The optimistic theory of civilisation was not unchallenged by
rationalists. In the same year (1750) in which Turgot traced an outline
of historical Progress at the Sorbonne, Rousseau laid before the Academy
of Dijon a theory of historical Regress. This Academy had offered a
prize for the best essay on the question whether the revival of sciences
and arts had contributed to the improvement of morals. The prize was
awarded to Rousseau. Five years later the same learned body proposed
another subject for investigation, the origin of Inequality among men.
Rousseau again competed but failed to win the prize, though this second
essay was a far more remarkable performance.
The view common to these two discourses, that social development has
been a gigantic mistake, that the farther man has travelled from
a primitive simple state the more unhappy has his lot become, that
civilisation is radically vicious, was not original. Essentially the
same issue had been raised in England, though in a different form,
by Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, the scandalous book which aimed at
proving that it is not the virtues and amiable qualities of man that are
the cement of civilised society, but the vices of its members which
are the support of all trades and employments. [Footnote: The expanded
edition was published in 1723.] In these vices, he said, "we must look
for the true origin of all arts and sciences"; "the moment evil ceases
the society must be spoiled, if not totally dissolved."
The significance of Mandeville's book lay in the challenge it flung to
the optimistic doctrines of Lord Shaftesbury, that human nature is good
and all is for the best in this harmonious world. "The ideas he had
formed," wrote Mandeville, "of the goodness and excellency of our nature
were as romantic and chimerical as they are beautiful and amiable;
he laboured hard to unite two contraries that can never be reconciled
together, innocence of manners and worldly greatness."
Of these two views Rousseau accepted one and rejected the other. He
agreed with Shaftesbury as to the natural goodness of man; he agreed
with Mandeville that innocence of manners is incompatible with the
conditions of a civilised society. He was an optimist in regard to human
nature, a pessimist in regard to civilisation.
In his first Discourse he begins by appreciating the specious splendour
of modern enlightenment, the voyages of man's intellect among the stars,
and then goes on to assever that in the first place men have lost,
through their civilisation, the original liberty for which they were
born, and that arts and science, flinging garlands of flowers on the
iron chains which bind them, make them love their slavery; and secondly
that there is a real depravity beneath the fair semblance and "our souls
are corrupted as our sciences and arts advance to perfection." Nor is
this only a modern phenomenon; "the evils due to our vain curiosity are
as old as the world." For it is a law of history that morals fall and
rise in correspondence with the progress and decline of the arts and
sciences as regularly as the tides answer to the phases of the moon.
This "law" is exemplified by the fortunes of Greece, Rome, and China, to
whose civilisations the author opposes the comparative happiness of
the ignorant Persians, Scythians, and ancient Germans. "Luxury,
dissoluteness, and slavery have been always the chastisement of the
ambitious efforts we have made to emerge from the happy ignorance
in which the Eternal Wisdom had placed us." There is the theological
doctrine of the tree of Eden in a new shape.
Rousseau's attempt to show that the cultivation of science produces
specific moral evils is feeble, and has little ingenuity; it is a
declamation rather than an argument; and in the end he makes concessions
which undo the effect of his impeachment. The essay did not establish
even a plausible case, but it was paradoxical and suggestive, and
attracted more attention than Turgot's thoughtful discourse in the
Sorbonne. D'Alembert deemed it worthy of a courteous expression of
dissent; [Footnote: In the Disc. Prel. to the Encyclopaedia.] and
Voltaire satirised it in his Timon.
2.
In the Discourse on Inequality Rousseau dealt more directly with the
effect of civilisation on happiness. He proposed to explain how it came
about that right overcame the primitive reign of might, that the strong
were induced to serve the weak, and the people to purchase a fancied
tranquillity at the price of a real felicity. So he stated his problem;
and to solve it he had to consider the "state of nature" which Hobbes
had conceived as a state of war and Locke as a state of peace. Rousseau
imagines our first savage ancestors living in isolation, wandering in
the forests, occasionally co-operating, and differing from the animals
only by the possession of a faculty for improving themselves (la faculte
de se perfectionner). After a stage in which families lived alone in
a more or less settled condition, came the formation of groups of
families, living together in a definite territory, united by a common
mode of life and sustenance, and by the common influence of climate, but
without laws or government or any social organisation.
It is this state, which was reached only after a long period, not the
original state of nature, that Rousseau considers to have been the
happiest period of the human race.
This period of the development of human faculties, holding a just mean
between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity
of our self-love, must be the happiest and most durable epoch. The more
we reflect on it, the more we find that this state was the least exposed
to revolutions and the best for man; and that he can have left it only
through some fatal chance which, for the common advantage, should never
have occurred. The example of the savages who have almost all been found
in this state seems to bear out the conclusion that humanity was made to
remain in it for ever, that it was the true youth of the world, and that
all further progresses have been so many steps, apparently towards the
perfection of the individual, and really towards the decrepitude of the
species.
He ascribes to metallurgy and agriculture the fatal resolution which
brought this Arcadian existence to an end. Agriculture entailed the
origin of property in land. Moral and social inequality were introduced
by the man who first enclosed a piece of land and said, This is mine,
and found people simple enough to believe him. He was the founder of
civil society.
The general argument amounts to this: Man's faculty of improving himself
is the source of his other faculties, including his sociability, and
has been fatal to his happiness. The circumstances of his primeval life
favoured the growth of this faculty, and in making man sociable they
made him wicked; they developed the reason of the individual and thereby
caused the species to deteriorate. If the process had stopped at
a certain point, all would have been well; but man's capacities,
stimulated by fortuitous circumstances, urged him onward, and leaving
behind him the peaceful Arcadia where he should have remained safe and
content, he set out on the fatal road which led to the calamities of
civilisation. We need not follow Rousseau in his description of those
calamities which he attributes to wealth and the artificial conditions
of society. His indictment was too general and rhetorical to make much
impression. In truth, a more powerful and comprehensive case against
civilised society was drawn up about the same time, though with a very
different motive, by one whose thought represented all that was opposed
to Rousseau's teaching. Burke's early work, A Vindication of Natural
Society, [Footnote: A.D. 1756.] was written to show that all the
objections which Deists like Bolingbroke urged against artificial
religion could be brought with greater force against artificial society,
and he worked out in detail a historical picture of the evils of
civilisation which is far more telling than Rousseau's generalities.
[Footnote: In his admirable edition of The Political Writings of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1915), p. 89, Vaughan suggests that in Rousseau's
later works we may possibly detect "the first faint beginnings" of
a belief in Progress, and attributes this to the influence of
Montesquieu.]
3.
If civilisation has been the curse of man, it might seem that the
logical course for Rousseau to recommend was its destruction. This was
the inference which Voltaire drew in Timon, to laugh the whole theory
out of court. But Rousseau did not suggest a movement to destroy all
the libraries and all the works of art in the world, to put to death or
silence all the savants, to pull down the cities, and burn the ships.
He was not a mere dreamer, and his Arcadia was no more than a Utopian
ideal, by the light of which he conceived that the society of his
own day might be corrected and transformed. He attached his hopes to
equality, democracy, and a radical change in education.
Equality: this revolutionary idea was of course quite compatible with
the theory of Progress, and was soon to be closely associated with
it. But it is easy to understand that the two ideas should first have
appeared in antagonism to each other. The advance of knowledge and
the increase of man's power over nature had virtually profited only a
minority. When Fontenelle or Voltaire vaunted the illumination of their
age and glorified the modern revolution in scientific thought, they took
account only of a small class of privileged people. Higher education,
Voltaire observed, is not for cobblers or kitchenmaids; "on n'a jamais
pretendu eclairer les cordonniers et les servantes." The theory of
Progress had so far left the masses out of account. Rousseau contrasted
the splendour of the French court, the luxury of the opulent, the
enlightenment of those who had the opportunity of education, with the
hard lot of the ignorant mass of peasants, whose toil paid for the
luxury of many of the idle enlightened people who amused themselves at
Paris. The horror of this contrast, which left Voltaire cold, was
the poignant motive which inspired Rousseau, a man of the people,
in constructing his new doctrine. The existing inequality seemed an
injustice which rendered the self-complacency of the age revolting. If
this is the result of progressive civilisation, what is progress worth?
The next step is to declare that civilisation is the causa malorum and
that what is named progress is really regress. But Rousseau found a
way of circumventing pessimism. He asked himself, cannot equality be
realised in an organised state, founded on natural right? The Social
Contract was his answer, and there we can see the living idea of
equality detaching itself from the dead theory of degradation.
[Footnote: The consistency of the Social Contract with the Discourse on
Inequality has been much debated. They deal with two distinct problems,
and the Social Contract does not mark any change in the author's views.
Though it was not published till 1762 he had been working at it since
1753.]
Arcadianism, which was thus only a side-issue for Rousseau, was the
extreme expression of tendencies which appear in the speculations of
other thinkers of the day. Morelly and Mably argued in favour of a
reversion to simpler forms of life. They contemplated the foundation
of socialistic communities by reviving institutions and practices which
belonged to a past period of social evolution. Mably, inspired by Plato,
thought it possible by legislation to construct a state of antique
pattern. [Footnote: For Mably's political doctrines see Guerrier's
monograph, L'Abbe de Mably (1886), where it is shown that among "the
theories which determined in advance the course of the events of 1789"
the Abbe's played a role which has not been duly recognised.] They
ascribed evils of civilisation to inequality arising from the existence
of private property, but Morelly rejected the view of the "bold sophist"
Rousseau that science and art were to blame. He thought that aided
by science and learning man might reach a state based on communism,
resembling the state of nature but more perfect, and he planned an ideal
constitution in his romance of the Floating Islands. [Footnote: Naufrage
des isles flottantes ou Basiliade du celebre Pilpai (1753). It begins:
"je chante le regne aimable de la Verite et de la Nature." Morelly's
other work, Code de la Nature, appeared in 1755.] Different as
these views were, they represent the idea of regress; they imply
a condemnation of the tendencies of actual social development and
recommend a return to simpler and more primitive conditions.
Even Diderot, though he had little sympathy with Utopian speculations,
was attracted by the idea of the simplification of society, and met
Rousseau so far as to declare that the happiest state was a mean between
savage and civilised life.
"I am convinced," he wrote, "that the industry of man has gone too far
and that if it had stopped long ago and if it were possible to simplify
the results, we should not be the worse. I believe there is a limit in
civilisation, a limit more conformable to the felicity of man in general
and far less distant from the savage state than is imagined; but how to
return to it, having left it, or how to remain in it, if we were there?
I know not." [Footnote: Refutation de l'ouvrage d'Helvetius in OEuvres
ii. p. 431. Elsewhere (p. 287) he argues that in a community without
arts and industries there are fewer crimes than in a civilised state,
but men are not so happy.]
His picture of the savages of Tahiti in the Supplement au voyage de
Bougainville was not seriously meant, but it illustrates the fact that
in certain moods he felt the fascination of Rousseau's Arcadia.
D'Holbach met all these theories by pointing out that human development,
from the "state of nature" to social life and the ideas and commodities
of civilisation, is itself natural, given the innate tendency of man to
improve his lot. To return to the simpler life of the forests--or to
any bygone stage--would be denaturer l'homme, it would be contrary to
nature; and if he could do so, it would only be to recommence the career
begun by his ancestors and pass again through the same successive phases
of history. [Footnote: Syst. soc. i. 16, p. 190.]
There was, indeed, one question which caused some embarrassment to
believers in Progress. The increase of wealth and luxury was evidently
a salient feature in modern progressive states; and it was clear that
there was an intimate connection between the growth of knowledge and the
growth of commerce and industrial arts, and that the natural progress of
these meant an ever-increasing accumulation of riches and the practice
of more refined luxury. The question, therefore, whether luxury is
injurious to the general happiness occupied the attention of the
philosophers. [Footnote: D'Holbach, ib. iii. 7; Diderot, art. Luxe in
the Encylopaedia; Helvetius, De l'esprit, i. 3.] If it is injurious,
does it not follow that the forces on which admittedly Progress depends
are leading in an undesirable direction? Should they be obstructed, or
is it wiser to let things follow their natural tendency (laisser aller
les choses suivant leur pente naturelle)? Voltaire accepted wealth with
all its consequences. D'Holbach proved to his satisfaction that luxury
always led to the ruin of nations. Diderot and Helvetius arrayed
the arguments which could be urged on both sides. Perhaps the most
reasonable contribution to the subject was an essay of Hume.
4.
It is obvious that Rousseau and all other theorists of Regress would be
definitely refuted if it could be proved by an historical investigation
that in no period in the past had man's lot been happier than in the
present. Such an inquiry was undertaken by the Chevalier de Chastellux.
His book On Public Felicity, or Considerations on the lot of Men in the
various Epochs of History, appeared in 1772 and had a wide circulation.
[Footnote: There was a new edition in 1776 with an important additional
chapter.] It is a survey of the history of the western world and aims at
proving the certainty of future Progress. It betrays the influence both
of the Encyclopaedists and of the Economists. Chastellux is convinced
that human nature can be indefinitely moulded by institutions; that
enlightenment is a necessary condition of general happiness; that war
and superstition, for which governments and priests are responsible, are
the principal obstacles.
But he attempted to do what none of his masters had done, to test the
question methodically from the data of history. Turgot, and Voltaire
in his way, had traced the growth of civilisation; the originality of
Chastellux lay in concentrating attention on the eudaemonic issue, in
examining each historical period for the purpose of discovering whether
people on the whole were happy and enviable. Has there ever been a time,
he inquired, in which public felicity was greater than in our own, in
which it would have been desirable to remain for ever, and to which it
would now be desirable to return?
He begins by brushing away the hypothesis of an Arcadia. We know
really nothing about primitive man, there is not sufficient evidence to
authorise conjectures. We know man only as he has existed in organised
societies, and if we are to condemn modern civilisation and its
prospects, we must find our term of comparison not in an imaginary
golden age but in a known historical epoch. And we must be careful not
to fall into the mistakes of confusing public prosperity with general
happiness, and of considering only the duration or aggrandisement of
empires and ignoring the lot of the common people.
His survey of history is summary and superficial enough. He gives
reasons for believing that no peoples from the ancient Egyptians and
Assyrians to the Europeans of the Renaissance can be judged happy. Yet
what about the Greeks? Theirs was an age of enlightenment. In a few
pages he examines their laws and history, and concludes, "We are
compelled to acknowledge that what is called the bel age of Greece was
a time of pain and torture for humanity." And in ancient history,
generally, "slavery alone sufficed to make man's condition a hundred
times worse than it is at present." The miseries of life in the Roman
period are even more apparent than in the Greek. What Englishman
or Frenchman would tolerate life as lived in ancient Rome? It is
interesting to remember that four years later an Englishman who had an
incomparably wider and deeper knowledge of history declared it to be
probable that in the age of the Antonines civilised Europe enjoyed
greater happiness than at any other period.
Rome declined and Christianity came. Its purpose was not to render men
happy on earth, and we do not find that it made rulers less avaricious
or less sanguinary, peoples more patient or quiet, crimes rarer,
punishments less cruel, treaties more faithfully observed, or wars
waged more humanely. The conclusion is that it is only those who are
profoundly ignorant of the past who can regret "the good old times."
Throughout this survey Chastellux does not, like Turgot, make any
attempt to show that the race was progressing, however slowly. On
the contrary, he sets the beginning of continuous Progress in
the Renaissance--here agreeing with d'Alembert and Voltaire. The
intellectual movement, which originated then and resulted in the
enlightenment of his own day, was a condition of social progress. But
alone it would not have been enough, as is proved by the fact that the
intellectual brilliancy of the great age of Greece exerted no beneficent
effects on the well-being of the people. Nor indeed was there any
perceptible improvement in the prospect of happiness for the people at
large during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, notwithstanding
the progress of science and the arts. But the terrible wars of this
period exhausted Europe, and this financial exhaustion has supplied the
requisite conditions for attaining a measure of felicity never realised
in the past.
Peace is an advantageous condition for the progress of reason, but
especially when it is the result of the exhaustion of peoples and their
satiety of fighting. Frivolous ideas disappear; political bodies, like
organisms, have the care of self-preservation impressed upon them by
pain; the human mind, hitherto exercised on agreeable objects, falls
back with more energy on useful objects; a more successful appeal can be
made to the rights of humanity; and princes, who have become creditors
and debtors of their subjects, permit them to be happy in order that
they may be more solvent or more patient.
This is not very lucid or convincing; but the main point is that
intellectual enlightenment would be ineffective without the co-operation
of political events, and no political events would permanently help
humanity without the progress of knowledge.
Public felicity consists--Chastellux follows the Economists--in external
and domestic peace, abundance and liberty, the liberty of tranquil
enjoyment of one's own; and ordinary signs of it are flourishing
agriculture, large populations, and the growth of trade and industry.
He is at pains to show the superiority of modern to ancient agriculture,
and he avails himself of the researches of Hume to prove the
comparatively greater populousness of modern European countries. As for
the prospect of peace, he takes a curiously optimistic view. A system
of alliances has made Europe a sort of confederated republic, and the
balance of power has rendered the design of a universal monarchy, such
as that which Louis XIV. essayed, a chimera. [Footnote: So Rivarol,
writing in 1783 (OEuvres, i. pp. 4 and 52): "Never did the world offer
such a spectacle. Europe has reached such a high degree of power that
history has nothing to compare with it. It is virtually a federative
republic, composed of empires and kingdoms, and the most powerful that
has ever existed."] All the powerful nations are burdened with debt.
War, too, is a much more difficult enterprise than it used to be; every
campaign of the king of Prussia has been more arduous than all the
conquests of Attila. It looks as if the Peace of 1762-3 possessed
elements of finality. The chief danger he discerns in the overseas
policy of the English--auri sacra fames. Divination of this kind has
never been happy; a greater thinker, Auguste Comte, was to venture on
more dogmatic predictions of the cessation of wars, which the event was
no less utterly to belie. As for equality among men, Chastellux admits
its desirability, but observes that there is pretty much the same amount
of happiness (le bonheur se compense assez) in the different classes of
society. "Courtiers and ministers are not happier than husbandmen and
artisans." Inequalities and disportions in the lots of individuals
are not incompatible with a positive measure of felicity. They are
inconveniences incident to the perfectibility of the species, and they
will be eliminated only when Progress reaches its final term. The best
that can be done to remedy them is to accelerate the Progress of the
race which will conduct it one day to the greatest possible happiness;
not to restore a state of ignorance and simplicity, from which it would
again escape.
The general argument of the book may be resumed briefly. Felicity has
never been realised in any period of the past. No government, however
esteemed, set before itself to achieve what ought to be the sole
object of government, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number
of individuals." Now, for the first time in human history, intellectual
enlightenment, other circumstances fortunately concurring, has brought
about a condition of things, in which this object can no longer be
ignored, and there is a prospect that it will gradually gain the
ascendant. In the meantime, things have improved; the diffusion of
knowledge is daily ameliorating men's lot, and far from envying any
age in the past we ought to consider ourselves much happier than the
ancients.
We may wonder at this writer's easy confidence in applying the criterion
of happiness to different societies. Yet the difficulty of such
comparisons was, I believe, first pointed out by Comte. [Footnote: Cours
de philosophie positive, iv. 379.] It is impossible, he says, to compare
two states of society and determine that in one more happiness was
enjoyed than in the other. The happiness of an individual requires a
certain degree of harmony between his faculties and his environment. But
there is always a natural tendency towards the establishment of such
an equilibrium, and there is no means of discovering by argument or by
direct experience the situation of a society in this respect. Therefore,
he concludes, the question of happiness must be eliminated from any
scientific treatment of civilisation.
Chastellux won a remarkable success. His work was highly praised by
Voltaire, and was translated into English, Italian, and German.
It condensed, on a single issue, the optimistic doctrines of the
philosophers, and appeared to give them a more solid historical
foundation than Voltaire's Essay on Manners had supplied. It provided
the optimists with new arguments against Rousseau, and must have done
much to spread and confirm faith in perfectibility. [Footnote: Soon
after the publication of the book of Chastellux--though I do not
suggest any direct connection--a society of Illuminati, who also called
themselves the Perfectibilists, was founded at Ingoldstadt, who proposed
to effect a pacific transformation of humanity. See Javary, De l'idee de
progres, p. 73.]