Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century traders were only dimly aware of what would today be considered ‘impersonal’ economic forces: when they took it upon themselves to explain why failure occurred they persisted in tracing the problem to immoral acts on the part of parties to business transactions. Accordingly, there was a strong tendency to believe that the solution to failure and most other business ills lay in a general reformation of social mores, essentially along what we are accustomed to call Puritan lines, although in fact they were more urban and commercial than uniquely Puritan.
As conditions for doing business grew more complex and less easy to monitor, while commercial activity remained closely interwoven with family life, people felt themselves caught up in “a tight, highly interdependent system in which individual immoral acts almost invariably caused chain-reactions of economic disorder.” In such situations, bad behavior was deplored not so much for its sinfulness (although that could be invoked too) as for the dangers it posed to families.10
Parallel to this heightened emphasis on moral behavior, and for similar reasons, there developed a widespread attention to “character,” seen as a kind of overall matrix or frame of personal being, within which certain specific qualities or virtues could be supported. Kant wrote extensively about character in works intended for ordinary people rather than philosophers, seeing it as a kind of everyday approximation to the difficult ideal of acting on the universal and abstract principles of the categorical imperative he set out in his formal moral theory (and to which I will return in a moment). For him it had a place in both business and in the activities of state officials; to others character was important precisely because it provided a foundation for stable and disciplined behavior in unpredictable situations, facing up to the unfamiliar conditions of city life or regulating relations with distant clients or associates who did not share some particular set of communal values. “Character,” as recent writers about its use in eighteenth-century Scotland have noted, “was partly a tool for designating the terms of interaction between strangers.” Both P. S. Atiyah and Thomas Haskell have called attention to the heightened emphasis on strict personal responsibility such interaction fostered. Atiyah has shown that English courts from late in the eighteenth century changed the standards for judging whether contracts were valid, declaring any covenant freely entered into as binding on those who made it, in contrast to longstanding practices that limited legally enforceable agreements to ones judged to be in accord with traditional standards of equity. Not communal practices or the justice system but personal discipline had to provide a shield for families against reckless and irresponsible actions by some of their members. This new jurisprudence was part of what made the period an “age of principles,” in which people were held strictly to whatever promises they made, a recognition that behavior once governed by collective standards had instead to be regulated on an abstract basis within the relations individuals established with one another.11
Both the emphasis on the possibility of developing character and the importance assigned to principles were part of the third factor in fostering a more rigid and demanding morality, namely a heightened estimation of the human power to direct individual conduct and to alter the forms of society and politics. Two broad historical phenomena contributed to this revaluation, Enlightenment culture and the impact of the French Revolution. Important as was the first, there are reasons to believe that it remained palpably incomplete until given greater force by the second.
As prisms through which to refract both the claims made for human autonomy in the Enlightenment and their limits we look briefly at two representative eighteenth-century figures, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Both were part of the larger contemporary project to make human nature itself rather than tradition or revealed religion the ground of morality; but it is not always recognized how much both also set clear boundaries for what individuals could be expected to achieve in this realm. Rousseau is well known for his declared belief in the fundamental goodness of human nature, and in the virtuous quality of feeling and sentiment in particular. In his various writings he sought ways to realize human moral potential by returning people to these natural sources of goodness. At the same time, however, Rousseau often portrayed people as weak and easily corrupted, not just by society, but at a deeper level where the very impulses taken to be the source of moral formation operated. Rousseau’s fears on this score were at work in making him an influential contributor to the incipient near-panic about masturbation that spread from the middle of the eighteenth century, and that I will consider in Chapter 12, in connection with the changing situation of culture in which it developed. In a more general way these anxieties were nowhere more evident than in the work that won him the greatest fame in his own time, Julie, or the New Heloïse. It is the story of two enthusiasts for goodness and virtue, the young Julie and her poor but honorable tutor Saint-Preux (recognized as a stand-in for the author by many readers), who yield to the feelings that draw them to each other and become lovers, not because they think it right to do so, but because their belief in the virtuous nature of their sentiments puts them onto a path whose moral ambiguity they cannot untangle. A chief reason for the book’s enormous appeal was that many readers (numbers of whom wrote to Rousseau about it) similarly saw themselves as caught between believing that their feelings of sympathy for others were sources of good, and discovering that following those feelings out could have consequences that they came to regret.12
In the novel, Saint-Preux is sent away by Julie’s parents once their relationship is discovered, and she is married to Wolmar, an older man and friend of her father. She accepts her transformation into Mme Wolmar with no visible reservations: family loyalty triumphs over the liberation of individual feeling and judgment. Her attachment to Wolmar is cemented by his character, at once upright and sympathetic, and by his remarkable talent as manager of the family estate, organizing things in a way that both yields wonderful products and generates harmony between owners and workers.13 More importantly, Wolmar serves as a sign of the book’s central moral message, namely that upright behavior – at least for the likes of Julie and Saint-Preux – requires both favorable circumstances and an external source of discipline. Fully aware of Julie’s earlier relations with her former lover, Wolmar all the same brings Saint-Preux back into the family some years later as tutor of the Wolmar children. Two things allay the potential dangers of this situation. One is the inner transformation effected by Julie’s changed circumstances: as a wife and mother, she tells Saint-Preux, she is no longer the Julie of their youth. But the old feelings still bubble up, and Wolmar succeeds in managing and redirecting them too. In a famous and crucial scene, he brings the former lovers to exchange a chaste kiss under his eyes on the very site of their first tryst, calling up the emotions that had caused their fall, but controlling and channeling them so that they conduce to the kind of outcome virtue requires. Even individuals with a capacity for moral development can only realize it with the aid of some external direction.14
A very similar conclusion marked the evolution of Kant’s moral thinking, making even the archetypal Enlightenment theorist of humanity’s moral capacity a figure who fully recognized its limits. His was a cosmopolitan morality infused with the spirit of the European-wide culture of Enlightenment, and one of its key terms was “character,” a notion shaped by the growing importance of extended networks and (as we saw above) “partly a tool for designating the terms of interaction between strangers.” Kant’s genius was to work out a principle for this morality that was equally a formula for autonomy because it simultaneously directed behavior toward action for the sake of good and freed people from control by any external authority or power. This principle and formula was the “categorical imperative,” which enjoined that, in every instance where we face a moral choice, we should always act on grounds that every rational creature would be justified in adopting, that we always obey the rule of reason. Among the things it commanded were t
ruthfulness, honesty, and treating other people as ends in themselves, not means to any ends imposed by others. Following the categorical imperative assured the will’s goodness because, in submitting action to direction by principles common to all rational creatures, it eliminated any self-interested motives that derived from the needs or interests of particular individuals or circumstances. And it was a formula for autonomy because the law obeyed by the creature that followed it was one laid down wholly by its own rational nature. The genuinely moral person would also be truly free.
We cannot pause over the ways Kant worked out the basis and implications of this perspective; what matters here are the limits he had to recognize in bringing it to life. The problem was that in order for people actually to be moral and autonomous, they had to be genuinely able to act in accordance with rational principles. Only if reason could be made “practical,” meaning only if it could actually achieve power to direct the will, could the categorical imperative realize the human potential for morality and autonomy. But as Kant knew perfectly well, human beings are material creatures driven by passion and interest; even when they claim or believe they are being guided by moral rules they are likely to be in the grip of some hidden and questionable inclination. Thus the quest for a way to give reason power over action was hugely difficult at best; in a letter to Moses Mendelssohn he called it the “the philosopher’s stone,” the longed-for but elusive power to transmute dross into gold. Kant sought to solve the riddle in various ways, but all of them (as Dieter Henrich has shown) ran up against the problem that the link between reason and action had to be woven out of some kind of feeling, the vehicle through which the mind could influence the body, and feeling was rooted in need and desire, motives that sought suspect or equivocal satisfactions and sometimes worked in devious ways, as Rousseau recognized in Julie (so did other eighteenth-century figures, such as Diderot, in their works). In the end Kant was driven to a surprising and in a way desperate solution, resting the power of reason to direct behavior on something that he had begun by regarding as incompatible with the Newtonian reason on which the Enlightenment’s intellectual liberation was founded, namely that deep within the order of nature, there might operate not the impersonal cause-and-effect relations on which modern scientific understanding was based, but a purposeful teleology that would predispose the material side of human nature toward the goals set by reason. As he put it in the last of his three major treatises, the Critique of Judgment, “without the help of nature to fulfill a condition beyond our abilities, the realization of this goal would not be possible.”15
In other words, only if the ability to act in accord with the categorical imperative was rooted outside human reason, in a divinely instituted natural order, could it be realized in conduct. Such a conclusion suggested a need for reliance on external power much like the role Rousseau assigned to Wolmar; we might well argue that it left humanity as Kant knew it hardly less dependent on outside aid than the traditional state of “tutelage” from which Enlightenment was supposed to liberate it. Kant continued to envision the development of a different configuration of human nature, but it receded into a far-off future.16 Like Rousseau, Kant was too wedded to the idea of virtue itself to sanction any of the indulgences characteristic of “classic moralism,” but his actual understanding of what individuals could accomplish on their own remained closer to the old and limited expectations than his formal theory hoped to establish.
Preserved in Enlightenment thinking, these limits to the human capacity to make reason “practical” were weakened or even overcome for people of a progressive temper by news of the overthrow of the Old Regime in France, and the era of revolutionary transformation it ushered in. Even though revolution failed to realize the exalted visions of its supporters and enthusiasts, it served as the great midwife of utopian imagination, dissolving the aura of stability that had long surrounded established ways of life and opening a window on radically new horizons, no less moral and personal than political. What Alexis de Tocqueville said of the atmosphere in Paris following the fall of the July Monarchy in February of 1848, that “it seemed as though the shock of the revolution had reduced society itself to dust, and as though a competition had been opened for the new form that was to be given to the edifice about to be erected in its place,” may have been less literally true for other instances of upheaval, but it describes the boost revolutionary change gave to the moral imagination very well.17 Kant recognized this when he greeted the 1789 Revolution with enthusiasm, locating its historical importance less in the immediate or future changes it might effect in its own country than in the sympathy the spectacle of transformation aroused in the hearts and minds of observers at a distance; their disinterested enthusiasm testified to the existence of a “moral disposition within the human race,” an innate impulse to rise above circumstance and inclination and to submit conduct to the liberating rule of reason (Wordsworth described the atmosphere of those heady days in a similar way: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!”).18
To be sure, the later stages of the Revolution generated new motives for pessimism in the eyes of many, but the power of the spectacle to demonstrate the capacity of human beings to make their own rules and free themselves from the grip of both custom and nature can be seen in the case of two figures who made a significant impact on moral thinking in the nineteenth century. One of these, the radical anarchist William Godwin, was predisposed to receive such a message, but the other, the dour parson Thomas Mathus who predicted that people would not be able to feed themselves as population expanded, was not. Between them they wove a tissue of moral attitudes that would be of great moment for Victorian morality.
For Godwin, whose An Enquiry into the Principles of Political Justice saw the light as revolutionary radicalism reached its pinnacle in 1793, the ability of the French to overthrow the monarchy was testimony that people had the ability to organize their lives without submitting themselves to outside authority. The revolutionaries demonstrated that humanity was acquiring an increasing sway over mere circumstances, rooted in the moral capacity individuals developed as the spread of knowledge and understanding gave new strength to the mind. These developments would render government unnecessary in both public and private life, and Godwin specifically applied this vision of the coming future to sex, arguing that desire and passion would lose their power over conduct as humanity progressed and people turned instead to higher kinds of satisfactions.
Godwin moderated his expectations somewhat in later years, but his vision of the human aptitude to control behavior and institute a more moral tenor of life acquired considerable power to influence people less radical than himself when Thomas Malthus introduced it into the second edition of his Essay on Population, in 1803. Malthus had originally written his book (in 1798) as a conservative and Christian rejection of Godwin’s rationalist optimism, presenting his argument that the expansion of population would outrun any possible increase in the food supply as evidence that hopes for a rise in the quotient of worldly happiness were vain and deluding. Part of his pessimism arose from a dour but unblinking recognition about how powerful a force sex was in human life; at the core of the “principle of population” that ensured that the growth in numbers was bound to outstrip the food supply was simply sexual desire. Beginning with the second edition, however, Malthus markedly changed his emphasis (rendering his book incoherent in the eyes of many critics), maintaining now that the working classes in particular, who would be the ones to suffer most as scarcity mounted, could improve their situation by “moral restraint,” that is, abstention from marriage and sex (contraception he saw as unacceptable from a Christian point of view and it was generally unreliable at the time in any case) so as to keep their family needs within the bounds of their resources. Despite their political differences, Godwin and Malthus were friends and corresponded for some years, and there is reason to think (though we cannot be certain) that the anarchist philosopher’s encouragement
helped move the parson to take this new direction. In any case, the latter’s doing so marked a significant turning in moral attitudes, giving the sanction of respectable conservative opinion to a view about the human potential for improvement hitherto associated with radicals and revolutionaries. Malthus never went over to Godwin’s kind of optimism about human nature, with its belief that the sex drive would lose its power as “higher” satisfactions became more available, but in one place he pictured sexual self-control as generating feelings of “romantick pride” and a “brighter, purer, steadier flame” of love inside marriage.
Other religious moralists, whether directly influenced by Malthus or not, displayed an even clearer turn to optimism about the capacity of people to alter their behavior and give a more moral tenor to life. One churchman wrote in a very Godwinian vein that chastity would become increasingly painless as people felt the influence of the right kind of reading and thinking, and another that society’s growing “intellectual refinement … withdraws men from the mere sensualities of life,” adding that “wherever society is highly cultivated more men will be found living in voluntary celibacy.” A third linked such hopes to the “universally admitted truth” (one at the center of Enlightenment thinking but hardly in accord with Christianity’s core understanding of human nature) that “man is what the circumstances in which he is placed make him.” These pronouncements are the signs that the other side of the more rigid moral demands nineteenth century people imposed on themselves was a considerably more optimistic view of their capacity to meet them than obtained in “classic moralism.”19
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