Lessons from the Franks and the Greeks

Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws, 1748) stands among the most intellectually challenging and inspired contributions to political theory in the eighteenth century. The scope of the book, its sustained reflection, its impact on social and political debates throughout Europe, as well as its enduring influence make it an exceptional work. As its subtitle indicates, it purports to examine the relation laws must have to the specific constitution, civil society, and physical circumstances of the country in which they are being made or enforced. To apprehend the spirit of a nation’s laws is thus to understand the relationship which pertains between a number of social, political, and material factors peculiar to that nation. What the remainder of the subtitle further suggests, and the body of the text makes explicit, is that the knowledge which such an examination both requires and produces is historical in nature. In linking history and law and making both central to political theory Montesquieu, together with the Scottish school of political economy, which he profoundly influenced, set the tone and form of modern social and political thought. He paved the way leading to Hegel, who recognised the true nature of his genius better than most of his admirers (Hegel 1991, pp. 29, 283, 310–11; 1999, p. 175; see also Carrithers 2001a).

The Revolution debate

In the winter of 1688 King James II was deposed. Within months of the offer of the crown to William III commentators sensed that a decisive shift had occurred in what it was possible to say in public about the nature of kingship. Remarking on a speech by a judge to the effect that ‘kings are made by the people’, Robert Harley declared that this ‘would have been high treason eighteen months ago’. The enthusiasts for the Revolution were clear about what had been achieved. The earl of Stamford told a grand jury that Britain had been liberated from ‘tyranny and slavery à la mode de France’ (RLP, i, p. 54). Grateful contemplation of the ‘wonderful and happy Revolution’ of 1688 quickly spawned complacent and repetitive clichés about Britannic liberty which reverberated down the succeeding decades. They were echoed in Montesquieu’s celebrated eulogy on the ‘beautiful’ system of the English (SL, xi.6). All Europe, declared the American James Otis in 1764, was ‘enraptured with the beauties of the civil constitution of Great Britain’ (RLP, iii, p. 8).

Commentators agreed that the Revolution had replaced absolute with limited monarchy. The king was ‘only a sort of sheriff to execute [parliament’s] orders’, observed the bishop of Derry in 1700 (qu. Rubini 1967, p. 202). Daniel Defoe told the readers of his newspaper The Review that the Revolution had thrown off the ‘absurdities’ of the divine right of kings and erected monarchy ‘upon the foundation of parliamentary limitation’ (30 Aug. 1705).

The reception of modern natural law

In order to appreciate the role of natural law in the eighteenth century, it is important to note that most Protestant Europeans saw it as a modern phenomenon. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers were well aware that natural law was prominent in both ancient and medieval thought, but in their eyes it acquired a new role with the division of Christianity and the emergence of modern statehood. The concern of modern natural law was to find a basis for moral life that, without conflicting with the tenets of Christianity, was neutral with respect to confessional religion. Natural law was thus central to one of the defining debates of the Enlightenment, namely whether and to what extent the cognitive, including moral, powers of humanity were adequate to the conduct of life in this world. While all the sciences were invoked to this purpose, in discussions of the foundation, nature, and extent of natural law, that central issue was particularly explicit.

The debate ran deep in every Protestant community – Reformed, Lutheran, and episcopalian – for at issue was the basis for the social world. Natural law’s replacement of revealed religion with natural religion led to a highly ambivalent view of morality and its institutional forms, ranging from the family and the economy to the state, as either the creation or the expression of natural man. Not least, the idea of religion as both a common bond and a shield between ruler and ruled was called into question, as was the status of the church.

The context of Scottish natural jurisprudence

One of the notable achievements of recent scholarship on moral and political thought in eighteenth-century Scotland has been a recognition of the importance of the early modern natural rights tradition for what has come to be called the Scottish Enlightenment. The manner in which the natural rights theories of Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Locke were received, adapted, criticised, and transformed has been narrated and interpreted from different points of view.

It has become increasingly evident, in part as a consequence of this scholarship, in part as a result of research into the history of Scottish universities, that natural jurisprudence constituted an integral part of the moral philosophy curriculum at the universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen (only St Andrews was the exception) from the 1690s to the late eighteenth century (Emerson 1972, 1995; Sher 1985, 1990;Wood 1993). Gershom Carmichael, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid at Glasgow; William Law, William Scott, John Pringle, and James Balfour at Edinburgh; and George Turnbull and David Verner at Aberdeen all lectured on natural rights theories. What led these professors, university councils, and noble patrons to conclude that students should be instructed in the literature and language of natural rights?

In the post-revolutionary world of the 1690s, there was the compelling practical political consideration that university students, the future political leaders of Scottish society, be made aware of the errors and dangers of pre-revolutionary political thought. In the natural rights theories of Grotius, Pufendorf, and, especially, Locke, students would find erroneous political theories – patriarchalism, the divine right of kings, indefeasible hereditary right – examined, analysed, and confuted.

The development of cameralism

Cameralism was a form of academic pedagogy aimed at the future administrators of the eighteenth-century German territorial states. As a written discourse it was embodied in the several hundred textbooks produced for use by students in German, Austrian, and Baltic universities between the 1720s and the 1790s. The first chairs dedicated to it were founded in 1727; the period 1760–80 saw its consolidation and diffusion, but during the later 1790s it entered a phase of terminal intellectual and institutional decline. The name persisted up to the end of the nineteenth century as a synonym for the economics of state administration, although its function had long been displaced by faculties of law, and its substance by Nationalökonomie. Its very nature and purpose as a pedagogic discourse rendered it unsuitable for contemporary translation into English, French, or Italian; consequently it had no manifest resonances among those writers who provided the foundations of political economy. Moreover, commentary upon it has been to this day largely confined to the German language, placing it therefore on the margins of Anglo-French eighteenth-century studies.

From the standpoint of a modern literature of commentary, it thus represents a hermetic tradition in more ways than one – remote, esoteric, and confined very much within a particular, though extensive, linguistic zone. Traditionally, it has been the French Enlightenment, the French and American Revolutions, and more recently also the Scottish Enlightenment that have been identified as the leading sources of modern political theory. In so far as the German Enlightenment was taken into account, it was generally viewed as a literary or philosophical phenomenon, of limited interest beyond a handful of key figures.

A Counter-Enlightenment?

When the roots of Romanticism are traced to the age of Enlightenment, they are often located in the hinterland of Europe, where, at the margins of civilisation, solitary thinkers like Vico in Naples, Rousseau in Neuchâtel, or Herder in Lithuania are portrayed as having cast themselves adrift from the prevailing intellectual currents of their day. In opposing the idea of progress such proponents of what in the late nineteenth century came to be termed the Counter-Enlightenment are alleged to have subscribed to diverse notions of primitivism, preferring ancient mythology over modern science, popular intuitions over abstract ideas, and uncouth human nature over the refinements of culture. In confronting Enlightenment philosophy they are taken to have undermined its most central premises and subverted its aims in the manner of prophets harking back to a world we have lost, betrothed to fictitious ideals of uncultivated simplicity which, while derided by their contemporaries, have made their doctrines seem peculiarly post-modern and thereby apposite to a post-Enlightenment world.

Such perspectives, however, do grave injustice to the careers of Vico, Rousseau, Herder, and their disciples. When he put forward his now-celebrated notion of ‘ricorso’ – that is, of ‘repetition’ or ‘return’ – in just the last of his three formulations of a New Science of the laws of development of human society (Scienza nuova, 1725, 1730, and 1744), Vico was not advocating mankind’s reversion to a state of barbarism. As the Italian scholar Giuseppe Giarrizzo remarked, Vico’s political science was actually conceived ‘to save mankind from the return of barbarism’ (Giarrizzo 1981, p. 21).

The idea of the philosopher king

The notion of the philosopher king comes from Plato’s Republic. After the Renaissance, Plato’s influence declined, and none of the authors writing about the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the previous volume of the Cambridge History of Political Thought found it necessary to mention this notion at all. But Hobbes concluded the second part of Leviathan (1651), in a characteristically sardonic passage, by placing the concept at the very heart of his political philosophy:

Accounts of England’s constitution, even in the more systematic treatments of the middle decades of the eighteenth century, followed the common early modern pattern in which political theory often comprised an uneven amalgam of classical maxims of government, narrow partisan polemics, antiquarian learning, historical researches, and technical legal doctrine. Nonetheless, ‘the constitution of England’, so constructed, enjoyed an extensive influence on liberal political philosophy and Western statecraft well beyond its place of origin and the particular circumstances of its first articulation. ‘The eye of curiosity seems now to be universally turned’ to this ‘model of perfection’, explained Jean Louis Delolme in the 1770s (Delolme 1834, p. 1). What was to be discovered in this model were the general principles of political freedom. ‘Tis the Britannic Constitution that gives this kingdom a lustre above other nations’, extolled Roger Acherley a half-century earlier, ‘as it secures to Britons, their private property, freedom and liberty, by such walls of defence as are not to be found in any other parts of the universe’ (Acherley 1727, p. vi).

The organising principle for much of the eighteenth-century celebration of the English constitution was the commonplace idea that structures of government could preserve political freedom only where they frustrated the abuse of political power. The extent to which the English enjoyed unique levels of political freedom was the result of a constitutional order which effectively prevented arbitrary or tyrannical acts of power. The achievement of this kind of political system, in turn, depended upon the existence and co-ordination of several distinct kinds of institutions and governmental procedures.

By way of its conception, production, and distribution, the Encyclopédie illustrates, more forcefully than any other publishing venture of the eighteenth century, how innovative philosophies of the period came to be disseminated, and how the market of ideas in the age of Enlightenment was organised. Current research on the Encyclopédistes, and on their allies and enemies, makes plain that both the economic and social forces which underpinned their enterprise, as well as those which resisted it, were for technical and political reasons joined together in the same ideological world. Thanks to the growth of literacy and the economic, cultural, and scientific institutions which literacy served, books came throughout the eighteenth century to acquire an unprecedented significance. The advent of commercial society allowed for the wide circulation of the printed word through newspapers, magazines, and other publications. Authors could manage to earn a livelihood from their writings alone. Intellectuals could become a political class. A system of signs could be transformed into systems of thought, and by way of their diffusion to readers impressed by them, revolutionary ideas could come to have revolutionary implications.

This ‘immortal work’, as Voltaire once termed the Encyclopédie, has for virtually the whole of the period since its completion appeared the emblematic monument of eighteenth-century culture. While in principle conceived as a work of reference and a compendium of knowledge distilled from other sources, the vast collection of more than 70,000 articles assembled in 25,000 folio pages, comprising seventeen volumes of text, eleven tomes of plates and seven volumes of supplements and tables, in fact came to occupy a central place within Europe’s republic of letters and even managed to help shape its political landscape.

The spectre of luxury

A spectre was haunting the modern world, wrote the Neapolitan Ferdinando Galiani in 1751, the spectre of ‘luxury’. It ‘wanders among us never seen in its true light, or recognised for its efficacy and it, perhaps, never occurs to the virtuous‘. It was akin to the idea of ‘terrestrial happiness’, but ‘no-one knows or dares to say’, Galiani grumbled, ‘what luxury might properly be’ (Galiani 1977, p. 214). Denis Diderot was in a similar quandary. Defining the term in the Encyclopédie, he called for a ‘discussion among those who show the most discrimination in their use of the term luxury: a discussion which has yet to take place, and which even they cannot bring to a satisfactory conclusion’ (Diderot 1755, v, p. 635). The article on ‘Luxury’, published in 1762, and written by the marquis de Saint Lambert, was asmuch a summary of the luxury debates of the first half of the eighteenth century as an attempt to resolve them. The purpose of this chapter is to present the work of eight important contributors to these debates in France and Britain before 1748, the year of publication of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, that supplied Saint Lambert with the resources he needed to try to say what luxury actually was.

As Saint Lambert presented it, luxury was not merely an economic phenomenon, but the central moral and political issue of modernity. The standard definition of luxury’ was excessive individual consumption (Butel- Dumont 1771), but Saint Lambert followed the definition of V´eron de Forbonnais (the author of the articles Commerce’ and Agriculture’ and the original assignee for Luxury’): [Luxury] is the use men make of wealth and industry to assure themselves of a pleasant existence’ (Forbonnais 1754, p. 221; Saint Lambert 1965, p. 202).

The ambiguities and resources of comparative method

Comparison and contrast were used by eighteenth-century European thinkers to characterise their nations and continent, as well as their historical epoch. This was done by distinguishing the arrangements of each nation from its neighbours’, by contrasting European regimes, societies, economies, cultures, and religions with those elsewhere in the world, and by juxtaposing their own time with periods preceding it. This comparative mode of analysis was deployed in conflicts between the champions and enemies of Enlightenment, in the sharp disagreements separating defenders of absolutism from those opposed to it, and in disputes about established churches and their theologies. Although political theory was often conducted through comparison and contrast between European regimes, the application of the method to the rest of the world was no less significant. Some modern interpreters hold that European thinkers assumed their continent’s superiority, and thus that ‘Enlightenment’ went hand in hand with imperial subjugation of non-Europeans. Others, on the contrary, say that xenophilia, étrangisme, and the conviction of European inferiority, decline, and corruption prevailed among intellectuals (Baudet 1988, pp. 50–1).

This chapter addresses some of the numerous and complex ways in which European writers used comparative discourse. It examines the extent to which key concepts in this discourse were shaped by theorists’ preferences and their positions on domestic controversies within their respective nations, as well as on issues during conflicts among European states within their own continent and in overseas competition for colonies. It asks whether there was any consensus about the superiority of Europeans over the rest of world, or about the legitimacy of European conquests, colonisation, and commerce, including the slave trade.

We now understand that Socrates believes that all desire is for the good. This understanding has been facilitated by the hierarchy of desire that is described in the Gorgias. Using this framework, we assume that people always endeavor to reach the best end available in their current situation. Such endeavors lead to subordinated desires for that which is the best means to that best end. As a result, agents always do that which they believe is the best means to the best end in their current situation. This suggests that Socrates must believe that all desire is rational. Indeed, Socrates confirms that this is true in the Protagoras, where he argues that no one errs willingly in the pursuit of happiness. Does Socrates really believe that everyone approaches every crossroad in their lives by weighing the various alternatives strictly in light of what they judge to be true about the world?

The notion that all desire is for the good and therefore all purposive behavior is rational has come to be called “Socratic intellectualism.” The name alone is offensive to the view with which I opened Chapter 2. By saying that our desire for the good works in concert only with beliefs to control our behavior, Socrates seems to be discounting any possible role for desires that are base or irrational. He seems to be discounting emotion altogether, as if people operated from a purely scientific basis. Certainly this claim flies in the face of robust evidence.

What is the relationship between virtue and happiness in Plato's early dialogues? How does Socrates think that virtue and happiness are each to be evaluated with respect to human good? These two questions have fueled many discussions of Socratic ethics and psychology.

Some authors have argued that the relationship between virtue and happiness is one of identity. They claim that Socrates must think that virtue and happiness are simply two different names for the same thing. This is known as the identity thesis.

Others have argued that while virtue and happiness are not identical, virtue is sufficient for happiness. That is, they think that Socrates held the view that whoever is virtuous is happy. This is known as the sufficiency thesis.

Many of the authors who adhere to one of these two positions have used phrases like “intrinsically good” and “good in themselves” in order to characterize happiness as the ultimate human good. Those who subscribe to the identity thesis call virtue “intrinsically good” or “good in itself” as well.

A number of authors have said that, according to Socrates, virtue is the only good. One way to make sense of this is to attribute the identity thesis to Socrates. For no one would deny that Socrates held happiness to be that ultimate human good toward which all desire is directed. And, it would be inconsistent for Socrates to assert that virtue is the only good, while asserting that happiness is the ultimate human good.