, the sovereign must leave it to the people and its representatives to vote the taxes, and then only for one year. Indeed, no regulations, no grants of pensions, can have binding force until the people and its representatives have voted for it. Nor should the people be terrorized by any arbitrary acts on the part of the sovereign or the military. “I believe,” Leopold wrote, “that the sovereign must govern through law alone,” and that the people can never renounce its fundamental rights, “which are the rights of nature.” These fundamental rights are the ground on which the people had accepted a sovereign ruler in the first place; “it granted him preeminence that he might bring about its happiness and its well-being, not as he wants it, but as they themselves want it and feel it—nicht wie er es will, sondern wie sie selbst es wollen und empfinden.” This, of course, was the point of Leopold’s great educational enterprise: to make ordinary men feel competent to judge their real needs and participate in making the environment in which they choose to live.7 Happiness, these principles suggested, was not something a man received, but something he made.
With all the expected restrictions on the franchise, and all the necessary elaborations of detail, these principles had actually found their way into the final draft of 1782. But time and circumstances were unpropitious; a combination of domestic resistance, administrative sabotage, and undesired foreign troubles kept the draft from becoming anything more than that, and so the single effort of a single eighteenth-century ruler to hand over most of his powers to his enlightened people came to nothing. It seems a pity: it would have been a splendid constitution.
The philosophes were well aware that education was of strategic importance for their political and social thought; after all, some of their favorite intellectual forebears—Seneca, Rabelais, Montaigne—had devoted serious attention to pedagogy, and besides, was it not highly significant that the admirable John Locke should have written a whole book on it? Nor was Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education a casual performance; it was a pioneering essay of vital interest to reformers partly because it advocated far-reaching reforms, but mainly because it was an evident offspring of Locke’s major work, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. To its many approving readers in the eighteenth century, Some Thoughts Concerning Education was the new philosophy in action; Locke’s philosophy of education deserved a hearing and demonstrated the importance of its subject, because it was Locke’s philosophy in education. In this area, as in others, the philosophes were pleased to be Locke’s pupils.
They were pupils that they might become preceptors. All the philosophes, more or less consciously, thought of themselves as educators, and enlightenment was what they taught. Diderot said as much: he wanted to change men’s way of thinking with his Encyclopédie; Voltaire was less explicit, perhaps, but just as didactic with his polemical pamphlets; Lessing rarely stepped out of his chosen part as preacher of peace, tolerance, and humanity; the Physiocrats lectured the general public incessantly with their journals and their popular tracts; Beccaria, modest as his expectations were, hoped to convert princes to his principles of jurisprudence. For some of the philosophes, especially those who had at some time borne public responsibility, education had a kind of desperate urgency: both the marquis d’Argenson and Turgot, during and after their periods of office under the French crown, entreated their master to enlist the public behind his program. “The king is badly advised,” wrote d’Argenson, as dismayed in the fifties as Turgot was to be in the seventies, by the popularity that the parlements enjoyed. “In this enlightened and philosophic age of ours he is slowly being discredited. If Henri III was obliged to place himself at the head of the League, Louis XV should place himself at the head of philosophy, justice, and reason.”8 Education here was a two-stage process: the philosophes had to educate the king in the need for educating his people.
But education was more than a theory or a hope for the philosophes; it was also an experience—in fact, it lies at the heart of their experience as philosophes. I have defined that experience as a dialectical struggle in which the philosophes first pitted classical thought against their Christian heritage that they might discard the burdens of religion, and then escaped their beloved ancients by appealing to the science of nature and of man; this pursuit of modernity was the essential purpose of their education. Indeed, their experience was an education in the most specific possible sense. Each philosophe recapitulated in his private development the course that the Enlightenment was prescribing for mankind in general; each first sensed his opportunity for engaging in this liberating and exhilarating struggle, and equipped himself for it, in his school.
When the philosophes went to school—run, practically all of them, by clerics—the old synthesis of Christianity and classicism, devised centuries before, was breaking down. Schools are notoriously conservative institutions, but the pressures of the eighteenth century could not be ignored; however muffled, they invaded the sanctuary of religious instruction and demonstrated the teaching of the classics to be excessive in its demands and ineffective in its results—or, at times, too effective in its results. Eighteenth-century criticism, all in all, amounted to the charge that the schools could do no right: the pious complained that the schools taught too little religion and the classics too well; the philosophes, on the contrary, that they taught too much religion and the classics not well enough. Gibbon records that at Oxford, “even the study of an elegant classic, which might have been illustrated by a comparison of the ancient and modern theatres, was reduced to a dry and literal interpretation of the author’s text.”9 Diderot vividly remembered “the pain students endured in explaining Vergil, the tears with which they soaked the pleasant satires of Horace,” and he warned that such disagreeable instruction had disgusted pupils “with these authors to such a degree that they later looked at them only to shudder.” The French curriculum, he thought, produced graduates who are “thoroughly tired, thoroughly bored, thoroughly chastened, and thoroughly ignorant, to say nothing of the disgust they have acquired for sublime authors whom they will return to only rarely.”10 Voltaire summed up these charges in a famous phrase about the educational standard in his day: “I learned Latin and nonsense.”11
There was much truth in these charges, but not the whole truth: the philosophes themselves are splendid testimony that the schools taught the classics pleasantly enough to attract pupils to unbelief, and memorably enough to permit them later to read, cite, and use the classics they had mastered. The schools, even though they were justly under attack, served better than the philosophes, as ungrateful pupils, liked to remember.
The Christian scholars of the Renaissance, Protestant and Catholic alike, had taken a calculated risk, forced upon them by a flourishing, irrepressible scholarship, the invention of printing, and the growth of a literate public. These scholars had steadily enlarged the range of Christian learning; they attempted to assimilate what they could not suppress. Nor were these simply the tactics of desperation: sixteenth-century educators found the classics less a menace too strong to ignore than a delight too great to renounce. For two centuries or more, Christian civilization continued to swallow increasing doses of anticlerical or pagan learning without gagging. But for eighteenth-century men, more and more aware of the sciences, stimulated by technology, skeptical of miracles, and eager to enjoy the world of the senses, pagan doctrines acquired new and dangerous vitality. The old charge that the Jesuits taught paganism, even by implication, is just as invalid as the charge that the Jansenists abetted materialism by emphasizing science. By their lights, these religious orders, and all the others, did their Christian duty. They taught what they had taught for centuries: a taste for pagan writers. It was not the schools that changed, but the times.
The schools, in fact, had changed very little. The Jesuit collèges still proceeded under the ratio studiorum devised in the sixteenth century by the founder of the Jesuit order and by his immediate successors. Ignatius Loyola, born at the height of the later Renaissance, had been thoroughly aware of the skeptical, impious implications of Renaissance humanism. It had been his aim to establish schools that would detach the great acquisitions of that humanism, the classics, from impiety, and weld them firmly to Christian doctrine. The first plan of study was drawn up under Loyola’s supervision in 1541 and revised several times later in the sixteenth century. It stressed leniency, urged that pupils’ ambition be fostered through competition, and proclaimed the central importance of the classics.
The principles of the ratio studiorum were tenaciously retained through two centuries of criticism. When the philosophes went to Jesuit schools in the eighteenth century—and in the Catholic countries most of them did—they still read a Martial cleaned up in 1558 at Loyola’s orders, an emasculated version of Horace’s Odes, some Vergil (carefully omitting Book IV of the Aeneid, which describes Dido’s suicide), selections from Cicero’s speeches, and the more harmless poets. Jesuit teachers, often respectable classical scholars, stressed linguistic drill, not pagan doctrine; they sought to form Christians with good taste. Saint-Lambert, a minor poet who held the unique distinction of seducing Voltaire’s mistress while preventing Rousseau from seducing his own, celebrated the urbane compromises of his Jesuit teachers in a neat verse:
Indulgente Société,
Ô vous, dévots plus raisonnables,
Apôtres pleins d’urbanité,
Le goût polit vos mœurs aimables.
Vous vous occupez sagement
De l’art de penser et de plaire
Aux charmes touchants du Bréviaire
Vous entremêlez prudemment
Et du Virgile et du Voltaire.12
Jesuit collèges, then, sweetened the Christian message with worldly poetry. Their celebrated collège Louis-le-grand in Paris, which produced a host of pagans from Voltaire to Robespierre, prescribed edifying Latin dramas as part of the curriculum. Nearly all the French philosophes were products of this fashionable classical education. At Louis-le-grand, Voltaire met the marquis d’Argenson, who became foreign minister and a royalist political theorist; his brother the comte d’Argenson, who had a distinguished career under Louis XV and somewhat ungraciously protected Diderot’s Encyclopédie; the comte d’Argental and the provincial aristocrat Cideville, who belonged to that intensely useful group of allies without whom the philosophes could not comfortably exist—often rich, always loyal, amateur poets, lovers of the theater, ready to smuggle subversive manuscripts, speak to a minister in behalf of a philosophe in trouble, advance lumières and impede l’infâme in any way the leading spirits thought appropriate.13 Malesherbes, Helvétius, and Turgot all went through Louis-le-grand; Diderot attended the Jesuit collège at Langres; Buffon and his close friend and collaborator Daubenton, Hénault, Vauvenargues, Marmontel, and Condorcet all had a Jesuit education. Throughout Catholic Europe, the Jesuits trained their most intransigent enemies.
While other orders drastically modified the Jesuit curriculum, the essential recipe—Christian edification made palatable through classical literature—remained intact. Montesquieu, educated at the Oratorian collège at Juilly, acquired his overpowering admiration for antiquity there; d’Alembert, who was turned toward mathematics by his severe Jansenist masters, nevertheless became a good Latinist at the collège Mazarin.
Protestant education was little different. Here too piety came first, classics second; here too the ancients stalked about like aged lions in the zoo, their ideological fangs drawn, noble, decorative, and innocuous. In Lessing’s Gymnasium in Meissen, prayer and the study of religion preceded Latin and Greek, and the ancient languages were imparted as exercises in philology. At the University of Edinburgh, Hume read Cicero and Marcus Aurelius and heard lectures filled with Newtonian Christianity; in England, with its inchoate conglomeration of schools, discipline was harsh, learning mechanical, instruction pedantic, and politics a demoralizing intrusion. Latin and Greek were taught, but in England, as elsewhere, the object was not to produce pagans, but Christians fit to live in polite society.
This system was not fatal to the classics largely because the love of the classics was in the air. Today we assume, and Diderot suggested it then, that a taste for higher things is ruined by bad education. But schooling has this baleful result mainly when cultivation is no longer prized by the culture as a whole. In the age of the Enlightenment, the kind of tiresome or hateful preceptors of whom Gibbon and Diderot complained did not poison the taste for the classics; they merely postponed its gratification. If the incentive to master them did not come from the school—though, as I have said, often enough it did come from there—it would come from the great world. Gibbon was his own tutor, and so was Rousseau; what Nicolai missed in one school he got in another.
Still, however adequate traditional schooling was here and there, dissatisfaction with accepted modes of pedagogy had been lively since the seventeenth century, and reformers had persistently demanded that the educational process modernize itself both by improving the teaching of the classics and by diversifying the curriculum as a whole. When the philosophes began to call for educational reform, they pushed, as they so often did, at an open door.
It was John Locke who anticipated many of the reforms that later reformers would embrace, usually in his name. Locke denounced the traditional method of teaching by rote, and thought it wholly inappropriate to beat children for the sake of dead tongues. He did not object to Latin; he objected rather to its disproportionate importance in the curriculum and the mechanical manner in which it was taught. Sound learning, Locke argued, must build on sound character, just as a sound mind needs a sound body—this famous line from Juvenal, indeed, is the first line of Locke’s treatise—but, Locke complained, the schools of his day reversed and perverted the natural sequence: they ruined character by imposing a deadening and often cruel routine. Latin should be taught, but only after French, and be taught through simple grammar and conversation. After the pupil has mastered some easy texts, he can work up his way gradually to the masterpieces of antiquity, “the most difficult and sublime of the Latin authors, such as are Tully, Virgil, and Horace.”14 With a boldness rare in his day, Locke urged that education be somehow made relevant to the future career of the pupil; let him learn history, geography, and anatomy if the Latin classics will not have any importance to him later: “Can there be anything more ridiculous than that a father should waste his own money, and his son’s time, in setting him to learn the Roman language, when, at the same time, he designs him for a trade, wherein he, having no use of Latin, fails not to forget that little which he brought from school, and which it is ten to one he abhors for the ill usage it procured him?”15 Locke was not a philistine; he recognized the intrinsic value of cultivation, but he had no sympathy with the organized flogging of remote classics into reluctant schoolboys who would hate what they learned and promptly forget it.
Locke’s ideas found a sympathetic hearing in France, where reforming pedagogues had already experimented with less repulsive methods of imparting the classical tongues. The Oratorians and Port Royal simplified the old grammars and made them more interesting and less cumbersome than before; Port Royal even tried out Latin grammars written in French. The Jansenists and Oratorians emphasized mathematics and science, just as some of the Dissenting schools in England tried to prepare their pupils for the world of business by modifying the traditional curriculum. Educators were beginning to notice that there was more to learn than ever before. The study of history, the knowledge of geography, the domain of the natural sciences had enormously widened and deepened since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it seemed—at least to reformers—essential to have these advances reflected in the curriculum. But the travail of classical learning began here: more time for science meant less time for Greek—it was as simple as that.
In addition to the pressure of technical subjects, the schools also began to experience pressure from vernacular literatures. The British and the French especially were building up collections of plays and poems that had every right to claim the time-honored title of “classic,” hitherto jealously reserved for works in Latin and Greek. It was essential for the educated man to know these modern classics; it even seemed likely that he would love them more than the old classics. In any event, the advent of impressive modern literature demanded a new attitude toward the staples of literary taste. In the seventeenth century, this problem was not yet serious. One day, the story goes, someone asked the great Arnauld of Port Royal what was the best way to form style. “Read Cicero,” he replied. “I am not asking about writing in Latin, but in French.” “Ah,” said Arnauld, “in that case, read Cicero.”16
By the eighteenth century, such advice came to seem reactionary. But it could still be heard: in his Réflexions critiques sur la poésie, which, though written in the 1720s, found readers as late as the 1770s, the abbé Dubos argued that Latin was infinitely preferable to French as the language of poetry.17 But then, as the century went on, this became a distinct minority view. Bossuet modeled his style on the Greeks and Romans; his successors modeled their style on Bossuet. Racine was indebted to Euripides; Voltaire was indebted to Racine. Shakespeare studied Seneca; Dryden studied Shakespeare. While French and British reformers demanded that schoolboys master their language because they could take pride in their literature, German reformers demanded that their schoolboys master their language so that they might create a literature in which they could take pride. In 1747, the rector of the Gymnasium at Görlitz asked, “Why should we not have autores classicos in our mother tongue as well as in that of the Romans?”18 The question, with its Latin phrase, was still a little pathetic, but it pointed to the future. In 1774, the Aufklärer Basedow, an enthusiastic disciple of the deist theology of Reimarus and the radical pedagogy of Rousseau, published his Elementarwerk, a vast program for educational reform on modern lines; in the same year he found sufficient support to found a school in Dessau, the Philanthropin, designed to make his ideas reality. Also in 1774, innovation had gone far enough in England to alarm the defenders of traditional classical learning, and prompt them to a touching lament, portraying Vergil displaced by mathematics and Horace by Newtonian popularizers:
See Euclid proudly spurns the Mantuan muse,
While gentle Horace wipes Maclaurin’s shoes.
There Homer learns the theory of light,
And tortured Ovid learns to sum and write.19
Things were far from this fearful stage; in some countries the classical schools retained their prestige and power through the nineteenth century. But modernity was on the way.
These reformist notions readily found their way into philosophic literature. The Encyclopedist Dumarsais, a disciple of Locke who had acquired a considerable reputation among the philosophes with his progressive proposals for the study of Latin, went so far as to suggest the elimination of grammars entirely; other reformers, lamenting years of wasted drill and arid memorization, sought to speed up the acquisition of Latin and Greek and to make both easier to learn and more pleasant to remember. D’Alembert wrote a trenchant critique of the prevailing system for the Encyclopédie; his article “Collège,” influential and controversial, was obviously aimed at Jesuit-dominated secondary schooling and provoked some outraged replies, but even d’Alembert sufficiently overcame his hostility to the Jesuits and his preoccupation with science to admit at least some classics into the curriculum of his ideal school: “In philosophy, logic should be limited to a few lines; metaphysics to an abridgment of Locke, purely philosophical ethics to the works of Seneca and Epictetus, Christian ethics to Christ’s sermon on the mount.…”20 A truncated and impoverished classical curriculum, to be sure, but not without its Stoics.
These drastic prescriptions were codified in the widely read Essai d’éducation nationale of 1763, by La Chalotais. Attorney general to the parlement of Brittany, La Chalotais seemed an unlikely person to be popular with philosophes, but he had ingratiated himself among them with his noisy campaign against the Jesuits, and his acceptance had been sealed by the accolade of a correspondence with Voltaire. His most far-reaching proposal was that the educational system be secularized and nationalized, but he also found much to criticize in the curriculum. “Our education,” he wrote with the severity common to inventors of projects, “everywhere shows the effects of the barbarism of past centuries. Except for a little Latin, which he has to study all over again if he wants to use that language, the young man on entering the world must forget almost all he has been taught by his so-called instructors.”21 Instead, he urged that French and Latin be taught simultaneously, and that the student grow proficient in both through constant comparison of the two literatures.
The philosophes found such plans admirable but troublesome; with many uneasy glances back at their beloved classics, they joined the movement toward modernity. They saw the value of scientific training, but they loved liberal learning too much to discard it as useless or to patronize it as a mere luxury. Diderot pointedly asked Catherine II: “What is it that particularly distinguishes Voltaire from all our young writers? Learning. Voltaire knows a great deal, and our young poets are ignorant. The work of Voltaire is full of material; their works are empty.”22 A writer, in any event, must have the classics at his command: “If he wishes to excel, he absolutely needs an intimate acquaintance with Homer and Vergil, Demosthenes and Cicero.”23 There was one way of resolving the conflicting claims of classical and scientific education—by assigning the classics to a narrow elite and modern technical subjects to all the other pupils. This was in fact the way that Diderot proposed. Still, a certain ambivalence remained in all the philosophes wrote about education: they were committed to modernity and professed to love the sciences, but they knew that they loved the ancients as well. And so, in pronouncements that were, if not logical, all too human, they sought to preserve in the educational system the best of two worlds.
To believe in the importance of education was to believe, at least implicitly, in its power. Of course, from the perspective of their philosophy, the philosophes were almost compelled to believe in that power: it supported their position on original sin. Christians, too, believed in education, and were, down to the philosophes’ time, the leading educators, but the most optimistic Christian was not free to assert that education, no matter how thoroughgoing, could ever erase the effects of Adam’s Fall. The myth of original sin, which the philosophes thought they had exploded, made much of man’s incapacity to change fundamentally through his own efforts: education could not do the work of grace. Conversely, the philosophes’ doctrine of man’s original innocence, though it did not necessarily imply, persuasively testified to the efficacy of education in man’s renewal. Locke had seen this clearly: “The crucial importance of Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education” as J. A. Passmore has suggested, lies “not so much in its rejection of innate ideas as in its rejection of original sin.”24
Rejection of original sin and the general recovery of nerve combined to make the philosophes into pedagogical optimists. Locke had already insisted that “men’s happiness or misery is part of their own making,” and that constitutional differences are insignificant compared to the effect of education. “I think, I may say, that, of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education.”25 In support of such optimistic doctrine Montesquieu had devoted a whole book of his De l’esprit des lois to education, and singled out “the laws of education,” the “first we receive,” as being of decisive importance because “they prepare us to be citizens.” Hence, “every family should be governed on the principles of the great family that comprehends each of them.”26 A little later, in the 1750s, Helvétius explicitly drew the political implications of these views: “In every country,” he wrote in De l’esprit, “the art of forming man is so closely linked to the form of government, that it may not be possible to make any considerable change in public education without making changes in the very constitution of the state.”27 Diderot, who much admired Helvétius, reiterated these sentiments in the 1770s, more in what he implied than in what he chose to assert: “To instruct a nation is to civilize it,”28 he told Catherine of Russia. There is no indication that she had any intention of following his hint; after all, to civilize a nation would be to make autocrats like her obsolete.
But granted that education could do much, how much could it do? This was the vexed question concerning the relative strength of nature and nurture, hackneyed today, but fresh and meaningful in the age of the Enlightenment. It too was in essence a political question, for the more thoroughly the educator could change his pupils, the easier the work of the legislator, and the closer the work of the legislator to that of the educator: the Physiocrats were by no means the only philosophes to notice this connection. Fired by the radical possibilities of the new secular view of education that Locke had hinted at, one prominent philosophe, Helvétius, thought that education could do everything. Other philosophes were not quite so sanguine. To judge from the utopian world he set up for Émile, Rousseau thought that education could do a great deal only after a great deal had been done about education first. Still other philosophes, like Diderot, thought it best to be moderate: their faith in education, though powerful, was not unlimited.
The spectrum of enlightened opinion on this delicate matter emerges most perspicuously in a strange private debate that Diderot held with the shade of Helvétius early in the 1770s. Helvétius was not the most famous of the philosophes; he was only the most notorious. In 1758, he had published De l’esprit, a materialistic and utilitarian treatise that epitomized the most radical views of the most radical philosophes with a kind of clumsy candor. The book, passed for publication by an inattentive censor, produced a reverberating scandal: authorities from the parlement of Paris to the Papacy thundered condemnations, and the philosophes’ enemies exploited the uproar by tarring Diderot’s Encyclopédie with Helvétius’s brush.
De l’esprit was a treatise on human motives, and as such prominently a treatise on education. Helvétius was a psychological egalitarian and extreme environmentalist. Men (as long as they are healthy specimens) are essentially equal; in explicit opposition to Montesquieu’s theory that “physical causes” greatly influence human character, Helvétius insists that the differences that do arise spring from “moral” cause alone.29 From Locke’s sensationalism and La Mettrie’s materialism Helvétius constructed a picture of man that is stark in its simplicity; even tough-minded contemporaries found his almost gloating insistence on universal, unrelieved egotism a little repulsive. Men, Helvétius argues, are the recipients of sensations and the centers of passion. Thus equipped, each man acts to realize his desires in the world by following his self-interest with a kind of iron consistency. This is a profoundly pessimistic view of man’s nature, but it is relieved by Helvétius’s optimistic view of man’s possibilities. What man thinks, believes, even what he feels, is open to the most extensive modifications through the social environment—man, in other words, can be educated to be almost anything, even a good citizen.
Helvétius was often naïve, but he was not naïve enough to equate education with schooling. Men’s education, taking the word “in its true and more extensive signification,” differed far more than their schooling did, hence the vast observed differences among them. “I say, no one receives the same education” as anyone else: “Everyone, if I may put it this way, has for his preceptors the form of government under which he lives, his friends, his mistresses, the men by whom he is surrounded, his reading, and, finally, chance, that is to say, an infinite number of events whose causes and connections our ignorance does not permit us to perceive.” In fact, Helvétius says with emphasis and seeks to prove with two unfortunate examples, “chance plays a larger part in our education than we think.” Chance led Galileo to that Florentine garden where gardeners “piqued” the “brains and the vanity of that philosopher” with their baffled questions about the water that would rise only to a certain height. Similarly, chance led Newton, thinking of nothing else, to the avenue of apple trees where, seeing some apples drop to the ground, the theory of gravitation sprang into his mind. Offering a psychological version of the pragmatic theory familiar from the philosophes’ histories, Helvétius suggested that small events often have enormous consequences. “How many men of parts remain lost in the mass of mediocre men, for want either of a certain tranquillity of mind, or of meeting a gardener, or of the fall of an apple!”30 In the light of such coarseness, the only thing that surprises us is the high esteem in which Helvétius was held by Diderot.
We have come to dread the menace posed by this environmentalism—the distortion of education through propaganda, the manipulation of public opinion through the organization of lies and the mobilization of hatreds. But Helvétius saw only its positive possibilities. This was not because he thought well of despotism but, on the contrary, because he thought so little of it. In his contemptuous chapters on despotic regimes he describes them as too vicious, too corrupt, too ignorant, and too feeble to use education for their own purposes. Only the responsible legislator, it seems, can recognize the essential truth that the sciences of legislation and of education are really one and the same. Himself educated in true philosophy, and legislating for a well-informed public that has shed the baleful vices of ignorance and superstition, the legislator-educator will work for the general well-being: “It is solely through good laws that one can form virtuous men. Thus the whole art of the legislator consists of forcing men, by the sentiment of self-love, to be always just to one another.” Obviously, “to make such laws one must know the human heart, and to know first of all that men, responsive to themselves, indifferent to others, are born neither good nor bad, but ready to be the one or the other.”31 Despite Helvétius’s pronounced distaste for despotism, this was dubious doctrine, both as educational and as political theory, especially since he did not consider Frederick of Prussia to be a despot, but quoted him with full approval: “There is nothing better than the arbitrary government of princes who are just, humane, and virtuous.”32
If nothing else, this passage alerted Diderot to the dangerous implications lurking in the educational views of Helvétius, and he addressed himself to them in 1773 and after. Helvétius had died, still relatively young, in 1771, and left behind a book, De l’homme, which was if anything more explicit on the wonders of education than his earlier De l’esprit had been. Diderot saw “the posthumous Helvétius” on his way to Russia, and studied it with considerable care. The book, he thought, was full of good ideas that only a few writers could have had, and a number of errors that everyone could easily correct. This was a family argument: for Diderot, Helvétius remained a brother, even if occasionally misguided. At least, unlike Rousseau, Helvétius did not constantly contradict himself: “The difference between you and Rousseau,” Diderot apostrophized his dead acquaintance, “is that Rousseau’s principles are false, and the consequences true, while your principles are true and the consequences false. In exaggerating his principles, Rousseau’s disciples will be nothing but madmen; yours, moderating your consequences, will be wise men.”33
The judgment is too beautifully balanced to be entirely trustworthy, but in any event Diderot envisioned his task to be fairly simple: it was to moderate Helvétius’s consequences. The result is a series of reasonable objections to Helvétius’s bold pronouncements, designed not so much to refute Helvétius as to “restrain” him: “He says: Education does everything. Say: Education does a great deal. He says: Constitution does nothing. Say: Constitution does less than you think.” And again: “He says: Character depends entirely on circumstances. Say: I think that they modify it. He says: One gives a man the temperament one wants to give him.… Say: Temperament is not always an invincible obstacle to the progress of the human spirit.”34 Everywhere, Diderot seeks to rescue Helvétius’s principles from the exuberance of their author. It is only when Helvétius moves from implicit to explicit politics that Diderot’s refutation acquires a certain warmth: quoting Helvétius’s reference to Frederick of Prussia, Diderot bursts out in disappointment and with rage: “And you, Helvétius, quote this tyrant’s maxim in high praise! The arbitrary government of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the most certain of his seductions: they insensibly habituate the public to love, respect, serve his successor, evil and stupid as he may be.” And he says again what he has now come to believe firmly: “One of the greatest misfortunes that can happen to a nation would be two or three reigns of a power that is just, mild, enlightened, but arbitrary: the people will be led by happiness to the complete forgetfulness of their privileges, and into perfect slavery.”35
It is an appealing outburst: Diderot remains an optimist in education but warns against the seductions of passivity. Yet no one in the Enlightenment, not even Diderot, fully faced, let alone resolved, the problems raised for political theory by the dangers and opportunities of education. The philosophes at best glimpsed the logic of Enlightenment and proclaimed it, but they did not see it clearly enough to work it through to the end. And there is a good reason for their failure: the canaille stood in their way.
THE QUESTION of the lower orders is the great unexamined political question of the Enlightenment. It is not that the philosophes preserved silence on the issue; they never preserved silence on any issue. Their writings and, even more, their private correspondence, abound in references to the common people, the gemeine Pöbel, the peuple, the canaille, the vulgar. What is missing is a serious attempt at working out the logic implicit in the philosophes’ view of Enlightenment, which, as I have said, was in essence pedagogic. There is snobbery in these casual remarks and a certain failure of imagination. There is also something else: a sense of despair at the general wretchedness, illiteracy, and brutishness of the poor, which appeared by and large incurable.
It is easy to grow impatient with the superb sneer that most of the philosophes directed, most of the time, at their less fortunate fellow beings; even the show of despair was, after all, at least in part a comfortable excuse for doing nothing, or doing nothing to disturb existing social arrangements. The kindly spirits that sent the children of the poor to the charity schools in England, for example, had no intention of permitting these pupils to rise above their station: the point of this schooling was to produce piety and insure deference; when some attempt was made to teach the most intelligent of these children something more than reading, petty tradesmen objected to this potential competition with their own children.36
Yet the despair of the philosophes was also something better than a self-protective ideology. If the idea of hierarchy had been expelled from the heavens, it continued to have its place in the society of men. The ladder of ascent everywhere was steep and narrow; differentiations among orders and even within orders were carefully marked and universally acknowledged; the gap between the noble and the peasant or the rich and the poor was a vast gulf across which the one stared at the other almost with disbelief. Far too many men and women remained in the eighteenth century what they had been through all the centuries before: beasts of burden, “two-footed animals,” as Voltaire said not without compassion, “who live in a horrible condition approximating the state of nature.”37 The metaphor of a hierarchy came to the pens of eighteenth-century writers so casually that it is obvious how real the phenomenon was, and how entrenched. “Opinions, like fashions,” wrote Swift, “always descend from those of quality to the middle sort, and thence to the vulgar”38; and some decades later Samuel Johnson said: “All foreigners remark that the knowledge of the common people is greater than that of any other vulgar. This superiority we undoubtedly owe to the rivulets of intelligence which are continually trickling among us, which anyone may catch.”39 Evidently, there was real advantage to an open society: anyone might catch a drop of civilization. But even that kind of society still preserved fences that only a few could leap, and still condemned the majority to hopeless indigence and permanent exclusion from the political public.
The educational plans of the age took these realities into account, without much analysis and without any apology. As early as 1681 John Locke had explained why class distinctions mattered fundamentally: “The three great things that govern mankind are reason, passion and superstition. The first govern[s] a few; the two last share the bulk of mankind and possess them in their turns; but superstition most powerfully, and produces the greatest mischiefs.”40 This was the condition the educator confronted: the vulgar were, and would doubtless forever be, prey to passion and superstition; reason was beyond them. Accordingly, Locke confined his educational program—the study of Latin and other ornaments of gracious civilization—to gentlemen, and recommended that the children of the poor be sent to special “working schools” where they would learn “spinning or knitting, or some other part of woollen manufacture,” and such edifying matters as “some sense of religion.”41 For Locke, education was designed not to subvert, but to confirm, the class system.
By and large, the philosophes moved away from Locke’s analysis with very deliberate speed. Hume thought “the bulk of mankind” governed “by authority, not reason,” and he doubted that most men could discard superstition. “When will the people be reasonable?” he asked; not, he was sure, in the foreseeable future.42 Rousseau, the great democrat, said flatly in Émile, “The poor have no need of education”43; and while this was not a recommendation, it was an acceptance of things as they were. Kant, Rousseau’s disciple, who owed to Rousseau, he said, his respect for the common man, evidently did not carry that respect very far: the “Volk” he wrote, “consists of idiots.”44 Diderot sounded much the same way; his writings offer a depressing anthology on the theme of the mob as a fact of life. Diderot calls the poor “imbécile” in matters of religion45; while the “national superstition is declining,” that welcome development will stop short of embracing the populace: the peuple is “too idiotic—bête—too miserable, and too busy” to enlighten itself. There is no hope here: “The quantity of the canaille is just about always the same.” The multitude needs a religion filled with ritual and with ridiculous fables, and always will.46 Reason is too cool; it presents none of the surprises, none of the wonderment, that the populace wants.47 “The general mass of the species is made neither to follow, nor to know, the march of the human spirit.”48 Enlightenment is confined to a small troop, an “invisible church,” capable of looking intelligently at works of art and literature, capable of reflecting, of speaking calmly; that little flock, rather than the canaille, will prevail in the long run.49 These are not merely the views of a young man or a part-time cynic: in his very last and most solemn book, the essay on Seneca, Diderot returns to the charge and denounces the masses for their perversity, their crudity, their stupidity.50 They have not changed and will not change.
At the same time, in the midst of this apparently unrelieved pessimism about the capacities of the canaille, and the capacity of education to permit the canaille to become something better, some of the philosophes could see countervailing forces at work. Diderot came to understand, if fleetingly, that the ignorance of the masses was not an inescapable condition, but a result deliberately produced by the holders of power and privilege: he invited Falconet to look at the “fear they have of the truth,” and at “the efforts they have made at all times to stifle it, and to keep the people in a state of ignorance and stupidity.”51 When in the 1770s, he devised an educational program for the realm of Catherine II, he told the czarina that there should be education for all: “From prime minister down to the last peasant, it is good for everyone to know how to read, write, and count.” The objection of aristocrats that education made peasants litigious and the objection of men of letters that it made the lower orders discontented with their station were nothing better than special pleading: it has always been in the interest of the privileged orders to keep the lower orders illiterate—it makes oppression so much easier. Of course, while all schools including the universities should be in principle open to all without distinction of rank, not everyone needed the same, or a higher, education. Nor should all study the classics: they should be reserved to those who really needed them—poets, scholars, men of letters. These suggestions are just that: suggestions. But they show Diderot at least groping for a principle: an aristocracy of education emerging from a democracy of opportunity.
Even Voltaire showed tendencies in the direction of liberalism. Unfortunately for his reputation among the reformers, throughout his life he expressed his contempt for lesser breeds in quotable formulations. In his earlier literary work he denounced the “people” as vacillating, emotionally unreliable, unjust, cruel, and fanatical.52 In his histories, he took the unqualified position that “the populace is the same nearly everywhere.”53 Like Hume and Diderot, he saw no improvement likely: “As for the canaille,” he wrote to d’Alembert, “I have no concern with it; it will always remain canaille.”54 Logically enough, Voltaire was inclined to argue that efforts at enlightenment must be restricted to the orders that can profit from it. Those who live by manual labor alone probably will never “have the time and the capacity to instruct themselves; they will die of hunger before they become philosophers.”55 Flippantly, Voltaire told d’Alembert: “We have never pretended to enlighten shoemakers and servants; that is the job of the apostles.”56 The consequences were plain: “Natural religion for the magistrates, damn’d stuff for the mob.”57 This was an early view; but in the 1760s, he was still of the same opinion: “I commend l’inf. … to you,” he wrote to Diderot; “it must be destroyed among respectable people and left to the canaille large and small, for whom it was made.”58 When La Chalotais sent him his educational plan, Voltaire was delighted to see that it explicitly excluded the peuple: “I thank you for proscribing study among day-laborers,” he wrote in acknowledgment. “I, who cultivate the earth, petition you to have laborers, not tonsured ecclesiastics.”59
But the same man who could cynically put down manual laborers as canaille who would always go to mass and to the tavern, because they could sing in both places, also championed the Genevan Natives in the mid-1760s, and learned, in those years, to discriminate among various types of canaille. With the years, Voltaire became less disdainful, more optimistic about the capacities of ordinary men. There were countries, notably England, the Dutch Republic, and Geneva, where common men were avid readers and reasonable political beings. When Linguet warned him that all would be lost once the people should discover that it has intelligence, Voltaire demurred: some people, those who did nothing but toil, were doubtless beyond the pale of light. “But the more skilled artisans–who are forced by their very profession to think a great deal, to perfect their taste, to extend their knowledge, are beginning to read all over Europe.” No, he protested to Linguet, “all is not lost when one gives the people the chance to see that it has intelligence. On the contrary, all is lost when one treats it like a herd of cattle, for sooner or later it will gore you with its horns.”60 This was written in 1767, when Voltaire had done a great deal to educate himself about the potentialities of the lower orders. Like Diderot’s perceptions of the 1770s, Voltaire’s perceptions of the 1760s were promising beginnings; they were the prerequisites for a comprehensive liberal theory of politics that would connect the logic of education as enlightenment with the practical needs of the poor, give room to the dimension of time by recognizing that those who were illiterate now might become literate later, and exercise the philosophes’ favorite device, criticism, on the self-interest of the ruling orders who kept the canaille in its place not because that place was natural but because it was convenient—for the ruling orders. But the philosophes stopped with these perceptions, and perceptions are not a theory. Their failure is the central weakness in the philosophes’ political thought; it lends a certain weight to the widespread charge that the philosophes were after all superficial thinkers.
To speak about the masses in the eighteenth century is to speak about the social religion. While the question goes back to the ancients, it was of consuming interest to the men of the Enlightenment and, since they were all passionate classicists, they did not hesitate to draw on classical literature when they considered their own times. The case for a social religion, in short, is this: the masses, prey to passion and inaccessible to reason, must be frightened out of antisocial behavior with tremendous threats of supernatural punishment, and tempted into docility by promises of supernatural rewards. This cynical, calculated religiosity, preached by rulers who do not believe it, is a kind of auxiliary police, more effective than any mere temporal restraining force. The mob, Juvenal had disdainfully said, wants only panem et circenses; but others added that it needed not merely tangible rewards and distracting amusement, but the whip of fear as much as the lure of reward: the rabble inspires fear only as long as it is not itself afraid, Tacitus said; once it has been intimidated by superstitions, it may be safely despised.61
As comparative sociologists eager to use historical materials for their generalizations, the philosophes were delighted to discover that Roman rulers in particular had inculcated superstitions for the sake of controlling the populace, and that Roman writers had understood and applauded that policy. Montesquieu, in his Sur la politique des Romains dans la religion, and Gibbon, with elegant sophistication and evident enjoyment in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, noted that Roman statesmen had manufactured religious notions, forged religious documents, piously celebrated religious rites they secretly despised, all to keep the lower orders in check: Augustus, said Gibbon, was “sensible that mankind is governed by names,” and so, to preserve social peace, he gave the Romans names, both glorious and frightening. “The policy of the emperors and the senate, as far as it concerned religion,” Gibbon noted with relish, “was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the superstitious, part of their subjects. The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrates as equally useful.”62 It seemed an interesting policy and, some of the philosophes thought, one worth imitating in a modern version in the eighteenth century. If the masses really were hopelessly mired in their passions and their superstitions, if attempts to make them reasonable were simply utopian, the social religion offered a cheap and effective means of social control. To deprive the masses of religion was a risky business, even, Voltaire thought, the “thinking masses”; unable to discriminate between true and false religion, they might take a legend that has been exposed to stand for religion itself, and then terrible consequences might follow: “Then they will say, ‘There is no religion,’ and will abandon themselves to crime.”63 By the middle of the eighteenth century, this view was a commonplace in advanced circles—even among liberal clergymen.
It was a seductive, apparently impeccable line of reasoning. But it ran afoul of the philosophes’ prized desire to spread enlightenment in general, and to crush l’infâme in particular. It was of course possible to argue, as Voltaire had argued, that one must educate some but not all, enlighten some but not all, écraser l’infâme for some but not all. But this involved a kind of selective lying that appeared too clever to be comfortable, and downright disagreeable. Moreover, as the philosophes knew, throughout history there had been a respectable minority party of scholars and thinkers who rejected the social religion: in the sixteenth century, Pietro Pomponazzi had argued in a famous essay that men who doubted the immortality of the soul could still be moral; late in the seventeenth century, Bayle had argued that a society of atheists could flourish and live in peace. Obviously the argument that ordinary men freed from the check of religion will simply run riot and give their antisocial impulses full play did not impress Bayle; he was concerned far more with the baleful effects of superstition. “The ancient paradox of Plutarch,” wrote Gibbon, one of Bayle’s admirers, “that atheism is less pernicious than superstition, acquires a tenfold vigour when it is adorned with the colours of his wit, and pointed with the acuteness of his logic.”64 Since the philosophes took Bayle with the utmost seriousness, his reasoning, which ran wholly counter to all arguments in behalf of a social religion, entered the mainstream of enlightened speculation and caused some debate. Voltaire, moved in part by his suspicion of atheism, took occasion to disagree with his great model: a society of atheists could function, he wrote late in life, only if it is a small colony of philosophers.65
This was a concession, and it suggests that the whole notion of religion as policeman caused the philosophes a good deal of uneasiness. Frederick II had no doubts: the mob needs the deception of religious lies for the sake of society as a whole. But then, Frederick was not a philosophe. Those who were treated the subject with hesitations, and they experienced sudden reversals. D’Alembert, for one, thought that in view of the irrationality of the multitude a social religion was a logical policy, yet he had doubts whether it would be effective: “In general the multitude is vividly moved only by the fear of an evil or the experience of a present good. Sad experience, unfortunately only too true, proves, to the shame of mankind, that the crimes punished by the laws are committed more rarely than those of which the Supreme Being is the sole witness and the sole judge, although divine law prohibits both the one and the other equally. Thus, on the one hand, the penalties with which faith threatens us are by nature the most formidable curb on crime; on the other hand, the blindness of the human spirit prevents this curb from being as general as it might be.”66 Here was a genuine perplexity: men were even too superstitious, it seemed, to listen to the voice of religion. In a letter to Frederick of Prussia, d’Alembert pours out his perplexity and his uncertain hope that a rational religion, a kind of ritualistic deism, might work after all: he was inclined to agree with the Prussian king, he wrote, that the “people needs a creed other than a reasonable religion.” Yet then he goes on, “If the Peace of Westphalia would permit a fourth religion in the Empire, I should beg Your Majesty to have a very simple temple constructed in Berlin or in Potsdam; there, God should be honored in a manner worthy of Him, and there one should preach nothing but humanity and justice. And if the crowd would not come to this temple after a few years (for one really must allow reason a few years to win its cause), Your Majesty would clearly be victorious—it would not be the first time.”67 This is the hesitant philosophe face to face with the self-confident cynic, hoping, almost against hope, that reason will slowly, slowly come to prevail even among the common people, and seeking a culte which, however unnecessary it might be for a philosophe, would not contain anything that would make a philosophe ashamed.
D’Alembert’s hesitations point the way to a principled rejection of any prudential lying whatever. In the Enlightenment there was a party of honesty, including not merely Kant, who thought lying unacceptable under all circumstances whatever, but philosophes like Holbach and Diderot, who had even less confidence in the powerful than they had in the poor. Holbach objected to even the most reasonable religion as nothing better than a trick imposed on the subject by the ruler for his own selfish purposes; besides, religion never prevented crime but often caused it. Diderot for his part was convinced that a nation relying on God to keep men from stealing and murdering must be backward indeed; the existence of God, he wrote, is like marriage: it is a notion useful for three or four people, but disastrous for the rest of the world. “The vow of indissoluble marriage makes, and must make, almost as many unhappy people as there are husbands. Belief in a God makes, and must make, almost as many fanatics as there are believers.” Wherever there is belief in God, “the natural order of moral duties is reversed, and morality is corrupted.”68 Honesty was the only good policy.
Even Voltaire, the notorious cynic, gradually moved in the direction of a candid liberalism. Everyone knows the anecdote about Voltaire entertaining fellow philosophes at Ferney: as they frankly talk about atheism, he silences them, sends the servants out of the room, and then justifies his precaution: “Do you want your throats cut tonight?” It is a dubious story, but the feeling is authentic enough. Repeatedly, Voltaire called for a social religion that would sustain the social order by holding out the warning of a God who watched the world, punished sinners, and rewarded the good. This was certainly not the God in whom Voltaire himself believed, but it was also not the God of Christianity. The social religion Voltaire called for was a relatively rational religion that reduced nonsense, observances, manipulation, and priestly power to a minimum: deism for the mob. “The simpler the laws, the more the magistrates are respected; the simpler the religion, the more its ministers will be revered. Religion can be simple. If the Protestants have got rid of twenty superstitions, they can get rid of thirty.… When enlightened people will announce a single God, rewarder and avenger, no one will laugh, everyone will obey.”69 Unfortunately, priests and politicians through the ages had imposed other kinds of religion, filled with terror, superstition, incredible fables, and enforced by inquisitors, “torch in hand.”70 That kind of religion had been both intellectually despicable and politically unsound; worse, it had burdened the world with misery and crime instead of relieving the one and controlling the other.
But Voltaire went further than this. “I want my attorney, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God, and I think that then I shall be robbed and cuckolded less often.”71 For Voltaire, the social religion embraces members of respectable classes. It embraced even royalty; Voltaire was as afraid of a king’s atheism as of a servant’s atheism, perhaps more. “An atheist king is more dangerous than a fanatical Ravaillac.”72 Except for the philosophes, who needed no lies to orient themselves in the world and who could sustain morality through philosophy alone, everyone could use the spur of hope and the specter of fear.
But in the 1760s, while he continued to voice the old doubts, Voltaire went beyond this position to approach the categorical stand of Holbach and Diderot. His surprising and pleasing experiences with ordinary Genevans helped to shape his growing misgivings about any sort of social lie. It was, after all, a matter of time and education. “The pure worship of the Supreme Being is today beginning to be the religion of all respectable people; it will soon descend to the sound part of the masses.”73 Religion will be purified by thinking men; the others will follow. Reason had already made inroads in superstition, it will make further inroads with the passage of time. It was certain that throughout history the most avid advocates of a social religion had been men whose aims ran counter to the aims of philosophical minds; it was at least possible, therefore, that the philosophes might strike an alliance with ordinary men and uproot superstitions together with them. Mankind had been dominated by the “deceiving party”; perhaps it was time to trust the “deceived party” at last.74 The elimination of the social religion presented itself to Voltaire at least as a possibility. “Perhaps,” he wrote, and the caution is obvious, “there is no other remedy for the contagion” of fanaticism “than finally to enlighten the people itself.”75
One thing, though, he thought absolutely clear: whatever social religion might finally be devised, it must include no compulsion. That is why Voltaire responded so vehemently to the notorious chapter on social religion in Rousseau’s Contrat social. Rousseau had urged a civil profession of faith that everyone in the community must subscribe to; anyone who, having publicly accepted this profession, then acted as though he did not believe it, must be put to death. Voltaire found this notion nothing less than outrageous: “All dogma is ridiculous, deadly,” he noted in the margin of his copy; and again, “All coercion on dogma is abominable. To compel belief is absurd. Confine yourself to compel good living.”76
It scarcely matters that Voltaire did not fully understand Rousseau’s purpose; his anger does credit to his liberalism. It suggests, once again, that he and most of the other philosophes were unwilling to force even their most cherished convictions on men not ready to accept them. They were not fanatics, even if they were often condescending and cynical about those who had not had their advantages. Yet even that condescension and cynicism were open to revision in their minds; it was just that the lot of the poor seemed so hopeless. But was it hopeless? The philosophes—and here they agreed with Rousseau—were always reluctant to give up hope.
ROUSSEAU was not wholly in the Enlightenment, but he was of it. The course of his life was one long estrangement from his fellow philosophes; his intimacy with Diderot, his admiration for Voltaire, his dependence on Hume, all ended in mutual hostility and public recriminations. While in his later years, his judgment clouded by paranoia, Rousseau greatly exaggerated the malice and the range of the “conspiracy” that the “Holbachian clique” had launched against him, he was right to suspect them of rancor and not wholly wrong to fear their machinations. Yet in some sense Rousseau always remained a member of the family he would not have and that would not have him. They needed each other in friendship as in enmity; they never stopped thinking and writing about one another, and some philosophes, like Hume and d’Alembert, who had good grounds for complaint against him, continued to treat Rousseau with compassion, and as a philosophe: in the mid-1760s, when Voltaire was incensed at Rousseau’s indiscretions, d’Alembert urged him to be calm: it is annoying, he told Voltaire, “that there should be discord in the camp of philosophy at the very moment when it is going to capture Troy.”77
The quarrels that divided Rousseau from his fellows are highly instructive. They were partly the fault of his style, an instrument much admired in his day, even by his critics, but a sharp knife that could cut in two directions. His writings, as David Hume noted in 1766, were “full of Extravagance”78; they are marked by a vehemence of expression, an almost forced spontaneity, a fatal addiction to lapidary phrases that veiled their essential meaning despite all of Rousseau’s desperate attempts to make them perspicuous. The philosopher who talked of forcing men to be free, or who defined the “thinking man” as a “depraved animal,” could hardly be surprised if his critics called him an authoritarian or an irrationalist, though he was neither. Rousseau came to discover that each of his clarifications invited new misunderstandings, and his life—that melodramatic vagabondage punctuated by angry letters—only focused attention on the paradoxes in his thought. As his former associates were to complain: Rousseau was a playwright who inveighed against the theater, a moralist who abandoned his children, a religious philosopher who changed his confession twice for dubious reasons, a libertarian who could not get compulsion out of his mind, a deist who accused his fellow deists of irreligion, a professional celebrant of friendship who broke with everyone.
Those of Rousseau’s ideas that were clear produced quite as much estrangement as those that seemed mere paradoxes. His devastating critique of culture, his unprecedented candor, his imaginative history of reason, his passion for politics set him apart from his fellow philosophes. Yet, in themselves, these ideas should have caused little trouble: other philosophes found it possible to disagree with one another across a wide range, and on matters they took very seriously, without raising their voices. Rousseau alone aroused aversion amounting at times to hatred, and alone invited retaliation. Moreover, while Rousseau’s ideas made him an isolated figure among the men of the Enlightenment, they also made him a member of their party. True: by offering a solution to the dilemma between freedom and reform that beset the others, Rousseau had entered a new era, for men who solve the problems that their contemporaries merely state have stepped, by that very act, beyond them. But if Rousseau’s solutions presented glimpses of a future not wholly palatable, offering some new possibilities and many new dangers, his problems, his interests, and in most essential respects his philosophical style anchor him firmly in the soil of the Enlightenment.
Nor can mere personal causes fully explain Rousseau’s isolation. His touchiness and impulsive gestures were disagreeable in the extreme; he permitted himself indiscretions that threatened to endanger writers intent on hiding their authorship of radical pamphlets, and he interfered in the cozy amorous arrangements of his friends with his middle-aged passions. By the 1760s he often moved beyond the boundaries of sanity, spreading false and ridiculous accusations against well-meaning and innocent acquaintances. On the other side, Rousseau’s very way of life grated on his former associates as though it were a reproach. But this too does not account for the philosophes’ sense that they were dealing with a demonic figure. There was something in him not to be explained by his style, his ideas, or his eccentricities alone, but compounded of all three, a strange element, that made his contemporaries uneasy.
This element is easy to identify but hard to define. It emerges in Rousseau’s almost voluptuous retelling of repulsive anecdotes about heroic Spartans who would rather have a fox eat out their insides than show a moment’s distress, his self-righteous attack on the theater as an immoral institution, his evident infatuation with the impossibly self-important heroine of his Nouvelle Héloïse, and his humorless ideal of the good man as exemplified in young Émile, a combination of Spartan muscularity, Genevan philistinism, and the bourgeois ethic of utility. Beyond this, Rousseau is all too often inclined to play God with his characters. One might argue, of course, that a writer may do with his characters as he chooses, but Rousseau sometimes sounds like a caricature of the enlightened despot about whom he had said some cutting things. It is as though Rousseau, fearful of his powerlessness, compensates by dreaming his dreams of omnipotence in public. Such conduct is always inappropriate, but especially so in Émile, his pedagogic masterpiece, designed after all to show the road to human autonomy. Young Émile repeatedly finds himself the victim of his manipulative tutor who takes some satisfaction in his capacity to get Émile to think and do what the tutor wants him to, while Émile mistakenly thinks that he is really free. When, at the end, Émile has married and reached his goal of independence, the tutor ostentatiously takes his leave to retire. But Émile is as much a dependent boy as before, perhaps more: “Up to now I have done my best to fulfill my duty to you,” the tutor tells Émile and his wife; “at this point my long task is over, and that of another begins. Today I abdicate the authority you have entrusted to me, and here,” pointing to Émile’s wife, “is your guardian from now on.” Even after the tutor has left them, the young couple continue to consult him and ask him to “govern” them: “We shall be docile,” Émile promises. “As long as I live, I shall have need of you.”79 Having constructed his bold ideal, Rousseau is afraid to take hold of it.
This fear, I think, reappears in another area of Rousseau’s concern, and one of critical importance: his urgent, sometimes frantic longing for community. The most acutely alienated among the philosophes, and the one most acutely aware of alienation as a cultural as well as personal malaise, Rousseau was also, and largely for that reason, impatient with frivolity and diversity. His models were simple civilizations, legendary Sparta and a Genevan republic idealized out of all recognition. He longed for a small society of equals in which each was candid with all, political participation was a universal feast of reasonable discussion and passionate fraternity, civic loyalty eclipsed all partial loyalties, and social utility governed all public deliberations. The pleasures, the diversions, the cultivation he prescribed for his good society are intensely purposeful, designed never to entertain but always to teach, to inculcate moral ideals, encourage respectable marriages, and stoke the fires of patriotic fervor.
This peculiar mixture of antique moralizing and political Calvinism pervades Rousseau’s polemical and prescriptive writings. In his famous Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles, which I have discussed before, Rousseau argues that Geneva had escaped the corruption of Paris by prohibiting a theater within its boundaries, for even at its best, the theater is a diversion in the literal sense: an activity that seduces men from the straight path of thinking on, and doing, their duty. His diatribe makes depressing reading, but it is perfectly comprehensible considering Rousseau’s fear of pleasure and of effeminacy.80
Rousseau’s advice to the Poles concerning their state, written in 1771 at the invitation of a Polish nobleman, transfers his search for community from his own to a foreign country. Education, Rousseau writes, is crucial, for it is “education that must give souls their national form, and so direct their opinions and their tastes that they will be patriots by inclination, by passion, by necessity.”81 By education Rousseau obviously means more than schooling: he calls for the glorification of patriotic virtues through honors and public rewards, suggests that a small country can succeed in being free because there “all the citizens know and watch one another,” and proposes sumptuary legislation that will stifle greed and the lust for luxury. While there shall be “military luxury” conducive to the martial spirit, it is “necessary to abolish (even at court, to set an example) the ordinary amusements of courts like gambling, theaters, comedies, opera; everything that makes men effeminate, everything that distracts them, isolates them, makes them forget their country and their duty; everything that makes them enjoy themselves as long as they are being entertained.”82
The most familiar and most widely discussed instance of Rousseau’s craving for wholeness appears in his chapter on the social religion in the Contrat social. Since the mid-1750s, when he had asked Voltaire to write the catechism of a civil profession of faith, Rousseau had considered the question of social cohesion. In the Contrat social he set out how such cohesion could be guaranteed: the state needs a “purely civil profession of faith,” whose articles were fixed “not precisely as dogmas of religion but as sentiments of sociability, without which it is impossible to be a good citizen or a faithful subject.” To be sure, no one should be compelled to accept these articles, but the sovereign can banish those who do not believe them, “not as impious, but as antisocial, as incapable of sincerely loving the laws and justice, and of immolating their life to their duty if necessary.” Finally, if someone, having publicly acknowledged these dogmas, “behaved as though he did not believe them, he should be put to death; he has committed the greatest of crimes, he has lied before the law.” Rousseau insisted that the dogmas be clear and few in number, limited to belief in an intelligent and beneficent God, a life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social contract and the laws, and outlawing only one thing: intolerance.83 Rousseau evidently did not believe that either atheists or fanatics could ever be good citizens.
All this was deeply disturbing to the other philosophes, not to Voltaire alone. Yet Diderot and Rousseau have been called “hostile brothers,” and with some restrictions the same name applies to Voltaire and Rousseau, d’Alembert and Rousseau. And philosophes like Kant, who enjoyed the advantage of not knowing Rousseau in person, did not hesitate to acknowledge him as their master, just as the archbishop of Paris, quite as unhesitatingly, stigmatized him as an impious philosopher. Later history has given undue prominence to what was a disturbing undertone in Rousseau and converted an organic but subdued element into a dominant concern of political speculation. But the estimates of Rousseau’s contemporaries remain just, while the terms current in the vocabulary of our day lead to misunderstandings. Rousseau was not a totalitarian; he was not even a collectivist. If he was anything, he was, with his fervor for freedom, what his earliest readers called him: an individualist. But, then, none of these names reach the heart of Rousseau, for looking beyond politics Rousseau was above all a moralist, and, as a moralist, an educator.
To fix Rousseau the man and thinker with a label is to impoverish him, for one prominent characteristic he shared with the other philosophes was versatility. Like Diderot, Hume, and Lessing, Rousseau was competent in many areas, and active in areas in which his competence was at best limited. Rousseau was for a time a popular composer and widely known for his writings on music; he won fame with an unmeasured assault on civilization, and kept it alive with an enormously successful novel and an enormously influential book on pedagogy; he participated in political polemics in Geneva, offered political advice to Corsicans and Poles, and devoted some of his best efforts to political theory; he was an innovating autobiographer and psychologist. Almost from the beginning of his life to the very end he had a genius for catching the imagination of the public; even his solitude was well publicized, and he succeeded in making himself into a center of controversy as much for what he was and even what he wore as for what he wrote.
Rousseau was by no means so scattered and impulsive as he appeared to be. His reports of his sudden dramatic inspirations are too well known; they have eclipsed his other reports of slow, deliberate reflection. If historians have come to visualize him seizing the secrets of the universe under a tree, bathed in tears, this is largely his own doing. Many of his most important ideas, in fact, he pondered for years and subjected to severe logical scrutiny. I have said before that all his attempts at clarifying his thought only resulted in further confusion, but he stubbornly told the world that he was consistent in his work and operated with a small store of ideas, well thought out. “All that is daring in the Contrat social,” he said in the Confessions, “had previously appeared in the Discours sur l’inégalité; all that is daring in Émile had previously appeared in Julie.”84 No one believed him: his life and, it seemed, his work showed him to be a man torn and confused, a man guilty proclaiming his innocence. He was all of that, but he sought wholeness and clarity, and his conception of himself as an educator, a role that the other philosophes also liked to claim, gave his work a center of gravity. Like his favorite philosopher, Plato, he sought to discover and produce the moral man who would make the moral society, and a moral society that would foster the moral man.
Rousseau often insisted on the critical importance of education. Throughout Émile he scatters hints that education and life and, in particular, education and politics, belong together. He refers those interested in education to his history of culture in the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité; he sends them to his political writings to learn the political bearing of his educational ideas; he lays it down that “We must study society through individuals, and individuals through society: those who want to treat politics and morals separately will never understand anything of either.”85 Most instructive of all, he appeals to Plato: “If you want a good idea of what public education is, read Plato’s Republic. This is by no means a work on politics, as those who judge books only by their titles like to think: it is the finest treatise on education ever written”86—an injunction that invites us to perform the opposite operation with Émile and see it as a great book on politics masquerading as a treatise on education. Occasional diversions apart, Rousseau’s work stands under the sign of civil education—paideia.
Plato had seen learning as the recovery of what had been lost: the trauma of birth had deprived man of what he had always known, and his education must restore to him what was rightfully his. Rousseau saw education as a recovery in a somewhat different sense. He often came back to it: his leading theme was man’s tragic departure from his essential nature, and his great task, to find the way that would enable man to reclaim it. Appropriately, Rousseau announces this theme in the very first line of Émile: “All is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things, all degenerates in the hands of men,”87 a famous sentence echoed in the equally famous sentence that opens the first chapter of the Contrat social: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”88 While Rousseau’s account of man’s essential character varies, it always remains faithful to the idea that man is originally without sin, that he comes into the world a free being, and that he is equipped with the capacity for decency, public-spiritedness, candor, authentic rationality. History, then, is for Rousseau a depressing commentary on man’s failure to realize his potentialities.
Rousseau did not launch his career as a philosopher with a life’s program; yet if most modern critics have found a profound coherence in his thought and an orderly development, this is not of their making. It is there, in his writings. Rousseau’s books of the 1750s are diagnostic and critical. They lay bare the damage. Rousseau’s trio of masterpieces, published between 1760 and 1762, move from diagnosis to prescription: they outline the remedy. Even the painful books of his last years perform a didactic task, though more indirectly.89 His three autobiographies are an appeal to a world that will not understand. They do not invite imitation—Rousseau knows that he is inimitable. But these brilliant and pathetic apologies, unprecedented in their grasp of the dark side of men’s motives, make a case for the one man among modern men who could have done the pedagogic work he had done: “Whence could the painter and apologist of human nature have taken his model, if not from his own heart? He has described this nature just as he felt it within himself. The prejudices which had not subjugated him, the artificial passions which had not made him their victim—they did not hide from his eyes, as from those of all others, the basic traits of humanity, so generally forgotten and misunderstood.… In a word, it was necessary that one man should paint his own portrait to show us, in this manner, the natural man.”90 The autobiographies are the pleas of the physician of civilization falsely accused of being its poisoner; they assert the uniqueness of his competence and the accuracy of his prescription.
From his first discourse, then, to his last reminiscence, Rousseau traversed a long but unbroken road; the claims of the latest works are implicit in the criticisms of the earliest. Rousseau’s Discours sur les sciences et les arts suffers all the disadvantages of a first work: it is strident, argumentative, a debater’s speech marshaling all the evidence on one side while suppressing all the evidence on the other. Rousseau himself later came to distrust this discourse, and with some justification: he scolds a great deal in it, and analyzes little. But as a first try at his great theme—man’s departure from his nature—it is perfectly satisfactory. “Our souls have been corrupted to the degree that our arts and sciences have advanced toward perfection.”91 His second book, the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, is far more ambitious than the first, and far more discriminating, but it pursues the same theme; it delineates a hypothetical history of man to discover how he has come to be what he is: snobbish, heartless, indifferent to elemental passions, and a stranger to true morality. In the original state of nature, men had been torpid, pacific, and equal; then the invention of private property, social distinctions, and the state introduced complications. “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying, This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries and horrors, might mankind not have been spared, if someone had pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch, and shouted to his fellow-men: ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are ruined if you forget that the fruits of the earth are everyone’s, and that the soil itself is no one’s.’ ”92
His first readers impatiently repudiated the discourse on inequality as an invitation to primitivism: Voltaire covered the copy Rousseau had sent him with uncomplimentary remarks, and acknowledged it with a burst of facile jokes: he thanked Rousseau sarcastically for his “new book against the human race” and suggested that it would tempt men to walk on all fours.93 But this was not the case Rousseau intended to make. The vices of modern civilization may be glaring, but since cultivated men share in them, and profit from them, they need a powerful, shocking demonstration of the betrayal they have perpetrated on their true nature. Instead of collaboration, there is social strife; instead of benevolence, hostility; instead of justice, injustice; instead of equality, inequality; worst of all, instead of the recognition of reality, the deliberate cultivation of appearance—this is the world Rousseau wanted men to see clearly for the first time. But the cure for modern civilization is not return to the savage state; it is, rather, the construction of a higher civilization. “We must not call Rousseau a liberal,” John Plamenatz has said, “because others have called him a totalitarian.”94 Just so; and we must not call Rousseau a primitivist because he attacked modern civilization. The original state of nature, and the several stages of prepolitical society that followed upon it, are ineligible as an option and unsuitable as an ideal. Their single use now is to hold a mirror up to society, that men may learn to despise and to reform it. Mankind cannot go back—on this point Rousseau always insisted, though, perhaps, in this early stage, less forcefully than was necessary to secure understanding of his thought. In all his writings, Rousseau said of himself late in life, he saw “the development of his great principle that nature has made man happy and good but that society depraves him and makes him miserable. Émile in particular, that book that has been so much read, so little understood, and so poorly appreciated, is nothing but a treatise on the original goodness of man.” In his earliest writings, he had “concentrated most of all on destroying that illusion that gives us a foolish admiration for the instruments of our unhappiness, and to correct that misleading evaluation that makes us honor pernicious talents and despise useful virtues. Everywhere he shows us mankind better, wiser, and happier in its primitive condition, blind, miserable, and wicked to the degree that it has departed from that condition.” But, he emphatically adds, “human nature does not turn back. Once man has left it, he never returns to the time of innocence and equality”—this was another principle on which Rousseau “insisted most strongly.” Rousseau repudiates the widespread and “obstinate” accusation that he had wanted “to destroy the arts and sciences, the theater, and the academies, and to plunge the world into its original barbarism.” Quite the contrary: “He always insisted on the preservation of existing institutions, arguing that their destruction would only remove the remedies but leave the vices intact, and to substitute plunder for corruption.”95
This is explicit, clear, and almost wholly accurate: if Rousseau is a doubtful witness to his life, he is a perceptive and dependable commentator on his writings. His explication requires only one correction: in the Discours sur l’inégalité Rousseau displays primitive man as anything but wise; he is neither good nor bad, he is torpid, stupid, given over to his simple passions. For Rousseau, man is superior to the animals in a single regard—his capacity for perfection. But primitive man cannot take advantage of this unique endowment; he may be happy, but he is not a moral being. Only civilized man can realize his potentialities. Rousseau’s recognition that in fact man has not realized them leads him to the conclusion that there is a desperate need for a thoroughgoing, fundamental reformation that will substitute a good for an evil civilization. “The passing from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man by substituting in his conduct justice for instinct, and giving his actions the moral quality they had lacked before. It is then only, with the voice of duty succeeding physical impulse and right succeeding desire, that man, who has up to then thought of himself alone, finds himself compelled to act on other principles, and to consult his reason before he listens to his inclinations. Although in that state he deprives himself of several advantages which he has from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so elevated, that if the abuse of his new condition did not often degrade him below the one from which he had emerged, he would endlessly bless the happy moment that tore him from it forever, and which, in place of a stupid and narrow animal, made him an intelligent being and a man.”96 This famous passage is from the Contrat social, but it grows directly out of Rousseau’s earlier critique of culture, and acts as a commentary upon it: his first two discourses were not exercises in nostalgia but in criticism. The work of construction depended upon, and could only follow it.
Rousseau developed his constructive ideas at the end of the 1750s with three important books which, dissimilar as they appear to be, belong together in conception and execution. La Nouvelle Héloïse, the Contrat social, and Émile, the first a novel, the second an essay on political theory, the third a treatise on education, complement and clarify one another; remove one and the other two remain incomplete and partially incomprehensible.
If the mutual relevance of the Contrat social and Émile is easy to perceive, the place of a novel in this earnest company is at first glance a little surprising. But only at first glance. On the surface, La Nouvelle Héloïse is a sentimental epistolary novel of the sort popular in Rousseau’s day. Julie, unimpeachably aristocratic, articulate, a born lecturer, and distressingly perfect, falls in love with her middle-class tutor, Saint-Preux, who loves her for her perfections but then, being only human, for her physical charms as well. Passive, delirious with desire but anxious to sin without having to feel guilty, Saint-Preux actually has Julie seduce him; but then she sends her lover away, repents, endlessly discusses the state of her soul with her adoring friend Claire, and marries an older man, the cool, all-knowing atheist Wolmar, who purifies her once again through marriage, and with whom she leads a calm and fulfilling life. Saint-Preux returns, and with him the danger, but all ends, as it were, happily, with the triumph and apotheosis of Julie: she dies after rescuing one of her children from drowning, and leaves behind her an inconsolable community of widower, lover, and friend who unite in worshipping her memory. All the elements are here to make the novel a popular triumph: the slow dawning of sexual love, an affair across class lines, a daughter disobeying her father, scenes of rapture and anguish. But there is more to La Nouvelle Héloïse than its mechanical plot and embarrassing exclamations; its scenario, mainly the Swiss countryside and sophisticated Paris, permits Rousseau to develop some of his favorite themes. He sings hymns to the beauties of nature, has Saint-Preux experience all the corruption and viciousness and deplore all the alienation from one’s true being consequent on metropolitan life, compels his characters to confess endlessly to one another and thus pay homage to his favorite cult: the cult of sincerity. But beyond that, Rousseau paints, in Julie’s married life with Wolmar, a social utopia. It is a small idyll, a community reduced to its essentials and thus suitable for observation. Life in the Wolmar household, for masters and servants alike, is a model of mutual candor, general respect, kindly government, rational discourse, silence that is deeper than words. The religion the leading characters debate is a first draft of the Profession de foi, the education Julie’s children receive is a first draft of the rest of Émile. La Nouvelle Héloïse began as an outlet for Rousseau’s erotic fantasies; it ended as a didactic demonstration, aiming, like Émile and the Contrat social, at constructing a world that must be if man is to become man.
The most explicitly pedagogic of these three books is, of course, Émile, which Rousseau himself more than once called his best and most important work. Émile parades as a rational, carefully planned program designed to produce a true man, worthy of living in a good society and capable of producing such a society; its subtitle proclaims it a work on education. But soon doubts arise: the very extravagance of its governing device—the solitary boy, brought up by a single tutor, removed from his family and abstracted for years from the outside world—suggests that Rousseau is concerned with large principles rather than with a realistic scheme of education that pedagogues might apply in life. Rousseau himself insisted on the theoretical character of his book: in 1764, he acknowledged to a correspondent that “it is impossible to make an Émile,” but, he added, “can you believe that this should have been my aim and that the book bearing this title is a true treatise on education? It is a relatively philosophical work on a principle that its author has advanced in other writings: that man is naturally good.”97 Émile is a thought experiment in which Rousseau strips man of all that is adventitious and of all that has corrupted other men; young Émile is of a piece with Condillac’s statue devised to demonstrate the growth of the senses.98 False values have dominated and distorted man’s life and perceptions for so many centuries that the very memory of authentic values has grown dim; even the philosopher must be suspected of complicity in the civilization he pretends to purify. This is why Rousseau employs his extraordinary device and invents the improbable situation into which he places Émile: the deepest study of contemporary modes of life alone can only reveal what is wrong, but not what is right, nor what must be done to set it right.
Some of Rousseau’s contemporaries were inclined to be amused by his educational “novel,” and saw only its surface. No doubt, Rousseau gave ammunition to these critics with his strained dialogues, unfortunate gift for provocative pronouncements, and irritable, aggressive asides to his readers. But Émile is a thoroughly logical and wholly serious book; some of its notions are odd, some of its proposals outlandish, some of its implications unpleasant, but the whole exhibits a consistent development of a few coherent central ideas. The key to Émile is the Stoic injunction that man must live according to nature; it was Rousseau’s genius to harness this idea, derived from Seneca, to the idea of human development. Other pedagogues, Rousseau notes in his Preface, “always seek the man in the child, without thinking of what he is before he becomes a man.”99 Precisely the opposite course is the correct one: “We must view the man as a man and the child as a child”100—to do this is to follow the indications that nature gives, and to prepare human beings to live in obedience to its commands.
The idea that children deserve respect was not in itself a new one; Juvenal, whom Rousseau paraphrases, had already said, Maxima debetur puero reverentia.101 Moreover, it had been obvious for centuries that growing children pass through a set of characteristic phases; a few educators in fact, notably Locke, whom Rousseau much admired and often quotes, had passed beyond conventional talk about “the seven ages of man.” But no one before Rousseau had drawn the consequences implicit in the idea of human development. The child, Rousseau forcefully argues, is not an imperfect or incomplete adult; he is a full human being with his own capacities and limitations. This is why Rousseau demands that the intellect be cultivated last—not from some innate hostility to reason, but from his estimate of the place of reason in the rhythm of human growth. “Of all man’s faculties, reason, which is, so to speak, a compound of all the others, is the one that develops last and with the greatest difficulty.” To reason with children, therefore, is futile, a cruel reversal of the process that nature has so obviously prescribed; it is, Rousseau notes sarcastically, “to begin at the end.” If “children understood reason, they would have no need to be pupils.”102 Rousseau is in no hurry to teach Émile how to read; the boy will learn to read late because he learns to think late. For the same reason, Émile will learn history or foreign languages only after he is ready for them. “People will be surprised to see that I count the study of languages among the futilities of education; but it must be remembered that I am here speaking only of the studies of the earliest years.”103 Here, as always, Rousseau is intent on matching desires with capacities as closely as possible; it is only when the child’s capacities are at full employment, neither frustrated by insensate demands nor idle through the tutor’s laxity, that he can be truly happy.
While childhood is “the sleep of reason,” it is also the age when the senses are keen and the body is vigorous; this is the time when one should train the first through observation and the second through exercise. The child must not study geography out of books: he should wander in the fields, across streams and hills, get lost with a few instructions and apply what he has learned on his rambles that he may find his way home to lunch; this is how Émile will learn the geography that matters, in a way that he will always remember and always use properly. Not “words, more words, still more words,” Rousseau exclaims, but “things, things!”104 Émile is being educated in the only way that education can work: by making his experience his own.
This dogma about the late growth of reason with its attendant delay in the training of the mind is dubious doctrine, anti-intellectual in its consequences if not in its intent. Like most of Rousseau’s thought, his educational ideas have proved to have the most divergent results. They have served to liberate pupils from deadening routine and in the course of two centuries have raised important questions about the meaning of education, but they have also spawned mindless platitudes about learning by doing and induced educators to mistake lack of discipline for authentic freedom. But all this was in the future. Rousseau took his view of reason as a sound observation, based firmly on the salient facts of human nature. It was “natural education,” or, also in Rousseau’s words, “negative education,” designed to avoid the mistakes of the past and to keep Émile from absorbing the vices of his culture. Eighteenth-century education, Rousseau argues, makes children into parrots who repeat what they do not understand, or into monsters who turn into premature, hypocritical sages, skilled at parading their learning but badly crippled by a pedagogy that has given them a permanent distaste for the things that matter and false standards they will not escape as long as they live. Émile will be different; ignorant for years, he will remain pure, and as he grows, become wise without becoming superior, learned without becoming pedantic, sociable without becoming snobbish.
With adolescence comes advanced learning, at the right time and on the right foundation. The emphasis of Émile’s later education will remain utilitarian, but it will include the sciences and literature. The walk in the fields that prepared Émile for geography is only the beginning of his scientific education; it will be followed by instruction in the use of instruments, in rudimentary applied mathematics, a practical trade, and finally—on his way to fifteen—reading.
Rousseau sounds grudging about this part of his educational program: “I hate books,” he exclaims, “they teach us only to talk about things we do not know.”105 But there must be books, and so the tutor chooses as appropriate reading for the young Émile’s “first book” and “for a long time his whole library”—Robinson Crusoe. It is an obvious choice: the adventures of Robinson Crusoe are a kind of thought experiment much like the education of Émile—Crusoe is man naked, free of accidental trappings, free of society, face to face with nature, alone. Rousseau uses Robinson Crusoe as a treatise on natural education; it teaches the real utility of things.106 But while this utilitarian handbook is Émile’s first reading, it is not his last: by the time he is a young man of eighteen who has experienced true friendship, authentic sociability, and the first stirrings of sensual passion, he is ready to read widely—history, biography, religion, and later, at twenty, the Latin classics, Now Émile is grown, responsible and ready for marriage.
The cultural ideal implicit in this course of education is congruent with the cultural criticism of Rousseau’s discourses: Rousseau’s good man is in all respects the opposite of the Rococo man of eighteenth-century urban civilization. Émile has no false politeness, no egotism, no guile; he is healthy, clear-thinking, cultivated without regard to fashion, sturdy, self-reliant, public-spirited, and capable of giving and accepting affection. It is, as I have said, a humorless ideal and a little unattractive, but it has a nobler side: Rousseau has intended Émile to grow up as no one before him had grown up: into an autonomous man. Kant’s affection for Émile was not an accident.
It is at this point, autonomy, that the Profession de foi du Vicaire savoyard justifies its place in Émile. The Profession de foi appears to be a lengthy digression, feebly justified by Rousseau’s professed intention to discuss Émile’s religious instruction. But the digression is not an intrusion; it is necessary to explicate the first sentence and fundamental position of Émile—that man is born good but has somehow spoiled his natural heritage—and to show the way to his worldly redemption.
Like the rest of Rousseau’s religious writings, the Profession de foi is drenched in emotion. Rousseau had always imported his needs into his thoughts on religion: when, in 1756, Voltaire gave vent to a profound pessimism in response to the catastrophic and, it seemed to Voltaire, senseless Lisbon earthquake, Rousseau had almost tearfully insisted on his continuing belief in Providence—not because the proofs for Providence were convincing, but because he needed his belief in Providence to live: “No,” he exclaimed to Voltaire, “I have suffered too much in this life not to expect another. All the subtleties of metaphysics will not make me doubt the immortality of the soul for a moment; I feel it, I believe it, I want it, I hope for it, I shall defend it to my last breath”107—a moving outburst, but hardly an impressive demonstration in view of Voltaire’s persistent denigration of “the subtleties of metaphysics.” With Rousseau, for all his logic and critical acumen, the will to believe was prelude to belief.
Despite its passionate passages, its apostrophes to the deity and to conscience—“divine instinct”108—the Profession de foi is an exercise in philosophical theology; it is significant that among all of Rousseau’s writings, this was the only one to gain Voltaire’s enthusiastic approval. No wonder: it was an essay that, occasional hyperbole apart, any one among the deists in the Enlightenment would have been proud to write. It outlines a natural religion appropriate to the natural education Émile is receiving. Its very placement is important: Rousseau exposes Émile to the monologue of the Savoyard vicar when his young charge is about eighteen—when he has full command of his reason.
For the Profession de foi is, in its heated way, a celebration of reason. “The highest ideas of the divinity come to us from reason alone.”109 Rousseau, to be sure, maintains that reason needs the assistance of sincere emotion: he always insisted that man must establish an alliance between the rational and the passionate elements in his nature. But reason, unaided autonomous reason, is its own best authority, and the only reliable test of religious truth. Doctrines, books of exegesis, tradition, clerical establishments, priestly authority are like so many veils before the divine being. “How many men between God and me!” the Savoyard vicar exclaims, and it is Rousseau’s voice we hear. God needs no intermediary, no interpreter, particularly since most, if not all, of his self-appointed spokesmen have done the divinity grievous injusice. Many of their statements are false, other are circular: “After proving the doctrine by the miracle, they then prove the miracle by the doctrine.”110 To be sure, there is a God; we have solid evidence of his existence and his transcendent goodness both through inner certainty and rational argument—Rousseau was a constructive as well as a critical deist. But the point is that man needs no external authority to prove that divine existence; to rely on others is to betray one’s vocation as a man. As the Savoyard vicar tells his rapt listener: “I closed all my books. There is one book open to all eyes, that of nature. It is in this great and sublime book that I learned to serve and worship its divine author.” There is no excuse for closing one’s eyes to that book, for it is intelligible to all men. Suppose, the vicar suggests, “I had been born on a desert island, seen no other man, never heard what took place long ago in some corner of the world; still, if I use my reason, if I cultivate it,” and make good use of the faculties with which God has endowed all men, “I should learn on my own to know him, to love him, to love his works, to want the good he wants, and to fulfill all my duties on earth to please him. What more than that could all the learning of men teach me?”111 There is a touch of anti-intellectualism here that is familiar from Rousseau’s other writings; Rousseau was always quick to ask his readers to close their books. But the dominant element here is his call for independence of judgment, for self-reliance. Since man alone is responsible for the evil in the world, man alone must strive to overcome it. In a short staged dialogue between reason and inspiration, Rousseau gives reason all the good lines. “No one is exempt from the first duty of man, no one has the right to depend on the judgment of another.”112 It is pronouncements such as these that made his fellow philosophes treat Rousseau like a lost brother rather than a Christian enemy, and, in the midst of their irritation, regret his desertion.
The Profession de foi is part of Rousseau’s scheme to make a moral man fit to live in a moral society. Morality is private, but its stage is public. Doubtless the debate between solitude and sociability was a sensitive point for Rousseau: his first serious quarrel with Diderot, never wholly repaired, was over what he took to be Diderot’s insulting reference to Rousseau’s “personal reformation” in the 1750s, which included his withdrawal from Parisian society. Diderot tactlessly said that “only the evil man is alone”; Rousseau believed that he had withdrawn only to be strengthened for return. Once again, the quarrel is more than a quarrel; Rousseau’s conduct is a kind of paradigm for the rhythm of Émile’s education: “Wanting to form the natural man, I have no intention of making him into a savage and sending him back to the woods.” The tutor intends to strengthen him for social existence by making him capable of detachment and independence: Émile must not “allow himself to be carried away by passions or by the opinions of men. Let him see with his eyes, let him feel with his heart, let him be governed by no authority but his own reason.”113 To make the social and political significance of education, if anything, even plainer that that, Rousseau includes an extensive discussion of political questions in book V of Émile, a book ostensibly devoted to the education of women. This book, the last, is the bridge to the Contrat social. Émile has shown the making of moral man; the Contrat social shows the making of moral society.
In form as in substance, the Contrat social is a treatise on political theory in the classical tradition. Its announced purpose is to establish a sound theory of obligation. “One thinks himself the master of others, which still leaves him more of a slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? I think I can resolve that question.”114 It is an ancient question, but Rousseau’s solution is modern, and inextricably intertwined with his educational program. The society that makes obedience lawful, and lawful obedience practicable, is a society of Émiles.
Force does not create right. But then, what can? Men must remain free; otherwise organized society is not worth having. But men must obey; otherwise organized society cannot function. This is Rousseau’s overriding problem: “To find a form of association which defends and protects with the whole common power the person and property of each associate, and in which each, uniting himself to all, yet obeys himself alone, and remains as free as before.”115 Rousseau’s solution is the social contract, by which each surrenders all his powers to the general will; but since each is the general will, he has lost nothing essential and rather gained what he needs most: civic freedom. The Contrat social takes up where Rousseau’s first two discourses had left off: it is a demonstration that the exchange of natural freedom for civic freedom is worth making, for it is this exchange that elevates man into a moral being capable of realizing his potentialities.
Man surrenders his natural rights to society, not to the state. Like other philosophes a moderate relativist, Rousseau was not doctrinaire about forms of government, and thought responsible aristocracies and elective monarchies legitimate; like other philosophes a disciple of Montesquieu, Rousseau did not think all forms suitable to all regions: freedom can subsist in many types of states and is wholly unattainable in others. But in any event, governments are only agents of society, never its master, and whatever the state may be, it must arise out of a society governed by the general will. Thus Rousseau envisions his good society as a society of free men, served rather than dominated by their government, freely obeying the laws that they themselves have made.
Political theorists have always sought to delimit the respective spheres of public authority and private freedom, and the dominant liberalism of political thought in the Enlightenment treated the two as in perpetual combat. But Rousseau eliminated the boundaries altogether; he was, after all, not a liberal. Rousseau’s citizen is at once ruler and ruled, lawgiver and subject. The general will, which both underlies and expresses rational public policy, is, in the good society, the voice of all, or nearly all, and the ruler of all. The general will is absolutely general: “To be general, it is not always necessary for the will to be unanimous, but it is necessary that all votes be counted; any formal exclusion breaches generality.”116 If Rousseau was not a liberal, he was a democrat.
Rousseau insisted that his democracy was not merely formal; it cannot function without certain social conditions, among them moral, legal, and relative economic equality. Other philosophes, including Holbach and Hume and Morelly, had seen the social utility of substantial equality, but Rousseau built equality into his theoretical system. No man, in his view, should be so poor that he must sell himself to another; no man so rich the he can buy others. Thus liberty and equality, far from competing or being incompatible with one another are actually, for Rousseau, indispensable allies, each giving substance to the other. There are other preconditions necessary before the general will can function: it works best in a small country, in a society without partial associations and pressure groups, and equipped with institutions embodying direct participation: it is notorious that Rousseau saw nothing but harm in representative government. But the most important of these preconditions, the one that brings the education of Émile quite directly to bear on Rousseau’s political thought, is the prevalence of the civic spirit.
The general will is always right, by definition. But how is it to be discovered? The state itself is to be founded by an almost superhuman being, the legislator, who stands above human frailty and manipulates his human material, much as Émile’s tutor stands above common humanity and manipulates his charge for his own good. But this charismatic figure retires from the scene once his work of construction is done. Men can discover the general will only by listening to the voice of the sovereign people. The man who has voted with the minority is not merely bound by the majority decision, but he also discovers, after the fact and through the very majority vote, that his own view has been mistaken all along. Rousseau offers two signs of the general will at work: pacific assemblies and near-unanimity. “Long debates, discord, tumult, announce the ascendancy of particular interests and the decline of the state.” But then Rousseau takes back what he has just granted; quiet assemblies and near-unanimity are good signs only as long as “all the qualities of the general will are still to be found in the majority; when they cease to be there, whatever side one may take, there is no more freedom.”117 Slaves, too, are subdued and united. The majority, in other words, is right as long as it is right.
This, I submit, is a fruitful tautology; it calls attention to Rousseau’s distinction between the general will and the will of all, and to his persistent demand that the voter in the good state be a moral being. The will of all is the sum of private interests; the general will emerges as men consider the common interest. It is true that Rousseau prescribes the preconditions for the general will with care, but in a selfish, corrupt, anomic society none of these—equality, absence of pressure groups, and the like—will have much effect. Once again: Rousseau’s society can function only if all its citizens are Émiles. Diderot had already noted in the Encyclopédie, and Rousseau had repeated it after him in the first version of the Contrat social: the general will should be “a pure act of the understanding which reasons in the silence of the passions” about the demands a man may make of his fellows, and his fellows of him.118 It was an exacting standard, for men thought of themselves first, and disinterestedness was rare. It was especially rare in eighteenth-century civilization, which, it seemed, celebrated the vice of selfishness (amour propre) in the mistaken belief that it was the virtue of self-regard (amour de soi). Of course, disinterestedness was rare; of course, the good state was only a hope and might not ever become reality. Rousseau, with all his optimism about man’s original condition, was a pessimist about his capacity to reform himself. But if reform was possible at all, it must come in the way in which the Nouvelle Héloïse, Émile, and the Contrat social outlined it. All three books, converging from different starting points—family, individual, society—aim at the same target: the citizen, responsible and free.
One should not ask of Rousseau what he cannot give. He was not a representative figure for the Enlightenment: his thought was at once too ancient, with its reminiscences of classical philosophy, and too modern, with its anticipation of future problems, to make him into a typical philosophe. But then he was not a typical anything. With a mixture of pride and indignation, he advertised himself to be unique and repudiated the very thought that he might be doing what others were doing. “I am not made like any other man I have seen,” he proclaimed in the opening paragraph of the Confessions, and he lived and wrote as if he fully believed it.
Yet, with all his hunger for community, Rousseau urged men on in the direction that the Enlightenment as a whole wanted mankind to go. If his language is feverish, the substance of his thought is free of fanaticism; his great political work, the Contrat social, is amply equipped with safeguards for the individual against the pressures of the community. He said over and over again, with the pathos of the man who does not think anyone will believe him, that freedom was more valuable to him than anything else. We may believe him: solitary and often despised, he did the work of the Enlightenment, and gave substance, more than any other pholosophe, to the still youthful, always precarious, science of freedom.
1 Diderot et Catherine II, ed. Tourneux (1899), 144.
2 Observations sur le Nakaz, in Œuvres politiques, 354–5.
3 Diderot et Catherine II, 144.
4 Observations sur le Nakaz, in Œuvres politiques, 355.
5 See Adam Wandruszka: Leopold II. Erzherzog von Österreich, Grossherzog von Toskana, König von Ungarn und Böhmen, Römischer Kaiser, 2 vols. (1963–5), I, 370, 385.
6 Ibid., 371.
7 Ibid., II, 217–18.
8 See Gerald J. Cavanaugh: “Vauban, d’Argenson, Turgot: From Absolutism to Constitutionalism in Eighteenth-century France” (Columbia Ph.D. dissertation, 1967), 140–1.
9 Autobiography, 78–9.
10 “Plan d’une université pour le gouvernement de Russie,” in Œuvres, III, 471.
11 “Éducation,” Questions sur l’Encyclopédie, in Œuvres, XVIII, 471.
12 André Schimberg: L’Éducation morale dans les collèges de la Compagnie de Jésus sous l’Ancien Régime (1913), in “Additions et Errata,” not paginated.
13 For this group, see The Rise of Modern Paganism, 19.
14 Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), para. 184.
15 Ibid., para. 164.
16 See Augustin Sicard: Les Études classiques avant la Révolution (1887), 200.
17 See in Geoffroy Atkinson: Le sentiment de la nature et le retour à la vie simple (1690–1740), (1960), 20.
18 Quoted in Friedrich Paulsen: Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts auf den deutschen Schulen und Universitäten (1885), 396.
19 Quoted by Sir Charles Mallet: “Education, Schools and Universities,” Johnson’s England, II, 227.
20 “Collège,” in The Encyclopédie, 30.
21 See François de la Fontainerie: French Liberalism and Education in the Eighteenth Century; The Writings of La Chalotais, Turgot, Diderot and Condorcet on National Education (1932), 48–9.
22 “Plan d’une université pour le gouvernement de Russie,” in Œuvres, III, 444. I have quoted this passage in The Rise of Modern Paganism, 197; see also above, 215.
23 “Plan d’une université,” in Œuvres, III, 473.
24 “The Malleability of Man in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” in Earl R. Wasserman, ed.: Aspects of the Eighteenth Century (1965), 22.
25 Some Thoughts Concerning Education, para. 1.
26 Book IV, chap. i, in Œuvres, I, part 1, 39.
27 De l’esprit (1758; edn. 1769), Discourse IV, chap. xvii, 472.
28 “Plan d’une université pour le gouvernement de Russie,” in Œuvres, III, 429.
29 De l’esprit, Discourse III, chap. xxvii, 329.
30 Ibid., chap. i, 188–9.
31 Ibid., Discourse II, chap. xxiv, 176–8.
32 Quoted by Diderot: Réfutation suivie de l’ouvrage d’Helvétius intitulé l’Homme, in Œuvres philosophiques, 619.
33 Ibid., 576.
34 Ibid., 601.
35 Ibid., 619–20.
36 See Dorothy Marshall: English People in the Eighteenth Century (1956), 161.
37 See above, 4.
38 Quoted in James Sutherland: A Preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry (1948), 61; from Swift: An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity.
39 The Idler, No. 7, May 27, 1758. Samuel Johnson: The Idler and The Adventurer, eds. W. J. Bate et al. (1963), 23.
40 Quoted in Richard H. Cox: Locke on War and Peace (1960), 33.
41 These passages are from a plan Locke drew up in 1697 to revise the Elizabethan Poor Law in the light of the increase in pauperism. The proposal is reprinted in H. R. Fox Burne: A Life of John Locke, 2 vols. (1876), II, 337–91.
42 “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,” Works, III, 480; The Natural History of Religion, in ibid., IV, 349.
43 Émile, ou de l’éducation (edn. 1939), 27.
44Der Streit der Fakultäten, in Werke, VII, 328.
45 Pensée LIII, Pensées philosophiques, in Œuvres philosophiques, 43.
46 To Sophie Volland (October 30, 1759). Correspondance, II, 299, 310–11.
47 To the same (July 25, 1762). Ibid., IV, 71.
48 “Encyclopédie”—a strategic place to make such a remark. The Encyclopédie, 54.
49 See Diderot’s fragment “L’église invisible,” in Dieckmann: Inventaire, 233; and Diderot to Falconet (September 1766?). Correspondance, VI, 306.
50 See Œuvres, III, 161, 263–4, 331. I owe one of these references to Mrs. Matile Poor.
51 Diderot to Falconet (May 1768). Correspondance, VIII, 41.
52 Œdipe and La mort de César, in Œuvres, II, 83; III, 330.
53 Siècle de Louis XIV, in Œuvres historiques, 720.
54 June 4 (1767). Correspondence, LXVI, 6.
55 Voltaire to Damilaville, April 1 (1766). Ibid., LXI, 3.
56 September 2 (1768). Ibid., LXX, 45.
57 Quoted in Walter L. Dorn: Competition for Empire, 1740–1763 (1940), 211.
58 September 25 (1762). Correspondence, L, 53.
59 February 28 (1763). Ibid., LI, 204.
60 (March 15, 1767). Ibid., LXV, 48.
61 See Tacitus: Annales, I, 29.
62 For further details and references see The Rise of Modern Paganism, 152–7.
63 Notebooks, 313.
64 Autobiography, 89. See The Rise of Modern Paganism, 292.
65 See Voltaire: “Athée, Athéisme,” Questions sur l’Encyclopédie, in Œuvres, XVII, 461–3.
66 “Morale des législateurs,” in Éléments de philosophie. For Frederick and the need for lies, see above, 486–7.
67 D’Alembert to Frederick II (February 1771). Œuvres complètes, V, 308. I owe this reference, and the previous one, to Mr. Ronald I. Boss.
68 To Sophie Volland (October 6, 1765). Correspondance, V, 134.
69 Notebooks, II, 381.
70 Ibid.
71 “A,B,C,” in Philosophical Dictionary, II, 605.
72 Histoire de Jenni, in Œuvres, XXI, 573—a strong thing to say, since Voltaire regarded the assassin of Henri IV as the greatest criminal in history. Incidentally, Voltaire obviously here is thinking of Frederick II of Prussia, but Frederick was not an atheist; he was a cynic about men and wholly unashamed about exploiting what he regarded to be their weakness.
73 Le dîner du comte de Boulainvilliers, in Œuvres, XXVI, 555.
74 Jusqu’à quel point on doit tromper le peuple, in ibid., XXIV, 71. The whole essay is worth reading, along with the article “Fraud” in the Philosophical Dictionary, I, 279–83.
75 Précis du siècle de Louis XV, in Œuvres, XV, 394.
76 George R. Havens: Voltaire’s Marginalia on the Pages of Rousseau: A Comparative Study of Ideas (1933), 68. On the question of Rousseau’s social religion, see below.
77 Grimsley: D’Alembert, 145.
78 Hume to Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard, November 5, 1766. Letters, II, 103.
79 Émile, 614. For instances of manipulation, see ibid., 120–7, 412–15.
80 See above, 258–9.
81 Considérations sur le Gouvernement de Pologne et sur sa réformation projetée, in Œuvres, III, 966.
82 Ibid., 970, 962.
83 Du contrat social, in Œuvres, III, 468–9.
84 Œuvres, I, 407.
85 Émile, 279.
86 Ibid., 10; see also, 70, 223.
87 Ibid., 5.
88 Œuvres, III, 351.
89 This division between critical, constructive, and confessional phases in Rousseau’s writings has become familiar to scholars of his work. They are, of course, not to be strictly divided in this way, since, for example, the Discours sur l’économie politique, which, dating from 1755, belongs to the first phase chronologically, foreshadows the constructive proposals of the Contrat social, which is of 1762.
90 “Dialogue Troisième,” Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, in Œuvres, I, 936.
91 Œuvres, III, 9.
92 Ibid., 164.
93 Voltaire to Rousseau (August 30, 1755). Correspondence, XXVII, 230. See above, 95.
94 John Plamenatz: Man And Society, I, Machiavelli Through Rousseau (1963), 436.
95 “Dialogue Troisième,” Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, in Œuvres, I, 934–5. See above, 94–6.
96 Contrat social, book I, chap. viii, in Œuvres, III, 364.
97 Rousseau to Philibert Cramer, October 13, 1764. Quoted in Émile, vi n.
98 This has also been noticed by Ernst Cassirer: The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau, 113.
99 Émile, 2.
100 Ibid., 63.
101 Ibid., 102; Juvenal, XIV, 47.
102 Émile, 76.
103 Ibid., 105.
104 See ibid., 104, 203.
105 Ibid., 210.
106 Ibid., 211–12.
107 Rousseau to Voltaire, August 18, 1756. Correspondance complète, ed. R. A. Leigh (1965——), IV, 81.
108 Émile, 354.
109 Ibid., 361.
110 Ibid., 366.
111 Ibid., 378; note the phrase “some corner of the world,” which is a typical deist’s reference to the origins of Christianity.
112 Ibid., 377.
113 Ibid., 306.
114 Du contrat social, book I, chap. i, in Œuvres, III, 351.
115 Ibid., book I, chap. vi, in Œuvres, III, 360.
116 Ibid., book II, chap. ii, in Œuvres, III, 369 n.
117 Ibid., book IV, chap. ii, in Œuvres, III, 441.
118 See Diderot’s article “Droit naturel” for the Encyclopédie, in Œuvres politiques, 34; and Rousseau’s first version of the Contrat social, in Œuvres, III, 286.