It is as true of the human sciences as of the sciences of nature that, by and large, only the most recent formulations of their overriding principles are deemed worthy of scientific scrutiny. The rudiments of physical anthropology and then biology and linguistics around the end of the eighteenth century, followed by sociology and social statistics in the early nineteenth century, and economics and political science in the early twentieth century, were characteristically sketched by pioneers whose fresh perspectives were in each case designed to free themselves of the excess baggage of their precursors. In virtually all disciplines, each major step is portrayed as if it were a new beginning, marking a conceptual revolution which relegates antecedent approaches to the defunct realm of the history of ideas.
From the point of view of scientific discovery, nothing could be more defunct than fossilized concepts which purport to explain human character or behaviour but reveal little more than their own age. When Saint-Simon and Comte put forward their ideas of social physiology or sociology, they supposed that they were laying the foundations of a new science, more deeply rooted in an understanding of society’s structures, mechanisms and organization than any of their precursors had previously imagined. When Quetelet and other statisticians of the early to mid-nineteenth century devised mathematical explanations to account for the regularities of social phenomena in human populations, they articulated notions of spontaneous natural law as distinct from jurisprudential principles of societal order which had purportedly been prevalent before. In the twentieth century, Graham Wallas, Charles Merriam and other political scientists promoted new methodologies through which the forces that were held to shape political institutions—public opinion, the formation of parties and eventually voting behaviour—could be investigated and measured without the encumbrance of mysterious philosophical abstractions.1 Namierite historians in England, Annales historians in France and Marxist sociologists everywhere have decried the vacuous concepts of the history of ideas, as vestiges of a disembodied and epiphenomenal World Spirit. Even the predominant traditions of intellectual history today—German Begriffsgeschichte and English contextualism—insist upon the discontinuity between an historical understanding and the scientific practice of a discipline, so as to ensure that the canons of current research are not anachronistically superimposed upon the past.
Of all periods in modern intellectual history, much the most discredited in the eyes of contemporary social scientists is the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The Enlightenment has been variously depicted as superficial in entrusting the promotion of self-reliance or social progress to the forces of reason over religion; it has been denounced for having naïvely sought to frame an understanding of moral and mental phenomena in terms of objective natural laws modelled in the image of Newtonian physics; it has been held in derision for supposing that human nature was everywhere the same, governed by universally constant appetites or infinitely malleable and hence capable of perfection; it has been found vacuous because its speculative histories of the human race or atomistic conceptions of human nature took no account of the inescapably complex textures of social life.
Such objections to the Enlightenment are not all compatible, but either collectively or separately they have come to colour popular perceptions of eighteenth-century intellectual history as well as criticisms made by contemporary social scientists. With regard to our explanations of human nature and society, the Enlightenment has to its detractors come to seem the last pre-scientific age, as the fresh disciplines we currently pursue, whose collective birth may be said to mark its demise, supplant its conjectures with real evidence. Modern notions of social science thus not only reject methodologies of the history of ideas in general. In conducting their empirical investigations of society today, contemporary scientists identify their own approaches as departing, both historically and conceptually, from the Enlightenment Project.
In the light of such putative disjunctions between eighteenth-century modes of thought and modern social science, it is altogether remarkable that so many other critics of the Enlightenment—sometimes even the same critics—have also denounced that intellectual movement for having engendered the pre-eminent political forces and social practices of modernity. For Jacob Talmon and Lester Crocker, the principal beneficiaries of the Enlightenment have been the totalitarian democracies of the twentieth century, whose vast schemes of social engineering are said to have drawn their inspiration above all from eighteenth-century notions of moral plasticity, perfectibility and the recasting of human nature. For Alasdair MacIntyre, the Enlightenment’s critical scepticism, empty formalism and vacuous rationalism have cut modern societies adrift from the moorings of shared beliefs, religious faith and communal action on which their survival depends. For John Gray, our naïve trust in perpetual progress and in the universal rights of man inspired by Enlightenment thought just obscures the insuperable cleavages between nations and cultures which no spirit of cosmopolitanism can hope to overcome. For Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Zygmunt Bauman, even the horrors of the Holocaust may be understood as a dreadful expression of the merely instrumental notions of scientific rationality to which Enlightenment thinkers subscribed.2
How is it possible that Enlightenment beliefs should have strayed so far from the genuine truths of social science while at the same time becoming so deeply imbedded within the structures of modern social life? The contention that the Enlightenment Project at once failed in theory but triumphed in practice amounts to an extraordinary indictment of the very social sciences which are said to have superseded it, and that for at least two major reasons. On the one hand, the claim implies an inversion of the relation between abstract ideas and the social realities said to underlie them, by virtue of its advocates’ stipulation that modernity is in fact fundamentally shaped by our perceptions of its nature. Even while denying the significance of conceptual history in their empirical investigations of social phenomena, interpreters of the moral universe we inhabit have turned their own explanatory schemes inside out. In so far as we identify the deepest structures of modernity within Enlightenment philosophy, we have all become conceptual historians. Never has World Spirit been so manifest in human history as in the current epoch, marked by the social scientific community’s disencumbrance of that illusion. However much the eighteenth century may have failed to adopt its own leading principles, by the common agreement of its critics we find ourselves today trapped in the age of Enlightenment.
On the other hand, the spiritual triumph of Enlightenment ideas in practice, if such an apotheosis has indeed occurred, undermines the theoretical plausibility of the very social sciences which are said to contradict them. What can be the use of our truly empirical sciences of human nature and society when it is conceded that modernity has been shaped instead by the lofty abstractions of the Enlightenment Project? Why should our funding councils and universities subsidize the piecemeal investigations of our social researchers in the field when it is supposed that they will there only uncover the manifold intimations of Enlightenment thought? If ours is indeed the age of Enlightenment, whose theoretical principles have been unsheathed in the institutions which today govern our lives, might we not gain a better understanding of modernity by abandoning our social sciences and returning instead to the study of philosophical history?
I do not myself subscribe to the belief that contemporary civilization has been fundamentally shaped by Enlightenment principles, nor to the view that such principles have failed because they have not been, or never can be, universally adopted. I am convinced that critics of Enlightenment thought over the past two hundred years have, by and large, not understood that intellectual movement correctly, even though, unlike a great number of better-informed specialists of eighteenth-century doctrines, they have correctly identified the Enlightenment in terms of certain widely shared principles, across diverse subjects. I regret that the Enlightenment’s detractors have been so undiscriminating in their treatment of eighteenth-century thinkers as to fail to notice how much one central figure of that age of intellectual ferment—Rousseau—offered a more profound critique of some of the Enlightenment’s most cherished ideals and aspirations than any produced since his day. My comments here, however, will only address these issues obliquely. In appraising certain accounts of the ideological foundations of the modern world, I shall instead attempt to disaggregate broad claims that have been put forward about the political and scientific legacy of a so-called Enlightenment Project. I mean to identify a particular period in European intellectual and political history which, to my mind, came to exercise a decisive impact upon what in the West has come to be understood as genuinely modern society. I shall argue that in that period a number of Enlightenment principles were not so much enacted as transfigured in ways that made the practical realization of those principles, as they were actually adopted, inconsistent with other, still more central, doctrines of the Enlightenment. And I shall try to show that modernity’s debt to the Enlightenment took at least one institutional form which betrayed that legacy.
It will follow from my account that the most striking and persuasive criticism of modernity can be drawn from within the Enlightenment Project itself. I shall not mind if my remarks here may appear to constitute a peculiarly Hegelian reading of the connection between the Enlightenment and modernity by way of the French Revolution, except that I regard the incipient institutions of the modern state which in the course of the French Revolution came to contradict Enlightenment ideals as corresponding in practice to nothing so much as the theoretical image of the state elaborated in Hegel’s own post-Enlightenment political philosophy. My overriding objective will be to explain, as best I can in the short space available, how both the invention of our modern understanding of the social sciences, on the one hand, and the post-Enlightenment establishment of the modern nation-state, on the other, encapsulated doctrines which severed modernity from the Enlightenment philosophy which is presumed to have inspired it. I shall be offering illustrations not so much of the unity of political theory and practice in the modern world as of their disengagement. In providing here some brief remarks on how post-Enlightenment justifications of modernity came to part company from their Enlightenment prefigurations, I hope to sketch an account of certain links between principles and institutions which bears some relation to both Enlightenment and Hegelian conceptual history.
More than thirty years ago Reinhart Koselleck and Michel Foucault, independently and in different ways, remarked upon the upheavals of the intellectual map of Europe which they each described as having occurred over a period of several decades around 1800.3 Their respective notions of a Sattelzeit or period of accelerated social and ideological change, on the one hand, and of an epistemic metamorphosis across academic disciplines, on the other, comprise perhaps the two most striking among recent contributions to a very long tradition of speculation about the nature and roots of modernity. Every school child who is taught that the principal features of the modern world spring either from the French or from the Industrial Revolution is presented with political or economic images of the transformation of European society, which were prefigured in literary, artistic or philosophical terms in the Italian Renaissance in the mid-sixteenth century, in the French Querelle des anciens et des modernes of the late seventeenth century, and in the international republic of letters’ Encyclopédie of the mid-eighteenth century.
In what might be called the perennial discourse of modernity, the conceptual frameworks around the Protestant foundations of capitalism as introduced by Weber, or of the force of will and subjectivity in civil society and the state as explained by Hegel, or of egalitarian democracy as portrayed by Tocqueville, or of the class structures of industrial capitalism as depicted by Marx, have exercised far greater influence than any schemes of conceptual change along lines mapped by Koselleck or Foucault. But in a crucial sense, all these ideological frameworks for an understanding of the spirit and tensions of modernity have been abandoned by the very disciplines which modernity is said to have engendered. For the great new science of society, or sociology, that was developed in the nineteenth century came to be articulated in other ways, expressing different priorities, which were also to inform the self-images nurtured in the practice of diverse sciences of human behaviour, including psychology and politics. By relegating conceptual history to a secondary and derivative role, our post-Enlightenment sciences of society have deconceptualized the classical expressions of modernity itself.
In their focus upon the linguistic transformations and defining concepts of modernity, Koselleck and Foucault have righted that inversion and have returned with a vengeance to just those traditions of philosophical history which had purportedly ended with the birth of our social sciences in their genuinely modern form. From the perspectives they adopt, the discourse of modernity has turned upon itself and become a discourse about discourse. In the beginning was the word, and the world which we inhabit has been manufactured in its image, freshly ground in a crucible of linguistic change. The Sattelzeit delineated by Koselleck and his associates in their massive Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe over the past twenty-four years encompasses the period from about 1750 to 1850,4 and while their work is predominantly addressed to German intellectual and social history, it may also be read as a conceptual map of the whole of modernity, whose dynamic forces are encapsulated in two great monuments of human enterprise and endeavour at the beginning and end of that period, the Encyclopédie and the Crystal Palace. It was in the 1750s that the words perfectibilité and civilisation made their first appearance in any European language,5 and it is from the 1750s that the scientific, political and economic manufacture of modernity may be conceptualized around such terms.
Foucault’s scheme of the epistemic metamorphosis of classical into modern civilization was intended, in Les mots et les choses, to be concentrated in a shorter period of perhaps twenty or thirty years around the end of the eighteenth century, in which he located the genesis of the human sciences of biology, linguistics and economics by way of identifying their newly conceived principles and fresh vocabularies. In suggesting that 1795 was a pivotal year of that intellectual transformation, Foucault anticipated the more detailed work of Georges Gusdorf, Sergio Moravia, Emmet Kennedy, Martin Staum, Cheryl Welch, Brian Head and others devoted to the idéologues of the 1790s,6 and while he seldom turned his gaze upon the role of the French Revolution in his conceptual history of modernity, he drew special attention to a short span of years in which terms such as démocrate, révolutionnaire and terroriste—as well as idéologie itself—erupted into European political discourse in conjunction with the events or doctrines which these new words defined.
In his subsequent writings on the trappings of sexuality and power in the modern world, Foucault pursued the intimations of his work on the potency of concepts, by identifying our prevailing forces of social control fundamentally in terms of mental structures, the corrective disciplines of our forms of punishment issuing from our taxonomic disciplines of knowledge, our structures of pouvoir and patterns of savoir inescapably joined. With Koselleck and Foucault together, the discourses of modernity may appear to have supplanted sociology as the pre-eminent social science of our time. For those of us who require holy writ, the Bible of our civilization might as well be Printing and the Mind of Man.
In the remarks which follow, I shall comment on two subjects which, to my own mind, lend some substance to such discourses of modernity but at the same time also place a number of their central tenets in doubt. Recent research has identified the first printed use of the term science sociale in the year 1789 and has indicated that a recognizably modern conception of the nature of the social sciences was developed in the course of the French Revolution, at first to conceptualize the ideological programme which it was the Revolution’s purported aim to achieve but, subsequently, even more to account for its failures. Other research addressed to doctrines of the state and the nation and to ideas of representation which were formulated in the course of Revolutionary debates between 1789 and 1794 has suggested that some of the defining features of French government, in that crucial period of its invention simultaneously in the realms of theory and practice, were conceived within a framework that owed less to any indigenous tradition of French political thought than to a seventeenth-century English doctrine of the public personality of the state.7
The particular configurations of both subjects within a few tempestuous years of French history may be seen as lending some warrant to the conceptual histories of modernity offered by both Koselleck and Foucault, though for different reasons—supporting Foucault’s depiction of quite sudden and dramatic epistemic change around 1795, on the one hand, and Koselleck’s broader perspective on the interconnections between intellectual, political and social history on the other. The same point may of course be made negatively in each case, in that, with respect to the idea of a social science and the construction of the state in their modern forms, Koselleck’s account of a century–long Sattelzeit seems to grant insufficient priority to the immediate impact of the most momentous cataclysm of modernity, whereas Foucault’s sketch of the metamorphosis of the human sciences appears to lack the requisite political and institutional dimensions. The fundamental contrast between civil society and the state, as set out by Hegel and then overturned by Marx, also has some bearing on the presentation of my case here, in so far as I mean to consider the contemporaneous but at bottom antagonistic invention of fresh methods of interpreting society, on the one hand, and creation of fresh institutions for the maintenance of political order, on the other. The point on which I wish to place greatest stress, however, is that these two subjects illuminate not only certain connections between the Enlightenment and modernity but, even more importantly, certain tensions between them which conceptual historians of all denominations have characteristically failed to notice.
So that I may at least attempt to place both those connections and those tensions under some scrutiny, I must first, however, dispose of the argument, so often made by specialists of various disciplines of eighteenth-century intellectual history, or of particular geographical regions or circumscribed periods, that there never had been a coherent Enlightenment Project at all, so that any attempt to explain modernity with reference to it must be pure fabrication. Alternatively, that thesis may be advanced as well with regard to the notion of modernity. From either or both perspectives, it is claimed that the task of genuine historians must be to break down such global concepts, to explain diversity and conflict, to situate ideas only in the specific contexts in which they were manufactured, in all their rich particularity and texture.
The truth of such propositions is of course undeniable, and yet specialists who invoke them as a matter of principle in order to discount conceptual history altogether often do disservice to their own fields of research. Across a variety of disciplines in eighteenth-century thought, there lie questions fit for historical investigation about the common presuppositions of subjects we now see as unrelated only because we no longer share the perspectives of authors whose meaning we seek to explain. If we insist upon fragmenting eighteenth-century intellectual history because we are convinced that our current disciplines are marked by impermeable boundaries, we risk parting company from the very objects of our scrutiny. In our commendable pursuit of local knowledge gained from surveys of the Enlightenment Project’s manifold dialects and regional differences,8 we ought not to lose sight of the international dimensions of what was widely perceived, already in the eighteenth century, by its subscribers and enemies alike, to be a great intellectual movement orchestrated out of Paris, Edinburgh, Naples, Philadelphia and Geneva, with an Eastern flank in Königsberg and bustling outposts in publishing houses, literary salons, scientific academies and corresponding societies scattered over Europe and America. If throughout much of his life Rousseau took issue with an interdisciplinary and cosmopolitan Enlightenment Project after having initially contributed to it, I cannot see why we must deny ourselves any grasp of his own interpretation of its nature. At any rate, specialist historians of eighteenth-century thought can have scant impact in philosophers’ and conceptual historians’ current controversies about the Enlightenment Project if, from the wings, they just shout that there never was one. Better to confront the critics of the Enlightenment Project with evidence of their mistakes than to regard all their loose talk as beneath contempt.
When the abbé Sieyès introduced the expression la science sociale in the initial issue of his most famous pamphlet, Qu’est-ce que le tiers-état?,9 he did not herald this neologism as signifying a new science of society, different in its approach from all previous disciplines. The epistemic metamorphosis of the concept was no thunderbolt which, like the goddess Athena, burst from Zeus’s head. It was to follow rather than accompany the first appearance of the words, and Sieyès himself thought so little of them that in subsequent editions of this most popular of all French Revolutionary pamphlets he replaced them with the expression, la science de l’ordre social. The meaning of the words he employed seemed plain enough to him and needed no elaborate explanation. They simply referred to the principles of social order which France’s Third Estate, representing the nation as a whole, sought to realize in practice, divorced from all particular or factional interests. Reflecting on his own work in a conversation with Étienne Dumont a few months after the publication of Qu’est-ce que le tiers-état?, Sieyès remarked that politics was a science he believed he had already completed.10 He might have said the same of social science, for he imagined that, with his encouragement, the political system of France would be empowered to put into practice the science of society he had himself set out in theory, having elaborated it just so that it could be publicly enacted and thereby made real.
Subsequent appearances of the term in its earliest articulations have been traced to Pierre-Louis Lacretelle’s De l’établissement des connoissances humaines of 1791, to a pamphlet by Dominique-Joseph Garat addressed to Condorcet in December of that year, and to Condorcet’s own Projet de décret sur l’organisation sociale of January 1792. It is very likely that the words la science sociale gained a certain currency in the fertile political literature of the period from 1789 to 1792 and that other instances of their use in those years have still to be uncovered. But with respect to the expression’s already ascertained pioneering examples, perhaps two points in particular may be noted. First, it should be remarked that every one of these authors of the earliest recorded uses of the term was a member of the short-lived Société de 1789—a club formed to commemorate the launch of the Revolution and to ensure the success of its reconstruction of French society—which was dissolved in 1791 after its membership had splintered into just such sectarian groups, representing different interests of the nation, which Sieyès had sought to prevent.11
The second point to note about these earliest expressions of the term is its authors’ more or less indiscriminate conjunction of la science sociale with other human sciences, such as la morale and la politique, in the terminology of Lacretrelle, or even with l’art social, in the language of Condorcet, the aim of which, as he put it in the prospectus of the Société de 1789 that he drafted, was to promote political stability through constitutional reform, based upon the prevailing sciences morales et politiques. In its first printed articulations in the most politically explosive period at the dawn of the establishment of the modern state, la science sociale was introduced, quite innocuously, as a term roughly equivalent to politics in general. To purloin a remark (albeit with regard to the philosophy of Montesquieu) by Destutt de Tracy, himself the inventor of the term idéologie in the year 1796, it may be said that in the course of the French Revolution’s first endeavours to establish a new order, social science meant much the same as the new politics.12
After the rise and fall of the Jacobins and the passing of their Terror, the new term, science sociale, was to undergo the epistemic break or metamorphosis proclaimed by Foucault on behalf of all the human sciences, precisely in 1795, the year of the décalage, the great rupture or conceptual guillotine, as if men’s minds could only be changed after their heads had already been severed. In that year the Convention established the Institut national des sciences et des arts, and within it the Classe des sciences morales et politiques, one of whose six sections was called Science sociale, et législation. The stipulated conjunction of social science with legislation in this name, and the election of Sieyès, Garat and Cabanis to other sections of the Classe des sciences morales et politiques considered as a whole, might appear to make Foucault’s notion of an epistemic metamorphosis with regard to the words science sociale just a tame sequel to the first performance, articulated by at least the survivors of a cast of already familiar characters. After 1795, however, the term science sociale came progressively to acquire a fresh meaning, all the more explosive for its divorce from, rather than conjunction with, politics and legislation. From the time of Foucault’s annus mirabilis of the human sciences in general, social science in particular came to acquire the meanings now associated with it as the central science of modernity.
That transformation of a fresh expression into a new concept was made possible by the intellectual predominance within the Classe des sciences morales et politiques of another section devoted to the analysis of sensations and ideas, the specially recognized domain of the so-called idéologues, led by de Tracy and Cabanis, until the dissolution of the entire Classe in 1803 by the First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had his own way of effecting epistemic change. Separately and collectively, the idéologues attempted to delineate a new science of human nature which was more deeply rooted in the psychology of the human mind and the physiology of the human body than any conception of la science sociale as the art of politics could ever be. They had learnt the dreadful lessons of the Terror and, following the Constitution of the year 1795, they were less disposed than their precursors had been to proclaim the dangerously egalitarian doctrine of the natural rights of man, preferring instead to defend such rights as mankind could only enjoy in society. Distrustful of the critical character of the revolutionary programmes which had inspired the establishment of the Société de 1789, they were convinced that the problems of social disorder and derangement which the Revolution itself had generated were as striking as the despotism of the ancien régime had appeared to the aspiring legislators of the National Assembly. Wholesale constitutional reform had proved a remedy just as harmful as the disease, in part because it was too drastic, in part too superficial, engendering political violence without producing social change. While they were men of predominantly liberal temperament whose outlook remained, by and large, as secular as was the anti-clericalism of their precursors, their new conception of the science of society was more historical, more preservative, more solidly situated, they supposed, in the concrete world of real experience.
Perhaps above all, the idéologues sought to explain mental and moral phenomena scientifically by retracing them to their physical roots. One of their central figures, Volney, attempted in this way to account for the production of cultural institutions, including political systems and religious beliefs, in connection with the physical geography that shaped the manner in which diverse populations lived. In his Rapports du physique et du moral, first delivered as a set of readings to the Classe des sciences morales et politiques, Cabanis himself expounded a doctrine of la science de l’homme, which he conceived to be a synthesis of physiology, morals and the science of ideas. If the idéologues had produced their writings in the twentieth century, they would have been warmly received as fellow travellers of the contemporary school of the French Annales; already in the eighteenth century theirs was a social science of mentalités.13 Unlike Condorcet and Sieyès they could never have confused the nature of that science with the art of politics.
There were no doubt other factors as well as their distrust of politics and legislation which made the idéologues conspicuously less incendiary than had been the inventors of an acutely critical notion of la science sociale. It may even be the case that their membership of the Classe des sciences morales et politiques, which Keith Baker has described as the embodiment of Condorcet’s dream of a social sciences academy,14 lent a more conservative character to the discipline than had been conceived by their patron saint, just on account of its institutionalization in an academic setting made possible by patronage of a different kind. In adopting holistic methodologies of social explanation unlike those that had figured in the notions of Condorcet and Sieyès, at any rate, they parted company from their ideological precursors and could even appear to have made common cause with a number of profoundly reactionary critics of the whole French Revolution, including Bonald and de Maistre, who likewise supposed, and indeed stressed even more, that the political manipulation of French society had fractured it. In France after 1795, the idea of a genuine social science, or science de la société, as Bonald sometimes termed it, could be appropriated by romantic conservatives no less than by progressive liberals or socialists.15 In every case, however, it would exclude the political tampering of naïvely enthusiastic legislators and metaphysicians, now identified in the same rogues’ gallery as the clerics and despots reviled by the philosophes.
In large measure modelled upon the idéologues’ attempt to sketch a new science de l’homme, the first great synthesis, of a post–French Revolutionary science of society was to be the scheme elaborated by Saint-Simon in several writings of the early nineteenth century, culminating in his Introduction aux travaux scientifiques du XIXe siècle of 1807–1808 and his Mémoire sur la science de l’homme of 1813. While Saint-Simon perceived himself as a disciple of the Enlightenment, inspired in his revolutionary ardour by its critical spirit, its commitment to science and its Encyclopédie, he also found himself drawn to the philosophical conservatism of Bonald and acknowledged a special debt to the physiologist, Jean Burdin, the author of a Cours d’études médicales ou exposition de la structure de I’homme of 1803. Through Burdin’s influence he acquired the belief, to which he was to subscribe for the rest of his life, that physiology was the chief of all human sciences, and in his Mémoire sur la science de l’homme he put a case for a positive science of human nature and society which had as its aim the synthesis of the anatomy of Vicq-d’Azyr, the physiology of Bichat, the psychology of Cabanis and the philosophical history of Condorcet.
That science de l’organisation sociale, as he sometimes termed it, was to lead Saint-Simon to inspect the internal constitution and morphology of the social body in a fresh idiom, different from the perspectives, adopted by the philosophes of the Enlightenment he admired, including even Montesquieu, who above all other major eighteenth-century thinkers came closest to sharing his conception of a social science. In the course of the nineteenth century, through the influence of Saint-Simon’s principal disciple, Comte, this new positive science of society, soon to be known by the word Comte invented—sociologie—was to become the pre-eminent science of modernity itself. It would be the science of society conceived in terms of its organization, its infrastructure and internal functions. To ensure society’s proper order, it would require, not the constitutions of legislators, but regulation by administrators and engineers. In place of the political power sought on behalf of the public good by the first social scientists, after its epistemic metamorphosis the new science of society would promote social hygiene. Rather than aiming to achieve the enfranchisement of all citizens, it would be designed to fulfil the prognosis of Pope’s couplet from An Essay on Man:
For Forms of Government let fools contest;
Whate’er is best administer’d is best.16
No less than modern social science, the modern state is also an invention of the French Revolution, in this case bred not out of Thermidor but from the National Assembly of 1789, whose destruction of the ancien régime heralds the self-creation of modernity in its political form. In a notable series of writings, Quentin Skinner has traced the origins of our conception of the state to transfigurations of the language of status, or the condition of the members of a civitas, in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe into the modern terminology of état or state to signify the civitas as a whole.17 The development of such new terminology and the institutions of government which it articulates are of profound importance to an understanding of the modern state, as are the theories of sovereignty of Bodin and most especially Hobbes in the late sixteenth and mid-seventeenth century, which encapsulate some of the central features of states today as ultimate repositories of political judgement and founts of all authority, exercising uncontested rule within defined territorial limits. Foucault himself, in addressing what he took to be a shift in the art of government from control over lands to control over the conduct of subjects, also came to hold the view, albeit from a quite different perspective, that the character of the modern state began to crystallize around the theme of its own rationality—its raison d’état—towards the end of the sixteenth century.18
But however much prefigured by Hobbes’s doctrines of sovereignty and representation in particular, the modern state required for its formation a principle which is absent from the political philosophies of both Bodin and Hobbes, and which is missing as well from the vast number of tracts on the practice of government that were produced even earlier in the Renaissance. In addition to superimposing undivided rule upon its subjects, the genuinely modern state further requires that those who fall under its authority be united themselves—that they form one people, one nation, morally bound together by a common identity. With some notable exceptions, the modern state is of its essence a nation-state, in which nationality is defined politically and political power is held to express the nation’s will. Hobbes had conceived a need for a unitary sovereign in his depiction of the artificial personality of the state, but he had not supposed that the multitude of subjects which authorized that power could be identified as having a collective character of its own. Joined together with his conception of the unity of the representer, as outlined in the sixteenth chapter of his Leviathan, the modern state generally requires that the represented be a moral person as well, national unity going hand in hand with the political unity of the state.19 While it speaks with only one voice in the manner imputed to absolutist monarchy, the modern nation-state cannot take the form of a monarchical civitas along any lines set forth by Bodin or Hobbes. It is instead, as it has been known since the late eighteenth century, a democratic republic.
That expression, employed by Paine and others to explain how Athenian democracy could be writ large by way of the people’s representation in an assembly which they elect, has never corresponded properly, however, to the constitution of the United States of America which it purportedly described. In the course of their history, the people of America have not comprised a single nation, and in many respects, by design as well as on account of civil war, their government has not even been that of a single state. So far from having been incorporated in the federal constitution of the United States, the idea of democracy was held by its founding fathers—Madison most conspicuously among them—to be a dangerously despotic notion. The political authors of the first republic of the New World drew up their system in such a way as to ensure that it would be divided internally between the separate states and the different branches of government, so as to substitute indirect forms of authority for any democratic assembly of the people as a whole. Political modernity, in so far as it is marked by the advent of the nation-state, was to begin not in the United States of America but in Revolutionary France.20
In neglecting the most immediately pertinent political dimensions of modernity, Foucault managed to obscure the best reason for tracing its epistemic metamorphosis to the pivotal year of 1795. But he also left too vague his dating of modernity as a whole, since, if I may here invert the chronology of Bishop Ussher’s account of universal history since Genesis, modernity was endowed by its creator with its political form on 17 June 1789. Between modernity’s explosive birth and the fall of the Bastille, that is to say, the human race must have enjoyed four weeks of innocence. It might be supposed that conceptual historians are characteristically imprecise about dates, but Hegel’s grasp of the chronology of political modernity was perfectly correct, and for almost two hundred years the section devoted to ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’ in his Phänomenologie des Geistes has comprised the most accurate reading of its earliest stages.
On 17 June 1789, the deputies of the Estates General, which had been convoked the previous autumn by King Louis XVI, resolved that they were no longer assembled at the monarch’s behest but were rather agents of the national will (le voeu national), entrusted with the task of representing the sovereignty of the people of France. The three estates thereby constituted themselves as a single Assemblée nationale,21 bearing sole authority to interpret the people’s general will. It is in this way that political modernity was born, with a unicameral political system corresponding to a unitary will, a unified state speaking on behalf of an undifferentiated nation.
Since the motion that thus generated the National Assembly had been put—initially to the delegates of the Third Estate alone—by the abbé Sieyès, it may be said that the inventor of the term science sociale is also the father of the modern nation-state. Although the words souveraineté and état were seldom evoked in his writings, he had a better grasp of their meaning, as articulated in the political philosophy of Hobbes, than any other public figure of the French Revolution, and he was convinced of the indispensability of their application, in Hobbes’s fashion, to the first genuinely self-governing populace of the modern age. Allowing for mankind’s constant temptation to resist parental guidance, it therefore appears that Sieyès, on two counts, stands to the whole of modernity as does God to his Creation. Sieyès indeed strove harder than God had done to ensure that his handiwork flourished, since over the next several years after modernity had been born he was to be its nursemaid and counsellor as well. No one has contributed more to shaping the modern world’s political discourse and the character of its nation-state in particular.
Hegel, who had witnessed modernity’s birth and was to devote much of his life to portraying its childhood, came eventually to reflect upon Sieyès’ paternity of modernity, as it were, in his essay, Über die englische Reformbill, of 1831, where he remarked that Sieyès had been able to extract out of his own papers the plan which was to give France the constitution it came to enjoy.22 In the language which he had employed earlier in his Phänomenologie of 1807, he described this birthday of modernity, in his fashion, as the undivided substance of absolute freedom ascending the throne of the world without there being any power able to resist it.23
In pursuit of the reasoning which had led to the formation of the National Assembly, it next followed from its members’ debates of late August and early September 1789 that the King of France must be denied an absolute veto over its legislation, principally on the grounds that there could be no sovereign above the people’s representatives. Both Robespierre and Sieyès argued forcefully in the same debates that the King could not even be permitted a suspensive veto, since the unity of the nation prohibited any executive constraint over its legislative will, while the King’s particular will could not be elevated above the rest. The advocates of a suspensive veto, on the other hand, either wished, as monarchists, that the King should retain a residual power in a more mixed constitution, or, as democrats, that he might hold the Assembly’s power in check on behalf of the people of France.
Their triumph of 15 September 1789 over the opponents of any royal veto was three years later to ensure the final destruction of both the monarchy and the Legislative Assembly, which in October 1791 succeeded the National Assembly. For having been granted a suspensive veto but at the same time denied thereby the right to represent the nation, the King was to find his office preserved in name only, cut off from the populace to which he might have appealed against the state. When his suspensive veto came to be exercised on behalf of just those forces which had opposed the Revolution altogether, the people of France were able to see the fracture of their constitution that had been manufactured at its birth, and in a particularly trenchant way they came to recognize the weakness of the authority of their state. In the late summer of 1792, with the King and the Legislative Assembly in conflict, the nation in effect brought them down together. As Hegel accordingly remarked in his Phänomenologie, all social groups or classes which are the spiritual spheres into which the whole is articulated are abolished.24
Around the time of its establishment along lines envisaged in Sieyès’ plan, the National Assembly, seeking to make its identity clear, deliberated not only about the powers of the King but also about the powers of the people. Both in the spring of 1789 and again at the end of July, Sieyès argued successfully that the people of France must be denied any binding mandate, or mandat impératif, over their own delegates, since such a mandate would deprive the people’s representatives of their freedom and would accordingly substitute the multifarious particular wills of scattered citizens for the collective will of the nation as a whole. The act of creation of the National Assembly which Sieyès had sponsored declared that the Assembly was one and indivisible. As the father of modernity insisted, if the general will was to speak with one voice in a unitary nation-state, it could no more be accountable to the people at large than to a king.
At the heart of Sieyès’ conception of modernity lay an idea of representation which in his eyes was to constitute the most central feature of the French state. The modern age in its political form, which he termed l’ordre représentatif, depended for its prosperity upon a system of state management which adopted the same principle of the division of labour as was necessary for a modern economy. This system entailed that the people must entrust authority to their representatives rather than seek its exercise directly by themselves, their delegates articulating their interests on their behalf while they accordingly remain silent. In thus distinguishing the effective agents of state power from its ultimate originators, Sieyès merely pursued the logic of his own differentiation of active from passive citizens, whose separate identification for a brief period under the French Constitution of 1791 was to prove one of the crowning achievements of his career as the first legislator of modern France.25 In the light of his doctrine of representation, it was accordingly plain to Sieyès that the people as well as the King must be barred from seeking control over the National Assembly, since any diminution of its authority from an external source would constitute a danger to the expression of the general will.
There could be no confusion in France between representation and democracy such as inspired Paine and others to imagine that the hybrid form of government established in America had nourished a classical principle of self-rule in a large state. For Sieyès, who sometimes spoke of direct democracy as a form of démocratie brute, it would be tragic for the first genuinely modern state of human history to make a retrograde step. In establishing a political system that was without precedent, France could not hesitate between ancient and modern principles of government. Despite his endorsement of other constitutional safeguards against the sovereign assembly’s abuse of its powers, Sieyès did not permit any allegiance to Montesquieu with respect to such matters to overcome his mistrust of Rousseau; he was above all adamant that the people themselves, lacking discipline, must be deprived of such means as would put public order at risk. The inventor of the term science sociale was convinced that democracy was no more fit for modernity than was the mixed constitution that would issue from the preservation of a royal veto. No plebiscite or other vestige of direct democracy could be tolerated by the sole representative of the entire nation. Sovereignty thereby passed from the nation’s multifarious fragments to the people’s delegates constituted as one body, the populace ceasing to have any political identity except as articulated through its representatives, who by procuration were granted authority to speak for the electorate as a whole.
While the conception of the modern state put forward by Sieyès thus required that both the King, on the one hand, and the people, on the other, should be marginalized from the government of France, the implementation of his plan did not proceed as smoothly as he might have hoped. Apart from the King’s disinclination to yield all his powers to an assembly which he had originally called into being himself, the people had their revolutionary champions as well. The Jacobins, in particular, regarded Sieyès’ distinction between active and passive citizenship as anathema and, opposing his principle of the indivisibility of the general will as articulated by the nation’s representatives, they sought to return directly to the people, in their districts and through their communes, the indivisible sovereignty of the whole nation which had been expropriated by their independently minded political delegates. No less than Condorcet, among the Legislative Assembly’s internal critics, the Jacobins, from their Club and from the Commune of Paris, contended throughout 1791 and 1792 that the people must be empowered to exercise their rights as citizens, even if in defiance of laws that would silence them.
The Jacobin notion of sovereignty, conceived as residing with the people as a whole, thus seemed to contradict the logic of modernity pursued by Sieyès and his associates, in so far as the Jacobins portrayed themselves as standing for the people rather than for the nation that had been substituted for them. The case which Sieyès assembled on behalf of representation against democracy seemed to them a peculiarly modern form of despotism. In this respect, it may be said that Robespierre and Saint-Just embraced the idea of popular sovereignty not less but more than did Sieyès, who in fact found the term almost as uncongenial as Locke had done a century earlier. As opposed to the political idea of the sovereignty of the nation, which to them signified no more than the sovereignty of the state, the Jacobins subscribed to a belief in the social sovereignty of the nation conceived as the sovereignty of the people in general.
But the Jacobins’ contradiction of Sieyès’ logic of modernity was in a crucial sense illusory, since the nation which they envisaged to be comprised of all its people was to prove as monolithic as Sieyès’ conception of a nation represented by the state. When the Jacobins came to power within the Convention in the autumn of 1793, they behaved as Sieyès and his associates had done earlier, but in reverse—that is, they attempted to root out the people’s enemies within the state, just as Sieyès had sought to silence the enemies of the state within the nation. The right of initiative of all citizens through direct elections and by way of referenda, such as had been proposed by Condorcet at the beginning of the year, was tempered by layers of indirect suffrage and obstructions to collective action which left the people in their sections and communes with only a tenuous and residual right of veto, when the Constitution of 1793 came to be enacted after the Girondins’ fall. In attempting to render the citizen population of France active so that the people’s delegates could be accountable to and even decomissioned by their true sovereign, the Jacobins were obliged to cleanse the nation of its internal differences, closing the Catholic churches, for instance, and forcing the Commune of Paris, from which they had drawn so much of their own strength, to surrender its powers.
For the people to act as a collective grand jury of their government, they must also speak with one voice. Having supported the rights of primary assemblies against the state, the Jacobins came within the Convention to oppose assemblies which betrayed the nation. Pure democracy was to prove as incompatible in practice with Robespierre’s populism as it was alien to Sieyès’ notion of representative government, so that in 1793, no less than in 1789, when these two enemies had last been in agreement in their opposition to the royal veto, they could once again be of one mind. The Terror of the Jacobins was to follow directly from their idea of the sublime unity of the nation, which required a lofty purity of public spirit that made the vulgar purity of democracy seem an uncouth substitute for virtue. Popular sovereignty was not only to be given voice but actually created by the nation’s genuine representatives. The greatest enemy of the people for whom they stood, and who had still to be manufactured in the image of what they might become, were all the fractious people cast in recalcitrant moulds resistant to such change, who thereby stood in the way of the agents of the people of the future. As Hegel remarks by way of bringing the passage on ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’ in his Phänomenologie to a climax, in its abstract existence of unmediated pure negation, the sole work of freedom is therefore death, a death without inner significance, the coldest and meanest of deaths, like cutting off the head of a cabbage.26
The history of the early development of this political discourse of modernity, and of the French Revolutionary assemblies and debates in which its principles were articulated and transformed, has been recounted several times before, most thoroughly, to my mind, by Patrice Gueniffey and Lucien Jaume.27 Paul Bastid, Murray Forsyth, Pasquale Pasquino, Jean-Denis Bredin, Keith Baker, Antoine de Baecque, William Sewell and others have stressed the special significance of Sieyès’ contribution, and in a notable recent essay, Istvan Hont, placing further emphasis upon Sieyès’ doctrine, locates it at the heart of a long and complex debate, over several centuries, about the nature of the state in general and the character of the modern nation-state in particular.28 I have here, however, tried to flesh out what I believe to be Hegel’s reading of the French Revolutionary birth of political modernity, and that for several reasons: First, because I believe that Hegel’s conception of the Terror as joined umbilically to the foetus of the National Assembly in the act of its creation offers an exceptionally imaginative account of the connection between political theory and political practice, even of the transfiguration of philosophy into violence; second, because it forms one of the most remarkable interpretations ever proposed of the genesis of modernity as a whole; third, because it provides a conceptual history of the political form which Hegel believed modernity had taken that bears comparison with the schemes of Koselleck and Foucault, albeit in a dramatically different idiom; and fourth, because it portrays the French Revolution as the political offspring or afterbirth of the Enlightenment.
Hegel perfectly well understood Sieyès’ role as nursemaid and chief counsellor of the French Revolution, but as is plain most of all from his Philosophie des Rechts and his Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, he believed that the Revolution’s spiritual father was not Sieyès himself but Rousseau, who in the Contrat social had articulated the idea of absolute freedom which was to be given political embodiment in the National Assembly and was subsequently to be unsheathed in the Terror. I hold that belief to be entirely without foundation, and to the extent that it informs Hegel’s conceptual history of modernity, I regard its falsity as undermining his whole case for joining the French Revolution to the Enlightenment.29 Of course Hegel had no doubt that Rousseau’s attachment to the republics of antiquity and his contempt for the trappings of civilization bore witness to his fundamental antagonism towards Enlightenment ideals of human progress. But in prescribing a notion of liberty that was at once absolute and pure, Rousseau was in Hegel’s eyes the author of a philosophy which was no less abstract than Kant’s, and which, as a blueprint for political change, was to prove the most dangerous of all the monolithic schemes of the Enlightenment. Koselleck’s account of the conceptual origins of the French Revolution in his Kritik und Krise is similarly built round an extravagant portrayal of the impact of Rousseau’s insidious philosophy, deemed to have unleashed the permanent revolution and permanent dictatorship of the modern totalitarian state.30
According to Hegel, Rousseau’s great achievement had been to put forward the idea of will as the state’s fundamental principle. In conceiving his notion of the will only in terms of its individuality, or Einzelheit, however, he had in his characteristically shallow fashion portrayed the union of individuals within the state as a mere contract of particulars, whose indeterminacy and arbitrariness made impossible the truly concrete union of wills upon which the establishment of a genuine political community depends. Having constructed his notion of the volonté générale as a compound formed out of individuals’ capriciousness, Rousseau had failed to see that the universal or general will, the allgemeine Wille, of the state depends upon cooperative obedience to its rules rather than on any idea of contractual association designed to leave individuals as free as they were before. In attempting to invest Rousseau’s abstractions with political power, the revolutionaries of France overthrew the constitution of their state, because it stood in the way of the fulfilment of their principles. The Reign of Terror, Hegel claims in his Philosophie des Rechts, was the destructive and fanatical form which had been taken by Rousseau’s abstract idea of absolute freedom, when in practice it confronted institutions incompatible with its own self-realization.
Through the language he employs in his conceptual history of modernity, Hegel’s reading of the revolutionary influence of Rousseau might appear to correspond with other images that had been drawn by so many of Rousseau’s revolutionary admirers and critics alike in just those debates that were to inform the account of absolute freedom and terror which is offered in the Phänomenologie. As early as 1791, Louis Sébastien Mercier had produced a work whose very title encapsulates a belief that was already widespread at the time, Rousseau, considéré comme l’un des premiers auteurs de la Révolution. After the fall of Robespierre in 1794, Rousseau’s remains were transferred from their grave at Ermenonville and brought to the Panthéon in Paris, where le citoyen de Genève could forever be acclaimed as a hero of the French nation. More than three years earlier, Edmund Burke had denounced Rousseau as the ‘insane Socrates’ of the National Assembly,31 and throughout the last decade of the eighteenth century the Contrat social would indeed come to be esteemed as the Revolution’s holy writ, fusing its Ten Commandments and its Sermon on the Mount in a blueprint for a new social order conceived by the patron saint of the First Republic of France three decades before its actual Creation.
But neither Hegel’s reading of Rousseau, nor his conceptual history of the National Assembly’s prefiguration of the Terror in its act of union, bears any relation to France’s own revolutionary canonization of its spiritual legislator. The interpretation of Rousseau’s revolutionary significance offered by Hegel, later taken up by Marx, is based entirely upon Hegel’s understanding of what he regarded as a defining feature of the age of modernity, the advent of bürgerliche Gesellschaft, that is, the realm of civil society, which he describes, in his Philosophie des Rechts, as an association of self-sufficient individuals whose common interests are pursued by contract and through legal institutions only.32 Hegel was contemptuous of all political thinkers, including Rousseau, who laboured under the misapprehension that the state could be, or might ever have been, established by contract. It was within civil society alone, and not the state, as he conceived it, that individuals, the bearers of natural liberty, remain as free after making their common agreements as before. According to Hegel, Rousseau’s failure, and that of the revolutionaries he inspired after him, had quite simply been due to the fact that they had all attempted to construct the state in the image of civil society and had neglected to transcend it so as to enter the true realm of communal action, described as Sittlichkeit, or ethical life, in the Philosophie des Rechts. Rousseau had merely abstracted homo oeconomicus, the individual in a civil society or market economy, from his concrete political relations and then had falsely supposed that by contract such a person could come together with others like himself to form a civil association which had as its aim the preservation of each person’s natural freedom.
Hegel, following Fichte before him, never noticed that Rousseau’s account of the volonté générale pertained specifically to a collective will, resembling his own notion of the allgemeine Wille, rather than to a compound of particulars, which would have been merely the volonté de tous. He was not aware that Rousseau’s vision of the moral personality of the state, as outlined in the Contrat social, entailed much the same dimensions of political solidarity and self-recognition as part of a greater whole that were embraced by his account of ethical life. He did not perceive that Rousseau shared with him a notion of community that transcended the arbitrariness of the individual will in civil society.
Still less was Hegel attentive to Rousseau’s critique of the modern idea of representation—to his insistence that citizens could only be truly free if they were themselves engaged in legislation, since the substitution of one’s will by delegates acting on one’s behalf was nothing other than despotism. Even while upholding a commitment to civil liberty of a kind which could not be enjoyed except by citizens partaking of their state’s corporate identity, Rousseau insisted upon each person’s genuine autonomy, or self-direction, which Hegel wrongly assumed to mean the maintenance of natural liberty, thereby neglecting Rousseau’s belief that liberty must always exclude dependence on others, prohibiting the representation of individuals’ freedom of choice. Rousseau was convinced, as Hegel was not, any more than Sieyès had been, that to express the general will citizens must deliberate together and then heed their own counsel; they could not just vote for spokesmen who, as their proxies, would determine the nation’s laws. In large states, as Rousseau recognized in both his Contrat social and Gouvernement de Pologne, there must be means whereby the true sovereign could exercise its will even when assemblies were entitled, over prescribed periods and subject to general ratification, to speak with the consent of the people as a whole. There must in such circumstances be plebiscites, he believed, such as had been enjoyed by the people of the Republic of Rome, entitled to dispense with their tribunes at will, for in the presence of the represented, as Rousseau put it, there could be no representation.33
For all his misgivings about democracy as a form of government, Rousseau believed more passionately than any other eighteenth-century thinker in the idea of popular or democratic sovereignty. It was principally this doctrine, which was presumed to have been inscribed in all the Declarations of the Rights of Man and all the constitutions of the revolutionary years, that ensured Rousseau’s renown as the patron saint of a regenerated France. But the doctrine was upheld by him in its pure form, embracing the people as a whole,34 while the purity of purpose sought by Sieyès, Robespierre and their associates with respect to the sovereignty of the nation was always of another, contradictory, sort. As is perhaps plainest from his Gouvernement de Pologne, Rousseau subscribed to just that notion of a mandat impératif which in the modern world most closely approximated the full legislative authority of citizens acting collectively, such as he understood to have prevailed in the free republics of antiquity. He was a democrat against representation, he stood for the direct and unmediated sovereignty of the people against all forms of delegated power, and not once in the course of a revolution said to have been framed by his ideas did the advocates of his philosophy—in the National Assembly, the Commune of Paris, the Jacobin Club or the Club of the Cordeliers—come to prevail.
Hegel’s conceptual history of modernity, within which Rousseau’s idea of absolute liberty is portrayed as having engendered both the National Assembly and the Terror, was thus only made possible by the category mistake of his confusing Rousseau’s political doctrine with the philosophies of both Sieyès, whom he supposed to have put Rousseauism into practice, and Robespierre, whom he regarded as having brought Rousseauism to its dreadful climax. The father of modernity was of course no more likely to assume responsibility for the Terror than was God ever inclined to accept blame for original sin. Sieyès was never persuaded by Hegel’s reading of the French Revolution and always remained convinced that the Terror had actually sprung from the betrayal of his own ideas on the part of populists who could not abide the principle of indirect sovereignty which his theory of representation prescribed. From his point of view, a form of Rousseauism had indeed been responsible for the Terror, in dissolving all his achievements in the National Assembly through its successful implementation of just that brutish form of direct democracy which was unfit for the modern world.
The inappropriateness of democracy for modernity was as striking to Sieyès as was the unsuitability of modernity for democracy in the eyes of Rousseau. With regard to his grasp of the meaning of Rousseau’s political philosophy, Sieyès was as clear as was Hegel obscure. Perhaps it was because he was not himself a conceptual historian of modernity but only its father that his reading of the texts of other authors was sometimes less blind than that of modernity’s scribe. Most of the features of Rousseau’s political philosophy which Hegel had overlooked, Sieyès recognized, and he devoted much of his career to combating those democrats of the National Assembly who espoused them. As against Rousseau’s democratic notion of sovereignty he turned instead to that of Hobbes, even to the extent of preferring a monarchical over a republican regime if polyarchy was to be averted. Rousseau’s followers in the National Assembly had no understanding of the system of representation required in a modern state, he supposed, but at least a sketch of it could be drawn from the sixteenth chapter of Hobbes’s Leviathan.35 The Jacobins likewise, in their advocacy of one nation, proved as little democratic as was Sieyès in upholding the integrity of one state.
Yet even before the genuinely modern nation-state came to be manufactured by Sieyès, Rousseau was convinced that the world had already suffered more of modernity than it could bear. When he contemplated much the same future that Sieyès was to call into being, it filled him with dread. In the third book of Emile, as if to anticipate Koselleck, he remarked that ‘we are approaching a state of crisis and the age of revolutions. . . . I hold it impossible that the great monarchies of Europe still have long to survive’.36 He had perceived already, from the abuse of their popular mandates by the legislative assemblies of both England and his native Geneva, that when the people’s will is represented, absolute right was corrupted into unfettered power. He had foreseen the terror as vividly as Hegel described it. ‘Where force alone reigns’, he had remarked in his Lettres de la montagne, ‘the state is dissolved . . . that is how all democratic states finally perish’.37
Where, then, does this scenario, focused upon the French Revolution, leave the conceptual history of modernity with respect to its imputed origins in the Enlightenment? The pioneers of modern social science around the year 1795 plainly owe a debt to certain eighteenth-century thinkers and traditions of thought. Sieyès, as well as many of the idéologues whose use of the term science sociale differed from his own, drew inspiration from the sensationalist philosophy of Condillac and especially from his sketches, in his Traité des sensations and Traité des systèmes, of a unified science of human nature which would be free of the metaphysical abstractions associated with seventeenth-century notions of the soul. By way of Condillac, they also owed a more distant debt to Locke’s epistemology; and they agreed with Maupertuis, La Mettrie and d’Holbach, among Condillac’s contemporaries, that the moral attributes of human nature could be explained with reference to man’s physical constitution alone, and with Helvétius that the central task of a system of education was to shape the pliant clay of human nature. In their physiological conception of a social science the idéologues owed a certain debt to Bordeu and Barthez, indirectly perhaps even to Haller, taking particular stock of such features of the Montpellier school of physiology as had inspired Diderot’s writings on the subject and were to come to the notice of Saint-Simon mainly by way of Burdin and Bichat.
Above all, perhaps, they were spiritual descendants of Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois, in its attempt to formulate what might be termed deep structural explanations of human behaviour, interpreting laws in terms of manners and mores, and even religions by way of mental dispositions which reflected the influence of climate and other external factors upon the nerve fibres of the body. Most of the ideological and scientific sources of French Revolutionary social science were themselves French, but at least in his theory of the political division of labour, Sieyès believed that he had followed and even anticipated Adam Smith,38 who may therefore be described, as he has always been known in Japan, as the godfather of modernity, just as Voltaire was the godfather of the Enlightenment.
Foucault was in a fundamental sense mistaken to suppose that the human sciences were first invented around 1795, since the epistemic metamorphosis he traces to that period of European intellectual history actually had a longer term of gestation throughout the eighteenth century than he allows. In its materialist philosophy it may indeed be said to have issued, through the Enlightenment, from some central elements of seventeenth-century Cartesian science itself. But to describe that metamorphosis, in Foucault’s manner, as the invention of the human sciences does a great injustice to other themes and traditions of eighteenth-century thought, including Hume’s perspective, which aimed at establishing a science of human nature on different foundations, equally concerned with the internal operations of the mind, but drawn from a conceptual framework of natural philosophy or physics rather than physiology.
It could even be argued with some plausibility that the human sciences were not so much invented around 1795 as superseded then by fresh scientific schemes which had as their defining characteristic the elimination from their accounts of a specifically human element. Mirabeau’s La Science ou les droits et les devoirs de l’homme, or Filangieri’s La Scienza della legislazione or Ferguson’s Principles of Moral and Political Science, for instance—each published or compiled before the French Revolution—placed special emphasis upon notions of human action and the human will, upon what it is that persons have a mind to do, and how they ought to behave, in the light of such truths as could be established about man’s nature. Among the more striking features of the new sciences of society which Foucault’s conceptual history of the modern age portrays is the removal of politics from explanations of human nature—the elimination of the spheres of legislation and political action from la science sociale and their redescription as abstract, utopian, metaphysical and, after the Terror, dangerous to know. Nothing was to prove so destructive of that central feature of the Enlightenment Project which throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century was conceived as a science of legislation for the promotion of human happiness than the birth, by Caesarean section plucked from the womb of the old society, of genuinely modern social science. The proponents of the fresh disciplines that arose from around 1795 were far less committed than their predecessors to changing the world. They sought instead, by interpreting its internal functions, to preserve it.
While a comprehensive history of the early development of our modern notions of social science can only be pieced together from detailed accounts of its various disciplines, there should be little doubt that the advent of the nation-state, in its manufacture by the father of modernity and his successors, has not fulfilled the Enlightenment Project but, on the contrary, brought it to an untimely end. Over the past thirty years, Jürgen Habermas—perhaps the best-known enthusiast of Enlightenment principles among contemporary social theorists—has argued valiantly on their behalf and against their detractors, in promoting eighteenth-century ideals of rational and critical discourse in a bürgerliche öffentlichkeit, or bourgeois public sphere, comprised of citizens committed to the pursuit of indefinite social progress through all the richly textured mediums of self-emancipation.
Yet although the Enlightenment Project itself is in my mind in no way to blame for modernity’s failure, the demise of all that Habermas holds dear was already sown in the establishment of the nation-state under the guidance of Sieyès, who contrived in advance to cut off Habermas’s fondest hopes as if, instead of seeds that should be nurtured, they formed, in Hegel’s terminology, the useless head of a cabbage. For as has been noted by communitarian critics of modernity of all denominations from Leo Strauss to Sheldon Wolin and beyond, the establishment of the nation-state has been marked throughout its history by the depoliticization of its subjects and the destruction of the public sphere of their engagement with one another as citizens,39 accelerating a process decried, in the Enlightenment itself with reference to the state, even before it had become a nation-state, not least by Rousseau.
Unless it is the legal despotism of Le Mercier de la Rivière, not a single major scheme of government conceived by Enlightenment thinkers—not classical republicanism or its modern derivatives meant for large states, not enlightened monarchy, nor democracy, nor the re-establishment of the ancient constitution, nor the mixed constitution, nor the separation of powers—has come to prevail anywhere in the epoch sired by the father of modernity.40 Most commentators on the philosophical foundations of the modern age of course ascribe seminal influence not to Sieyès but to Kant, mainly in the light of his portrayal of autonomous human agency, freed from the shackles of classical metaphysics, religious dogma and historical tradition.41 After initially describing Kant’s arousal of philosophy from its dogmatic slumber as a soporific awakening which only lulled it into fresh anthropological sleep, Foucault himself came to reassess the impact of the Kantian ethic upon modernity as critical and liberating, if not the harbinger of universally acceptable rules of conduct.42
But in heralding the liberation of the self from all externally imposed authority, Kant excluded the domain of politics, whose most characteristically modern institutions in particular have embraced new images of personal identity and have given rise to fresh constraints upon the exercise of individual choice which are thoroughly incompatible with the ideals of moral independence that he espoused himself. Though he greatly welcomed the French Revolution, and in particular its republican zeal, Kant maintained a lofty optimism about its ultimate achievement on behalf of the whole human race that left little room for engagement as a protagonist of any of its immediate aims. A life-long sense of prudence and political circumspection no doubt also forbade the invocation of the modernist principles of his ethics as wholesale grounds for opposition to the modern state.
Yet Locke, near the end of the seventeenth century, and Rousseau and other liberally minded thinkers of the eighteenth century before Kant, had already denounced the Hobbesian account of sovereignty as a form of voluntary subjection, in consequence of which the people were deemed to be bound by an artificial power of their own making. It extracted slavery from liberty, claimed Rousseau in particular, driving the consenters to the Leviathan’s rule into chains which they believed would make them free. Since political power is by its very nature undemocratic, perhaps the principal ideological achievement of social contract theory in the two centuries in which it flourished in European political thought was its success in portraying the legitimation of state power back to front, as if it were ultimately enacted by the authorization of the governed, so that popular choice could be made to appear to have supplanted either God or nature as the real originator of the state.
The mandat impératif was in the eighteenth century designed to preserve an essential element of democracy within a system of representation whose centripetal force progressively tore it free of any popular control. In the course of the French Revolution democracy’s advocates were accordingly defeated, as they would be again in the Paris Commune of 1871. By and large, such defeats, which had several precedents in the history of the Roman Republic, were predictable, and so too would be the later triumph of the Leninist conception of a communist party vanguard of the proletariat over the democratically inspired criticism of Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg.
The utter inappropriateness of democracy for the modern age had been perfectly plain to Sieyès, and it is a measure of the impact of the father of modernity upon the social sciences we have inherited from the end of the age of Enlightenment that political scientists of the twentieth century, following Roberto Michels and Joseph Schumpeter, have shared Sieyès’ objections to pure democracy and have merely pursued them a few steps further. For in portraying the establishment of rule by competing elites as genuine democracy—that is, as the only sense of democracy that has any real meaning—they have adopted the representative alternative to democracy which Sieyès bequeathed to the modern age and have granted to it the name of its opposite.43 Almost every state throughout the world now describes itself as democratic in just this way.
Classical republicanism, on the other hand, can in some sense be said to have survived the French Revolution not just in name but in fact, for although modernity is inescapably hostile to it as well, it has managed to make fitful appearances at least in the only form our governments occasionally tolerate, that is, as socialism. With respect to its ideals of collective and civic identity, classical republicanism of course may itself be described as a forebear of modern nationalism and even of the nation-state. Yet since the French Revolution, most of its adherents, when they have upheld their principles, have remained sufficiently populist, sometimes even sufficiently egalitarian, to resist the hegemony of contemporary governments. So long as the nation-state continues to flourish, nevertheless, it may be safely assumed that modern republicanism, or socialism, will occupy in the political realm a place such as is filled by the polar bear in the natural world, as a species which has a splendid history but has become endangered, almost vestigial, now that it can no longer roam free.
If all this was in a fundamental sense predictable and in no way contrary to the plan of modernity mapped by its father, what could not have been foreseen by anyone in the Enlightenment or in the course of the French Revolution was the price that modern civilization would be obliged to pay for its establishment of the nation-state. In opposing the democratic mandat impératif in the National Assembly, Sieyès recognized the threat to the expression of the nation’s general will which might be constituted by the people. It was of the essence of his plan that the nation in assembly spoke for all the people and must never be silenced by the people themselves. Over the past two hundred years the nation-state has characteristically achieved that end because it represents the people, standing before them not just as monarchs had done earlier, as the embodiment of their collective will, but rather by assuming their very identity, bearing the personality of the people themselves. While a small number of genuinely multinational states have in that period been established as well and continue to flourish, the majority of peoples everywhere now comprise nations which, by way of their representatives, are politically incorporated as states. All peoples that have identities form nation-states. What Sieyès did not foresee was that in the age of modernity heralded by his political philosophy, a people might not survive unless it constituted a nation-state. In the age of modernity, it has proved possible for the nation-state to become the enemy of the people.
To the Hobbesian theory of representation, the nation-state adds the dimension of the comprehensive unity of the people, the representer and represented together forming an indissoluble whole, the state now identical with the nation, the nation bonded to the state, each understood through the other. As Hannah Arendt rightly noted in her Origins of Totalitarianism, it has been a characteristic feature of the nation-state since the French Revolution that the rights of man and the rights of the citizen are the same.44 By giving real substance and proper sanction to the various declarations of the rights of man within the framework of its own first constitutions, the French revolutionary nation-state invented by Sieyès joined the rights of man to the sovereignty of the nation.45 It defined the rights of man in such a way that only the state could enforce them and only members of the nation could enjoy them.
So far from putting into practice the universal rights of man long advocated by proponents of cosmopolitan enlightenment, the modern nation-state was to ensure that henceforth only persons comprising nations which formed states could have rights. In such modern states as are not genuine nation-states, human rights may still have some purchase. In the United States, in particular, where citizens have no single national identity, courts of law are generally so sympathetic to the exercise of human rights, and so generous in their recompense when they judge that such rights have been breached, that lawyers seldom charge their clients in advance for their services. But the history of modernity since the French Revolution has characteristically been marked by the abuse of human rights on the part of nation-states which alone have the authority to determine the scope of those rights and their validity.
Not only individuals but whole peoples which comprise nations without states have found themselves comprehensively shorn of their rights. At the heart of the Enlightenment Project, which its advocates perceived as putting an end to the age of privilege, was their recognition of the common humanity of all persons. For Kant, who in Königsberg came from practically nowhere and went nowhere else at all, to be enlightened meant to be intolerant of injustice everywhere, to pay indiscriminate respect to each individual, to be committed to universal justice, to be morally indifferent to difference,46 even while obedient to civil authority. But in the age of the nation-state, it is otherwise. Thanks ultimately to the father of modernity, ours is the age of the passport, the permit, the right of entry to each state or right of exit from it which is enjoyed by citizens that bear its nationality alone. For persons who are not accredited as belonging to a nation-state in the world of modernity, there are few passports and still fewer visas. To be without a passport or visa in the modern world is to have no right of exit or entry anywhere, and to be without a right of exit or entry is to risk a rite of passage to the grave. That above all is the legacy bequeathed to us from the political inception of the modern age on 17 June 1789. It was then that the metempsychosis of modernity began, when we took the first steps of the Mephisto Waltz of our transfiguration, when we started to manufacture Frankenstein’s monster from Pygmalion’s statue.47