By way of commenting on the study of manuscripts I mean in these remarks to put a plea for toleration, or methodological eclecticism, as distinct from both the philosophical and especially the contextualist approaches to the interpretation of political argument now prevalent among Anglo-American theorists. Uncovering manuscripts might be thought to lead merely towards arcane knowledge gained from subtextual probes with scalpels and lenses, and in conducting archival research I have indeed sometimes felt myself transported by otherworldly attractions, sniffing the glue of the secret diaries of long-departed friends. The case I wish to advance here, however, has less to do with remoteness than pertinence. I shall be concerned most particularly with the insights that manuscripts may shed upon writings destined to become more sharply focused through later refinement but which, in their initial and sometimes explosive utterance, offer glimpses of the interpenetration of themes that cross their authors’ minds perhaps more clearly than do published works.
I first met Jimmy Burns in the mid-1960s when I was a postgraduate student at the London School of Economics working on Rousseau and some of his modern interpreters, just after Jimmy himself had addressed the same themes in a notable article in Political Studies that had caught my attention.1 Why he was so patient in dealing with a stranger who could not refrain from disputing his own account of Rousseau’s meaning did not then prompt the curiosity on my part it merited, and later I found it required no explanation at all, since Jimmy was indiscriminately gracious to all tiresome and importunate students. Over the years I have often thought that his proposed translation of the real title of the work for which Du Contrat social2 was only intended as a half-title—that is, Principes du droit politique—made perfect sense as Principles of Constitutional Law, if only because that title is virtually irresistible to anyone who devotes so much of his own professional life to the study of Bentham. It was, moreover, by way of his treatment of Bentham, rather than Rousseau, and most particularly his painstaking devotion to deciphering Bentham’s manuscripts, that I came to find in Jimmy a kindred soul whose sensitivity to the surprises that lurk in archives spared him the methodological strait-jackets of either dogmatic truth or demonstrable accuracy such as too often confine one-eyed studies of political thought. Of all the memorably congenial political theorists or intellectual historians of his generation, Jimmy has always struck me as the most benign and most tolerant. In keeping his distance throughout his professional life from a political thinker he served as an indefatigable amanuensis, he gave me reason to hope that my transcription of Rousseau’s manuscripts need not of itself contaminate me fatally. He has shown us all that it is possible to probe conceptual undergrowths without losing sight of the bridges or buttresses overhead. Even the writing of methodological essays is largely alien to him. In resisting that temptation, he has proved wiser than I can be here.
In commenting on manuscripts mainly in order to correct contextual treatments of political thought, I have it in mind less to stress the putative differences between historical and philosophical readings of texts than to cast doubt on the validity of such distinctions. Historians of ideas often decry the attempts of philosophers to address the sense of past thinkers’ arguments in plucking them from the circumstances of their composition, but through these remarks I mean to show that contextual meanings also have to be ascribed and legislated by their interpreters. They are not, merely on the evidence of their being couched in historical terms, thereby rendered more accurate or more reliable. In his entry on ‘History’ in the Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy edited by Robert Goodin and Phillip Pettit, Richard Tuck has described the historical revolution, to which he has contributed much himself, as ‘the new history’, a term appropriated by Dario Castiglione in a notable essay on the subject published a few years ago in the Political Theory Newsletter.3 There may indeed be as many denominations of ‘the new history’ as there are persons who practise it, proceeding, for instance, from Stefan Collini in his focus on the determinants of a political culture, to John Pocock on political language and discourse, to Quentin Skinner on the intentional meaning of particular authors. If the approaches they adopt are in each case distinctive, however, our new historians of political thought are nevertheless agreed that political writings must always be situated within the particular intellectual landscapes that define them, excluding philosophical perspectives as anachronistically decontextualized from the worlds and the works they purport to explain.
To my mind, however, in insisting upon the contextual analysis of political doctrines, we risk just relocating ambiguities of interpretation from one domain to another. What counts as a proper context is not an independent variable but inescapably our own construction, as open to challenge as are the abstractions it is meant to supplant. This is hardly an original thesis. It has many precursors and in terms I admire was articulated at length in 1933 by Michael Oakeshott in Experience and Its Modes. My aim here is to pursue its implications with reference to the study of manuscripts, which I believe need not be based on presuppositions as to what their authors must mean in the light of the intentions we impute to them or the interpretations of their thought which we ascribe to their immediate contemporaries. Manuscripts are of course no more pregnant with meaning than are published works; their recoverable sense also reflects the skills of their interpreters. But as well as constituting drafts of other texts, they can point towards meanings their authors might later refine, sharpen, blunt, suppress, abandon or deem insignificant. They may articulate a free association of ideas and give expression to dreams that wend across disciplines. As distinct from the works to which they give rise, they are genuine pièces fugitives, not to be confined to quarters, bursting from their contexts.
As I understand them contextual readings of political arguments do not, as a matter of fact, always displace philosophical ones, and even the most historically learned interpretations may seem at bottom to have eluded the truth. Consider for a moment a number of recent studies of Locke. Thanks initially to Peter Laslett and his pupils, and now to several generations of scholars inspired by his contextualist account of the Second Treatise, we have come a very long way from Brough Macpherson’s model of the capitalist presuppositions of Locke’s theory of possessive individualism. After John Dunn in particular it has become impossible for Locke scholarship to make a retrograde step with impunity. But where exactly do we find ourselves in having assimilated the most up-to-date contextualist interpretations of Locke’s political thought? James Tully, among the most learned of all our new historians of the subject, does not, as I read him, make use of his undeniable scholarship to decisive advantage in his confrontation with Jeremy Waldron about the true meaning of the texts they explore. Perhaps no one has ever studied the sources of Locke’s political philosophy in general, or his theory of property in particular, with greater care, and I am unacquainted with any finer treatment than Tully’s of Locke’s debts to, and departures from, Suárez, Grotius and Pufendorf, in their uses of the terms dominium and proprietas, and of the formulations of his objections to Filmer.
Much of Tully’s substantially juristic account of Locke on property is designed to refute the anachronisms of Macpherson’s essentially economic interpretation of the same subject, and in highlighting their differences he lays great stress upon the fact that, on his reading of the text, ‘property in political society is a creation of that society’,4 not so much a natural right preserved as an entitlement determined by positive law, its distribution accordingly secured by convention. Several passages of the Second Treatise are presented as evidence which informs this interpretation, which to my mind is neither required by Tully’s account of Locke’s sources, nor warranted by the text itself, including the passages presented by Tully in defence of his claims, even allowing for the opacity of Locke’s own views.
In a long commentary on Tully’s thesis, Jeremy Waldron provides what seems to me far more convincing testimony, equally drawn from the Second Treatise, that property rights are indeed natural entitlements which ought to survive men’s transition to civil society from their original state, as not only Macpherson but other careful readers of that text had correctly understood to be its meaning. When Locke speaks of property rights as ‘determined’ by positive law, he is not claiming that they are created by civil society but only that they are regulated there, Waldron contends,5 recalling a somewhat similar debate which some years ago exercised other political theorists about the meaning of bestimmen or determine in Marx’s theory of history. My point here is not to show that a subtly contextualist reading of a political doctrine may be successfully challenged by a purely analytical account, or that the doctrine is better interpreted with respect to its internal coherence than in the light of claims prevalent in works its author embraced or combated. I mean only that Tully’s case, designed to disabuse Locke’s readers of a widespread misconception, remains unproven in the face of Waldron’s challenge, and I am surprised to find that in his most recent study of Locke in Contexts, where Tully replies to his critics, he leaves this objection unanswered.6
Consider, too, the work of the late Richard Ashcraft who, after devoting more than twenty years of his life to the most brilliantly meticulous study of Locke’s democratic radicalism that could ever have been hoped for this side of pedantry, had to contend with Ellen Meiksins Wood’s carefully assembled riposte that Locke was no democrat, as well as with Mark Goldie’s even more closely argued challenge to the effect that he was not much of a radical either.7 Because it turns around manuscripts I shall comment exclusively on this second case. As readers of History of Political Thought and The Historical Journal will know, the question of whether Locke had been a covert conspirator against James II has come to hinge on the meaning of the word tree in letters he addressed around 1685 to one of the members of his circle, Samuel Clarke, identified by Ashcraft as a fellow conspirator. Writing to Clarke about ‘seeds’ and ‘trees’, Ashcraft claims that these terms were a code for ‘money’ and ‘troops’, to which Goldie replies that Locke had an abiding interest in vines and trees, in this context expressing a preference for limes over horse-chestnuts, so that when he talks of ‘trees’ Locke just plainly means ‘trees’—a point unconvincing to Ashcraft, who retorts that the letters are in ciphers, marked by the repetition of secret injunctions Clarke would have understood.8
Not least as a student of Rousseau, I am myself quite partial to trees, and since those which Rousseau recollects in the Seventh Walk of his Rêveries may, I suspect, have been originally inspired by a lust for Sophie d’Houdetot which he hoped might be more lyrically persuasive in botanical form, I can understand, with Ashcraft, how reference to trees might pass from one discourse to another. In Locke’s own lifetime, after all, Andrew Marvell had also employed a kind of sexual code in his rich imagery of vegetable love. But how are readers to legislate between Ashcraft and Goldie in this matter? Goldie’s common—or garden—reading of Locke on trees seems quite compelling, but even if Locke had only meant to state his preference for limes over chestnuts, may we not see that preference itself as at least a faint sign of his radicalism, bearing in mind that the lime is a Whig tree, in contrast with the oak, which is Tory? May we not turn to chapter 5, paragraph 28 of the Second Treatise, where Locke speaks of being nourished by acorns picked under an oak, and, noting that there is no reference to limes anywhere in the text, thus deduce that he held the state of nature itself to be Tory? At any rate, when a weary Ashcraft calls for ‘interpretive charity’,9 I feel inclined to regret our collective failure to grant him that peace of mind in good time.
Or consider Richard Tuck on Hobbes. In a number of recent essays, and in his 1989 ‘Past Masters’ on Hobbes, Tuck has suggested that the anonymous manuscript entitled A Short Tract on First Principles, uncovered by Ferdinand Tönnies among the Harleian papers in the British Museum and published a century ago, is not in fact by Hobbes.10 Supposing that it is indeed Hobbes’s work, other scholars had dated it from around the end of 1630 or the beginning of 1631, and there at least appears to be no dispute that if it were actually by Hobbes it would have had to be drafted before 1636, when we know from his correspondence that he had come to reject the particulate or corpuscular theory of light which the work embraces.
Since Tuck, however, had already established to his own satisfaction that Hobbes had no consistent natural philosophy before the publication of Descartes’ Discours de la méthode in 1637, he claims that there is nothing particularly Hobbesian about the Short Tract and no good reason for ascribing it to Hobbes, preferring instead to attribute it to Robert Payne, a member of the circle of Sir Charles Cavendish and the Earl of Newcastle at Welbeck Abbey. Johann Sommerville, a former pupil of Tuck, finds his tutor’s arguments plausible, without, however, hazarding the manuscript’s attribution to Payne.11 In his remarkable edition of Hobbes’s Correspondence, Noel Malcolm agrees with Tuck that the Short Tract, apparently drafted in Payne’s own hand, can for that reason be ‘plausibly attributed to him’, although he disputes Tuck’s identification of Payne’s handwriting in the light of letters which he contends are not actually in Payne’s hand but are, rather, transcripts from Payne made by Thomas Birch.12 According to Tuck, at the time the Short Tract is alleged to have been drafted Hobbes had been preoccupied with epistemological matters and not natural philosophy—in particular, with the fashionable revival of Pyrrhonianism under the influence of Montaigne and Charron, whose sceptical challenge was met in this period by Mersenne and Gassendi, together with their mutual friend, Hobbes, before the argument would later be given a new twist in the direction of natural philosophy by Descartes.13
But Tuck’s reading of the Short Tract has not borne well the close scrutiny of other historians, it having already been established by Jean Jacquot in 1952 that the handwriting of the text in question bears striking similarity to that of a letter addressed by Hobbes to Cavendish among the same papers.14 To more recent commentators on the subject, there seems scant reason for denying Hobbes’s authorship, notwithstanding Tuck’s suppositions of the correct timing of Hobbes’s pertinent intellectual interests such as would contextually preclude his having had the range of scientific interests the work articulates. As Richard Popkin and Tom Sorell have shown over the past couple of decades, moreover, the sceptical crises which troubled Mersenne and Gassendi are hardly mentioned by Hobbes, who, by contrast, following Descartes’ imputation of plagiarism in a letter to Mersenne, replied that certain ideas on light which he admittedly shared with Descartes had not been culled from his work but had been independently conceived in research he had undertaken around 1630, as he had already conveyed to the Earl of Newcastle and to Cavendish at the time, which forms one of the main reasons for the scholarly ascription of the Short Tract to that period in the first place.15
In a notable commentary on the subject published in 1993, Perez Zagorin agreed with Sorell that the appropriate context for an assessment of the Short Tract is that of Euclidean geometry and Galilean mechanics, providing sources for the formulation of Hobbes’s natural philosophy independent of Descartes, and an anti-sceptical focus around a theory of perception, owing little to the epistemological doctrines of Mersenne and Gassendi, whose expression, in much the same terms, can be traced from the Short Tract to the Elements of Law, which had supplied Tönnies’ original reason for publishing the works together.16 Two years later, in the most authoritative treatment of the Short Tract thus far produced, Karl Schuhmann demonstrated, not least by meticulously collating this text with passages from other writings by Hobbes, that it must indeed have been manufactured by him, albeit probably in 1632 or 1633 rather than 1630.17 Allowing that Tuck may one day reply to what now seems a formidable set of objections to his exclusion of the manuscript from the corpus of Hobbes’s writings, it seems to me that, at least for the time being, the historical case against his contextualist reading of Hobbes is as persuasive as Waldron’s philosophical case against Tully’s reading of Locke. How is it that the new history, which like logical positivism in the 1930s was meant to overcome our confusion of categories in the interpretation of arguments, has sometimes managed to conduct us from one wilderness to another? Where are the clearings in the history of political thought from which we can safely map out a new frontier? Who benefits from this surfeit of fresh readings, of which, to my taste, too many come into the world with the express wish that the others should leave it? Plainly our publishers benefit, for in so far as our new historians have failed to dispose of decontextualized analyses, on the one hand, while at the same time generating multiple candidates for historical investigation, on the other, we are now confronted with several accredited perspectives on every major thinker where before it was thought that a single framework might suffice—at least two Hobbes industries, three independent approaches to Locke and four distinct ways of situating Mill in the history of liberal thought, allowing, of course, that Mill’s contribution to liberalism was problematic even before the historians parted company from the philosophers. What are we to do in the face of such confusion? Never mind who wrote the Short Tract on First Principles. If we must all unravel the intricacies of the connections between Hobbes and the de facto Tories, Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy, or Hobbes and the Royal Society (in this case a lack of connection), who can blame those among us who give up in frustration in the face of so much historical detail and just resign themselves to their original brisk grapple with the unsituated mysteries of eighteen central chapters from the Leviathan? In the short space that remains, let me suggest how the study of manuscripts may point in another direction.
Of course manuscripts sometimes matter scarcely at all. No one would have been more dismayed than Marx to find the history of Western communism in the twentieth century so much shaped by the scholarly interpretation of papers that, around the time of their composition, he jettisoned to the scrap heap of history. Such papers, moreover, take widely different forms, from documents in public records offices to jottings and drafts of letters which their authors abandoned. Each of these forms invites an appropriate scholarly use, as is plain, for instance, from Ralph Leigh’s magisterial edition of the Correspondance complète de Rousseau, which assembles the biographical details of perhaps five thousand minor figures who populated Rousseau’s world from manuscripts of one kind, but also documents the immediacy of Rousseau’s vision and the stages of creativity of his writing from manuscripts of another. Let me call this second kind dreams trapped in archives, although the same manuscripts may sometimes be better described as nightmares which decline to take leave of their host.
There are of course many important aspects of the subject which must be overlooked here—not least what counts as a manuscript in this age of new technologies when, in the composition of our texts upon screens, we destroy the rough drafts that express the spontaneity of our imagination in the very act of refining statements we hope will be fit for public consumption. There are also notable technical problems about the retrieval of manuscripts, for instance in Henry Hardy’s reconstruction of dictated recordings of lectures given by Isaiah Berlin for which, in certain instances, there was no surviving manuscript. Thanks to the ingenuity of staff at the National Sound Archive who located a relic in the National Science Museum and thereby managed to reassemble a long defunct dictabelt transcription machine, the transfer of obsolete tapes to modern cassettes was achieved and Berlin’s ipsissima verba have survived,18 which, if the matter had been left to him alone, may not really have been his first preference.
The point I wish to stress is that if we start from an author’s manuscripts rather than the imputed context of his or her published work, we might at least avoid the trap into which Tuck has apparently fallen of supposing that a manuscript cannot be by its author, because it does not seem tailored to fit that context. To put this point in more general terms, one of my main objections to the contextualist strictures of our so-called ‘new history’ of political thought is that it seems, to my mind, too narrowly political in focus. Having divorced the truly historical treatment of texts from the world of political theory to which my former tutors supposed they could freely contribute by way of commenting on past authors, our new historians have also sometimes disengaged those features of an intellectual context which they regard as appropriate to political argument from all the rest, isolating the various languages of politics they address from other discourses—from anthropology, psychology and the philosophy of music and language, for instance, just to name certain themes of particular interest to me. The compelling attraction of such circumscribed frameworks for historians is that they can provide an apparently more solid foundation—embracing institutions and sometimes even events—within or around which to locate ideas in context that more abstract interpreters have ignored. In transporting political thought from the peaks of Parnassus to the lowlands of the Fens, some of them have brought down-to-earth, even subterranean, respectability to a subject which, in History Faculties or Departments, is otherwise held to be irredeemably philosophical. But political institutions and the popular languages of public morality are by no means the only framework within which political theories were formed.
When in the late 1960s I came across and then later transcribed the manuscript of Rousseau’s Du principe de la mélodie in the archives of the Bibliothèque de la Ville de Neuchâtel, I was particularly drawn to those passages of the text which I took, and still take, to be of remarkably political character. It is in this manuscript that we find the first surviving draft of what were to become chapters eighteen and nineteen of the Essai sur l’origine des langues in which Rousseau describes the chords of the scale of Western music as a crude and vulgar innovation unknown to the Greeks and then traces the moral decadence of modern music to the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire, bringing about, among other things, the destruction of the mellifluous intonations of ancient Greek and Latin and their replacement by the dull and nasal consonants which Emperor Julian had compared to the croaking of frogs. As prose replaced poetry the civic culture of its speakers likewise became prosaic, Rousseau claims, and thereafter, in the final chapter of his Essai, entitled ‘Rapport des langues aux gouvernemens’, he argues that languages which have come to be separated from music are inimical to freedom.
No earlier sketch of that chapter figures in Du principe de la mélodie, but the political implications which Rousseau draws directly from his account of the corruption of music and language in the manuscript I uncovered and transcribed19 point to a thematic unity of his philosophy which embraces disciplines that his specialist interpreters must bridge if they are to grasp his meaning correctly. It was Rousseau’s belief that a prosaic rhetoric inspires servile manners and that speech made hollow by its lack of tone and rhythm also makes for hollow men. The languages of modern Europe are little more than the ineffectual chatter of persons who just murmur feebly to one another, with voices that lack inflection and therefore spirit and passion as well, he argued. As our speech has succumbed to the loss of its musical traits, so has it been deprived of its original vigour and clarity and become instead little more than the faint mutterings of individuals who have no strength of character or purpose. In the form they have currently adopted in commercial society, the vocal intonations which had once expressed our pleasures, Rousseau explains, have been reconstituted as the terms that denote our trades. Whereas the languages of passion had been superseded by the languages of need—that is, aimezmoi had been replaced by aidez-moi—now all that we say to one another is donnez l’argent. Any attentive reader of the Contrat social will recognize the same critique of commercial society in Book III, chapter fifteen, with the same expression—donnez de l’argent—there rendered as the principal medium of commercial society’s discourse.
To my mind, Rousseau’s philosophy of music forms a no less integral feature of his political theory than does the same subject in the Republic of Plato, and yet, despite the fact that the text had been recorded more than seventy years ago,20 and despite other evidence known to scholars that it had originally been drafted as a fragment of the Discours sur l’inégalité and was then withdrawn because of its length,21 Du principe de la mélodie had never been seriously studied before, largely on account of its also including more technical treatments of music in reply to Rameau’s objections to the articles on music Rousseau had prepared for Diderot’s Encyclopédie. Rousseau’s philosophy of music, which forms much the largest single subject aside from his correspondence in the quite massive Neuchâtel archive, has only in the past twenty years or so received the editorial notice it merits, simply because a certain (albeit modest) command of musical notation and musical theory is indispensable for that task, and Rousseau’s literary and political editors have been unable or unwilling to acquire a sufficient mastery of the subject to deal with it in a scholarly way. But it lies at the heart of both Rousseau’s life and his writings as a whole, and I believe that there can be no persuasive interpretation of his political philosophy which ignores it.
Let me add one other point here about what might be regarded as solely aesthetic and acoustical reflections in the context of Rousseau’s political and social philosophy. In recounting what he takes to be the decay of Western music in its divorce from the inflected languages of antiquity, Rousseau as I read him just adds a correlative perspective to his account of civilization as mankind’s progressive enslavement to institutions which purport to make it free. That proposition is indeed implied by his manuscript testimony to the effect that Du principe de la mélodie once formed a fragment of the Discours sur l’inégalité. What, indeed, are our moral relations as Rousseau conceived them but calculations of intervals in scales whose harmonies may take the form of dominant and subdominant modes? The prevailing social divisions between persons have their counterpoint in the divisions of their octaves, the enthralments of instrumental music are matched by those of instrumental politics, and the subjugation of peoples is achieved in no small measure by their masters’ conjugation of verbs and their manipulation of language in general.
When Rousseau takes issue with the notion of the basse fondamentale of Rameau, in particular, his style of cross-examination seems to me remarkably akin to that of John Plamenatz on Hobbes.22 Rousseau’s method of interrogating not only Rameau but also Locke, Diderot, Buffon, Condillac and Helvétius, as well of course as his most formidable adversary, Hobbes, distills from their writings what he regards as profound, disposes of what he holds to be mistaken, inconsistent or naïve, relocates their arguments in specific contexts to show that they do not hold universally, if at all, identifying them as peculiar perspectives bred of a particular time and set of circumstances, wrongly extrapolated in his view, to human nature in general. His main complaint against other luminaries bears a striking resemblance to the allegations of decontextualized anachronism so often made by advocates of the new history, except that in order to grasp this charge one must first contextualize it philosophically, with respect not just to the immediate circumstances of its composition in connection with Rameau’s notion of the basse fondamentale, but also a whole tradition of speculation, across a variety of disciplines, which Rousseau takes to task as if confronting contemporary adversaries. His charges are quintessentially those adopted by Plamenatz, and indeed, if I dare say so, Macpherson, as well. Supposing that in order to break the hermeneutic circle, we must somehow at least attempt to enter the minds of past authors and not just reveal the strategies of their published works, why must we handicap what is already an undeniably, perhaps insuperably, difficult task, by excluding from our focus of interpretation the very devices which those authors themselves employed to understand their own precursors?
It was by way of Rousseau’s Discours sur l’inégalité, whose few surviving manuscript fragments I have been assembling throughout almost the whole of my professional life, that I was initially drawn to Lord Monboddo’s papers and correspondence on the origins of language and on the humanity of apes lodged in collections in Edinburgh, Cambridge, Birmingham and elsewhere.23 Monboddo was one of the eighteenth century’s greatest admirers of this text, though he also took issue with it and, in the course of attempting to refine his own anthropological speculations on the origins of language so as to correct Rousseau even while acknowledging his debt, he recast the first edition of his own work On the Origin and Progress of Language along lines, illuminated by his manuscripts, which turn on his correspondence with commentators and the availability of sources to which he had access in the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh. In recounting these matters I felt inclined to follow the trajectory of Monboddo’s and indeed Rousseau’s own speculations on the humanity of orang-utans in the direction of twentieth-century scientific experiments on the teaching of languages to apes. Did I breach some sacred principle of the division of labour in moving from eighteenth-century speculation and experiments to contemporary research on what strikes me as precisely the same questions as were at issue in the Enlightenment? In investigating recent palaeoanthropological findings and studies of the sublaryngeal vocal tract was I just moving out of my depth? Why should DNA hybridization studies in genetics pass without any comment from those who are convinced that they can trace these biological formulations of Scottish conjectural history to their source? One of the most striking features of the European Enlightenment was the interdisciplinary character of its philosophy, its lack of impermeable boundaries within its maps of knowledge, its denial of esoterically privileged information to any hegemonic castes. Manuscripts may have that character too. They demand public scrutiny. They invite their interpreters to investigate their meanings and pursue their intimations wherever they might lead, sans parti pris.
Lack of attention to manuscripts sometimes accounts for major flaws in the interpretation of an author’s published work. Consider the example of one of the pre-eminent political theorists of America since the Second World War who, with profound sophistication, showed how it was possible to contribute directly to our subject through the translation of classic texts, including Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles and Emile. Both in his introduction and notes to Rousseau’s greatest masterpiece Allan Bloom rightly remarks that Emile was conceived in large measure as a reply to Locke’s Thoughts concerning Education, and since Rousseau’s stance is so plainly defined by way of objections to Locke, he contends that a deep understanding of Rousseau presupposes some knowledge of Locke’s teaching.24 That is undeniably true. Such understanding also presupposes some familiarity with Helvétius, however, whom Bloom neglects to mention. There are at least four surviving manuscripts of Emile, as well as a number of fragments, and I do not suggest that it is the responsibility of a translator to collate them. But even if Bloom had deemed it unnecessary to leave the shores of Lake Michigan for a visit to Paris and especially Geneva to inspect Rousseau’s papers, he ought at least to have read the first draft of Emile, known as the Manuscrit Favre, published in the same volume of Rousseau’s Oeuvres complètes from which his translation is drawn, and then consulted the excellent notes to the text by John Spink, as well as the more comprehensive annotation by Pierre Burgelin to the final version of Emile.
In offering his readers a guide to Rousseau’s meaning, Bloom ought above all to have paid some attention to the wonderfully majestic collation and edition of the manuscripts of the ‘Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard’ and the equally splendid three-volume study of La Religion de Rousseau prepared by much the most distinguished Rousseau scholar of his generation, Pierre-Maurice Masson,25 killed on the Front in the First World War, whose profoundly moving final letters to his wife and to his publishers with respect to editorial matters, incidentally, have survived. If Bloom had managed a few supplementary hours of essential reading, he would have found that in Emile Rousseau addresses passages from Helvétius’s De l’esprit and in his original draft refers to it; and either through Masson’s or Burgelin’s editorial notes, Bloom might also have had his attention drawn to a letter drafted in September 1762, and to a passage of the Lettres de la montagne of 1764, in which Rousseau claims that he had originally intended to attack this already celebrated work but had then suppressed his criticism in order to dissociate himself from the muckrakers which De l’esprit had stirred immediately on its publication in 1758.26
Much of Rousseau’s argument in his ‘Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard’ in the fourth book of Emile forms a proof of the existence of God by way of refuting the central thesis of Helvétius’s work—that is, the contention that human intelligence springs from sensory experience and that our judgements are therefore no more than sensations. Because our senses are passive, our impressions of the objects that excite them cannot spontaneously give rise to our judgements of the relation between objects, he argues in his ‘Profession de foi’ in reply to Helvétius. Judgement is a matter of interpretation, which therefore requires human agency, pointing to intelligence and a will, which cannot have sprung from our bodily parts or matter alone, but must stem from an intelligence outside us, and hence, according to Rousseau, from God who is the ultimate author of our spirituality.
The educational doctrine of Emile as a whole, moreover, refutes a second principle articulated by Helvétius but equally ignored by Bloom, that is, the claim that l’éducation peut tout, challenged by Rousseau not only in Emile but also in the Nouvelle Héloïse, in a long passage to which Bloom never refers, where, through his fictional protagonist, Saint-Preux, he objects to this notion because it gives rise to the dangerous pretensions of tutors who suppose themselves licenced to mould pupils in any way that they choose.27 Bloom would have been well-advised to take some heed of Rousseau’s challenge to Helvétius. He of course has not overlooked Rousseau’s insistence throughout the text upon the difficult art of governing without precepts and of doing everything by doing nothing. But in failing to notice that Rousseau’s argument forms a challenge as much to Helvétius as to Locke, he misses half the point. For Rousseau’s whole philosophy of education, as he puts it in Emile, is at bottom purely negative.28 It sets aside all the books and lessons by which children’s tutors might otherwise indoctrinate their pupils, shaping them before their time in the image of adults, rather than allowing their education to proceed endogenously out of their own curiosity and first-hand experience as they mature. That programme of negative education stands at the opposite end of a spectrum from one which at its other extreme embraces the claim that l’éducation peut tout as a practical conclusion of the argument that judgement springs directly from sensation. Some easily accessible information about the manuscript background of Emile would have served Bloom well in the fulfilment of an undertaking he set for himself of both translating and interpreting Rousseau’s text.
A little further reflection on this subject, moreover, should soon show that Rousseau’s challenges to Locke and Helvétius form parts of much the same argument—that is, a response to what Rousseau took to be dangers inherent in contemporary materialism. This point, which I should like to develop by way of some final remarks on Locke, underpins my contention that some of our new historians of political thought have circumscribed their subject in too narrowly political a way, excluding from their range of interests themes that once figured very near the heart of political argument but are not now accorded that status in more rigorous interpretations of its appropriate contexts. If I may here speak on behalf of intellectual historians of the Enlightenment more generally, there seems to me something rather odd about Locke scholarship as it is currently practised in certain quarters—by which I do not mean at all the meticulous concentration of a number of scholars upon the political landscape of the world which Locke inhabited but rather such enthusiasm as is displayed by those who first offer us very close readings of the Second Treatise and then transpose its themes on natural law, labour or property to contemporary philosophical discourse informed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Robert Nozick, Jerry Cohen, Michel Foucault and other modern luminaries.29 Historians who with one hand point the way to a redemptive truth which corrects philosophical error ought not, with the other hand, to throw dust in their readers’ eyes.
However subtly addressed, some of the questions at issue in these discussions seem to me desultory, feeding upon each other rather than drawing succour from Locke. Where, I wonder, do Locke’s other writings figure in the scholarship now so earnestly addressed to the Second Treatise, and where, with respect to the new history, should one turn for guidance in identifying the influence throughout the eighteenth century of a thinker pre-eminently regarded at the time as godfather of the whole Enlightenment? Philosophically minded postmodernists may be excused for forgetting the French Revolution and the nineteenth century in order to hold an Enlightenment Project of their own invention responsible for the most sinister crises of modernity, but are historians of ideas entitled to skip stages as well? Allowing that most interpreters of the Second Treatise in the eighteenth century were best acquainted with it through the passages cited by Jean Barbeyrac in his annotations to Pufendorf’s De jure naturae et gentium, Locke’s work was undoubtedly then known and read firsthand as well. But by contrast with his Letter concerning Toleration, Thoughts concerning Education or especially the Essay concerning Human Understanding his principal contribution to political thought cannot by any means be said to have had a wide circulation, and it is mainly to these other texts and not the Second Treatise that most Enlightenment commentaries on Locke were addressed. I shall conclude with just one, albeit a centrally important, example.
In the course of a long controversy about the nature of the human intellect to which Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Cudworth and many other philosophers had already contributed, Locke observed, in the fourth book of his Essay concerning Human Understanding, that it was at least conceivable that God should add or, rather, ‘superadd’, to matter a faculty of thinking, thereby animating insensate particles with the power of thought. A few pages later, he stressed that it was impossible for matter of itself ever to give rise to thought, thus combating the chief contention of materialists, chiefly Spinozists, of his own day, who asserted what he denied.30 But Locke’s proposition that through God’s will matter might be made to think occasioned numerous rebuttals from theologians and philosophers of the early eighteenth century, most of whom associated this claim with Locke’s further suggestion, in the same section of his work, that the truths of morality and religion do not depend upon the immateriality of the soul.
Such questions were to lay at the heart of the dispute between Anthony Collins and Samuel Clarke in the first decade of the eighteenth century, with which some greater familiarity by modern philosophers might have led to our being spared its reconfiguration as a 1960s debate on methodological individualism, whose central points had been virtually exhausted two hundred and fifty years earlier. Hartley, Reid and Priestly, in turn, pursued certain ramifications of Locke’s argument about thinking matter several steps further. In France, Voltaire commented upon it in his Lettres philosophiques of 1734, and French materialists throughout the mid-eighteenth century, including Maupertuis, La Mettrie, Diderot and d’Holbach, drew inspiration from it, some stressing what would now be termed its physicalist and others its physiological or organic implications. In his Traité des sensations of 1754, Condillac attempted to construct a theory of the formation of human intelligence from pure sensory experience, while in the article ‘Évidence’ published in the sixth volume of the Encyclopédie in 1756, Quesnay (most probably) attempted to show that sensation gives rise to judgement, and then two years later in De l’esprit Helvétius put forward the same thesis, rejected by Rousseau in Emile.
But this eighteenth-century debate as to whether our judgements might spring from sensation did not end with Rousseau and Helvétius. Through Helvétius especially it was taken up again by Bentham and then above all by James Mill, whose whole philosophy of education, as it was the great misfortune of his son to experience first-hand, was essentially Helvétian in character and ultimately Lockean in origin. To my mind, it is the eighteenth-century debates about sensationalism, and the implications of that doctrine for the philosophy of education as pursued above all by the utilitarians and Philosophic Radicals of the nineteenth century, which point most comprehensively to Locke’s influence upon Enlightenment political and social thought. Here is the Locke whom the philosophes of the eighteenth century knew best. But I suspect that it is because these arguments appear to be drawn from another discourse, which according to the contextualist canons of our new histories of political thought is not fundamentally political in focus, that they have been largely ignored by Locke’s most recent political interpreters and have been left instead to be explored by historians of philosophy, theology and science.31 More’s the pity.32