The Virtual Stoa

Edmund Burke on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791).

[via comments here]

I was rereading chunks of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s imperishable classic, The Invention of Tradition, the other night, while munching on a Chinese takeaway, and this passage made me laugh and laugh…

(more…)

Rousseau scholar Robert Wokler died last month. Josh Cherniss obituarized him for the Guardian just a few days ago, and he also pointed me to robertwokler.com, from where you can download a copy of his splendid D.Phil thesis, “Rousseau on Society, Politics, Music and Language: An Historical Interpretation of His Early Writings”.

Welcome to the latest Early Modern instalment of Carnivalesque, hosted for the first time at the Virtual Stoa, and with apologies for appearing a little later than I think I said it would.

Kicking off in Tudor England, we’ve got another entry in the Dead King Watch, conceivably inspired by a regular feature on this blog, who knows?, with this one devoted to Edward VI.

Something Earmarks saw on telly brought Thomas Wright�s 1604 The Passions of the Minde in Generall to mind.

Misteraitch over at Spamula has been considering the artist Jacques de Gheyn, 1565-1629.

And while we’re thinking about artists in the Low Countries, the Interesting Thing of the Day a few days ago was a discussion of the possible use of a camera obscura by Johannes Vermeer.

Crossing back over the Channel, Escalus is advertising the Early Modern English Ballad Archive and shares a favourite ballad, “A Looking-Glass for Lascivious Young Men: OR, THE Prodigal Son SIFTED”, together with a bit of discussion and an attempt to date it to the 1680s.

And it’s ballads ballads ballads at the Carnivalesque, with Blogging the Renaissance telling us all about “My Bird is a Round-head”, a fine ballad from 1642.

Continuing the Puritan theme for a short while, at least, Early Modern Whale interested in face patches, and in what puritans thought about them (not keen).

And moving towards the broad sunny uplands of the eighteenth century, David Davisson has helpfully reproduced the text of a 1773 Connecticut law against mountebanks and told us a bit about his proposed research on itinerancy in colonial America…

… Brandon Watson has some valuable words and links about Moses Mendelssohn…

… and we end over at The Skwib with its presentation of lost power point slides of the Marquis de Sade…

The next Carnivalesque for Early Modern History (Loosely Defined) is going to take place here at the Virtual Stoa some time in the middle of June, so do send in your candidates for inclusion using the Official Submission Form, which will probably make its way back to me in the fullness of time. More over here.

Just for reference, I’m posting a few links to other posts that appeared in the Enlightenment wars over the last week or so, to add to the ones I mentioned below.

Chris Dillow made the unusual move of taking Madeleine Bunting’s question about models of rationality seriously, and offered a MacIntyre-inflected response. Bunting herself posted a follow-up here, accurately noting that my friend Jon Wilson’s comment was one of the smarter ones posted on the various Guardian threads (go here and ctrl-F on “jonewilson”).

Four posts that suggested that I’d missed the point somewhat are here (from a muscular liberal), here (from a non-muscular liberal), here (from a muscular non-liberal) and here (from a non-muscular non-liberal), all of which tend to converge on the idea that this isn’t really an argument about the eighteenth-century Enlightenment at all.

And if I’ve missed any more good links, please pop them in the comments.

As a footnote to last week’s posts on the Enlightenment, here’s a footnote from Istvan Hont’s Jealousy of Trade, which I bought yesterday (see below) and have been reading this morning:

198. [Adam] Smith expressed a violent dislike for the vicious combination of political and intellectual authority which today is often described as a characteristic of “the Enlightenment project.” “Project” is a genuine eighteenth-century key-word, but Smith deployed it for negative purposes. Jeremy Bentham, who regretted Smith’s aversion to “dangerous and expensive experiments” in business and technology, noted Smith’s hostility to projectors and his derogatory use of the term “project.” (Jeremy Bentham, “Letter XIII, ‘To Dr. Smith, on Projects in Arts, & C’” in Defence of Usury [1787], reprinted in Smith, Correspondence, “Appendix C,” pp.388-404) Samuel Johnson, like Bentham noted, defended projectors in science but made it clear that in politics “project” was a pejorative term. Projectors were persons of “rapidity of imagination and vastness of design,” such as Catiline and Caesar at the end of the Roman Republic whose projects were “to raise themselves to power by subverting the commonwealth.” Xerxes and Alexander the Great were projectors, and more recently there were the “royal projectors” such as Charles XII of Sweden and Peter I of Russia, all of whom Johnson, like Smith, detested (The Adventurer, [No. 99, October 16, 1753], subsequently retitled as “Projectors, Successful and Unsuccessful,” reprinted in Samuel Johnson: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Donald Greene [Oxford: OUP, 1984], pp.273-277). The Encyclopédie defined “Projet” as a kind of large-scale reform that had considerable beauty or imaginative order, like Lycurgus’ laws for Sparts, or Rome’s empire over Europe. While such large-scale meliorative efforts were of considerable beauty and imaginative order, the Encyclopédie asserted, the experience of centuries had shown such projects to be chimerical (Encylopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par unes société de gens de lettres, ed. d’Alembert and Diderot, vol. 13 POM-REGG, [Neuchatel: S. Faulche, 1765], p.44b). The greatest enemy of projects in France was Montesquieu, with whom Smith was completely in tune on this issue; see Montesquieu’s “Preface” to the Spirit of the Laws: “In a time of ignorance, one has no doubts even while doing the greatest evils; in an enlightened age, one trembles even while doing the greatest goods. One feels the old abuses and sees their correction, but one also sees the abuses of the correction itself. One lets an ill remain if one fears something worse; one lets a good remain if one is in doubt about a better. One looks at the parts only in order to judge the whole; one examines all the causes in order to see the results” (p.xliv). By “projects” Montesquieu meant policies of “increase,” either as designs of conquest and territorial expansion, or grand economic schemes, mainly in revenue raising and taxation.

- Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective, Harvard University Press, 2005, pp.108-9.

People are suddenly arguing about the Enlightenment. It’s terribly exciting: Madeleine Bunting posted here, leading to responses here, here, here and here, with, no doubt, more to come. But how many people have a good idea as to what they are talking about?

In the posts that follow (read down: I’ve posted them in reverse order), I ask a few standard questions about the Enlightenment. I think it’s worth having answers to questions like these — otherwise you just end up in a position where you can cheerlead for “the Enlightenment” (the rule of law! democracy! science!) or just slag it off for the bad things you vaguely associate with it somewhere along the way (racism! sexism! Revolutionary Terror!) without letting anything as complicated as history or evidence get in the way of your arguments. And that’d be a shame.

So, here we go…

When do you think the Enlightenment happened?

Even those contemporary historians who are happy to talk of a single “Enlightenment” disagree about what the key period we’re talking about actually is. For Jonathan Israel (Radical Enlightenment), it’s the late C17th and early C18th. As he writes, “even before Voltaire came to be widely known, in the 1740s, the real business was already over” [p.7]. Is he right, or not?

Someone who disagrees is John Robertson who has recently published his book on The Case for the Enlightenment” Scotland and Naples, 1680-1760, which restates the case for a “traditional” dating of Enlightenment from the 1740s to the 1780s, replying to Israel with a claim that all that was over by the 1740s “was the radical assault on the foundations of the Christian religion” and “it was over because the authorities, Protestant as well as Catholic, had effectively suppressed it”.

Where do you think it happened?

For a long time, when people wrote of the Enlightenment, they were thinking about France in general, Paris in particular, and - even more particularly - the small group of people clustered around the Encyclop�die of Diderot and d’Alembert. Lots of people want to make “Enlightenment” a broader category than that, but how broad should it go, in geographical terms? Does it include Eastern Europe (apart, perhaps, from K�nigsberg)? Does it make much sense to talk of England as being an “Enlightened” country in the eighteenth century, and, if so, in what respects? And there’s a social geography as well as a spatial one: to what extent was “Enlightenment” an elite intellectual movement, and to what extent was it something ordinary men and women could participate in?

Putting the two previous questions together: was there one Enlightenment, or several?

As we make “Enlightenment” include more than just Paris, we can still ask whether Paris remains a privileged centre or not? Are you “Enlightened” insofar as you are reading the same books as the people in Paris and arguing about them in a language they would understand, or are there alternative ways of being “Enlightened” in the eighteenth century that bypass Paris altogether?

If you talk about the “Scottish Enlightenment”, for example, as people in the last fifty years have quite often done, is this in order to distinguish it from the “French Enlightenment” or the “German Enlightenment” or the “Neapolitan Enlightenment”, or is it to indicate that Scotland was participating in a much broader set of international developments?

I don’t know the history of the historiography of the Enlightenment especially well, but my sense is that the idea that there was a unitary pan-European Enlightenment only goes back to the time of the Second World War — by way of criticism in Adorno & Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, and by way of celebration in post-war scholarship (a tradition that culminates in Peter Gay’s two volumes on The Enlightenment in 1966).

And if you do think there was only one, or if you think there was more than one Enlightenment, ask yourself whether you think the answer to the question matters much. Is it important to you that the Enlightenment is a unitary phenomenon, or not, and, if so, why?

Whatever we think about “the Enlightenment”, does it matter what people at the time thought about whatever it was they were doing, or not? To what extent should we be investigating the eighteenth-century language of Enlightenment (les lumières, Aufklärung, etc.), in order to find out what it was, or otherwise trying to find out what Smith or Diderot or Voltaire or Kant thought they were doing when they were writing the books they were writing? To what extent should we be nervous about projecting onto these people stories about an Enlightenment that they might not themselves have recognised?

(This is especially important for anyone who thinks that the Enlightenment has something to do with democracy, as many of the people who figure at the centre of many of the narratives about Enlightenment were strongly anti-democratic.)

Do you think the idea of the “Counter-Enlightenment” is a useful category or not, either intellectually or historiographically?

Isaiah Berlin and some others have tried to draw a distinction between the Enlightenment (Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, etc.) and the Counter-Enlightenment (definitely Herder, sometimes Rousseau, sometimes Vico, sometimes Burke, and so on). Does this distinction illuminate more than it misleads?

In particular, how should we understand Rousseau in relation to the Enlightenment? Is he a figure embedded right at its heart, or is he its sharpest critic? How do our understandings of “the Enlightenment” change according to the choices we make in answering this question?

What do you take the relevant difference between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries to be, such that it makes sense to call one period “Enlightened” and the other not? What is it that makes the eighteenth-century world of Hume, Smith, Kant, Voltaire and Rousseau distinct from the seventeenth-century world of Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Newton, Locke and Bayle? Or do you think the term “Enlightenment” ought to be stretched to cover pretty much all of modern science and philosophy (in which case, the more it’s stretched, the less it refers to anything terribly precisely any more)?

Is it important that we call whatever it is we’re talking about “the Enlightenment”? Why not use the older language — which, unlike “Enlightenment”, really was very widely used at the time — of “the Republic of Letters” instead? Or use some other term altogether?

What do you think happened to the Enlightenment?

Do the French and American Revolutions somehow represent its climax - or its betrayal? In France, was Si�y�s an Enlightened architect of modern politics, or someone who turned genuinely Enlightened political theory on its head? What’s the relationship between the nineteenth-century politics of nation-states and democratisation and what happened in the eighteenth century? Is there much connection between the social philosophies of the eighteenth century and those of the nineteenth (in Hegel, Marx and Weber, say), or not? And what, if anything, has the Enlightenment got to do with the political distinction between Left and Right?

That’s probably enough for now. And finally, out of pure curiosity, can people tell me what their favourite piece of Enlightenment literature is, and, if you feel so inclined, why.

For reasons I don’t fully understand, it’s become a bit of a Britain-in-the-late-eighteenth-century Christmas: I’ve been motoring through William Hague’s life of William Pitt the Younger, L. G. Mitchell’s of Charles James Fox and the first few chapters of Gareth Stedman Jones’s An End to Poverty? (which is very, very good) — and quite by chance the other evening I flipped on the telly, caught the start of The Madness of King George, and watched through to the end. As I say, I’m not quite sure what’s brought on this little British 1780s/90s moment, but if anyone wants to make additional recommendations in the comments, they might even be taken up while I’ve still got a bit of momentum going.

Here we go, to end this mini-serial, broken up into a number of shorter paras for ease-of-reading convenience.

We may go one step farther. The property of labour, you say, overbalances the community of land: because the value of it, when compared with the value of land, is worth ninety nine parts in a hundred. Now if, by saying, that the property of labour overbalances the community of land, you only mean, that labour is worth much more than uncultivated land, we might allow it. But if you mean, that, because the value of labour is so much greater than the value of land, the labour of one man will overrule or set aside the common claim of all mankind, we must deny it.For suppose the labour of him, who cultivates the land, to be worth ninety nine parts in a hundred of the whole value of the land, after it is cultivated; all that could be due to the labourer, upon this supposition, would be no more than the produce of his own labour: the ninety nine parts, which belong to him, would not swallow up the hundreth part, which he had originally no exclusive right to. This hundreth part, that is, the land itself, must therefore still remain in common, as it was before; he might labour in it again, if he pleased, as one of the joynt commoners; but he would have no property in it.

Let us try this reasoning in another instance. The landlord, as we call him, or the owner of the soil, after property has been introduced, has an exclusive right to some certain quantity of land, suppose for instance, to an acre which bears twenty bushels of wheat: the tenant ploughs and sows this land; and besides the mere personal act of labour, he uses his own materials in cultivating the land. Now the labour of the occupyer puts the chief value upon the land, and without this labour it would be worth little; for it is to [p.61] this, that we owe all its useful production. For whatever the straw, bran, bread, &c. of that acre of wheat is worth more than the product of an acre of as good land, which lies waste, is all the effects of labour.

You see then how much the property of labour overbalances the property of land. But no one will be led to conclude from hence, that, because, according to this reckoning, in the value of an acre of land ninety nine parts in a hundred are owing to the labour of the occupyer, the property, which he has in his own labour, will swallow up the property, which the landlord has in the soil; and that the land, because he has cultivated it, will for the future become his own.

But if the right of property in the soil, which in estimating the value of land, is but one part in a hundred, is not overruled or set aside by the overbalance in the value of labour; I can see no reason why the same overbalance should be supposed to set aside the common claims of mankind to land, which was never appropriated. Let the right be what it will, whether it is a right of property, or of common claim, if an overbalance in the value of the labour, which is joyned to it, will not swallow up one of them, no good reason can be given, why it should swallow up the other.

And that’s your lot.

I’ve broken up the inordinately long final para., to help bring this epic to a digestible conclusion:

To strengthen this opinion concerning the introduction of property, and to answer an objection, which has been hinted at already, Mr. Lock compares the value of labour with the value of the land, with which it is so mixed.

“Nor is it, says he, so strange, as perhaps before consideration may appear, that the property of labour should be able to balance the community of land. For it is labour indeed, that puts the difference of value on every thing; and let any one consider what the difference is between an acre of land planted with tobacco, or sugar, sown with wheat or barley; and an acre of the same land lying in common, without any husbandry upon it, and he will find, that the improvement of labour makes the far greater part of the value. I think, as he goes on, it will be but a very modest computation to say, that of the products of the earth, useful to the life of man, nine [p.59] tenths are the effects of labour: nay if we will rightly estimate things, as they come to our use, and cast up the several expences about them, what in them is purely owing to nature and what to labour, we shall find, that in most of them ninety nine parts in a hundred are wholly to be put on the account of labour.”

But we may ask in return, what the value of pure labour is, when considered merely as the personal act of the labourer? If neither the timber of his plough, nor the horses that draw it, nor the meat, which they eat, nor the manure, which he lays upon his land, nor the grain, with which he sows it, are his own, what will you rate his labour at? Certainly you rate it much too high, if upon comparing it with the value of the land, you set it at ninety nine parts in a hundred, or even at nine parts in ten. But you will suppose all these materials to be his own. I ask therefore how he gained property in them? You answer, by his labour, and explane this labour to be only the act of taking them or separating them from the common stock. Now this labour is of little or no value at all; and consequently you cannot say, in this instance, that the common right of mankind is overbalanced by the labour of the occupant. And if, in one instance, a labour, which is worth nothing, when compared with the thing acquired, will give the occupant property; then we can have no reason to imagine, that it is the high rate of labour, when compared with the value of land, which so overbalances to the common right of mankind to the land, as to give the labourer an exclusive right to it. You have only dazzled our eyes with this high account of the value of labour; since you must, in order to give it so high a value, suppose property to have been introduced before- [p.60] hand by a labour, which is of little or no value at all.

The end is nigh…

Here’s a bit more, with similar editing principles as in earlier instalments.

[p.57] “In Mr. Locks opinion, property in immoveable goods, such as the earth or soil, is acquired in the same manner and is governed by the same measure, as property in moveable goods.

“As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, enclose it from the common.”

But what is this again, but the exercise of a common right, instead of such an exclusive right as property is. For not to insist here upon the limitation of having property only in so much land, as we can use; let us try the effects of this right, and see whether they are the same with the effects of property. Suppose then, that the man, after he has for some time tilled the land, and cultivated it, was either by age or sickness to become incapable of tilling and cultivating it any longer: if the mixing his labour with it was his whole title to it; when his labour ceases, his title to the land must cease with it; the land can be his no longer, than he can cultivate it; and when he is disabled for labouring, he cannot sell or let it to any other person: that is, it was his to labour in, but not his to dispose of as he pleases: and consequently his right could only be a right to use, and not an exclusive right of property. This Mr. Lock might have been sensible of, if he had attended [to] his own reasoning.

“He, say this author, that in obedience to the command of God, to improve the earth to the benefit of life, tilled and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something, that was his property, which another had no title to, nor could, without injury, take from him. Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of [p.58] land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other man, since there was still enough, and as good left, and more than the yet unprovided for could use.”

If then his title to the land, which he occupies, rests upon this principle, that there was enough for others, besides what he had taken for his own use; it is plane that, unless there had been enough for others, his title would not have been a good one: and from hence it follows, that all his title is no more than a common right to use what he wants, and no an exclusive right of property: because the right of property does not at all depend upon the convenience of others.

Just one more paragraph to go — but it’s a long ‘un.

As he was being chased into exile in Switzerland following the condemnation of his book on education, Emile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau composed a short “prose poem” based on the Biblical story of the Levite of Ephraim in the Book of Judges. It’s one of his shorter and more obscure pieces of writing, obscure in both the sense of little known and also rather difficult to understand quite what he’s getting at in it. Still, modern scholarship — Thomas Kavanagh, Mira Morgenstern, etc. — is doing its best. He wrote in his Confessions that

In three days I composed the first three cantos of the little poem which I finished at Motiers, and I am certain of not having done anything in my life in which there is a more interesting mildness of manners, a greater brilliancy of colouring, more simple delineations, greater exactness of proportion, or more antique simplicity in general, notwithstanding the horror of the subject which in itself is abominable, so that besides every other merit I had still that of a difficulty conquered. If the Levite of Ephraim be not the best of my works, it will ever be that most esteemed…

I’m delighted to be able to report that this disturbing Biblical tale of violent rape and murder is now available to the contemporary reader in Lego, over at (where else), The Brick Testament. Read on, Rousseauists, read on…

A bit more, carrying on from where we left off. I’ve indented the quotes from Locke, to break up the long paragraphs somewhat.

That it is this common right which a man exercises, when he separates a thing for his own use, and claims to use it, because he has so separated it, will appear [p.54] from the limitation, which Mr. Lock himself puts upon what he calls property, when it is thus acquired.

“God has given us all things richly, is the voice of reason, confirmed by inspiration. But how far has he given it us? To enjoy. As much as any one can make use of, to any advantage of life, before it spoils, so much he may, by his labour, fix a property in: whatever is beyond this, is more than his share, and belongs to others. Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.”

But certainly, to take no more than we want, or no more than we can make use of, before it will be spoiled, is a limitation unknown to property: it belongs only to the exercise of a common right in a joynt stock; where no one of the commoners has an exclusive right to keep, but all and each of them have a joint right to use.But Mr. Lock endeavours to take off this limitation, and to shew us by what means, upon the same principles, property might be accumulated.

“The greatest part of things really useful to the life of man, and such as the necessity of subsisting made the first commoners of the world look after, as it doth the Americans now, are generally things of short duration; such, as if they are not consumed by use, will decay and perish of themselves: gold, silver, and diamonds, are things, that fancy or agreement hath put the value on, more than real use, and the necessary support of life. Now of those good things, which nature hath provided in common, every one had a right to as much as he could use, and property in all he could effect with his labour; all, that his [p.55] industry could extend to, to alter from the state nature had put it in. He that gathered a hundred bushels of acorns, or apples, had thereby a property in them, they were his goods, as soon as gathered. He was only to look, that he used them before they spoiled, else he took more than his share, and robbed others. And indeed it was a foolish thing, as well as dishonest, to hoard up more than he could make use of. If he gave away a part to any body else, so that it perished not uselessly in his possession, then he made use of it. And if he also bartered away plums, that would have rotted in a week, for nuts, that would last good for his eating a while year, he did no injury; he wasted not the common stock; he destroyed no part of the portion of goods, that belonged to others, so long as nothing perished uselessly in his hands. Again, if he would give his nuts for a piece of metal, pleased with its colour, or exchange his sheep for shells or wool, for a sparkling pebble or diamond, and keep them by him all his life, he invaded not the rights of others; he might heap up as much of these durable things, as he pleased; the exceeding the bounds of his just property not lying in the largeness of his possessions, but the perishing of any thing uselessly in it.”

But this writer seems here to take for granted the point in question. We contend, and he allows, that the right of him, who gathered acorns or plums, extends no farther than to such a quantity of them, as he can use before they are spoiled: and in shewing how this limitation may be removed, he reasons as if there was no such limitation. How else should he, who had collected more plums, than he could use before they were [p.56] spoiled, or more sheep than he wanted to cloath or to feed himself, barter away the plums for nuts, which would keep the year round, or for metal, that would keep as long as he lived? The very notion of bartering implys property. Our author therefore must suppose the man to have property in what would spoil before he can use it; or else he could not suppose him to barter it away: that is, since this contrivance of bartering was introduced, to shew how property might be accumulated, or to take off the limitation of appropriating no more than can be used, whilst it is good; in order to apply this contrivance, he must suppose the limitation to be taken off already, and the man to have property in plums, or sheep, which he does not want, and which he could not use, before they would perish in his hands. Indeed in mankind would consent and submit thus to barter one with another; this consent would be sufficient to take off the limitation, and to introduce a true right of property. For if I knowingly and willingly bargain with another about my own goods, which are in his possession, as if they were his; this act of mine may well be construed as a tacit consent to make them his. And if in like manner mankind would bargain with one another about goods, which belonged to all in common, as if they were the property of the possessor, they tacitly give up their claim to those goods, and so they become his property. But property, when introduced after this manner, is introduced by consent of parties, and not by the labour, which the possessor, or occupant, has employed in separating the things, which he possesses, from the common stock.

More to come…