We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2017
This article considers the philosophical foundations of the French Enlightenment through a close study of the Stoic influences on the Marquis de Condorcet's education philosophy. The article argues that although Condorcet did not acknowledge any direct Stoic influence, his philosophy of education nevertheless should be understood in the eclectic idiom of eighteenth-century Stoic discourse. Furthermore, Condorcet's Stoicism was entirely compatible with Rousseau's Stoicism to the degree that one could call Condorcet a Rousseauean at least in matters of education theory—even though Condorcet, a protégé of Voltaire, is usually presented as a critic of Rousseau. Finally, the article suggests that the notion of liberty that Condorcet seeks to make flourish through his national education plan is in line with the Stoic ideal of rational autonomy, despite Condorcet's insistence that the modern idea of liberty (that is, his own idea) is fundamentally different from the ancient idea.
I delivered an early version of this research at the 2015 meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies in Colorado Springs, and wrote this article while on sabbatical in fall 2016. I would like to thank Micah Alpaugh, Stephen Auerbach, and Noah Shusterman for reading and commenting on the first draft. I am especially grateful to Sophia Rosenfeld for all her help with later drafts that prepared this article for publication.
1 See, for example, G. Matthew Adkins, “In Defense of Gadflies,” Community College Week, 20 Sept. 2016, at http://ccweek.com/article-5282-in-defense-of-gadflies.html.
2 See Foucault, Michel, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–82, ed. Gros, Frédéric, trans. Burchell, Graham (New York, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 A thesis ultimately dating back to Benjamin Constant's famous speech at the Parisian Athenaeum in 1819, “Sur la liberté des anciens comparée à celles des modernes,” in Oeuvres politiques de Benjamin Constant (Paris, 1874), 258–86.
4 See Jonathan Israel, “Natural Virtue versus Book Learning: Rousseau and the Great Enlightenment Battle over Education,” European Journal of Developmental Psychology (2012), Supplement, 6–17.
5 Israel, “Natural Virtue versus Book Learning,” 9.
6 Rousseau's work also strongly influenced Condorcet's wife, Sophie de Grouchy, as revealed by her Letters on Sympathy. See Smith, Adam, Théorie des sentimens moraux, trans. de Grouchy, Sophie (Paris, 1798)Google Scholar, which includes the Letters; also Forget, Evelyn, “Cultivating Sympathy: Sophie Condorcet's Letters of Sympathy,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 23/3 (2001), 319–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 In April 1870, Jules Ferry commented on Condorcet's influence, “C'est Condorcet qui, le premier, a formulé, avec une grande précision de théories et de détails, le système d’éducation qui convient à la société moderne. J'avoue que je suis resté confondu quand, cherchant à vous apporter ici autre chose que mes propres pensées, j'ai rencontré dans Condorcet ce plan magnifique et trop peu connu d’éducation républicaine . . . C'est bien, à mon avis, le système d’éducation . . . autour duquel nous tournerons peut-être longtemps encore, et que nous finirons, un jour ou l'autre, par nous approprier.” See Ferry, Jules, “Discours sur l’égalité d’éducation,” in Discours et opinions de Jules Ferry, vol. 1 (Paris, 1893), 283–305, at 291Google Scholar.
8 However, Stoicism had never really died out in European intellectual culture since at least some aspects of it had been incorporated into Christian theology and education. See, among many other works that examine the relation of Hellenic and Hellenistic thought to the Enlightenment, Cook, Alexandra, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Botany: The Salutary Science (Oxford, 2012)Google Scholar; Leddy, Neven and Lifschitz, Avi S., eds., Epicurus in the Enlightenment (Oxford, 2009)Google Scholar; Stanley, Sharon, The French Enlightenment and the Emergence of Modern Cynicism (Cambridge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shea, Louisa, The Cynic Enlightenment: Diogenes in the Salon (Baltimore, 2009)Google Scholar; Matytsin, Anton, The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore, 2016)Google Scholar. See also Parker, Harold T., The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries: A Study in the Development of the Revolutionary Spirit (New York, 1965Google Scholar; first published 1937); Rawson, Elizabeth, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar.
9 de Fontenelle, Bernard, 5 vols. “Dialogues des morts anciens,” in Oeuvres complètes de Fontenelle (Paris, 1818), 4: 5–29, at 9Google Scholar; Fontenelle, “Du bonheur,” in ibid., 4: 279, original emphasis. On Fontenelle's refusal to laugh see Aldis, Janet, Madame Geoffrin: Her Salon and Her Times, 1750–1777 (London, 1905)Google Scholar.
10 “Pour nous faire enrager.” Voltaire, Candide, ou l'optimisme (1759), 191.
11 Hume, David, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects in Two Volumes, vol. 1 (London, 1788), 16, emphasis addedGoogle Scholar.
12 Cassirer, Ernst, The Myth of the State (New Haven, 1946), 166–7Google Scholar.
13 Challenging Cassirer's thesis, Quentin Skinner later argued that the development of modern natural-law theory owes much to the work of scholastics such as John Mair (1467–1550) at the University of Paris, and his students—Mair taught John Calvin and Francisco de Vitoria, who in turn taught Francisco Suarèz, whose work on natural-law philosophy greatly influenced Hugo Grotius. But Benjamin Straumann has recently defended the essentially Stoic and Roman sources of Grotius's theory of natural law. See Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2, The Age of Reformation (Cambridge, 1978), 24, 135, 148–66Google Scholar; and Straumann, , Roman Law in the State of Nature: The Classical Foundations of Hugo Grotius’ Natural Law, trans. Cooper, Belinda (Cambridge, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment, an Interpretation, vol. 1, The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York, 1966), 9–10Google Scholar.
15 Robertson, John, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005), 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 Ibid., 21.
17 See Dew, Ben, “Epicurean and Stoic Enlightenments: The Return of Modern Paganism?”, History Compass 11/6 (2013), 486–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and especially Kavanagh, Thomas M., Enlightened Pleasures: Eighteenth-Century France and the New Epicureanism (New Haven, 2010)Google Scholar, who specifically discusses the curious linkage of the two philosophies, and uses the phrase “Epicurean Stoicism” first at 3.
18 Israel, Jonathan, Enlightenment Contested (Oxford, 2006), 51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 Such scholarship has also examined the Stoic influences on Spinoza's thought. See DeBrabander, Firmin, Spinoza and the Stoics: Power, Politics, and the Passions (London, 2007)Google Scholar.
20 Lafond, Jean, L'homme et son image: Morales et littérature de Montaigne à Mandeville (Paris, 1996)Google Scholar. See especially the essay “Augustinisme et épicurisme au XVIIe siècle,” at 345–68. Also see Baker, Keith M., “On Condorcet's ‘Sketch’,” Daedalus 133/3 (2004), 56–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Force, Pierre, Self-Interest before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science (Cambridge, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brooke, Christopher, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton, 2012)Google Scholar; Robertson, , The Case for the Enlightenment; and Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2001)Google Scholar.
22 Christopher Brooke, Philosophic Pride, 150–59.
23 Hirschman, Albert, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, 1977)Google Scholar.
24 Brooke, Philosophic Pride, 181–208. See also Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures, 103–27.
25 Edelstein, Dan, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 Tierney, Brian had earlier pointed out the importance of William of Ockham, and later scholastic philosophy, to the origin of rights theory in The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150–1625 (Atlanta, GA, 1997)Google Scholar.
27 Edelstein, Dan, “Enlightenment Rights Talk,” Journal of Modern History 86/3 (2014), 530–65, at 541CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 The classic study of education reforms in the French Revolution remains Palmer, R. R., The Improvement of Humanity: Education and the French Revolution (Princeton, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the Condorcet plan specifically see 124–39.
29 See Israel, “Natural Virtue,” 8.
30 On the failure of the Condorcet plan also see Adkins, G. Matthew, The Idea of the Sciences in the French Enlightenment: A Reinterpretation (Newark, DE, 2014), 118–35Google Scholar.
31 Robespierre referred to Condorcet in 1794 as “ce lâche Caritat,” “le lâche Condorcet,” and “conspirateur timide, méprisé de tous les partis.” Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, vol. 10 (Paris, 1967), 401–2 and 456.
32 de Caritat, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas, de Condorcet, Marquis, Cinq mémoires sur l'instruction publique, ed. Coutel, Charles and Kintzler, Catherine (Paris, 1994), 85Google Scholar.
33 Ibid., 64.
34 Ibid., 63.
35 Ibid., 96–9.
36 Condorcet also argued that, as a result, political powers must have no authority over the learned institutions that direct public education. Ibid., 179–80.
37 Plato, Alcibiades I, 118C. From Plato in Twelve Volumes, trans. W. R. M. Lamb, vol. 12 (Cambridge, MA, 1927).
38 From Cicero's Three Books of Offices, or Moral Duties, trans. Cyrus Edmonds (London, 1856), 218–20.
39 Seneca to Lucilius, I: XVI, from Seneca ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, trans. Richard Gummere (Cambridge, MA, 1917), 103.
40 Seneca, II: LXXIX, 8–9, 205.
41 Seneca, I: XLVII, 301–11.
42 See Brockliss, L. W. B., French Higher Education in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History (Oxford, 1987), 111–77 and 185–227Google Scholar; and Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries, 8–16.
43 Carter, Elisabeth, All the Works of Epictetus (London, 1758)Google Scholar.
44 Condorcet, , Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain suivi de fragment sur l'Atlantide (Paris, 1988), 147–9Google Scholar.
45 Condorcet, Cinq mémoires, 201–3.
46 Ibid., 82.
47 Ibid., 146.
48 Ibid., 131, emphasis added.
49 Seneca, I: LIX, On Pleasure and Joy, 409–11.
50 Fontenelle, “Du bonheur,” 278.
51 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The First and Second Discourses, trans. , Roger and Masters, Judith (New York, 1964), 130–31Google Scholar.
52 Ibid., 222, emphasis added.
53 Brooke, Philosophic Pride, 42–7.
54 Translation from ibid., 189.
55 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Émile, ou de l'education, ed. François, and Richard, Pierre (Paris, 1961), Book 1, 7Google Scholar. I am selectively using the Barbara Foxley translation from Project Gutenburg, at www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5427/pg5427.txt.
56 On the concept of virtue in Rousseau's political thought see Linton, Marisa, The Politics of Virtue in Enlightenment France (New York, 2001), 80–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
57 Rousseau, Émile, Book 2, 60–61.
58 Ibid., 61.
59 Ibid., 68.
60 Ibid., 70.
61 Ibid., 246–7.
62 Rousseau, Émile, 246. See Strong, Tracy B., Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary (Lanham, MD, 2002)Google Scholar.
63 “So it is the fewness of his needs, the narrow limits within which he can compare himself with others, that makes a man really good; what makes him really bad is a multiplicity of needs and dependence on the opinions of others.” Rousseau, Émile, 246–9.
64 In Rousseau: On Education, Freedom, and Judgment (University Park, PA, 2014), 16–35, Denise Shaeffer comments on the “slippery” concept of “nature” in Émile, but I wonder if this apparent ambiguity stems from the fact that Shaeffer never considers that Rousseau's concept of nature is essentially a Stoic one.
65 Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, 179.
66 Cassirer, The Myth of the State, 169.
67 See Force, Pierre, “Helvétius as an Epicurean Political Theorist,” in Leddy, and Lifschitz, , Epicurus in the Enlightenment, 105–18Google Scholar.
68 Helvétius, De l'esprit (Paris, 1758), 276.
69 Condorcet to Turgot, 4 Dec. 1773, in Henry, Charles, ed., Correspondance inédite de Condorcet et de Turgot, 1770–1779 (Paris, 1882), 141Google Scholar.
70 Turgot to Condorcet, Dec. 1773, in ibid., 142. We might expect Turgot, as a student of François Quesnay and of Physiocracy, to prefer a Stoic (or Taoist) rationalism that leads to the discovery of the ordre naturel. See Vardi, Liana, The Physiocrats and the World of Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and also Sonenscher, Michael, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, 2007), 216–17Google Scholar.
71 J.-P. Brissot, “Observations sur Helvétius,” La chronique du mois, ou les cahiers patriotiques, July 1792, 36–41, at 37.
72 Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, 43.
73 Rousseau, Émile, 218.
74 Ibid., 120.
75 Ibid., 379.
76 Shovlin, John, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca and London, 2006), 191–204, at 199Google Scholar.
77 Ibid., 197. See also Jones, P. M., “The ‘Agrarian Law’: Schemes for Land Redistribution during the French Revolution,” Past and Present 133/1 (1991) 96–133, at 99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rose, R. B., “The ‘Red Scare’ of the 1790s: The French Revolution and the ‘Agrarian Law,’” Past and Present 103/1 (1984) 113–30, at 127–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
78 See Palmer, The Improvement of Humanity; also Smith, Jay, Nobility Reimagined: The Patriotic Nation in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, 2005), 49–52Google Scholar.
79 Saint-Étienne, Jean-Paul Rabaut, Projet d’éducation nationale (Paris, 1792), 8Google Scholar.
80 “Plan de Michel Lepeletier,” in Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, 12–34, at 15–16.
81 Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, 11.
82 Ibid., 354–5.
83 Condorcet, Cinq Mémoires, 82–5.
84 Ibid., 85.
85 Constant, “Sur la liberté des anciens,” 259–61.
86 Bloch, Jean, in Rousseauism and Education in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1995), 132–5Google Scholar, highlights the various technical and practical overlaps in Rousseau's and Condorcet's education ideas, and points out that the supposed opposition between them owes much to Robespierre's rhetorical attack on Condorcet, in which he presented himself as Rousseauean and Condorcet as the friend of Voltaire.
87 Condorcet to Turgot, 27 Nov. 1770, Correspondance inédite de Condorcet et de Turgot, 20.
88 Turgot to Condorcet, 1 Dec. 1773, Correspondance inédite de Condorcet et de Turgot, 146.
89 Condorcet to Turgot, 13 Dec. 1773, Correspondance inédite de Condorcet et de Turgot, 148.
