Not everyone in Europe’s intellectual elite agreed. In 1748, in The Spirit of Laws, a work that inspired constitutional reformers all over Europe, the Baron de Montesquieu claimed that ‘the cudgel governs China’ – a claim endorsed by Jesuit accounts of Chinese habits of harsh justice and judicial torture. He condemned China as ‘a despotic state, whose principle is fear’. Indeed, a fundamental difference of opinion divided Montesquieu and Voltaire. Montesquieu advocated the rule of law and recommended that constitutional safeguards should limit rulers. Voltaire never really trusted the people and favoured strong, well-advised governments. Montesquieu, moreover, developed an influential theory, according to which Western political traditions were benign and tended toward liberty, whereas Asian states concentrated power in the hands of tyrants. ‘This’, he wrote, ‘is the great reason for the weakness of Asia and the strength of Europe; for the liberty of Europe and the slavery of Asia.’ ‘Oriental despotism’ became a standard term of abuse in Western political writing.37
While Diderot echoed and even exceeded Montesquieu in favour of the subject against the state, François Quesnay, Voltaire’s colleague, echoed the idealization of China. ‘Enlightened despotism’, he thought, would favour the people rather than elites. In their day, Quesnay’s ideas were more influential than Montesquieu’s. He even persuaded the heir to the French throne to imitate a Chinese imperial rite by ploughing land in person as an example to agrarian improvers. In Spain, dramatists provided the court with exemplars of good kingship, translated or imitated from Chinese texts.38 ‘Enlightened despotism’ entered the political vocabulary along with ‘oriental despotism’, and many European rulers in the second half of the eighteenth century sought to embody it. One way or another, Chinese models seemed to be shaping European political thought.
The result was a bifurcation in Western politics. Reforming rulers followed the principles of enlightened despotism, while the radical enlightenment of Montesquieu influenced revolutionaries. Both traditions, however, could only lead to revolution from above, crafted or inflicted by despots or by a Platonic guardian class of the Enlightenment who would, as one of them said, ‘force men to be free’. The Abbé Raynal, a hero of the philosophes, assured the ‘wise of the Earth, philosophers of all nations, it is for you alone to make the laws, by indicating to other citizens what is needed, by enlightening your brothers’.39 So how did real, bloody, uncontrolled revolution, red in tooth and claw, happen? What induced part of the elite to relax control and confide in the risky and unpredictable behaviour of the ‘common man’? New influences arose in the eighteenth century to make some philosophes challenge the established order so thoroughly as even to question their own hold over it.
The Noble Savage and the Common Man
The subversive ideas had a long history behind them. Civilization has always had its discontents. Moralists have always berated each other with examples of virtuous outsiders, or of natural virtues that make up for deficient education, or of the goodness of the simple life corrupted by commerce and comfort. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, European overseas exploration had begun to accumulate examples of ways of life supposedly close to those of natural man – naked, untutored, dedicated to foraging, dependent on God. At first, they seemed disappointing. The golden age of primitive innocence was nowhere to be found. But clever scrutineers could find redeeming features in ‘savages’. In the mid-sixteenth century, the sceptic Michel de Montaigne argued that even so repugnant a practice as cannibalism had moral lessons for Europeans, whose mutual barbarities were much worse. In the seventeenth century, missionaries believed they really had found the good savage of legend among the Hurons, who practised appalling barbarities, torturing human-sacrifice victims; yet their egalitarian values and technical proficiency, compared with other, meaner neighbours, combined to make them seem full of natural wisdom. In the early eighteenth century, Louis-Armand de Lahontan – an embittered, dispossessed aristocrat who sought escape in Canada from derogation at home – made an imaginary Huron a spokesman for his own anticlerical radicalism. Voltaire made a hero of an ‘ingenuous Huron’ who criticized kings and priests. Joseph-François Lafitau praised the Huron for practising free love. In a comedy based on Voltaire’s work and performed in Paris in 1768, a Huron hero led a storming of the Bastille. From the noble savage the philosophers hailed, it was but a short step to the common man whom revolutionaries idolized.40
The socially inebriant potential of the Huron myth grew as more noble savages appeared during the exploration of the South Seas, a voluptuary’s paradise of liberty and licence.41 Feral children, with whom enlightened thinkers became obsessed as specimens of unsocialized primitivism, provided supposedly supporting evidence. Carl Linnaeus – the Swedish botanist who devised the modern method of classifying species – supposed wild children were a distinct species of the genus Homo. Plucked from whatever woods they were found in, wrenched from the dugs of vulpine surrogates, they became experiments in civilization. Savants tried to teach them language and manners. All the efforts failed. Boys supposedly raised by bears in seventeenth-century Poland continued to prefer the company of bears. Peter the Wild Boy, whom rival members of the English royal family struggled to possess as a pet in the 1720s, and whose portrait stares blankly from the stairway frescoes of Kensington Palace, hated clothes and beds and never learned to talk. The ‘savage girl’ kidnapped from the woods near Songi in 1731 liked to eat fresh frogs and rejected the viands of the kitchen of the Château d’Epinoy. For a long time she was better at imitating birdsong than speaking French. The most famous case of all was that of the Wild Boy of Aveyron, who, kidnapped for civilization in 1798, learned to dress and dine elegantly, but never to speak or to like what had happened to him. His tutor described him drinking fastidiously after dinner in the window of the room, ‘as if in this moment of happiness this child of nature tries to unite the only two good things which have survived the loss of his liberty – a drink of limpid water and the sight of sun and country’.42
The savage Eden, meanwhile, proved full of serpents. The Huron died out, ravaged by European diseases. Commerce and contagion corrupted the South Seas. Yet, despite the disappointments, in some philosophical minds the noble savage blended into the common man, and the idea of natural wisdom legitimated that of popular sovereignty. Without the Huron, the South Sea Islander, and the wolf-child, perhaps, the French Revolution would have been unthinkable.43
Among the consequences was the impetus the noble savage gave to an old but newly influential idea: natural equality. ‘The same law for all’ was a principle ancient Stoics advocated. Their justifications were that men were naturally equal, that inequalities were historical accidents, and that the state should try to redress them. Plenty of ancient religious thinking, well articulated in early Christianity, lighted on the notions that all people were equal in divine eyes and that society was bound, by allegiance to God, to try to match the vision. Some thinkers and – sporadically and briefly – some societies have gone further in demanding equality of opportunity, or of power, or of material well-being. In practice, communism tends to ensue, since communal ownership is the only absolute guarantee against the unequal distribution of property.
From the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, many projects were launched to create egalitarian utopias in Europe and America, usually by religious fanatics in a Christian tradition. Most went seriously wrong. When, for instance, the Anabaptist prophet Jan of Leiden set out to start a utopia of his own devising in Münster in 1525, the corruption of power transformed him into a monstrous tyrant, who acquired a harem, licensed orgies, and massacred enemies. Violence was a typical consummation. When the Levellers took advantage of the English Civil War to recreate what they imagined was apostolic equality, their project ended in bloody suppression. Other efforts merely subsided under their own impracticality. The backwoods utopias socialists constructed in the US Midwest in the nineteenth century lie in ruins today. Gilbert and Sullivan convincin
gly lampooned egalitarianism in their comic opera The Gondoliers:
The earl, the marquis and the duke,
the groom, the butler and the cook,
the aristocrat who banks with Coutts,
the aristocrat who cleans the boots …
all shall equal be.
No one has seriously recommended equalizing age or brainpower or beauty or stature or fatness or physical prowess or luck: some inequalities genuinely are natural. It is noble to try to remedy their effects, but nobility in pursuit of equality tends always to be condescending.
Still, there was a moment in the eighteenth century when equality seemed deliverable, if the state were to guarantee it. In some ways, the notion was reasonable: the state always tackles gross inequalities, so why not all inequalities? For those who believe in the natural equality of all, the state is there to enforce it; for those who do not, government has a moral role, levelling the ‘playing field’, redressing the imbalances between the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor. It is a dangerous idea, because equality enforced at the expense of liberty can be tyrannous.
The idea that this function of the state exceeds all others in importance is no older than the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Of the thinkers who broke with the outlook of the Encyclopédie in the second half of the eighteenth century, Rousseau was the most influential. He was a restless supertramp who loved low life and gutter pleasures. He changed his formal religious allegiance twice without once appearing sincere. He betrayed his mistresses, quarrelled with his friends, and abandoned his children. He shaped his life in addiction to his own sensibilities. In 1750, in the prize-winning essay that made his name, he repudiated one of the most sacred principles of the Enlightenment – ‘that the Arts and Sciences have benefited Mankind’. That the topic could be proposed at all shows how far disillusionment with enlightened optimism had already gone. Rousseau denounced property and the state. He offered nothing in their place except an assertion of the goodness of humans’ natural, primeval condition. Voltaire loathed Rousseau’s ideas. After reading them, ‘one wants to walk on all fours’, he said. Rousseau abjured other Enlightenment shibboleths, including progress. ‘I dared to strip man’s nature naked’, he claimed, ‘and showed that his supposed improvement was the fount of all his miseries.’44 He anticipated the post-Enlightenment sensibility of romantics who would value feelings and intuition, in some respects, above reason. He was the hero par excellence of the makers and mob of the French Revolution, who paraded his effigy around the ruins of the Bastille, invoked his ‘holy name’, and engraved his portrait over revolutionary allegories.45
Rousseau regarded the state as a corporation, or even a sort of organism, in which individual identities are submerged. Inspired by naturalists’ reports of the habits of orang-utans (whom Rousseau called gorillas, and whom, like many equally under-informed commentators, he classified in the genus Homo), he imagined a pre-social state of nature, in which humans were solitary rovers.46 At an irrecoverable moment, he thought, the act occurred ‘by which people become a people … the real foundation of society. The people becomes one single being … Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will.’ Citizenship is fraternity – a bond as organic as blood. Anyone constrained to obey the general will is ‘forced to be free … Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body.’47 Rousseau was vague about how to vindicate morally this obviously dangerous doctrine. Towards the end of the century Immanuel Kant provided a precise justification. He was averse to change, as solitary as an orang-utan, and, reputedly a creature of boringly predictable habits, rarely stirring from his accustomed paths around his home town of Königsberg. His thinking, however, was restless and boundless. Reason, he suggested, replacing individual will or interests, can identify objective goals, whose merit everyone can see.
Submission to the general will limits one’s freedom in deference to the freedom of others. In theory, the ‘general will’ is different from unanimity or sectional interests or individual preferences. In practice, however, it just means the tyranny of the majority: ‘The votes of the greatest number always bind the rest’, as Rousseau admitted. He wanted to outlaw political parties because ‘there should be no partial society within the state’.48 Rousseau’s logic, which would forbid trade unions, religious communions, and reformist movements, was a licence for totalitarianism. All the movements or governments it influenced – the French Jacobins and Communards, the Russian Bolsheviks, the modern fascists and Nazis, the advocates of tyranny by plebiscite – have suppressed individual liberty. Yet the passion with which Rousseau invoked freedom made it hard for many of his readers to see how illiberal his thought really was. Revolutionaries adopted the opening words of his essay of 1762: ‘Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains!’ They loosed the slogan more easily than the chains.
Universal Rights
Rousseau did share one of the axioms of the enlightened mainstream: the doctrine, as we now say, of human rights, inferred from natural equality. Here was the alchemy that could turn subjects into citizens. In the course of defending American rebels against the British crown, Thomas Paine, a publicist for every radical cause, formulated the idea that there are liberties beyond the state’s reach, rights too important for the state to overrule. Paine’s assertion was the climax of a long search by radical thinkers for ways of limiting rulers’ absolute power over their subjects. Revolutionaries in France and America seized on the idea. But it is easier to assert human rights than to say what they are. The US Declaration of Independence named them as ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. All states ignored the first: they continued to put people to death when it suited them. The second and third rights seemed, at first, too vague to change the course of history; they could be ignored on the specious grounds that different people had conflicting claims to liberty and happiness. In France revolutionaries enthusiastically echoed the US Declaration. Illiberal governments, however, repeatedly sidelined, until well into the twentieth century, the rights the document proclaimed. Napoleon set something of a pattern: he managed to practise tyranny – including judicial murders, arbitrary manipulation of laws, and bloody conquests – while embodying revolutionary principles in his admirers’ eyes: to this day, hardly a liberal’s study seems well furnished without his bust in bronze. Even in America, slaves and their black descendants were long denied the rights that, according to the founding Declaration, were universal.
The idea of rights with which all people are endowed acted unexpectedly on the world. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it became the basis of the American dream, according to which everyone in America could pursue purported happiness, in the form of material prosperity, with encouragement (instead of the usual interference) from the state. In partial consequence, the United States became the richest and, therefore, the most powerful country. By the turn of the millennium, the United States was a model most of the world acknowledged, copying institutions – a free market, a democratic constitution, and the rule of law – that made the American dream deliverable.49
In the same period, an agreement, to which most states signed up, with varying degrees of sincerity and commitment in the ‘Helsinki Process’ of 1975–83, defined further human rights: of immunity from arbitrary arrest, torture, and expropriation; of family integrity; of peaceful association for cultural, religious, and economic purposes; of participation in politics, with a right of self-expression within limits required by public order; of immunity from persecution on grounds of race, sex, creed, sickness, or disability; of education; and of a basic level of shelter, health, and subsistence. Life and liberty, however – the other choice ingredients of the US founding fathers’ formula – remained problematic: life, because of abiding disputes over whether criminals, the unborn, and euthanasia victims deserve inclusion; liberty, because of disparities of power. Neither right could be secure against predatory st
ates, criminal organizations, and rich corporations. The rhetoric of human rights triumphed almost everywhere, but the reality lagged. Female workers are still routinely short-changed; children’s rights to live with their families are commonly alienated, often to the state, as are those of parents to bring up their children; immigrants are unable to sell their labour at its true value or even to escape effective servitude if they are without the documents that states unblinkingly deny them. Employees without access to collective bargaining, which laws often forbid, are often not much better off. Targets of crime commonly get protection or redress in proportion to their wealth or clout. Above all, it is no good prating about human rights to the lifeless victims of war, fatal neglect, abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment.
French revolutionaries often referred to inalienable rights as ‘the rights of man and the citizen’. A by-product was a new focus on the rights and citizenship of women. Condorcet’s wife ran a salon in revolutionary Paris, where guests declaimed rather than debated the doctrine that women collectively constitute a class of society, historically oppressed and deserving of emancipation. Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft launched a tradition, recognizable in feminism today, in two works of 1792, Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne and A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Both authors struggled to earn their livings; both led irregular sex lives; both ended tragically. De Gouges was guillotined for defending the king of France; Wollstonecraft died in childbirth. Both rejected the entire previous tradition of female championship, which eulogized supposedly female virtues. Instead, de Gouges and Wollstonecraft admitted to vices and blamed male oppression. They rejected adulation in favour of equality. ‘Women may mount the scaffold’, de Gouges observed. ‘They should also be able to ascend the bench.’50
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