Misanthropy

by Andrew Gibson

  32William Doyle, Jansenism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 4.

  33Quoted ibid., p. 39.

  34Quoted ibid., p. 30.

  35Quoted Bishop, Life and Adventures, p. 231; cf. Lafond, ‘Préface’, p. 10.

  36See Bishop, Life and Adventures, p. 245.

  37Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Gérard Ferreyrolles (Paris: Livres de Poche, 2000), hereafter cited in the text as P; p. 55.

  38A version of Isa. 41.24.

  39George Herbert, The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (Cambridge: T. Buck and R. Daniel, 1635), p. 120.

  40Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Nouveaux dialogues des morts, ed. with introd. and notes Jean Dagen (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1971), p. 276.

  41François de La Mothe Le Vayer, Œuvres (Paris: L. Billaine, 1699), vol. ix, p. 270.

  42Nicolas Boileau, Satires, épitres, art poétique, ed. with notes Jean-Pierre Collinet (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), pp. 97–105.

  43Quoted Jean Delvolvé, Religion, critique et philosophie positive chez Pierre Bayle (Paris: F. Alcan, 1906), p. 285.

  44François de Salignac de La Mothe Fénelon, Letter LXXXVII, Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1810), vol. 5, Lettres Spirituelles, p. 22.

  45Quoted Ladurie, Saint-Simon, p. 199.

  46Ibid., p. 232.

  47Ibid., p. 207.

  48Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 205.

  49La Fontaine, Fables et épitres, introd. Émile Faguet (Paris: Nelson, 1914), p. 380.

  50See Jones, Great Nation, p. 75.

  51Quoted K. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 214.

  52Jones, Great Nation, p. 128.

  53Ibid., p. 70.

  54Ibid., p. 96.

  55Ibid., p. 144.

  56J. S. Spink, French Free-Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire (London: Athlone, 1960), p. 4.

  57Françoise Charles-Daubert, Les Libertins érudits en France au XVIIe Siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), p. 6.

  58See Bernadette Hoeffer, ‘Penser la mélancolie: La Mothe le Vayer et Molière’, in Libertinism and Literature in Seventeenth-Century France, ed. Richard G. Hodgson (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2009), pp. 129–42, p. 131.

  59Quoted Spink, French Free-Thought, p. 39.

  60Cyrano de Bergerac, Œuvres libertines, ed. F. Lachèvre (Paris: Champion, 1921), p. 61.

  61La Mothe le Vayer, Les États et empires du soleil, quoted Jean-Charles Darmon, ‘Ironie libertine et analytique de l’imposture’, in Libertinism and Literature in Seventeenth-Century France, ed. Richard G. Hodgson (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2009), pp. 9–36, p. 24.

  62 Le Parnasse satyrique du Sieur Théophile, avec le receuil des plus excellens vers satyriques de ce temps (2 vols., Paris: Gand, 1861), vol. 1, pp. 50–3.

  63See Marc André Bernier, Libertinage et figures de savoir: Rhétorique et roman libertin dans la France des Lumières (Saint-Nicolas: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2001), p. 8 and passim.

  64‘Avertissement de l’éditeur’, Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses, pref. André Malraux (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 26.

  65Laclos, Liaisons dangereuses, pp. 471–2.

  66See for instance the introduction and foreword to Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, The Complete Marquis de Sade, trans. with a foreword Paul J. Gillette, introd. John S. Yankowski (2 vols., Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1966), vol. 1, pp. 11–23, 27–41.

  67For a contrary argument, see for instance Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (London: Penguin, 2001), passim. I am grateful to Vicki Mahaffey for pointing this out to me.

  68Daniel Cottom, Unhuman Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 5.

  69Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, Maximes, pensées, caractères et anecdotes, with ‘Une Notice sur sa vie’ by Pierre-Louis Ginguené (Paris and London: J. Deboffe, 1796), hereafter cited in the text as MP; p. 21.

  70See ibid., p. 87.

  71Quoted Ginguené, ‘Notice’, p. lii.

  72Quoted ibid., p. xlv.

  73‘Manfred: A Dramatic Poem’, in George Gordon, Lord Byron, Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page and John Jump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 390–406, 1.1. 154, 2.2. 57.

  74‘Cain: A Mystery’, in Byron, Poetical Works, pp. 520–44, 1.1. 138–9, 2.1. 67, 3.1. 184.

  75See Rémi Rizzo, Byron et le misanthropie (Paris: Pensée Universelle, 1985), p. 55.

  76Giacomo Leopardi, Poems, trans. with introd. Arturo Vivante (Wellfleet: Delphinium, 1988), pp. 57, 61.

  77Ladurie, Saint-Simon, p. 40.

  78Pascal, Pensées, p. 80.

  79See Saint-Simon, Mémoires, vol. 7, p. 706, 1491.

  80See Lathy, Memoirs, p. 202.

  81Quoted Mitford, Sun King, p. 104.

  Chapter 2

  1Quoted Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-56, trans. Harry T. Willetts (New York: Random House, 2011), p. 446.

  2I am grateful to Anthony Ossa-Richardson for making almost exactly this point to me.

  3Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Gérard Ferreyrolles (Paris: Livres de Poche, 2000), pp. 88, 235.

  4Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, Mémoires (18 vols., Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1977), vol. 9, p. 47.

  5Saint-Simon, Mémoires, ed. Arthur Michel de Boislisle, Léon Lecestre and Jean de Boislisle (43 vols, Paris: Hachette, 1879–1930), vol. 31, p. 16.

  6Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 8.

  7James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), hereafter cited in the text as LJ; p. 130.

  8Johnson, The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (23 vols, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1958–2010), vols. iii–v, hereafter cited in the text as R; 175, vol. v, p. 160. Johnson is quoting Diogenes Laertius, The Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 1.5.

  9Quoted Peter Martin, Samuel Johnson: A Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2008), p. 15.

  10Johnson, ‘Irene’, Poems, ed. E. L. McAdam Jr. with George Milne, Works, vol. vi, pp. 109–218, p. 155.

  11Johnson, ‘The Vision of Theodore, The Hermit of Teneriffe, Found in his Cell’, Rasselas and Other Tales, ed. Gwin J. Kolb, Works, vol. xvi, pp. 195–212, pp. 195, 198.

  12Johnson, ‘London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal’, Poems, pp. 47–61.

  13Dr Johnson by Mrs Thrale: The ‘Anecdotes’ of Mrs Piozzi, in their Original Form, ed. with introd. Richard Ingrams (London: Chatto and Windus, 1984), p. 36.

  14Samuel Beckett, Letters, Vol. 1: 1929-1940, ed. Martha Dow Felsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 529.

  15See Thomas R. Preston, Not in Timon’s Manner: Feeling, Misanthropy and Satire in Eighteenth Century England (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1975), pp. 121–43.

  16Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 1.

  17Johnson, ‘The Young Author’, Poems, p. 72.

  18Ecclesiastes, 1.14.

  19Quoted Martin, Johnson, p. 203.

  20Cf. ibid., p. 342.

  21Quoted ibid., p. 247.

  22Cf. Lacan’s well-known assertion that ‘there is no sexual relation’; for which see On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-1973: Encore, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, trans. Bruce Fink (London and New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1975), for instance at p. 58.

  23Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 302.

  24Martin, Johnson, p. 458.

  25An early biographer, quoted Boswell, LJ, p. 1121.

  26Martin, Johnson, p. 113.

  27Quoted Boswell, LJ
, p. 105.

  28Tobias Smollett, ‘Preface’, in Roderick Random, introd. H. W. Hodges (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1973), hereafter cited in the text as RR; p. xx.

  29See Smollett, Travels Through France and Italy, ed. Frank Felsenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), hereafter cited in the text as TFI; p. 40.

  30Preston, Not in Timon’s Manner, pp. 73–4.

  31Quoted Jeremy Lewis, Tobias Smollett (London: Pimlico, 2004), p. 144.

  32See Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. with an introd. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), hereafter cited in the text as HC; p. 234.

  33Lewis, Smollett, p. 113.

  34See ibid., p. 109.

  35Ibid., p. 35.

  36Smollett, The History and Adventures of an Atom, ed. O. M. Brack Jr., introd. and notes Robert Adams Day (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1989), p. 7.

  37Quoted Lewis, Smollett, p. 174.

  38Quoted Rev R. Wyse Jackson, ‘The Secret Religion of Jonathan Swift’, Churchman, vol. 52, no. 3 (April–June 1939), pp. 148–51, p. 150.

  39Jonathan Swift, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, in Satires and Personal Writings, ed. with introd. and notes William Alfred Eddy (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 1–18, pp. 3–4.

  40Swift, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, hereafter cited in the text as MP, in Satires and Personal Writings, pp. 19–31, p. 23.

  41David Nokes, Jonathan Swift: A Hypocrite Reversed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

  42Swift, Correspondence, ed. Harold Williams (5 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963–5), vol. iii, p. 118.

  43Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. with introd. and notes Robert Demaria Jr. (London: Penguin, 2003), hereafter cited in the text as GT; p. 47.

  44Swift, A Tale of a Tub, to which is added The Battle of the Books and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, ed. with introd. and notes R. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), hereafter cited in the text as TT; p. 167.

  45See Nokes, Swift, p. 183.

  46Swift, ‘When I Come to be Old’, in Prose Works, ed. Herbert Davis et al. (14 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939–68), vol. 1, p. xxxvii.

  47Ibid.

  48Swift, Poems, ed. Harold Williams (3 vols, Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), vol. 2, pp. 525–30, p. 527.

  49Ibid., p. 529.

  Chapter 3

  1Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 7.

  2Ken Gemes and Christopher Janaway, ‘Life-Denial versus Life-Affirmation: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on Pessimism and Asceticism’, in A Companion to Schopenhauer, ed. Bart Vandenabeele (Blackwell: New York, 2012), pp. 280–99, p. 289.

  3Alain Badiou, Circonstances 1: Kosovo, 11 Septembre, Chirac/Le Pen (Lignes: Éditions Léo Scherer, 2003), p. 8.

  4Guy Lardreau, La Véracité: Essai d’une philosophie negative (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1993), p. 166, 170.

  5Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau, Le Monde: Réponse à la question, qu’est-ce-que les droits de l’homme? (Paris: Grasset, 1978), p. 13.

  6Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1984), p. 65.

  7Plato, Theaetetus, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. with analysis and introd. Benjamin Jowett (5 vols, Oxford: Clarendon, 1892), 155d, vol. 4, p. 210; and Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredennick (2 vols, London: Heinemann, 1933), 1.2.982b12-14, vol. 1, p. 13.

  8Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (2 vols, New York: Dover, 1969), hereafter cited in the text as WW1 and 2; vol. 1, p. 81.

  9Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and his Poor, trans. Andrew Parker (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 98.

  10Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or, the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, ed. Michael Oakeshott, introd. Richard S. Peters (New York: Collier, 1978), hereafter cited in the text as L; p. 115, 186.

  11Quoted in A. P. Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 2.

  12Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne, introd. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), hereafter cited in the text as OC; p. 37.

  13Quoted Peters, ‘Introduction’, L, p. 12.

  14Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961), p. 541.

  15I owe my awareness of this term to friend and Hobbes scholar Martin Dzelzainis.

  16See Jules Steinberg, The Obsession of Thomas Hobbes: The English Civil War in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), p. 4.

  17See in particular the work of Quentin Skinner, as in Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

  18See Martinich, Hobbes, pp. 38–9, 53–7, 93.

  19See Noel Malcolm, Reason of State, Propaganda and the Thirty Years’ War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), passim.

  20Hobbes, Behemoth, or, an Epitome of the Civil Wars of England, from 1640 to 1660 (London, 1679), p. 1.

  21Ibid., pp. 2, 142, 144.

  22The original runs thus: ‘Even in this short space of life, no man is so blessed by fortune that he would not many times desire to die rather than cling on to life’. Herodotus, Histories, Books VII–IX, trans. G Woudrouffe Harris (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1907), 7.6.46, p. 19.

  23Peter Oliver Loew, Danzig: Biographie einer Stadt (München: Verlag C.H.Beck oHG, 2011), pp. 11, 47, 143.

  24See ibid., p. 143.

  25Quoted David E. Cartwright, Schopenhauer: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 1.

  26Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Fall of Prussia 1600-1947 (London: Allen Lane, 2006), p. 354.

  27See Adam Zamoyski, 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow (London: Harper, 2005), pp. 93–4.

  28Quoted ibid., p. 497. I take all details in this paragraph from this excellent book.

  29See for example Clark, Iron Kingdom, p. 357; another superb book.

  30See ibid., pp. 356–7.

  31Cartwright, Schopenhauer, p. 239.

  32Ibid., p. 180.

  33See Christopher Janaway, Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 16–27.

  34Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile ou de l’éducation, Œuvres complètes, vol. IV, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, with the collaboration of Pierre Burgelin, Henri Gouhier, John S. Spink, Roger de Vilmorin and Charles Wirz (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), hereafter cited in the text as E; p. 470.

  35See in particular Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Œuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond and Robert Osmont (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), hereafter cited in the text as RPS; p. 1066.

  36Rousseau, Les Confessions, ed. Bernard Gangebin and Marcel Raymond, pref. J.-B. Pontalis, notes by Catherine Kœnig (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), hereafter cited in the text as CO; p. 75.

  37Rousseau, Du Contrat social ou principes du droit politique, Œuvres complètes, vol. III, ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond, with the collaboration of François Bouchardy, Jean-Daniel Candaux, Robert Derathé, Jean Fabre, Jean Starobinski and Sven Stelling-Michaud (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), hereafter cited in the text as CS; p. 351.

  38Joseph Conrad, Victory (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 169.

  39Rousseau, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloise, ed. with introd., chronology and notes by René Pomeau (Paris: Bordas, 1988), hereafter cited in the text as J; p. 738.

  40See Isaiah Berlin, ‘Rousseau’, in Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Pimlico, 2003), pp
. 27–49, esp. pp. 47–9.

  41For an excellent account of Rousseau’s relationship with Geneva, subtle beyond my scope here, see Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva: From the ‘First Discourse’ to ‘The Social Contract’ 1749-62 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  42Maurice Cranston, Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712-1754 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 14.

  43Nicolas Bouvier, ‘Geneva’, in Geneva, Zurich, Basel: History, Culture and National Identity, ed. Nicolas Bouvier, Gordon A. Craig and Lionel Gossman, introd. Carl E. Schorske (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 17–38, pp. 28–9.

  44Rousseau, letter to Mme. d’Houdentot, 5 January 1758; in Correspondance complète, ed. R. A. Leigh (51 vols, Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1965–91), vol. 5, p. 7.

  45Quoted Cranston, Jean-Jacques, p. 228.

  46Quoted ibid., p. 309.

  47Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), p. 376.

  48Quoted Roderick Graham, The Great Infidel: A Life of David Hume (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2004), p. 312.

  Chapter 4

  1Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans. Daphne Hardy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946), p. 229.

  2Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 202.

  3Quoted Tim Pat Coogan, Wherever Green is Worn (London: Hutchinson, 2000), p. 63.

  4Ruth Dudley Edwards, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors: The Destruction of Hiberno-Norman Civilization (London: Croom Helm, 1977), pp. 23, 26.

  5James Joyce, Occasional, Critical and Political Writing, ed. with an introd. and notes by Kevin Barry, with translations from the Italian by Conor Deane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 119.

  6Quoted David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait, ‘Early Modern Ireland: A History of Violence’, in Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland, ed. Edwards, Lenihan and Tait (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007), pp. 9–33, p. 26. I get much of the material in this passage from this excellent essay.

  7See Edwards, ‘The Escalation of Violence in Sixteenth-Century Ireland’, in Age of Atrocity, ed. Edwards, Lenihan and Tait, pp. 34–78, p. 69.