Teoría política

Excerpts from the Origins of Totalitarian Democracy

by Jacob L. Talmon

(London: Secker and Warburg, 1955), Intro, Part I, Part II and Conclusion


INTRODUCTION

THIS study is an attempt to show that concurrently with the liberal type of democracy there emerged from the same premises in the eighteenth century a trend towards what we propose to call the totalitarian type of democracy. These two currents have existed side by side ever since the eighteenth century. The tension between them has constituted an important chapter in modern history, and has now become the most vital issue of our time. It would of course be an exaggeration to suggest that the whole of the period can be summed up in terms of this conflict. Nevertheless it was always present, although usually confused and obscured by other issues, which may have seemed clearer to contemporaries, but viewed from the standpoint of the present day seem incidental and even trivial. Indeed, from the vantage point of the mid twentieth century the history of the last hundred and fifty years looks like a systematic preparation for the headlong collision between empirical and liberal democracy on the one hand, and totalitarian Messianic democracy on the other, in which the world crisis of to-day consists.

(I) THE TWO TYPES OF DEMOCRACY, LIBERAL AND TOTALITARIAN

The essential difference between the two schools of democratic thought as they have evolved is not, as is often alleged, in the affirmation of the value of liberty by one, and its denial by the other. It is in their different attitudes to politics. The liberal approach assumes politics to be a matter of trial and error, and regards political systems as pragmatic contrivances of human ingenuity and spontaneity. It also recognizes a variety of levels of personal and collective endeavour, which are altogether outside the sphere of politics. The totalitarian democratic school, on the other hand, is based upon the assumption of a sole and exclusive truth in politics. It may be called political Messianism in the sense that it postulates a preordained, harmonious and perfect scheme of things, to which men are irresistibly driven, and at which they are bound to arrive. It recognizes ultimately only one plane of existence, the political. It widens the scope of politics to embrace the whole of human existence. It treats all human thought and action as having social significance, and therefore as falling within the orbit of political action. Its political ideas are not a set of pragmatic precepts or a body of devices applicable to a special branch of human endeavour. They are an integral part of an all-embracing and coherent philosophy. Politics is defined as the art of applying this philosophy to the organization of society, and the final purpose of politics is only achieved when this philosophy reigns supreme over all fields of life.

Both schools affirm the supreme value of liberty. But whereas one finds the essence of freedom in spontaneity and the absence of coercion, the other believes it to be realized only in the pursuit and attainment of an absolute collective purpose. It is outside our scope to decide whether liberal democracy has the faith that totalitarian democracy claims to have in final aims. What is beyond dispute is that the final aims of liberal democracy have not the same concrete character. They are conceived in rather negative terms, and the use of force for their realization is considered as an evil. Liberal democrats believe that in the absence of coercion men and society may one day reach through a process of trial and error a state of ideal harmony. In the case of totalitarian democracy, this state is precisely defined, and is treated as a matter of immediate urgency, a challenge for direct action, an imminent event. The problem that arises for totalitarian democracy, and which is one of the main subjects of this study, may be called the paradox of freedom. Is human freedom compatible with an exclusive pattern of social existence, even if this pattern aims at the maximum of social justice and security ? The paradox of totalitarian democracy is in its insistence that they are compatible. The purpose it proclaims is never presented as an absolute idea, external and prior to man. It is thought to be immanent in man's reason and will, to constitute the fullest satisfaction of his true interest, and to be the guarantee of his freedom. This is the reason why the extreme forms of popular sovereignty became the essential concomitant of this absolute purpose. From the difficulty of reconciling freedom with the idea of an absolute purpose spring all the particular problems and antinomies of totalitarian democracy. This difficulty could only be resolved by thinking not in terms of men as they are, but as they were meant to be, and would be, given the proper conditions. In so far as they are at variance with the absolute ideal they can be ignored, coerced or intimidated into conforming, without any real violation of the democratic principle being involved. In the proper conditions, it is held, the conflict between spontaneity and duty would disappear, and with it the need for coercion. The practical question is, of course, whether constraint will disappear because all have learned to act in harmony, or because all opponents have been eliminated.

(2) THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ORIGINS OF POLITICAL MESSIANISM; THE SCHISM

Enough has been said already to indicate that totalitarian democracy will be treated in these pages as an integral part of the Western tradition. It is vital to add that much of the totalitarian democratic attitude was contained in the original and general eighteenth century pattern of thought. The branching out of the two types of democracy from the common stem took place only after the common beliefs had been tested in the ordeal of the French Revolution. From the point of view of this study the most important change that occurred in the eighteenth century was the peculiar state of mind which achieved dominance in the second part of the century. Men were gripped by the idea that the conditions, a product of faith, time and custom, in which they and their forefathers had been living, were unnatural and had all to be replaced by deliberately planned uniform patterns, which would be natural and rational. This was the result of the decline of the traditional order in Europe: religion lost its intellectual as well as its emotional hold; hierarchical feudalism disintegrated under the impact of social and economic factors; and the older conception of society based on status came to be replaced by the idea of the abstract, individual man. The rationalist idea substituted social utility for tradition as the main criterion of social institutions and values. It also suggested a form of social determinism, to which men are irresistibly driven, and which they are bound to accept one day. It thus postulated a single valid system, which would come into existence when every- 1 thing not accounted for by reason and utility had been removed. This idea was, of course, bound to clash with the inveterate irrational ability of man's ways, his likings and attachments. The decline of religious authority implied the liberation of man's conscience, but it also implied something else. Religious ethics had to be speedily replaced by secular, social morality. With the rejection of the Church, and of transcendental justice, the State remained the sole source and sanction of morality. This was a matter of great importance, at a time when politics were considered indistinguishable from ethics. The decline of the idea of status consequent on the rise o f individualism spelt the doom of privilege, but also contained totalitarian potentialities. If, as will be argued in this essay, empiricism is the ally of freedom, and the doctrinaire spirit is the friend of totalitarianism, the idea of man as an abstraction, independent of the historic groups to which he belongs, is likely to become a powerful vehicle of totalitarianism. These three currents merged into the idea of a homogeneous society, in which men live upon one exclusive plane of existence. There were no longer to be different levels of social life, such as the temporal and the transcendental, or membership of a class and citizenship. The only recognized standard of judgment was to be social utility, as expressed in the idea of the general good, which was spoken of as if it were a visible and tangible objective. The whole of virtue was summed up as conformity to the rationalist, natural pattern. In the past it was possible for the State to regard many things as matters for God and the Church alone. The new State could recognize no such limitations. Formerly, men lived in groups. A man had to belong to some group, and could belong to several at the same time. Now there was to be only one framework for all activity: the nation. The eighteenth century never distinguished clearly between the sphere of personal self-expression and that of social action. The privacy of creative experience and feeling, which is the salt of freedom, was in due course to be swamped by the pressure of the permanency assembled people, vibrating with one collective emotion. The fact that eighteenth-century thinkers were ardent prophets of liberty and the rights of man is so much taken for granted that it scarcely needs to be mentioned. But what must be emphasized is the intense preoccupation of the eighteenth century with the idea of virtue, which was nothing if not conformity to the hoped-for pattern of social harmony. They refused to envisage the conflict between liberty and virtue as inevitable. On the contrary, the inevitable equation of liberty with virtue and reason was the most cherished article of their faith. When the eighteenth-century secular religion came face to face with this conflict, the result was the great schism. Liberal democracy flinched from the spectre of force, and fell back upon the trial-and-error philosophy. Totalitarian Messianism hardened into an exclusive doctrine represented by a vanguard of the enlightened, who justified themselves in the use of coercion against those who refused to be free and virtuous. The other cause for this fissure, certainly no less important, was the question of property. The original impulse of political Messianism was not economic, but ethical and political. However radical in their theoretical premises, most eighteenth-century thinkers shrunk from applying the principle of total renovation to the sphere of economics and property. It was however extremely difficult to theorize about a rational harmonious social order, with contradictions resolved, anti-social impulses checked, and man's desire for happiness satisfied, while leaving the field of economic endeavour to be dominated by established facts and interests, man's acquisitive spirit and chance. Eighteenth-century thinkers became thus involved in grave inconsistencies, which they attempted to cover with all kinds of devices. The most remarkable of these certainly was the Physiocratic combination of absolutism in politics with the laissez-faire theory in economics, which claimed that the free, unhampered economic pursuits of men would set themselves into a harmonious pattern, in accordance with the laws of demand and supply. But before the eighteenth century had come to an end, the inner logic of political Messianism, precipitated by the Revolutionary upheaval, its hopes, its lessons and its disappointments, converted the secular religion of the eighteenth century from a mainly ethical into a social and economic doctrine, based on ethical premises. The postulate of salvation, implied in the idea of the natural order, came to signify to the masses stirred by the Revolution a message of social salvation before all. And so the objective ideal of social harmony gave place to the yearnings and strivings of a class; the principle of virtuous liberty to the passion for security. The possessing classes, surprised and frightened by the social dynamism of the idea of the natural order, hastened to shake off the philosophy which they had earlier so eagerly embraced as a weapon in their struggle against feudal privilege. The Fourth Estate seized it from their hands, and filled it with new meaning. And so the ideology of the rising bourgeoisie was transformed into that of the proletariat. | The object of this book is to examine the stages through which the social ideals of the eighteenth century were transformed-on one side-into totalitarian democracy. These stages are taken to be three: the eighteenth-century postulate, the Jacobin improvisation, and the Babouvist crystallization; all leading up to the emergence of economic communism on the one hand, and to the synthesis of popular sovereignty and single-party dictatorship on the other. The three stages constitute the three parts into which this study is divided. The evolution of the liberal type of democracy is outside its scopes Modern totalitarian democracy is a dictatorship resting on popular enthusiasm, and is thus completely different from absolute power wielded by a divine-right King, or by a usurping tyrant. In so far as it is a dictatorship based on ideology and the enthusiasm of the masses, it is the outcome, as will be shown, of the synthesis between the eighteenth-century idea of the natural order and the Rousseauist idea of popular fulfillment and self-expression. By means of this synthesis rationalism was made into a passionate faith. Rousseau's " general will ", an ambiguous concept, sometimes concocted as valid a priori, sometimes as immanent in the will of man, exclusive and implying unanimity, became the driving force of totalitarian democracy, and the source of all its contradictions and antinomies. These are to be examined in detail.

(3) TOTALITARIANISM OF THE RIGHT AND TOTALITARIANISM OF THE LEFT

The emphasis of this theory is always upon Man. And here is the distinguishing mark between totalitarianism of the Left, with which this study is concerned, and totalitarianism of the Right. While the starting-point of totalitarianism of the Left has been and ultimately still is man, his reason and salvation, that of the Right totalitarian schools has been the collective entity, the State, the nation, or the race. The former trend remains essentially individualist, atomistic and rationalist even when it raises the class or party to the level of absolute ends. These are, after all, only mechanically formed groups. Totalitarians of the Right operate solely with historic, racial and organic entities, concepts altogether alien to individualism and rationalism. That is why totalitarian ideologies of the Left always are inclined to assume the character of a universal creed, a tendency which totalitarianism of the Right altogether lacks. For reason is a unifying force, presupposing mankind to be the sum total of individual reasoning beings. Totalitarianism of the Right implies the negation of such a unity as well as a denial of the universality of human values. It represents a special form of pragmatism. Without raising the question of the absolute significance of the professed tenets, it aspires to a mode of existence, in which the faculties of man may-in a deliberately limited circumference of space, time and numbers-be stirred, asserted and realized so as to enable him to have what is nowadays called a wholly satisfying experience in a collective elan, quickened by mass emotion and the impact of impressive exploits; in brief, the myth. The second vital difference between the two types of totalitarianism is to be found in their divergent conceptions of human nature. The Left proclaims the essential goodness and perfectibility of human nature. The Right declares man to be weak and corrupt. Both may preach the necessity of coercion. The Right teaches the necessity of force as a permanent way of maintaining order among poor and unruly creatures, and training them to act in a manner alien to their mediocre nature. Totalitarianism of the Left, when resorting to force, does so in the conviction that force is used only in order to quicken the pace of man's progress to perfection and social harmony. It is thus legitimate to use the term democracy in reference to totalitarianism of the Left. The term could not be applied to totalitarianism of the Right. It may be said that these are distinctions that make little difference, especially where results are concerned. It may further be maintained that whatever their original premises were, totalitarian parties and regimes of the Left have invariably tended to degenerate into soulless power machines, whose lip service to the original tenets is mere hypocrisy. Now, this is a question not only of academic interest, but of much practical importance. Even if we accept this diagnosis of the nature of Left totalitarianism when triumphant, are we to attribute its degeneration to the inevitable process of corrosion which an idea undergoes when power falls into the hands of its adherents ? Or should we seek the reason for it deeper, namely in the very essence of the contradiction between ideological absolutism and individualism, inherent in modern political Messianism ? When the deeds of men in power belie their words, are they to be called hypocrites and cynics or are they victims of an intellectual delusion ? Here is one of the questions to be investigated. This essay is not concerned with the problem of power as such, only with that of power in relation to consciousness. The objective forces favoring the concentration of power and the subordination of the individual to a power machine, such as modern methods of production and the arcane imperil offered by modern technical developments, are outside the scope of this work. The political tactics of totalitarian parties and systems, or the blueprints of social positivist philosophies for the human hive, will be considered not for their own sake, but in their bearing on man's awareness and beliefs. What is vital for the present investigation is the human element: the thrill of fulfillment experienced by the believers in a modern Messianic movement, which makes them experience submission as deliverance; the process that goes on in the minds of the leaders, whether in soliloquy or in public discussion, when faced with the question of whether their acts are the self-expression of the Cause or their own willful deeds; the stubborn faith that as a result of proper social arrangements and education, the conflict between spontaneity and the objective pattern will ultimately be resolved by the acceptance of the latter, without any sense of coercion.

(4) SECULAR AND RELIGIOUS MESSIANISM

The modern secular religion of totalitarian democracy has had unbroken continuity as a sociological force for over a hundred and fifty years. Both aspects, its continuity and its character as a sociological force, need stressing. These two essential features permit us to ignore the isolated literary ventures into Utopia in the earlier centuries, without denying the influence of Plato, Thomas More or Campanella upon men like Rousseau, Diderot, Mably, or Sam-Just and Buonarroti.- If one were in search of antecedents, one would also have to turn to the various outbursts of chiliasm in the Middle Ages and in the Reformation, especially to the extreme wing of the Puritan Revolution in seventeenth-century England. The coexistence of liberal democracy and revolutionary Messianism m modern times could legitimately be compared to the relationship between the official Church and the eschatological revolutionary current in Christianity during the ages of faith. Always flowing beneath the surface of official society, the Christian revolutionary current burst forth from time to time in the form of movements of evangelical poverty, heretical sects, and social-religious revolts. Like the two major trends of the modern era, the Church and the rebels against it derived their ideas from the same source. The heterodox groups were, however, too ardent in their literal interpretation of God's word. They refused to come to terms with the flesh and the kingdom of this world, and were unwilling to overcome the ideal of a society of saints to the exclusively transcendental plane. There were, however, vital differences between the chiliastic movements of the earlier centuries and modern political Messianism. The former were only sporadic occurrences, although the tension from which they sprang was always latent. A flame burst forth and was soon totally extinguished, or rendered harmless to society at large. The crisis might leave behind a sect. The myth might survive and perhaps rekindle a spark in some remote place and at some later date. Society as a whole went on much as before, although not quite free from the fear and mental discomfort left by the conflagration, and not wholly immune to the influence of the new sect. There was however a fundamental principle in pre-eighteenth century chiliasm that made it impossible for it to play the part of modern political Messianism. It was its religious essence. This explains why the Messianic movements or spasms of the earlier type invariably ended by breaking away from society, and forming sects based upon voluntary adherence and community of experience. Modern Messianism has always aimed at a revolution in society as a whole. The driving power of the sects was the Word of God, and the hope of achieving salvation by facing God alone and directly, without the aid of intermediary powers or submission to them, whether spiritual or temporal, and yet as part of a society of equal saints. This ideal is not unlike the modern expectation of a 3] society of men absolutely free and equal, and yet acting in spontaneous and perfect accord. In spite of this superficial similarity, the differences between the two altitudes are fundamental. Although the Christian revolutionaries fought for the individual's freedom to interpret God's word, their sovereign was not man, but God. ~ They aimed at personal salvation and an egalitarian society based I on the Law of Nature, because they had it from God that there lies salvation, and believed that obedience to God is the condition of human freedom. The point of reference of modern Messianism, on the other hand, is man's reason and will, and its aim happiness on earth, achieved by a social transformation. The point of reference is temporal, but the claims are absolute. It is thus a remarkable fact that the Christian revolutionaries, with few exceptions, notably Calvin's Geneva and Anabaptist Munster, shrunk from the use I of force to impose their own pattern, in spite of their belief in its divine source and authority, while secular Messianism, starting with a point of reference in time, has developed a fanatical resolve to make its doctrine rule absolutely and everywhere. The reasons are not far to seek. Even if the Monistic principle of religious Messianism had succeeded in dominating and reshaping society the result would still have been fundamentally different from the situation created by modern political " absolutism". Society might have been forbidden the compromises which are made possible by the Orthodox distinction between the kingdom of God and the earthly State, and as a consequence social and political arrangements might have lost much of their flexibility. The sweep towards the enforcement, of an exclusive pattern would nevertheless have been hampered, if not by the thought of the fallibility of man, at least by the consciousness that life on earth is not a closed circle, but has its continuation and conclusion in eternity. Secular Messianic Monism is subject to no such restraints. It demands that the whole account be settled here and now. The extreme wing of English Puritanism at the time of the Cromwellian Revolution still bore the full imprint of religious eschatology. It had already acquired modern features however, It combined extreme individualism with socia radicalism and a totalitarian temperament. Nevertheless this movement, far from initiating the continuous current of modern political Messianism, remained from the European point of view an isolated episode. It was apparently quite unknown to the early representatives of the movement under discussion. While eighteenth-century French thinkers and revolutionary leaders were alive to the political lessons of the " official " Cromwellian Revolution as a deterrent against military dictatorship, and a writer like Harrington was respected as a master, it is doubtful whether the more radical aspects of the English Revolution were much known or exercised any influence in France before the nineteenth century. The strongest influence on the fathers of totalitarian democracy was that of antiquity, interpreted in their own way. Their myth of antiquity was the image of liberty equated with virtue. The citizen of Sparta or Rome was proudly free, yet a marvel of ascetic discipline. He was an equal member of the sovereign nation, and at the same time had no life or interests outside the collective tissue.

(5) QUESTIONS OF METHOD

Objections may be urged against the view that political Messianism as a postulate preceded the compact set of social and economic ideas with which it has come to be associated. It may be said that it is wrong to treat Messianism as a substance that can be divorced from its attributes; to consider it altogether apart from the events which produced it, the instruments which have been used to promote it, and the concrete aims and policies of the men who represented it at any given moment. Such a procedure, it may be said, presupposes an almost mystical agency active in history. It is important to answer this objection not less for its philosophical significance than for the question of method it raises. What this study is concerned with is a state of mind, a way of feeling, a disposition, a pattern of mental, emotional and behaviouristic elements, best compared to the set of attitudes engendered by a religion. Whatever may be said about the significance of the economic or other factors in the shaping of beliefs, it can hardly be denied that the all-embracing attitudes of this kind, once crystallized, are the real substance of history, The concrete elements of history, the acts of politicians, the aspirations of people, the ideas, values, preferences and prejudices of an age, are the outward manifestations of its religion in the widest sense.

The problem under discussion could not be dealt with on the plane of systematic, discursive reasoning alone. For as in religion, although the partial theological framework may be a marvel of logic, with syllogism following syllogism, the first premises, the axioms or the postulates must remain a matter of faith. They can be neither proved nor disproved. And it is they that really matter. They determine the ideas and acts, and resolve contradictions into some higher identity or harmony. The postulate of some ultimate, logical, exclusively valid social I order is a matter of faith, and it is not much use trying to defeat it by argument. But its significance to the believer, and the power it has to move men and mountains, can hardly be exaggerated. Now, in Europe and elsewhere, for the last century and a half, there have always been men and movements animated by such a faith, preparing for the Day, referring all their ideas and acts to some all embracing system, sure of some pre-ordained and final denouement of the historic drama with all its conflicts into an absolute harmony. Jacobins may have differed from the Babouvists, the Blanquists from many of the secret societies in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Communists from the Socialists, the Anarchists from all others, yet they all belong to one religion. This religion emerged in the second part of the eighteenth century and its rise | will be traced in these pages. The most difficult problem of the secular religion was to be the antinomy of freedom and the exclusive Messianic pattern. Complex, intricate and at times magnificent as the theories evolved by the various Messianic trends in the later days were, the original phase, which is the subject of this study, reveals the first elements and threads in a crude, naive and simple form. This fact should help towards understanding the historic phenomenon as a whole. For some of the basic ideas of the late and highly developed Messianic secular religion, especially, as it will be shown, those relating to human nature, ethics and philosophical principles, have remained the same as they were in the eighteenth century. It is in the nature of doctrines postulating universal abstract patterns to be schematic and grey. They lack the warmth, limpidity and richness which is to be found in living human and national tissues. They do not convey the tensions which arise between unique personalities, in conflict with each other and their surroundings. They fail to offer the absorbing interest of the unpredictable situation and the pragmatic approach to it. But all these, absent in the doctrine, emerge in the vicissitudes of the doctrine as a sociological force. This study is neither purely a treatise on political theory, nor a recital of events. Justice would not be done to the subject by treating it in terms of the individual psychology of a few leaders. Nor would the point be made clear by an analysis in terms of mass psychology. Religion is created and lived by men, yet it is a framework in which men live. The problem analyzed here is only partly one of behavior. The modern secular religion must first be treated as an objective reality. Only when this has been done will it be possible to consider the intellectual and historical patterns created by the interplay between the secular religion and particular men and situations. This interplay becomes particularly interesting, when it results in contradictions between, on the one side, the impersonal pattern and, on the other, the demands of the particular situation and the uniqueness of personality.

PART I THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ORIGINS OF POLITICAL MESSIANISM

. . . a l'epoque ou ['influence de ces progres sur ltopinion, de ['opinion sur les nations ou sur leurs chefs, cessant tout a coup d'etre lente et insensible, a produit dans la masse entiere de quelques peuples, une revolution, gage certain de celle qui doit embrasser la generalite de ltespece humaine. Apres de longues erreurs, apres stetre egares dans des theories incompletes ou vagues, les publicistes vent parvenus a connaitre enfin les veritables droits de l'homme, a les deduire de cette seule verite qutil est un etre sensible, capable de former des raisonnements et d'acquerir des idees morales. CONDORCET Rousseau, den ihr noch einmal uber das andere einen Traumer nennt, indes seine Traume unter Buren Augen in Erfullung gehen, verfuhr viel zu schonend mit euch, ihr Empiriker; das war sein Fehler. JOHANN GOTTL}EB FICHTE

Dieses merkt euch, ibr stolzen Manner der That. Ihr seid Nichts als unbewusste Handlungen der Gedankenmanner, die oft in demuthigster Stille euch all euer Thun auEs bestimmteste vorgezeichnet haben. Maximilien Robespierre war Nichts als die Hand von Jean lacques Rousseau, die blutige Hand, die aus dem Schosse der Zeit den Leib hervorzog, dessen Seele Rousseau gescha

Chapter One NATURAL ORDER: THE POSTULATE (a) THE SINGLE PRINCIPLE

IN I755 Morelly in the Code de la Nature set out to " lift the veil " so that all should be able to behold " with horror, the source and origin of all evils and all crimes ", and learn " the simplest and most beautiful lessons of nature perpetually contradicted by vulgar morality and vulgar politics". He placed on the one side the science of natural morality, which was meant to be the same for all nations, and was as simple and as self-evident in its axioms and consequences " que les mathematiques elles-memes "; and on the other side the chaos of errors, absurdities, false starts and loose ends, presented by the whole of human history. Morelly's aim was to find a situation where it would be " almost impossible for 'I man to be depraved and vicious ", and in which man would be as happy as possible. Chance, " cette pretendue fata]ite ", would be exorcised from the world. Morelly thought in terms of deliberate planning, but at the same time claimed to be only discovering an objective pattern of things. This pattern is conceived by him as a social mechanism, a " marvelous automatic machine". It is described as " tout intelligent qui starrangeat lui-meme par un micanisme aussi simple que merveilleux; ses parties etaient preparees et pour ainsi dire taillees pour former le plus bel assemblage ". Like any being in nature, mankind has " un point f~xe d'integrite ", to which it is ascending by degrees. The natural order is this ultimate fulfilment of mankind. Morelly's Code de la Nature is the earliest in the series of writings with which this study is concerned. It was the first book in modern times to put fully-fledged communism on the agenda as a practical programme, and not merely as a Utopia. It became Babenf's Bible, although he happened to attribute the work to Diderot. A soulless, badly written book, very crude in its premises and argument, not very influential in the pre-Thermidorian period of the Revolution, it expresses nevertheless in an exaggerated form the common tenets of eighteenth-century thought. All the eminent French political writers of the second part of the century were engaged in a search for a new unitary principle of social existence. Vague as to the concrete nature of the principle, they all met on common ground as far as the postulate of such a principle was concerned. The formulae differed only in emphasis, and some of these differences deserve to be illustrated. Helvetius, laying all the emphasis on utilitarianism, of which he was, in his De l'Esprlt (I758), the first teacher, and Holbach, writing in the seventies, and preaching materialist determinism, I both postulated a kind of cosmic pragmatism, of which the social order was only a replica. The structure of the world is such that | if society were properly balanced, all that is true would also be socially useful, and all that is useful would also be virtuous. None therefore would be vicious except fools, and none unhappy but the ignorant and wicked, in other words, those who presume to kick against the necessary, natural order of things. I Mably, who like Morelly was in the last resort a Communist, and therefore had a fixed image of the desired natural pattern, in; contrast to the vagueness of the utilitarian postulate, strove for scientific certainty in social and human affairs. He believed that politics could develop from the most conjectural into a most exact science, once the recesses of the human heart and passions had been explored, and a scientific system of ethics defined. I Condorcet, writing at the height of the Revolution in 1793, when he was in hiding and about to die the victim of the triumph of his ideas, summed up in a most moving manner the achievement -of his age by claiming that it had come into the possession of a universal instrument equally applicable to all fields of human endeavour. The same instrument was capable of discovering those general principles which form the necessary and immutable laws of justice, of probing men's motives, of "ascertaining the truth of natural philosophy, of testing the effects of history and of formulating laws for taste ". Once this instrument had been applied to morals and politics, a degree of certainty was given to those sciences little inferior to that which obtained in the natural sciences. This latest effort, Condorcet claimed, had placed an everlasting barrier between the human race and the " old mistakes of its infancy that win forever preserve us from a relapse into former ignorance " The analogy with the claims of dialectical materialism in the next century is evident. Placed in this context Rousseau occupies a position all his own. He starts from the same point as the others. He wants to investigate the nature of things, right, reason and justice in themselves, and the principle of legitimacy. Events and facts have no claim to be taken for granted, and to be considered natural, if they do not conform to one universally valid pattern, no matter whether such a pattern has ever existed. And yet, Rousseau makes no attempt to link up his ideal social order with the universal system and its as-embracing principle. A mighty fiat conjures up the social entity whatever its name, the State, the social contract, the Sovereign or the general win. The entity is autonomous, without as it were antecedents or an external point of reference. It is self sufficient. It is the source and maker of Al moral and social values, and yet it has an absolute significance and purpose. A vital shift of emphasis from cognition to the categorical imperative takes place. The sole, as explaining and as-determining principle of the philosopher, from which all ideas may be deduced, is transformed into the Sovereign, who cannot by definition err or hurt any of its citizens, Man has no other standards than those laid down by the social contract. He receives his personality and all his ideas from it. The State takes the place of the absolute point of reference embodied in the universal principle. The implications of this shift of emphasis will be examined later. Eighteenth-century thought, which prepared the ground for the French Revolution, should be considered on three different levels: first, criticism of the ancient regime, its abuses and absurdities; second, the positive ideas about a more rational and freer system of administration, such as, for instance, ideas on the separation of powers, the place of the judiciary, and a sound system of taxation; and lastly, the vague Messianic expectation attached to the idea of the natural order. It is due to this last aspect that social and political criticism in eighteenth-century writings always seems to point to things far beyond the concrete and immediate grievances and demands. So little is said directly about, for instance, feudal abuses or particular wrongs, and so much, however vaguely, about eternal principles, the first laws of society, and the cleavage of mankind into ruling and exploiting classes, into haves and have-nots, that I has come into existence in contradiction to the dictates of nature. An incalculable dynamism was immanent in the idea of the natural | order. When the Revolution came to test the eighteenth-century teachings, the sense of an imminent and total renovation was almost universal. But while to most the idea of the natural order preached by the philosopher appeared as a guiding idea and a point of reference, only to be approximated and never really attained, to the more ardent elements it became charged with a driving power that could I never be halted tip it had run out its fun and inexorable course. I And that course appeared to expand into boundlessness. It is easy to imagine the horror of Robespierre's listeners at the Convention when, desperately anxious to know where all the purges and all the terror were leading, after all possible Republican and popular measures had already been taken, and the sternest reprisals against counter-revolutionaries applied, they heard the Incorruptible say that his aim was to establish at last the natural order and to realize the promises of philosophy. There was something strikingly reminiscent of the medieval evangelical revolutionaries quoting the Sermon on the Mount to the dignitaries of the Church in Babenf's pleading before the Court at Vendome. He read extract after extract from Rousseau, Mably, Morelly and others, and asked his judges, haunted by the memory of Robespierre's reign of virtue, why he should be tried for having taken the teachings of the fathers of the Revolution seriously. Had they not taught that the natural order would result in universal happiness ? And if the Revolution had failed to realize this promise, could one claim that it had come to an end ? The survivors of the Gironde restored to power after the downfall of Robespierre, who in 1792 were still using the same vocabulary as Robespierre and keeping up a constant appeal to nature and its laws, had learned their frightful lesson in year II of the Republic. Writers like Benjamin Constant and Mme de Stael were soon to develop their brand of liberal empiricism in answer to 1793. It was out of that inner certainty of the existence of a natural and wholly rational and just order that scientific socialism and the idea of an integral Revolution grew. Already, however, by the end of 1792 a Girondist " liberal " grew alarmed. Thus Salle wrote to Dubois-Crance: " The principles, in their metaphysical abstractness and in the form in which they are being constantly analyzed in this society-no government can be founded on them; a principle cannot be rigorously applied to political association, for the simple reason that a principle admits of no imperfection; and, whatever you may do, men are imperfect. I say more: I make bold to say, and indeed, in the spirit of Rousseau himself, that the social state is a continuous violation of the will of the nation as conceived in its abstract relationships. What may not be the results of these imprudent declamations which take this will as a safe basis; which, under the pretext of full and complete sovereignty of the people, will suffer no legal restriction; which present man always in the image of an angel; which, desirous of discovering what befits him, ignore what he really is; which, in an endeavour to persuade the people that they are wise enough, give them dispensation from the effort to be that ! . . . I would gladly, if you like, applaud the chimera of perfection that they are after. But tell me, in divesting in this way man of what is human in him, are they not most likely to turn him into a ferocious beast ? "

Eighteenth-century philosopher were never in doubt that they were preaching a new religion. They faced a mighty challenge. The Church claimed to offer an absolute point of reference to man and society. It also claimed to embody an ultimate and all embracing unity of human existence across the various levels of human and social life. The Church accused secular philosophy of destroying these two most essential conditions of private and public -morality, and thereby undermining the very basis of ethics, and indeed society itself. If there is no God, and no transcendental sanction, why should men act virtuously? Eighteenth-century philosophy not only accepted the challenge, but turned the accusation against the Church itself. The philosopher felt the challenge so keenly that, as Diderot put it, they regarded it their sacred duty to show not only that their morality was just as good as religious ethics, but much better. Holbach was at pains to prove that the materialistic principle was a much stronger basis for ethics than the principle of the " spirituality of the soul " could ever claim to be. A great deal of eighteenth-century thought would assume a different complexion, if it was constantly remembered that though a philosophy of protest, revolt and spontaneity, eighteenth-century philosophy, as already hinted, was intensely aware of the challenge to redefine the guarantees of social cohesion and morality. The philosopher were most anxious to show that not they, but their opponents, were the anarchists from the point of view of the natural order. The philosophical line of attack on the Church was that apart from the historic untruth of the revealed religion, it also stood condemned as a sociological force. It introduced " imaginary" and heterogeneous criteria into the life of man and society. The commandments of the Church were incompatible with the requirements of society. The contradiction was harmful to both, and altogether demoralizing. One preached ascetic unworldliness, the other looked for social virtues and vigor. Man was being taught to work for the salvation of his soul, but his nature kept him earthbound. Religion taught him one thing, science another. Religious ethics were quite ineffective, where they were not a source of evil. The promise of eternal reward and the threat of everlasting punishment were too remote to have any real influence on actual human conduct. This sanction at best engendered hypocrisy. Where the teachings of religion were successful, they resulted in human waste, like monasticism and asceticism, or in cruel intolerance and wars of religion. Moreover, the " imaginary " teachings and standards of the Church offered support and justification to tyrannical vested interests harmful to society as a whole. Rousseau, Morelly, Helvetius, Holbach, Diderot, Condorcet, not to mention of course Voltaire, were unanimous in their insistence on the homogeneous nature of morality. Some, the Voltairians and atheists, speak in terms of a deliberate plot against society, when attacking the claims of religious ethics. Others, like Rousseau, lay all the emphasis on matters of principle, above all the principle of social unique: you' cannot be a citizen and Christian at the same time, for the loyalties clash. " It is from the legislative body only," wrote Helvetius, " that we cm expect a berveftcent religion . . . let sagacious ministers be clothed with temporal and spiritual powers, and all contradiction! between religious and patriotic precepts will disappear . . . the religious system shall coincide with the national prosperity . . religions, the habitual instruments of sacerdotal ambition, shall become the felicity of the public."

Philosophy of protest, revolt and spontaneity, eighteenth-century philosophy, as already hinted, was intensely aware of the challenge to redefine the guarantees of social cohesion and morality. The philosopher were most anxious to show that not they, but their opponents, were the anarchists from the point of view of the natural order. The philosophical line of attack on the Church was that apart from the historic untruth of the revealed religion, it also stood condemned as a sociological force. It introduced " imaginary" and heterogeneous criteria into the life of man and society. The commandments of the Church were incompatible with the requirements of society. The contradiction was harmful to both, and altogether demoralizing. One preached ascetic unworldliness, the other looked for social virtues and vigor. Man was being taught to work for the salvation of his soul, but his nature kept him earthbound. Religion taught him one thing, science another. Religious ethics were quite ineffective, where they were not a source of evil. The promise of eternal reward and the threat of everlasting punishment were too remote to have any real influence on actual human conduct. This sanction at best engendered hypocrisy. Where the teachings of religion were successful, they resulted in human waste, like monasticism and asceticism, or in cruel intolerance and wars of religion. Moreover, the " imaginary " teachings and standards of the Church offered support and justification to tyrannical vested interests harmful to society as a whole. Rousseau, Morelly, Helvetius, Holbach, Diderot, Condorcet, not to mention of course Voltaire, were unanimous in their insistence on the homogeneous nature of morality. Some, the Voltairians and atheists, speak in terms of a deliberate plot against society, when attacking the claims of religious ethics. Others, like Rousseau, lay all the emphasis on matters of principle, above all the principle of social unity: you cannot be a citizen and Christian at the same time, for the loyalties clash. " It is from the legislative body only," wrote Helvetius, " that we can expect a beneficent religion . . . let sagacious ministers be clothed with temporal and spiritual powers, and all contradiction between religious and patriotic precepts will disappear . . . the religious system shall coincide with the national prosperity . . . religions, the habitual instruments of sacerdotal ambition, shall become the felicity of the public."

NATURAL ORDER: To POSTULATE 23

Holbach taught the same, and although Rousseau and Mably quarreled bitterly with the two atheistic materialists, there was hardly a fundamental disagreement between them. For even to them the vital consideration was not really the existence of a Divine Being, but guarantees for social ethics. Rousseau, the master of Robespierre, and Mably, whose religious ideas made such a deep impression upon Saint-Just, were nearer Hebrew Biblical and classical pagan conceptions than Christian ideas. Robespierre's Jewish idea of Providence hovering over the Revolution was a conclusion from the eighteenth-century view that the moral drama is played out under the judgment of Nature exclusively within the framework of social relations. No eighteenth-century thinker recognized any distinction between membership of a kingdom of God and citizenship of an earthly state, in the Christian sense. Whether, as the eighteenth century as a whole, in the spirit of the Old Testament, believed, that reward and punishment for the deeds of one generation are distributed to posterity, or whether, as Rousseau and Mably thought, it was the individual who comes to judgment to be rewarded or punished as an individual soul, the only virtues or sins recognized were those of social significance. The only difference between Helvetius and Holbach, on the one hand, and Rousseau and Mably, on the other, was that according to the materialists social legislation and arrangements alone were sufficient to ensure moral conduct, while Rousseau and Mably feared that man may elude the law. It was vital that man should always remember that even if he eludes the magistrate, the account would still have to be settled elsewhere and before a higher tribunal. It was not less important that the unhappy and the injured should not despair of justice in society, even if it fails to come to their succor on earth. Rousseau, transcending the limits of mechanical materialist rationalism, harked back to antiquity. He felt compelled by the ancient sense of awe at the idea of a Divinity hovering over the city-state, and imbuing every act of its life with a solemn significance. He was fascinated by the pomp and thrill of collective patriotic worship in the national religious fetes, games and public displays, while Mably was convinced that no religion was possible without external forms, institutions and fixed rites. The articles of Rousseau's civil religion, other than those concerning the existence of Divinity and the immortality of the soul, do not materially differ from " the principles that are eternal and invariable, that are drawn from the nature of men and things, and like the propositions of geometry are capable of the most rigorous demonstration ", upon which Helvetius believed a universal religion should be founded. They refer to the laws of the State and articles of the Social Contract. It was not only theism that caused Rousseau to make the belief in Divinity a social necessity. It was also the fact that his and Mably's approach differed from that of the rationalists on the fundamental point, already made. The social harmonious pattern of Helvetius, Morelly and Holbach was a matter of cognition. It was there to be discerned and applied. In the case of Rousseau and Mably it was a categorical imperative, a matter of will. The materialist determinists felt confident that knowledge would be translated into action. Not so Rousseau and Mably, with their different attitude to human nature, and their deep sense of sin. Hence Rousseau felt driven to demand the death penalty for one who disbelieved in the civil religion, while Mably wished to ban all atheists and even deists, who claim that a religion of the heart was all that was wanted. Man had to be made to fear God, and made to experience the sense of fear constantly and vividly. Too much has been made of the contradiction between the chapter on the Civil Religion in the Social Contract and the Pro Cession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard. The latter may well have been a shock to the materialists in so far as the purely philosophical problem of the existence of a personal deity was concerned. The direct and intensive relationship between man and God of the Vicar of Savoy need not, however, necessarily be taken as a refutation oft the self sufficiency of the religion of society. It would be so if the State or society were to be considered as purely human contrivances) If the State or Society are, as in the case of Robespierre, regarded as existing under the personal Providence of God, like the pre exilic Hebrew society, and if the relationship between God and man, unlike that presented by the Old Testament, does not entail a hierarchical organization and a system of laws and duties outside the framework of social institutions and laws, then the purely religious sense of awe and patriotic piety not only need not clash' but are likely to become fused into the Robespierre type of mysticism. There are no other priests than the magistrates, religious and patriotic ceremonial are the same, and to serve you country is to serve God.

The faith in a natural order and the immutable, universal principles deduced from it was the cause of the almost universal opposition in the second part of the eighteenth century to Montesquieu's central idea, in spite of the high esteem in which the father of the idea of republican virtue was held. The lack of understanding for the pragmatic evolution of social forms was so great that Morelly took the Esprit des Lois to be a didactic tract designed to show the vagaries and follies of mankind, once they had deviated from and abandoned the state of nature. Politics, according to Sicyes, was an art, and not a descriptive science like physics. Its object was to plan, to create reality and to do so in obedience to a permanent pattern. It was, Sieyes maintained, natural law that was old, and the errors of existing societies were new. Diderot did not think that a knowledge of history must precede that of morality. It seemed to him more useful and expedient to gain an idea of the just and unjust I' before possessing a knowledge of the actions and the men to whom one ought to apply it ". The emphasis upon " ought " instead of " why " was Rousseau's answer to Montesquieu. In the much quoted passage in Emile Rousseau says that Montesquieu was the only man capable of . creating the " great and useless " science of politics, or rather political right, but unfortunately contented himself with dealing with the positive laws of the established governments, " et rien au monde n'est plus different que ces deux etudes ". Rousseau's own references to relativism conditioned by different geographical circumstances do not affect his general approach. They appear to tee the necessary tributehe feels obliged to pay to political geography, and they usually occur when the subject is economics. Condorcet, like Rousseau, thought that Montesquieu would have done better had he been less occupied with finding " the reasons for that which is there than with seeking that which ought to be". More interesting and less noticed was eighteenth-century criticism of Montesquieu which implied that his relativism was due to his having given preference to geographical and other factors over the human factor. The underlying assumption of this criticism-a point to be developed later-was the idea that while objective conditions make for variety, it was human nature that called for uniformity. Even Montesquieu himself, never quite a " Montesquieu'ist "-as Marx not a Marxist-believed in natural laws derived from man's inner being as a constant and immutable quality. Helvetius and Mably maintained that Montesquieu's thesis was vitiated by his failure to recognize that human psychology was the only vital factor in shaping political systems. To Helvetius it was the desire for power and the ways of obtaining it. Mably recognized human passions, and not climatic differences or the particular configuration of a territory, as the decisive factor in politics. He believed that human psychology was the same in every climate. Hence, knowledge of psychology was the safest way to scientific politics. Condorcet and others put the main emphasis on the rights of man as the condition of an exclusive social system. His criticism should be read together with his comparison between the French Revolution and the political systems of antiquity and the United States of America. The case between rationalist politics and political empiricism has nowhere been made clearer on the side of eighteenth century French philosophy. Condorcet objects to the empiricism of the ancient Greek political philosophy. It was a science of facts, but not a true theory founded upon general, universal principles, nature and reason. The Greek thinkers aimed less at extirpating the causes of evil than at destroying their effects by opposing their causes one to another. In brief, instead of applying a systematic and radical cure, they tried to play up to prejudices and vices, and play them off against each other so as to cancel their effects. No effort to disperse and suppress them was made. The result was, that these policies deformed, misled, brutalized and inflamed men, instead of refining and purifying them. Condorcet seems at one time to come very near Morelly's condemnation of what to-day would be called reformism: the perennial effort, in the words of the Code de la Nature, to perfect the imperfect. This procedure -claimed Morelly-only complicates the chain of evils, misleads the people and kills the energy for a radical reform. Like all his eighteenth-century predecessors, Condorcet based his idea of a radical reform on the immutable necessities of human nature, or rather the rights of man derived from them. He thought that the Greeks had a consciousness of rights, but failed to comprise trend their coherent structure, their depth, extent and real nature.

They saw in them, as it were, a heritage, a set of inherited rights, and not a coherent, objective framework. Even the American Revolution had not yet achieved the full consciousness of these principles. The Americans had not yet acquired principles sufficiently invariable not to fear that legislators might introduce into the political institutions their particular prejudices and passions. Their object could not as yet therefore be to build on the firm, permanent basis of nature and universal maxims a society of men equal and free; they had to be content with establishing " laws to hereditary members ", that is to say, within the context of the given realities and expediency. The American system therefore offered an example of a search for a mean between the oligarchy of the rich and the fickleness of the poor, inviting tyranny. The French Revolution marked the absolute turning point. " We arrived at the period when philosophy . . . obtained an influence on the thinking class of men, and these on the people and their governments that ceasing any longer to be gradual produced a revolution in the entire mass of certain nations, and gave thereby a secure pledge of the general revolution one day to follow that shall embrace the whole human species . . . after ages of error, after wandering in all the mazes of vague and defective theories, writers . . . at length arrived at the knowledge of the true rights of man . . . deducted from the same principle . . . a being endowed with sensation, capable of reasoning . . . laws deduced from the nature of our own feeling . . . our moral constitution." The French Revolution compared with the American Revolution had been an event on quite a different plane. It had been a total revolution in the sense that it had left no sphere and retrospect of human existence untouched, whereas the American Revolution had been a purely political change-over. Furthermore, while the French Revolution had enthroned equality and effected a political transformation based upon the identity of the natural rights of man, the American Revolution had been content to achieve a balance of social powers based on inequality and compromise. It was this human hubris and impious presumption that frail man is capable of producing a scheme of things of absolute and final significance that, on the one hand, provoked some of Burke's most eloquent passages and, on the other, led Joseph de Maistre, Bonald and their school to proclaim the idea of theocratic absolutism.

Chapter Two THE SOCIAL PATTERN AND FREEDOM : :. (HELVETIUS AND HOLBACH)

(a)IDENTITY OF REASON WE now reach the core of our problem, the paradox of freedom. The fighting argument of the teachers of the natural system was that the powers that be and their theoretical defenders deliberately or ignorantly took no heed of human nature. All the evils, vices and miseries were due to the fact that man had not consulted his true nature, or had been prevented from doing so by ignorance, which was spread and maintained by vested interests. Had man probed his true nature, he would have discovered a replica of the universal order. By obeying the postulates of his own nature he would have acted in accordance with the laws of Nature as a whole, and thus avoided all the entanglements and contradictions in which history has involved him. Now the paradox is that human nature, instead of being regarded as that stubborn, unmanageable and unpredictable Adam, is presented here as a vehicle of uniformity, and as its guarantee. The paradox is based upon vital philosophical premises. There is a good deal of confusion as to the philosophical kinship of the eighteenth-century philosophers. It is made worse by the fact that the philosopher were not philosophers in the strict sense of the word. They were eclectics. They were as much the heirs of Plato and Descartes as puff Locke and Hume, of philosophical rationalism and empirical skepticism, of Leibnitz and' Condillac's associationist theory. Not even a founder of utilitarianism like Helvetius, or one of the most important teachers of materialist determinism like Holbach, ever made their position unequivocally clear. But it is necessary to sum up what all the eighteenth-century thinkers had in common in their underlying premises as far as it affects the subject of this investigation. Following the footsteps of Descartes, the philosopher believed in truth that is objective and stands on its own, and which can and would be recognized by man. To Holbach truth was the conformity of our ideas with the nature of things. Helvetius believed that all the most complicated metaphysical propositions could be reduced to questions of fact that white is white and black is black. Nature has so arranged that there should be a direct and unerring correlation between objects and our powers of cognition. Helvetius, Holbach and Morelly repeatedly say that error is an accident only. We all would see and judge rightly if it were not for the ignorance or the particular passions and interests that blind our judgment, these being the result of bad education or the influence of vested interests alien to man. Everyone is capable of discovering the truth, if it is presented to him in the right light. Every member of Rousseau's sovereign is bound to will the general will. For the general will is in the last resort a Cartesian truth. Helvetius goes so far as to deny any inherent differences of ability and talent. These are nothing but the product of conditions and chance. Uniform education, the placing of all children in as similar conditions as possible, their subjection to exactly the same impressions and associations, would reduce the differences of talent and ability to a minimum. With what eagerness this theory was seized upon by the revolutionary egalitarians, especially Buonarroti Genius can be reared, and you can multiply men of genius according to plan, taught Helvetius. Rationalists and empiricists at the same time, eighteenth-century thinkers felt no incongruity when boasting that in contrast to their opponents they based their theories on experience alone. They never tired of urging people to observe and study man in order to learn how he behaves and what are his real needs. But this emphasis on empiricism was directed not against philosophical rationalism, but only against the auth