CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT DENIS DIDEROT Political WritingsCAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT Series editors Raymon Geuss Reader m Phalosophy, University of Cambridge QUENTIN SKINNER Regius Professor af Modern History in the Uxiversity of Cambridge Cambridge ‘Texts in the History of Political Thought is now firmly established as the major student textbook series in political theory. It aims to make available to students all the most important texts in the history of wesiern political thought, from ancient Greece to the eatly twentieth cemtury. All the familiar classic texts will be included, but the series seeks at the same time to enlarge the conventional canon by incorporating an extensive range of less well-known works, many of them never before available in a modern English edition, Wherever possible, texts are published in complete and unabridged form, and translations are specially commissioned for the series. Each volume contains a critical introduction together with chronologies, biographical sketches, 2 guide to further read- ing and any necessary glossaries and textual apparatus. When completed the seties will aim to offer an outline of the entire evolution of western political thought. For a list of titles published in the series, please see end of hookContents Foreword Introduction Chronology Further reading Articles from the Encyclopédie The Supplément au Voyage de Bougainvitie Observations sur le Nakaz Extracws from the Histoire des Deux Indes Index page vii aii 3 1 165, 215Foreword ‘Towards the end of his life, after he had completed his editorial labours for the Encyclopédie, Diderot wrote extensively about politics. Some of his earlier writings on the subject, though influential, were unoriginal; muuch of his later work was unpublished in his lifetime. Our selection of texts has been formed from those which were the mostimportant when they appeared, or which give the fullest treatment of his political thought. The first category includes his articles for the Encyclopédie and his contributions to the Histoire des Deux Indes, works which were widely circulated and attracted much attention. The second category includes the Suppliment ax Voyage de Bougainville, the most speculative of his political writings, and the Observations sur le Nakaz, his most precise, detailed and also broadest discussion of contemporary issucs. Any selection of course entails omission, and ours does scant justice to the range of Diderot’s literary styles and skills, for instance the conversational tone of his Mémoires pour Catherine IT or the polemical quality of the Apologie de l'abbé Galiani, a defence of Galiani’s critique of the physiocrats. If Diderot’s forceful arack against the despotism of Frederick II in his Pages contreun tyran hasits counterpart in the Historre des Deux Indes, nothing in our selection can capture the idiosyncratic flavour of his last work, the Essai sur les régnes de Claude et de Néron (1782), largely devoted to Seneca, but interspersed with reflections on the role of the phifosophe in times of oppression and a final volley in the protracted quarrel with Rousseau. Since our aim has been to convey Diderot’s political thought, rather than his literary personality, such exclusions are inevitable. Among these omitted texts, moreover, the Mémoires and Essai are each too long to be included in a collection ofForeword this kind, and the Apologic and Pages contre un tyran both form commentaries on another author and cannot be read properly apart from the writings to which they refer. While we have worked together closely and produced the introduc- tion joindy, it may be noted that the translations of the Observations sur ke Nakaz and the Histoire de Deux Indes are chiefly by JHM, and those from the Encyclopédie and of the Suppiément are mainly by RW. We are grateful to Karen Hall for typing much of the material in this volume, and to Derek Beales and Raymond Geuss for their comments on an carlier draft. viiiIntroduction The Encyclopédie The reign of Louis XIV, le roi soleil, may have marked the epitome of absolutist government in Europe, but that achievement did not survive him, Although monarchica! power, buttressed by divine right, had become unlimited in theory, it was in practice often ignored and occasionally even defied. The separate regions of France preserved their own traditions and administration, while the legal and tax privileges of the hereditary nobility and Church ensured that some of the most prosperous sections of society retained a vested interest in resisting the dominance of the throne. In the eighteenth century, moreover, new intellectual forces appeared which undermined the spiritual and moral authority of the French state. In their barle against superstition and intolerance, and by their call for a rational exercise of power, the philosophes of the Enlightenment challenged the assumptions of absolutism and condemned the brutalities of auto- cratic rule. Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau each championed liberal principles of toleration against religious bigotry and the despotic tendencies of unrestrained government, and they were rightly perceived by their contemporaries 2s opponents of the same dark forces of prejudice and injustice which still held sway under the ancien ségime. Although they envisaged disparate, even incompatible, programmes of reform, they were united in seeing the prevalent institutions of politics, religion and society as corrupt. Each espoused ideals of freedom against the despotisms of their day, and at least to this extent upheld a common cause of enlightenment. ixIntroduction No one in the eighteenth century promoted that cause more vigorously than Diderot. For more than twenty years, from the mid 17408 unti the late 1760s, he was absorbed by the ordeals of editing and contributing to the greatest literary monument of the eighteenth century. [ike the Crystal Palace built a century tater to pay tribute to an Age of Industry, the Encyclopédie was assembled as an exhibition and celebration of an Age of Reason and Invention. Originally con- ceived as a French translation of Chambers’ Cyclopedia, the work underwent remarkable expansion after Diderot was appointed editor, jointly with d'Alembert, in 1747. The first volume was published in 1751; the seventeenth, intended to conclude the written text, appeared in 1765. By 1780, when at last completed by others, it came to embrace thirty-five volumes exceeding 20 million words and 2,000 plates. This ‘reasoned dictionary of the arts and sciences’ was of course a collective venture, composed by a ‘society of men of letters’ which inchuded Voltaire, Rousseau, d’Hoibach, Turgot, Raynal, Toussaint and more than a hundred other authors. A substantial proportion, perhaps one-fifth of the whole text, came to be drafted by a single person, the chevalier de Jaucourt. But it was Diderot who proved the guiding spirit of the enterprise; who fired the enthusiasm of his contributors and subscribers while at the same time whetting the ambitions of his publishers; who attracted sufficient sympathy from the director of publications, Malesherbes, to resist the bans imposed upon it by the Church, Crown and Paris Parlement; who scorned the work’s enemies and persisted after they had driven d'Alembert into retirement; who at the outset personally took charge of mote articles, covering a wider range of subjects, than any other figure; who ventured to make the Engelopéidie not only a lofty com- pendium of knowledge but also worldly display of the arts and crafts of his day. By background and disposition he was well suited to his task. Born in Langres in 1713, he was the devoted son of a master cutler and retained a life-long interest in the manufacturing techniques of ordi- nary domestic implements and tools. Formally educated in his native city and in Paris, be read widely in classical literature and science - especially Horace and Lucretius, whose ideas would always inform his mature writings, Surrounded by relatives who devoted their lives to the Church, he acquired that distaste for clerical intolerance and the pieties of obscurantism which infuses many of the essays he xIntroduction drafted for the Encyclopédie, and which in other, even bolder, works would incline him towards atheism. Launched upon his career as a writer through translations of such texts as Shaftesbury’s Inquiry con- cerning Virtue or Merit, he soon became an expert literary ventriloquist, refashioning the compositions of others so that they might speak in his voice. No one in the Enlightenment achieved greater originality by way of transliteration and commentary, through the reassociation of the ideas of other authors. Diderot’s articles ‘Art’ in volume 1 and ‘Encyclopédie’ in volume v illustrate his attachment to the mechanical arts as instruments of scientific discovery and the moral improvement of mankind. He assesses the revolutionary impact of technological innovations and calls for greater co-operation between specialists of different disci- plines ~ more interpenetration of the theory and practice of science, and of liberal with mechanical arts - so that knowledge may be invested in applications which promote public welfare. The dis- semination of such useful knowledge formed the central objective of the Encyclopédie. To make intelligible the successive achievements of extraordinary individuals which constitute ‘the march of the human spirit’ is to benefit the general mass of mankind. It shows the value of criticism and reveais how the authoritative precepts of one age become dead dogma to another, lifting the yoke of precedent and pointing the way towards reason. These ideas from the article ‘Encyclopédie’ recapitulate some of the themes of d’Alembert’s ‘Dis- cours préliminaire’ to the first volume of the Encyclopédie, and indeed the two pieces together form a kind of manifesto of the Eniighten- ment as a whole. Each, coincidentally, draws attention to the philo- sophy of Rousseau, who, just prior to the publication of the first volume, had produced an account of the moral effects of civilisation {his Discours sur les sciences et les arts) which seemed to contradict the very purpose of the Enoydepédie. In 1755, when the fifth volume was published, Diderot was still Rousseau’s closest friend, but he would soon have occasion to regret his encomium of a man he ‘never had the strength to hold back from acclaiming’ (p. 26). If the article ‘Encyclopédie’ forms a part of his philosophy of history, Diderot’s more specifically political contributions concentrate instead on principles such as justice, authority and natural right, illustrated with examples drawn most often from antiquity. These articles are largely second-hand — partly by design, since Diderot was xiFntreductien convinced that a work of reference cught to be inspired by the best authorities, and partly from necessity, since official opposition to the Encyclopédie soon deprived him of the services of some liberal theolo- gians who had been responsible for material on the history of political thought. Diderot took over this subject himself, borrowing copiously from Sully, Fontenelle, Bayle, Girard, Buffier and other sources, and relying above all on the political thinker whose authority throughout the first half of the eighteenth century was pre-eminent — that is, Pufendorf. In the article ‘Cité’ he adopts Pufendorf’s formulation of the idea of the state as.a corporate body or moral being entrusted with the collective will and assembled force of its various members, and in the article ‘Citoyen’ he accepts Pufendorf’s distinction berween the duties of man and those of the citizen, while nevertheless objecting to his views on native-born as opposed to naturalised citizenship. In ‘Autorité politique’ he subscribes to Pufendorf’s conception of the true source of all authority, which must be the consent of the people themselves, rather than nature or force. In relinquishing their liberty to their princes, the inhabitants of civil society act in conformity with tight reason and so establish a common power in the public interest. ‘This is the doctrine of the social compact, which binds subjects to their prince, but also princes wo their subjects, limiting their authority, as Diderot conceived it, under conditions stipulated by natural law. The moral foundations of the state might thus appear not to need a theological framework. Yet, together with Pufendorf, he contends that subjects retain no right of resistance against the authority they have set up, however despotic they might judge it, since they are bound by religion, reason and nature to abide by their undertakings. Men should remain free in matters of conscience, he observes in his article ‘Intolérance’ in volume vill, since conscience can only be enlightencd, never constrained, and violence merely renders a man a hypocrite. But he does not follow the Anabaptists or Locke, who held similar views, in suggesting that conscience and good faith may justify a civil right of resistance. The article ‘Autorité politique’ gave rise to no such implications, though it excited fierce hostility from the sup- porters of the divine right of kings, which even put the continued publication of the Encyeopédie at tisk. To allay any misunderstanding, Diderot added, to volume 11 inan erratum (see p. 11), that the consent of subjects to the rule of their princes does not contradict, but rather xiFntroduction confi, the proposition that real authority stems ultimately from od. Pufendorf had put forward his account of the popular and contrac- tual foundations of monarchy in conjunction with a theory of human nature and a speculative history of the origins of civil society. Much persuaded by the Hobbesian doctrine of man’s fundamental inse- curity and selfishness, he nevertheless maintained that Hobbes had been mistaken to suppose that man was by nature a solitary creature « whose ambitions incline him towards war, since, on the contrary, the weakness of savages must have led them to seck survival through association with their neighbours, their selfish sociability prompting them to establish and accept the regulations of civil law. In his article ‘Droit naturel’ Diderot pursues much the same critique of the idea of natural conflict, reproaching Hobbes, whom he portrays as a ‘violent interlocutor’, for supposing that each person's passions must bring “terror and confusion to the human race’ (pp. 18-19). The Hobbesian thesis is either insane or evil, he observes, for ‘man is not just an animal but an animal which thinks’, capable of exercising his reason in accordance with justice. In his Suite de l’Apologie de Vabbé de Prades of 1752, Diderot had already remarked that the pure state of nature was an dat de troupeas: - a barbarous condition of men living in herds, each individual being motivated by fear and his natural passions alone. But only s contemptible Hobbist could suppose that the unlimited power of princes had been established as a remedy for man’s original anarchy, since the passage of the human race from an état de troupeau to an état de société policée — from its natural state to the state of civil society — had come about just because of men’s recog- nition of their need to subject themselves collectively to laws whose beneficial effect was manifest to them all. As Diderot puts this point in the Observations sur le Nakaz (.xx1), ‘men . . . became aware that they struggled to better effect together, than separately’. In the ‘Droit nature? he considers how selfish individuals, motivated by private interest, can form such agreements. Before the institution of governments, he claims, justice can only be settled by the tribunal of mankind as a whole. For although ‘private wills are suspect... the general will is always good! (pp. 19-20), and cach of us partakes of that general will by virtue of our shared membership of the human race, which determines what are the inalienable natural rightsIntroduction and fundamental dutics of man. It was in this way that Diderot introduced his idea of the ‘volonté générale’, a term of scant signifi- cance in political thought before the publication of the Encyclopédie. In his own article, ‘Economic politique’, in the same volume, Rousseau employed the term himself for the first time, along lines not dissimilar to those of the ‘Droit naturel’. Later, in the Contrat social, he was to give a very different meaning to the concept, insisting that it could only be realised within, and never outside, the state. Diderot’s idea of the law of nature was thus conceived as a rational principle of common humanity which restrained the selfishness of individuals and made the establishment of civil society both necessary and possible. Many philosophers of natural law had put forward similar notions before, but from his references and allusions to Pufendort’s work — that is, to both the De jure naturae et gentium and the De officio hominis et civis - it is clear that his account was principally indebted to this author alone. That debt, however, was by and large indirect, since Diderot drew most of his Pufendorfian principles not from their original source but from Jacob Brucker’s Historia critics philosephiae, published in five volumes between 1742 and 1744 (with a sixth supplementary tome printed in 1767). This was an erudite work of a Lutheran pastor, himself much inspired by Pufendorf, which Diderot consulted time and again in his contributions; many of his essays amount to little more than plagiarism from Brucker’s Latin. Indeed, no other text was pillaged so frequently and at such length by Diderot as the /fisteria critica philosophiac; itis one of the mainsprings of the whole Encylopédie. But while the article ‘Hobbisme’ is an almost literal translation of Brucker’s account of Hobbes, it includes a postscript of Dideror’s own conception, comparing the system of Hobhes with that of Rousseau, to the detriment of both thinkers. According to Diderot man is neither naturally good nor naturally wicked, since goodness and’ evil, together with happiness and misery, are finely balanced in human nature, If Hobbes had falsely supposed that men are by nature vicious, Rousseau had been equally wrong to believe that they always become so in society. For Diderot virtue and vice were at once natural and social, and by his nature man was impelled and enabled to form civil associations which brought both benefits and harm to the human race. A Pufendorfian perspective ofa society of selfish agents could therefore be invoked as a corrective not only to Hobbes but to Rousseau as well. With the publication of his xiv