In framing our original plan of this work, we adopted a number of guidelines which formed our prospectus for the contributors and which, by and large, still lend direction to and map the limits of this volume. We were determined in the space available to provide as comprehensive a treatment as possible of eighteenth-century political thought in the diverse historical contexts of the period, instead of a series of essays on our subject’s acknowledged masters. We wished to give due weight to the polemical character of eighteenth-century disputations and to the circumstances surrounding the composition of the works at issue, rather than to subsume their differences of principle or perspective in separate chapters manifesting the internal logic of each author’s career. We accordingly aimed for a largely thematic framework in preference to an interconnected collection of intellectual biographies. In addition to focusing on the seminal writings of the vanguard of the eighteenth-century’s republic of letters, we also wished to address the texts ofrelatively minor figures who often couched their contributions to both national and international debates in locally specific contexts and idioms. We sought to survey not only the towering treatises of the age of Enlightenment but also a large number of its disparate pièces fugitives, in part because we thought it necessary to fill in the valleys from which the peaks arose, but more generally because, in our judgement, some of the most centrally recurrent topics of eighteenth-century political thought were pursued in works that were perhaps of greater historical than philosophical significance.

An older historiography of the Enlightenment took the defence or rejection of Christian belief as its starting point and, dividing the world into ‘believers’ and ‘unbelievers’, regarded political thought as derivative of these groupings. Unbelief unleashed a ‘liberal’ assault on monarchy and social hierarchy, while belief came to the defence of these institutions, resulting in ‘conservative’ political thought (see, for example, Martin 1962). This model does justice to something that was incontestably new in the eighteenth century: namely, the emergence of emancipated, secular thought. Yet it is not without its limitations, chief among them being its underestimation of the ‘enlightenment’ of, and dissent within, ‘believing’ communities. Accordingly, this chapter explores the political ramifications of the divisions between ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ within eighteenth-century Europe’s believing communities. It asks to what extent the religious and theological differences separating Jesuits from Jansenists, orthodox Lutherans or Calvinists from Pietists, and High Church Anglicans from English Dissenters took the form of differing political visions, not only about the church but also about state and society. In so doing, it broaches the relationship between divergent religious sensibilities and differing kinds of political thought. The heart of the most ‘irreligious’ of Europe’s Enlightenments, France, should provide the acid test of any religiously oriented construal of eighteenth-century political thought. France, therefore, must be this European grand tour’s first and longest stop.

Although they were preceded by several decades of political contestation, the debates of the French Revolution can reasonably be said to have begun on 5 July 1788, when Louis XVI agreed to summon the Estates General after a lapse of almost two centuries. Declaring the royal archives inadequate to determine how that body had once been convened, the king invited his subjects to investigate the precedents for calling an assembly that would be ‘truly national, both in its composition and in its results’ (Baker 1987b, pp. 143–5). This was a remarkable pronouncement in what was still thought to be an absolute monarchy, since it invited public enquiry not only into the entire history of the realm but also the ultimate definition of the ‘truly national’. No earlier constitutional crisis in France had unleashed a response comparable in force and magnitude to the torrent of political argument that was now to sweep the country.

Competing discourses of the Old Regime

Participants in this debate could draw upon a variety of discourses forged in the course of several decades of political contestation. A discourse of justice drew on the conceptual resources of a French constitutional tradition dramatically revived and reworked by defenders of the parlementsin opposition to the royal ‘despotism’ which was increasingly their target after 1750. Juxtaposing the lawful (justice) with the arbitrary (will), it upheld the principles of a society comprised of orders and Estates, governed according to regular legal forms, secured by magistrates exercising their functions of judicial review and registration of laws in the parlements.

Scepticism, Judaism, and the natural history of religion

Philosophical scepticism, the questioning of the adequacy of evidence to justify any view or belief, and the questioning of the criteria for deciding intellectual issues in any domain whatsoever, reached its high point in modern philosophy during the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the century the complete edition of Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1702) appeared, raising sceptical problems about matters in philosophy, theology, science, and history, and providing what Voltaire called ‘the arsenal of the Enlightenment’. Bishop Pierre Daniel Huet’s Traité philosophique de la faiblesse de l’esprit humain(Treatise on the Weakness of the Human Mind), a forceful presentation of Pyrrhonism, written at the end of the seventeenth century but published posthumously in 1723, became a sensation (Popkin 1993, p. 139). The Traité appeared twice in English, and in Italian, Latin, and German in short order. In 1718 the most scholarly edition of the writing of Sextus Empiricus was published by J. A. Fabricius, with the Greek text and Latin translations. This was soon followed by two printings of a French translation of Sextus’s Hypotyposes (Outlines of Pyrrhonism), and David Hume carried the sceptical analysis of human reasoning to its highest point in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40). A mitigated form of scepticism was developed by many French Enlightenment thinkers, culminating in the radical scepticism of Jean-Pierre Brissot and Condorcet in the last quarter of the century.

The American Revolution transformed thinking about politics. Its significance goes beyond the creation of the United States of America. ‘The independence of America, considered merely as a separation from England, would have been a matter of little importance’, wrote Thomas Paine in 1791, ‘had it not been accompanied by a revolution in the principles and practice of government’ (Paine 1989, p. 152). The era of the Revolution was undoubtedly momentously creative in its political thought, but the contributions were collective, not individual; they were the products not of closet philosophising but of contentious political debate. The Revolution spawned no great theorists of the stature of Hobbes, Locke, or Montesquieu; no Rousseau, not even a Burlamaqui or a Pufendorf. The revolutionary leaders were widely read and thoughtful men, but they were not philosophers, and they did not work out their theories in the quiet of a study (though some like James Madison tried to do so). They were experienced, pragmatic political leaders who competed for power, lost and won elections, served in colonial and state legislatures and in the national congress, became governors, judges, even presidents. Yet they were also intensely interested in ideas and concerned with making theoretical sense of what they were doing. Because they were so intimately involved in politics, much of their thinking was polemical and of the moment. They usually had to extemporise in the heat and urgency of debate. Most of their many political writings took the form of pamphlets and newspaper essays, and only occasionally large treatises, such as John Adams’s sprawling Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States (1787–8).

The historical background

At the heart of social contract theory is the idea that political legitimacy, political authority, and political obligation are derived from the consent of the governed, and are the artificial product of the voluntary agreement of free and equal moral agents. On this view, legitimacy and duty depend on a concatenation of voluntary individual acts, and not on ‘natural’ political authority, patriarchy, theocracy, divine right, necessity, custom, convenience, or psychological compulsion. Michael Oakeshott was thus right to call contractarianism a doctrine of ‘will and artifice’ (1975a, p. 7).

While traces of contract theory can be found in ancient and medieval thought, and while the doctrine has recently been revived by John Rawls, it is generally agreed that the golden age of social contract theory was the period 1650–1800, beginning with Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) and ending with Kant’s Rechtslehre (Metaphysics of Morals, 1797;Rawls 1972, pp. 11–13; Riley 1982, 1983). For at least the following century it was eclipsed by utilitarianism, Hegelianism, and Marxism. But between the mid-seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries consent emerged as the leading doctrine of political legitimacy. Hobbes urges in chapter 42 of Leviathan that ‘the right of all sovereigns is derived originally from the consent of every one of those that are to be governed’, and in chapter 40 he insists that human wills ‘make the essence of all covenants’ (Hobbes 1991, pp. 395, 323). Locke in the second of his Two Treatises of Government argues that ‘voluntary agreement gives … political power to governors’ (TTG, ii, §173, p. 383).

Rousseau

A Protestant among Catholics, a proud citizen of the tiny republic of Geneva among cosmopolitan fellow travellers of monarchical imperialism, a critic of modernity at its most fashionable eighteenth-century shrine, Rousseau was spiritually estranged from the intellectual circles in Paris to which he had previously been drawn when, in 1750, he won the prize offered by the Academy of Dijon by responding in the negative to its question, ‘Has the restoration of the arts and sciences contributed to the purification of morals?’ With the publication of this work, his First Discourse, he immediately became a celebrity and thereby launched his literary career as chief critic of the age of Enlightenment. When, in 1755, in addressing the same academy’s question, for another prize competition, on ‘What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorised by natural law?’, he condemned both the loss of innocence and lack of virtue prevalent in refined society. Private property, he asserted in his Second Discourse, was the principal source of that form of unnatural inequality which gives rise to governments, rulers, and violence.

Rousseau here, as well as in his Essay on the Origin of Languages largely drafted some years later (and first published posthumously in 1781), sketches a theory of historical development according to which mankind must originally have lived in a purely animal and unsociable state of nature, driven by hunger and sexual appetite alone. In that condition man’s only inclinations would have been self-love and compassion, Rousseau argues, but as the human race multiplied, this simple form of life would have disappeared.

Adam Smith’s pre-eminence

Whereas Scotland in the eighteenth century was already credited with the native talent of its metaphysicians and historians, its association with political economy owes more to hindsight than to contemporary perceptions. By the early decades of the nineteenth century the association was strong enough to become part of an English caricature of the ‘Scotch pheelosopher’, who was assumed to combine an interest in political economy with another Scottish habit of enquiry – the pursuit of the origins and development of civil society from ‘rudeness to refinement’ by means of a form of history in which universal psychological principles and socio-economic circumstances played twin illuminating roles. By then of course an imposing work by a Scotsman that employed both of these modes, Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), had begun to make its way in the world. It was therefore appropriate that the first course of lectures on post-Smithian political economy in Britain should be given by Dugald Stewart, who for a decade after 1799 employed his chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh for just that purpose. The result of Stewart’s initiative was to produce for Smith a small band of Scottish-educated grandchildren in the shape of those who founded the Edinburgh Review in 1802, making it the main organ for disseminating the latest views on political economy for the next three decades.

The first object of this chapter is to chart the development of philosophical thought about crime and punishment in the latter half of the eighteenth century, with special emphasis on the writings of Montesquieu, Beccaria, and Bentham. It will be shown that the common thread running through their writing is the application of a doctrine of civil and political liberty to this aspect of state power. A second object is to relate the philosophical arguments of these influential thinkers to the more practical discussions, mainly in Britain, regarding the abolition of the death penalty and the use of various alternative forms of punishment such as transportation and imprisonment. It will be shown that intellectual debate was not simply between ‘reformers’ and ‘conservatives’ but instead proceeded in a more complex manner on philosophical and ideological levels and was directed towards different objects.

Liberty and the criminal law

Montesquieu was the first major writer to place the reform of the criminal law on the agenda of the Enlightenment. As early as the Persian Letters (1721) (especially no. 80, but also nos. 76 and 102), but mainly in books vi and xii of the The Spirit of the Laws (1748), he contended that severe punishments did not necessarily deter crime. Following his typology of constitutions he argued that mild punishments were appropriate to moderate governments and severe ones only to despotisms (SL, vi.9, 11–13). In moderate governments the wise legislator attempted to prevent crime by the adjustment and use of customs and traditions.

Nostalgia and modernity

British radicals of the later eighteenth century derived their ideas from the various ‘outs’ excluded from the Revolution Settlement of 1689 and the Whig triumph of the early Hanoverian era: the ‘Country’ Whigs and city Tories, the supporters of the ‘Good Old Cause’ disappointed by the half-revolution of 1688, the Dissenters, and the deists (Colley 1981; Dickinson 1977, ch. 6; Pocock 1985, ch. 11; Robbins 1959). It was during the controversies surrounding John Wilkes, the continued imposition of religious tests, the American War of Independence, and, most spectacularly, the French Revolution that radical ideas developed.

The languages used – versions of classical republicanism, ancient constitutionalism, natural jurisprudence and contract, Dissenting tolerationism, and millenarianism – had been well established in the conflicts of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the context of a new political and economic order characterised by the growth of empire, a military establishment, the explosion of commerce and credit, a court-dominated Commons, urbanisation, rural enclosure, and a creeping if never secure secularism, such ‘radicalisms’ were dispositionally nostalgic (Pocock 1984, 1985, ch. 11). An important feature of the period is the attempt by radicals to accommodate their inherited patterns of thought to new and irreversible features of society and to the aspirations of the growing urban middle and lower orders. This involved integrating received vocabularies with those derived from the philosophical psychology wrought by Locke and elaborated by Hume and David Hartley, and with the largely Scottish development of political economy and historical sociology (Claeys 1990; Hampsher-Monk 1991; Pocock 1985, chs. 2, 11; ch. 15 above).

Optimism

From the early seventeenth century a new age of rationalism sprang up, with Descartes as its main progenitor, and Spinoza and Leibniz as epigones. Since Descartes contributed so heavily to establishing confidence in reasoning as a reliable human instrument, it seemed useful to apply critical enquiry to the ancient mystery of evil and suffering. Did theodicy, that branch of philosophy concerned with the justification of God’s goodness and the refutation of arguments based on the existence of evil, still remain a valid approach? The traditional Christian explanations – the Fall and the redemption, original sin, eternal reward and punishments – no longer appeared to suffice as answers to the conundrums posed by the new philosophies.

The basic problem was not new. Epicurus had stated it centuries earlier: if evil exists then God must be either malevolent or impotent. No-one reformulated this dilemma with greater trenchancy than Pierre Bayle who, in his voluminous Oeuvres diverses (1727–31) and even more so in his Dictionnaire philosophique et critique (1697), was constantly engaged in forcing rationalist thinkers into a corner. Why, in a God-given universe, is mankind exposed to disease, hunger, and pain? Why do men have any inclination to evil? God must have foreseen, and therefore wished to prevent, human sin. It cannot be any justification to argue that God permitted sin simply to demonstrate his own powers. Such a God would be odious. Free will can scarcely be deemed a desirable gift if it can lead to everlasting damnation.

Physiocracy in its historical, intellectual, and political setting

Physiocracy, or ‘rule of nature’, was a largely, but not exclusively, French movement in political economy that prioritised agricultural productivity over manufacturing as the source of economic growth, and sought to move on from that analysis to provide a fresh model of the fiscal and administrative relationships that should operate between royal governments and the owners of property broadly defined. It exercised intermittent influence on French administrations between the 1760s and 1780s and furthermore attracted vehement supporters and opponents outside France, especially in Italy and Spain, but also as far afield as the United States and Bengal.

However, physiocracy has not habitually been associated with innovative political theory, or indeed with any coherent political theory at all. From the days of early commentators such as the Abbé Galiani, Adam Smith, and, later, Jean Baptiste Say, it became conventional to argue that French physiocracy was mistaken in its economics and inept in its politics, partial in its understanding of the mechanisms of wealth creation, and ineffective in making its case before both the tribunal of emerging French public opinion and across the shoals of court politics. The first part of this condemnation, though not perhaps the most important in the eyes of contemporaries, has been conventionally turned into a textbook account, conveniently summarised by Robert Heilbroner in the following terms:

The invention of the modern nation-state

The American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century were each preceded and accompanied by lofty debates about constitutional principles, whose prospects of imminent enactment lent a sense of urgency to the fulfilment of philosophical ideals. Notions of a state of nature and a social contract had long been decried as illusions that could not account for the complexity of even our most primitive associations, but in overthrowing the trappings of government in two widely separated continents, legislators of modern republicanism in the United States and France made such abstractions appear credible, as if through their endeavours an earthly paradise might be regained and the first liberated citizens of large and durable republics since the demise of classical Rome could aspire to genuine self-rule. No less than in England around the time of its Civil War of the 1640s, there appeared, in America for about a decade before 1787 and in France for a similar period from 1789, a collection of classic works, some by leading statesmen or major figures in public life, each of which sought to plot a fresh path for civil institutions that had still to be born. These include Paine’s Common Sense (1776), Hamilton, Madison, and Jay’s Federalist Papers (1787–8), and, in France, Sieyès’s Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-Etat? (What is the Third Estate?, 1789) and Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progregrave;s de l’esprit humain (Sketch of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind, 1795).

Prologue: Babeuf

Early in May 1793 François Noël Babeuf changed his name to Gracchus. By doing so, he committed himself to a conception of the relationship between property, community, and citizenship (and a particular claim about the place of justice in the modern world) that was to lead, exactly three years later, to his arrest and, in 1797, his execution for conspiring to overthrow the government of the first French republic. Gracchus Babeuf first used his new name in an open letter to the procureur (procurator) of the Paris commune, Nicolas Chaumette (who had changed his own name to Anaxagoras, after the sixth-century bce Scythian leader, celebrated in Greek Cynic philosophy as a critic of Athenian luxury), on 7 May 1793, on the eve of an aborted Parisian insurrection on the night of 9–10 May 1793, when some of the leaders of the Paris commune and its forty-eight sections started, then abandoned, an armed attempt to force the French Convention to include the principle of ‘real equality’, as its advocates called it, in the articles dealing with the right to private property which were to be part of the new, republican, Declaration of the Rights of Man. In his letter, Babeuf called upon Chaumette to take the lead in convincing the Convention to accept the seven additional articles on the scale and scope of property rights which the Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre, in a speech to the Convention on 24 April 1793, had presented for incorporation into the new Declaration of Rights (Robespierre 1967, pp. 51–7).