The Physiocrats and Adam Smith have been viewed as founders of the modern discipline of economics. The leader of the Physiocrats was François Quesnay (frahn-SWAH keh-NAY) (1694-1774), a highly successful French court physician. Quesnay and the Physiocrats claimed they would discover the natural economic laws that governed human society. Their first principle was that land constituted the only source of wealth and that wealth itself could be increased only by agriculture because all other economic activities were unproductive and sterile. Even the state’s revenues should come from a single tax on land rather than the hodgepodge of inequitable taxes and privileges currently in place. In stressing the economic primacy of agricultural production, the Physiocrats were rejecting the mercantilist emphasis on the significance of money – that is, gold and silver – as the primary determinants of wealth (see Chapter 14).
Their second major “natural law” of economics also represented a repudiation of mercantilism, specifically, its emphasis on a controlled economy for the benefit of the state. Instead, the Physiocrats stressed that the existence of the natural economic forces of supply and demand made it imperative that individuals should be left free to pursue their own economic self-interest. In doing so, all of society would ultimately benefit. Consequently, they argued that the state should in no way interrupt the free play of natural economic forces by government regulation of the economy but rather should just leave it alone, a doctrine that subsequently became known by its French name, laissez-faire (less-ay-FAYR) (noninterference; literally, “let people do as they choose”).
The best statement of laissez-faire was made in 1776 by a Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith (1723-1790), in his Inquity into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, known simply as The Wealth of Nations, In the process of enunciating three basic principles of economics, Smith presented a strong attack on mercantilism, First, he condemned the mercantilist use of tariffs to protect home industries, If one country can supply another country with a product cheaper than the latter can make it, it is better to purchase the product than to produce it. To Smith, free trade was a fundamental economic principle, Smith’s second principle was his labor theory of value. Like the Physiocrats, he claimed that gold and silver were not the source of a nation’s true wealth, but unlike the Physiocrats, he did not believe that land was either. Rather labor - the labor of individual farmers, artisans, and merchants - constituted the true wealth of a nation, Finally, like the Physiocrats, Smith believed that the state should not interfere in economic matters; indeed, he assigned to government only three basic functions: to protect society from invasion (army), defend individuals from injustice and oppression (police), and keep up certain public works, such as roads and canals, that private individuals could not afford, Thus, in Smith’s view, the state should stay out of the lives of individuals, In emphasizing the economic liberty of the individual, the Physiocrats and Adam Smith laid the foundation for what became known in the nineteenth century as economic liberalism.
THE LATER ENLIGHTENMENT By the late 1760s, a new generation of philosophes who had grown up with the worldview of the Enlightenment began to move beyond their predecessors’ beliefs. Baron Paul d’Holbach (dawl-BAHK) (1723-1789), a wealthy German aristocrat who settled in Paris, preached a doctrine of strict atheism and materialism. In his System of Nature, written in 1770, he argued that everything in the universe consisted of matter in motion. Human beings were simply machines; God was a product of the human mind and was unnecessary for leading a moral life. People needed only reason to live in this world: “Let us persuade men to be just, beneficent, moderate, sociable; not because the gods demand it, but because they must please men. Let us advise them to abstain from vice and crimes; not because they will be punished in the other world, but because they will suffer for it in this.” D'Holbach shocked almost all of his fellow philosophes with his uncompromising atheism. Most intellectuals remained more comfortable with deism and feared the effect of atheism on society.
Marie-Jean de Condorcet (ma-REE-ZHAHNH duh kohn-dar-SAY) (1743-1794), another French philosophe, made an exaggerated claim for progress. Condorcet was a victim of the turmoil of the French Revolution and wrote his chief work, The Progress of the Human Mind, while in hiding during the Reign of Terror (see Chapter 19). His survey of human history convinced him that humans had progressed through nine stages of history. Now, with the spread of science and reason, humans were about to enter the tenth stage, one of perfection, in which they will see that “there is no limit to the perfecting of the powers of man; that human perfectibility is in reality indefinite, that the progress of this perfectibility... has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has placed us.” Shortly after composing this work, the prophet of humankind’s perfection died in a French revolutionary prison.
ROUSSEAU AND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT No one was more critical of the work of his predecessors than Jean-Jacques Rousseau (ZHAHNH-ZHAHK roo-SOH) (1712-1778). Born in Geneva, he spent his youth wandering about France and Italy holding various jobs. He went back to school for a while to study music and the classics (he could afford to do so after becoming the paid lover of an older woman). Eventually, he made his way to Paris, where he was introduced into the circles of the philosophes. He never really liked the social life of the cities, however, and frequently withdrew into long periods of solitude.
Rousseau’s political beliefs were presented in two major works. In his Discourse on the Origins of the Inequality of Mankind, Rousseau began with humans in their primitive condition (or state of nature – see Chapter 15), where they were happy. There were no laws, no judges; all people were equal. But what had gone wrong?
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, thought of saying, This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders; how much misery and horror the human race would have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and filled in the ditch, and cried to his fellow men: “Beware of listening to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone and that the earth itself belongs to no one!”
To preserve their private property, people adopted laws and governors. In so doing, they rushed headlong not to liberty but into chains. “What then is to be done? Must societies be totally abolished? .. . Must we return again to the forest to live among bears?” No, civilized humans could “no longer subsist on plants or acorns or live without laws and magistrates.” Government was an evil, but a necessary one.
In his celebrated treatise The Social Contract, published in 1762, Rousseau tried to harmonize individual liberty with governmental authority (see the box on p. 512). The social contract was basically an agreement on the part of an entire society to be governed by its general will. If any individual wished to follow his own self-interest, he should be compelled to abide by the general will. “This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free,” said Rousseau, because the general will represented a community’s highest aspirations, whatever was best for the entire community. Thus, liberty was achieved through being forced to follow what was best for all people because, he believed, what was best for all was best for each individual. True freedom is adherence to laws that one has imposed on oneself. To Rousseau, because everybody was responsible for framing the general will, the creation of laws could never be delegated to a parliamentary institution:
Thus, the people’s deputies are not and could not be its representatives; they are merely its agents; and they cannot decide anything finally. Any law which the people has not ratified in person is void; it is not law at all. The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during the election of Members of Parliament; as soon as the Members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing. 7
This is an extreme and idealistic statement, but it is the ultimate statement of participatory democracy.
Another influential treatise by Rousseau also appeared in 1762. Titled Émile, it is one of the Enlightenment’s most important works on education. Written in the form of a novel, the work is really a general treatise “on the education of the natural man.” Rousseau’s fundamental concern was that education should foster rather than restrict children’s natural instincts. Life’s experiences had shown Rousseau the importance of the promptings of the heart, and what he sought was a balance between heart and mind, between sentiment and reason. This emphasis on heart and sentiment made him a precursor of the intellectual movement called Romanticism that dominated Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
But Rousseau did not necessarily practice what he preached. His own children were sent to foundling homes, where many children died young. Rousseau also viewed women as “naturally” different from men: “To fulfill [a woman’s] functions, an appropriate physical constitution is necessary to her. . . . She needs a soft sedentary life to suckle her babies. How much care and tenderness does she need to hold her family together.” In Émile, Sophie, who was Émile’s intended wife, was educated for her role as wife and mother by learning obedience and the nurturing skills that would enable her to provide loving care for her husband and children. Not everyone in the eighteenth century agreed with Rousseau, however, making ideas of gender an important issue in the Enlightenment.
THE “WOMAN’S QUESTION” IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT For centuries, men had dominated the debate about the nature and value of women. In general, many male intellectuals had argued that the base nature of women made them inferior to men and made male domination of women necessary (see Chapter 16). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many male thinkers reinforced this view by arguing that it was based on “natural” biological differences between men and women. Like Rousseau, they argued that the female constitution destined women to be mothers. Male writers, in particular, were critical of the attempts of some women in the Enlightenment to write on intellectual issues, arguing that women were by nature intellectually inferior to men. Nevertheless, some Enlightenment thinkers offered more positive views of women. Diderot, for example, maintained that men and women were not all that different, and Voltaire asserted that “women are capable of all that men are” in intellectual affairs.
It was women thinkers, however, who added new perspectives to the “woman’s question” by making specific suggestions for improving the condition of women. Mary Astell (AST-ul) (1666-1731), daughter of a wealthy English coal merchant, argued in 1697 in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies that women needed to become better educated. Men, she believed, would resent her proposal, ‘but they must excuse me, if I be as partial to my own sex as they are to theirs, and think women as capable of learning as men are, and that it becomes them as well.” In a later work titled Some Reflections upon Marriage, Astell argued for the equality of the sexes in marriage: “If absolute sovereignty be not necessary in a state, how comes it to be so in a family … ? For if arbitrary power is evil in itself, and an improper method of governing rational and free agents, it ought not be practiced anywhere .... If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?”9
The strongest statement for the rights of women in the eighteenth century was advanced by the English writer Mary Wollstonecraft (WULL-stun-kraft) (1759-1797), viewed by many as the founder of modern European feminism. In Vindication of the Rights of Women, written in 1792, Wollstonecraft pointed out two contradictions in the views of women held by such Enlightenment thinkers as Rousseau. To argue that women must obey men, she said, was contrary to the beliefs of the same individuals that a system based on the arbitrary power of monarchs over their subjects or slave owners over their slaves was wrong. The subjection of women to men was equally wrong. In addition, she argued, the Enlightenment was based on the ideal that reason is innate in all human beings. If women have reason, then they are entitled to the same rights that men have. Women, Wollstonecraft declared, should have equal rights with men in education and in economic and political life as well (see the box on p. 514).
The social background of the philosophes varied considerably, from the aristocratic Montesquieu to the lower-middle-class Diderot and Rousseau. The Enlightenment was not the preserve of any one class, although obviously its greatest appeal was to the aristocracy and upper middle classes of the major cities. The common people, especially the peasants, were little affected by the Enlightenment.
Of great importance to the Enlightenment was the spread of its ideas to the literate elite of European society. Although the publication and sale of books and treatises were crucial to this process, the salon was also a factor. Salons came into being in the seventeenth century but rose to new heights in the eighteenth. These were the elegant drawing rooms in the urban houses of the wealthy where invited philosophes and guests gathered to engage in witty, sparkling conversations that often centered on the ideas of the philosophes. In France’s rigid hierarchical society, the salons were important in bringing together writers and artists with aristocrats, government officials, and wealthy bourgeoisie.
As hostesses of the salons, women found themselves in a position to affect the decisions of kings, sway political opinion, and influence literary and artistic taste. Salons provided havens for people and views unwelcome in the royal court. When the Encyclopédie was suppressed by the French authorities, Marie-Thérèse de Geoffrin (1699-1777), a wealthy bourgeois widow whose father had been a valet, welcomed the encyclopedists to her salon and offered financial assistance to complete the work in secret. Madame Geoffrin was not without rivals, however. The marquise du Deffand (mahr-KEEZ duh duh-FAHNH) (1697-1780) had abandoned her husband in the provinces and established herself in Paris, where her ornate drawing room attracted many of the Enlightenment’s great figures, including Montesquieu, Hume, and Voltaire.
Although the salons were run by women, the reputation of a salon depended on the stature of the males a hostess was able to attract (see Images of Everyday Life on p. 515). Despite this male domination, both French and foreign observers complained that females exerted undue influence in French political affairs. Though exaggerated, this perception led to the decline of salons during the French Revolution.
The salons served an important role in promoting conversation and sociability between upper-class men and women as well as spreading the ideas of the Enlightenment. But other means of spreading Enlightenment ideas were also available. Coffeehouses, cafes, reading clubs, and public lending libraries established by the state were gathering places for the exchange of ideas. Learned societies were formed in cities throughout Europe and America. At such gatherings as the Select Society of Edinburgh, Scotland, and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, lawyers, doctors, and local officials gathered to discuss enlightened ideas. Secret societies also developed. The most famous was the Freemasons, established in London in 1717, France and Italy in 1726, and Prussia in 1744. It was no secret that the Freemasons were sympathetic to the ideas of the philosophes.