Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

24

Liberty, Property and Community: the Origins of Conservatism and Liberalism

Louis XIV, the Sun King of France, born in 1638, became king in 1643 and achieved his age of majority in 1661. Until his reign, the last sentence on laws in France usually read: ‘In the presence and with the consent of the prelates and barons.’ Later that changed to: ‘Le roi a ordonné et établi par délibération de son conseil’, ‘The king has resolved by deliberation in his council’.¹ This nicely illustrates the dominant political fact of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which was the rise of the nation-state and absolute monarchy, emerging out of feudal dynasties and the ‘city-states’ that had characterised the Middle Ages and Renaissance.² These states gradually took on a form, and size, not seen since Roman times. Their emergence went hand-in-hand with a fresh round of political theorising, more impressive than at any other time, and the consequences of which are still with us.

These states emerged when they did thanks to a whole series of disasters and catastrophes, which left Europe little more than a wreck. In 1309 the popes began their exile at Avignon. In 1339 the Hundred Years War was begun between England and France. Increasing famines and plague culminated in the Black Death of 1348–1349. The Jacquerie, the French peasant insurrection, took place in 1358 and the Great Ecclesiastical Schism lasted from 1378 to 1417. There were risings in England and France in 1381–1382 and the Habsburgs were defeated by the Swiss Confederation four years later. In 1395 the Turks destroyed the Hungarian army at Nikopolis, the beginning of a campaign that culminated in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople. No area of Europe was immune, and Christendom itself was devastated. The Black Death reduced the population of the continent by a third but even so there was not enough food to go round and this widespread destitution and distress resulted in the most drastic upheaval in society that Europe had ever known.³ At the same time that ideas about the universe (and therefore about God) were beginning to change, so law and order here on earth were disintegrating.

Men had been told, by the likes of Thomas Aquinas, that God had ordained the forms by which men should live together, and that any change was unthinkable. Under Aquinas, secular authority was allowed, but still as part of God’s plan. Yet men, though they might still be very religious, though unbelief might still be an impossibility for them, were not fools. Some of them at least could not accept that chaos and disintegration were part of any divine plan.

The first man to attempt to think his way through this problem was Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). He was fortunate (if that is the word) in living in Florence under three different systems of government – the rule of the Medici, until 1494, then of Savonarola and, after his fall, in 1498, of a republic. Indeed, Machiavelli was given a job in the new republic, as secretary to the second chancery, concerned with home matters, war, and some foreign affairs.⁴ This did not give him much in the way of power but it did give him an inside view of politics. In his dealings with other city-states in Italy, he came in touch with the oligarchy of Venice and the monarchy of Naples in addition to the democracy in his own city. In Rome his travels also brought him up against the notorious Cesare Borgia, then in his mid-twenties. Machiavelli made Cesare Borgia the ‘hero’ of his book The Prince. This book, generally regarded as the first book of modern political theory, or realpolitik, as we would say, was in fact written only because the Florentine republic fell in 1512 and the Medici were restored to leadership. Machiavelli fell from favour, lost his position, was tortured and – all in quick succession – exiled from the city. In his enforced leisure, at his estate in San Casciano, he wrote The Prince very quickly, completing it in 1513, and dedicated it to Lorenzo de’ Medici (grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent). In this way he hoped to return to favour. In fact, Lorenzo never even read the book, and it wasn’t printed in Machiavelli’s lifetime.⁵

Machiavelli was a humanist and this coloured The Prince. It meant for example that he had a rigidly secular attitude to politics. Like Leonardo da Vinci, he was a scientist, the very first social scientist according to some, and in following this course he noted to himself that he was, in fact, opening up a ‘new route’. What he meant was that he tried to look at politics objectively, in a disinterested way, so as to be able to generalise. He wanted to describe things as they were, not as they ‘should be’. The Prince made a total break with the past in that Machiavelli didn’t tell people what the good or honourable way to behave was, rather he was describing what he saw, how people actually do behave, ‘how a prince must act if he wishes to prevail’.⁶ In politics, Machiavelli was the first empiricist.

In some ways Machiavelli prefigured Galileo a century later. One of Galileo’s ideas was that matter was the same everywhere, in the heavens as on earth, and Machiavelli argued that human nature was the same everywhere and at all times. He carried this further, insisting that while man’s nature is both good and bad, for the purposes of politics we must assume it is bad. ‘Men are wicked,’ he writes, ‘and will not keep faith with you . . . Unless men are compelled to be good they will inevitably turn out bad.’ It may be that Machiavelli took his ‘new route’ because he himself had been so disillusioned by his own political experiences, or it may be that he took his theory from the religious temper of the times, with its emphasis on evil. But in doing what he did, Machiavelli emancipated politics from religion. In working out that men would always tend to act in their own selfish, short-term interests, Machiavelli turned politics into an arena of secular thought.⁷

Machiavelli’s other great innovation was his treatment of the state. In circumstances where men were selfish and evil and giving way constantly to evil inclinations, the only defence was lo stato – the state. ‘This is a term which in its application to the organisation of political power occurs for the first time in Machiavelli, and which in fact was long limited to the Italian language.’⁸ Hitherto, Hagen Schulze tells us, people had talked of ‘rule’ (dominium), ‘government’ (regimen), of ‘kingdoms’ or ‘land’ (regio or territorium), ‘but when Machiavelli and his Italian contemporaries, from Villani to Guicciardini, spoke of stato they had in mind a form of government that had not been thought of before: basically a situation in which a concentrated form of public political authority was exercised uniformly throughout a given territory, irrespective of the person who exercised it, or in whose name it was exercised; a self-justifying system without transcendental dimension or reference.’⁹ For Machiavelli the ends always justify the means and the maintenance of the state requires no justification beyond survival, because life without the state is unthinkable. ‘A prince need only be victorious and maintain his rule, and whatever means he employs will be looked upon as honourable and will please everyone.’¹⁰ This effectively marks the point of separation between theology and politics – in fact, at one point Machiavelli urges his readers to care more for their state than for their souls (though he thought the Church should support the state and that success without such support would be difficult). His contemporary Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) went further, arguing that the medieval practice of subordinating politics to theology was now outmoded, that ‘no one can live truly according to God’s will unless he withdraws totally from the world; on the other hand, it is hard for man to live on tolerable terms with the world without offering offence to God’.¹¹

It is worth mentioning here that, in calling his book The Prince, and using Cesare Borgia as a kind of anti-hero, as we would say today, Machiavelli wasn’t writing a manual for tyranny. This was just a device of Machiavelli’s, to make his book readable and accessible. The Prince, for him, is the personification of the state. He acts on behalf of the community and therefore must be willing ‘to let his own conscience sleep’.¹² This is made clear when Machiavelli considers the rise and fall of states, which he says are governed by laws that differ from the laws of religion and from those of personal morality. ‘The state has its own rules, its own code of behaviour, and its reasons of state that must govern the actions of statesmen, if they wish to succeed.’¹³ The phrase ‘reasons of state’ was new too, but it entered the language firmly, never to leave. In essence it meant that a ruler was at liberty to break his word if the publica utilitas, the public interest, required him to do so. By the same token, the prince may lie to his own people – serve up propaganda – if, in his judgement, that serves the state. ‘Men in general judge by their eyes . . . the common people are always impressed by appearances and results.’ This was a decidedly un-Christian approach but it caught on, perhaps reflecting the fact that Machiavelli had it exactly right when he said that in man’s nature, when it came to politics, the bad outweighed the good.

A final factor in the emergence of the state was the Protestant revolt, which broke the unity of Christendom.¹⁴ In doing so it changed the position of the papacy. It was now, at least for Catholics, a state within the European community of states, rather than the supreme papacy it had been, or tried to be, in medieval Christendom. The significance of Luther and Calvin lay in the transfer of authority and political sovereignty from institutions to people.¹⁵

In his Defence of Liberty Against Tyrants, Hubert Languet (1518–1581), a famous Protestant divine, invoked ‘a theory of contract between God on the one hand, and the prince and the people jointly on the other’. Both king and people were supposed to ensure that each observed the correct forms of worship. It fell to the king to organise the Church within his realm but if he defaulted, the people had a duty to coerce him, being guilty in the eyes of God if they lapsed and did not oppose a prince ‘who was in error’. ‘The common man is caught between two fires but he does have a role to play.’¹⁶ This, politically speaking, was the crucial point.

Even the Catholics, even the Jesuits, were affected by this thinking to some extent. Among the Jesuits their two most important political theorists, Juan Mariana and Francisco Suárez, both Spaniards, were by no means deaf to what was happening elsewhere. Mariana argued that the social order derived from nature and that government evolved to accommodate the needs of civilised life and to protect property. From this, he said, it follows that the interests of the whole community come first and ought not to be subordinated to an absolute ruler. For him, the purpose of the state is the worship of God and the establishment of a Christian way of life, always of course in accordance with the doctrines of the Church. Therefore, secular government cannot command spiritual loyalty unless sanctified by the church. But here too the people have a role, albeit limited. Suárez, in his De Legibus ac Deo Legislatore (1619) argued that ‘all power comes from the community; men are born free and society is ordained to ensure order’. For him, therefore, a community is not simply an aggregate of individuals but an authority in itself, based on common consent. From this it follows that only the community can sanction authority. This is a much stronger statement than Mariana’s.¹⁷ Finally, in defining the papal position, the Jesuit theorists abandoned the traditional claim for papal sovereignty over all princes, which had caused so much trouble in the past, and in the process redefined the role of the headship of the Church. In this way the pope became a sovereign on a par with other sovereigns, negotiating with them on equal terms for the benefit of Catholics.¹⁸

We may say then that four ideas emerged from this mix of events and theories: the secular side of politics had been emphasised, in which the people had a clearly defined role; the idea of individual liberty, and the right of rebellion, had crossed a psychological watershed (this was Karl Mannheim’s point); the concept of the state had been introduced and clarified; and finally, the sheer, unending bitterness of religious strife had concluded in what John Bowle aptly calls ‘a toleration of exhaustion’.¹⁹ Politically speaking, this was the end of the medieval order and the birth of the modern world.²⁰

The modern state, centred on a bureaucracy and organised for defence/aggression, first emerged in France. Louis XIV never actually said ‘L’état, c’est moi’, but one can certainly see why the words were put into his mouth.²¹ At that time the use of the word état, in the singular, in France, would have been particularly shocking. Les états, in the plural, were the ‘estates’, the different ‘natural’ groupings that made up French society – the nobles, the clergy, the commons, who ruled jointly with the monarch, who was himself an estate. (In both France and Holland the Parliaments were, and in Holland still are, known as the ‘Estates General’.) The novel – the revolutionary – idea that the monarch should be the sole power in the state had been born as a result of the vicious civil war that tore France apart in the sixteenth century. Faced with such widespread demoralisation and the collapse of all civilised standards, and with religious fanaticism on all sides, humanists everywhere came to the view that any system of government that put an end to civil war was preferable to continual fighting. In this way the equivalents of Machiavelli arose in France and England: Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes.

Surrounded by the bloodshed of the Huguenot wars in France, Jean Bodin (1529–1596), a lawyer and philosopher, realised that the salvation of his country lay in the strong rule of a central power, and as a direct consequence produced his doctrine of sovereignty. In the Six Books of the Republic, he sought to make the power of government so strong that it could always outweigh the special interests of regional autonomy and of religious persuasion. Like the Jesuits, he regarded the safeguarding of property as pre-eminent and, on this reading, his idea of the state was that it was there, above all, to preserve order.²² It should be confessionally neutral and embodied in one man, the monarch.²³ This did not mean the sovereign could do as he pleased. He had to abide by natural law, fairness, and by God’s law. ‘This sovereignty [of the state] is unassailable. “He is sovereign who recognises nothing greater than himself save only Immortal God . . . The prince or people who possess sovereign power cannot be called to account for their actions by anyone but Immortal God”.’ This sounds fanatical and Bodin’s arguments certainly arose out of the vicious fanaticism shown in the French wars of religion.²⁴ But under his system, religious issues were deliberately excluded, and not permitted to govern the policies of the state. They were matters for the Church and it was expressly forbidden that they be settled by force.²⁵ Thus was born the theory of the modern sovereign state. ‘Both the classical Roman conception of a world order, and the ideal of a Christian society, formulated by St Thomas [Aquinas] and Dante, are abandoned.’²⁶

As many people have commented, the eventual results of this change were to be disastrous, in the twentieth century. But, at the time, in the wake of vicious religious intolerance, and the changing fortunes of nobles and ordinary people, it was felt that the only immediate hope of efficient government was in the development of centralised power, for the sake of order.

In seventeenth-century France, it seemed to work. This was the time when she rose to a position of unchallenged supremacy in Europe, both politically and culturally. Her population was 20 million people, about twice that of the Holy Roman Empire, three times the combined population of England and Scotland, and four times that of Spain. The great feudal aristocracies had been tamed and domesticated by means of the court: this provided the setting for the glorification of the monarch, ‘a temple for the worship of the ruler’.²⁷ No fewer than 10,000 people took part in the court’s complicated rituals and no greater honour could be imagined than to be part of it. The strength and unity of the state was maintained by a standing army ten times the size of the court – 100,000 men. This standing army was the ultima ratio Regis, the ultimate instrument for the enforcement of royal authority (these Latin words were actually engraved on the cannon of the Prussian army). Such standing armies were expensive but were paid for, in part, by the state’s involvement in trade.²⁸ The theory here was that the status and reputation of the sovereign were dependent on the economic prosperity of the state, which gave the state the right to intervene in commerce. This meant the introduction of taxes (and tax farming, to guarantee revenues) and the development of luxuries. The latter was based on the economic theory that the amount of money circulating in Europe was roughly constant, so that one country could only become wealthier by drawing money from somewhere else. The ideal form of trade, therefore, was to import raw materials, relatively cheaply, and work them up to finished products, to be sold back abroad for much higher prices. So far as France was concerned, the idea worked spectacularly: the level of skill in arts and crafts was far higher there than elsewhere – French textiles, porcelain, furniture and perfumes brought in huge revenues, much of which was siphoned off by the state. Many other states in Europe modelled themselves on the Sun King.²⁹ A final element in absolutism was the new tactics of war. With huge standing armies in Europe, for the first time, the new tactics called for the manoeuvring of large bodies of men with great precision, and meant that much greater discipline was now needed. This led to a greater concentration of power of the absolute state at home, and indeed the idea of the state now overwhelmed men’s minds.³⁰ This also had something to do with the ever-present European wars of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.

The first man to make the most of the scientific revolution in politics was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), the son of a vicar in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, in the west of England.³¹ Hobbes was never a Fellow of the Royal Society, as John Locke was (see below), but he did send in scientific papers to the society and he carried out his own experiments in physiology and mathematics. (His friend John Aubrey, in his famous book, Brief Lives, described Hobbes as being ‘in love with geometry’.) Hobbes acted as assistant to Boyle and amanuensis to Francis Bacon and met both Galileo and Descartes. He had an entirely materialistic view of the world, and developed the important doctrine of causality, the idea that the world is ‘an endless chain of cause and effect’.³²

Though Hobbes went further than Bodin, he shared some of the same views, and for much the same reasons. Just as Bodin produced Six Books against the background of the Huguenot wars in France, so Hobbes produced his works in the immediate aftermath of the English Civil War. Like Bodin, he thought religious atrocities were based on fantasies and illusions brought about by fanaticism; therefore, what he was after, above all, was security for people and property – order. Like Machiavelli, he assumed that men are reasonable and yet predatory, and like Bodin he built an argument for the absolute authority of the sovereign. Hobbes, however, considered that a sovereign could be either a monarch or an assembly (though he preferred the former), and he put the ecclesiastical power firmly under the secular power. The Leviathan (the biblical monster, ‘which alone retained the wolflike potential of man’s primeval condition’) is one of the great books of political theory and contains the most comprehensive description of Hobbes’ ideas, though he wrote several other books, notably the De Cive, the Tripos and the Philosophical Rudiments.³³ In these, he reveals just what a heavy price he is willing to pay for order.

The Leviathan, ‘my discourse of Civill and Religious Government occasioned by the disorders of the Present Time’, was published in 1651.³⁴ The book is divided into four. ‘Of Man’, Part One, is an investigation of the state of human knowledge and of psychology. There are chapters on the ‘Lawes of Nature’ and the origins of the social contract. Part Two, ‘Of Commonwealth’, contains the main thrust of the book. In the third part Hobbes airs his religious views and in the last part, ‘Of the Kingdom of Darkness’, he culminates with an attack on the Church of Rome.³⁵

Hobbes was dogmatic, didactic, dogged. His attempt to be ‘scientific’ is everywhere apparent. Underneath it all, he believed that sociological truth is just as discoverable in politics as it is in physics, biology or astronomy. ‘The skill of making and maintaining Common Wealths consists in Certain Rules, as doth Arithmetique and Geometry; not (as Tennis play) in practice only . . .’³⁶ Hobbes argues openly that the state is a mere artificial contrivance for furthering the interests of the individuals who comprise it. He denied the Aristotelian belief that man is a social animal and argued that no society exists before the ‘covenant of submission’.³⁷ Instead, he begins with the axiom that the natural condition of man is war. This is Machiavellian, only more so, and Hobbes’ pessimistic outlook conditions all of the book. In the first part, on human knowledge and psychology, his survey of what was known at the time leads him to conclude (controversially enough, then) that nature has made man ‘so equal in faculties of body and mind’ that, ‘when all is reckoned together, the difference between man and man is not so considerable as to prevent competition between them . . . So that in the nature of man we find three principall causes of quarrel. First, Competition; secondly, Diffidence [by which Hobbes meant fear]; thirdly, Glory.’ The consequences of this are not good. Life, he famously remarked, was ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’.³⁸

There are no exceptions to this state of affairs. Even kings and queens, he comments, are continually jealous of each other ‘in the state and posture of gladiators’. For Hobbes it therefore follows that, to avoid this primitive condition of perpetual war, men must submit to a common authority. Since the main law of nature is self-preservation, it follows that men are obliged to ‘conferre all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men that they may reduce all their wills . . . to one will . . .’ This is what he means by the great Leviathan, a form of mortal God (as he put it) who alone has the power to enforce contracts and obligations. For Hobbes this contract is supreme. He does not allow any appeal to God or one’s conscience ‘because that would open the way for cunning men to get the better of their fellows, which is little more than a return to war’. Whatever the sovereign does, whatever taxes or censorship he imposes, they are all just because of the basis of his authority. Hobbes is not blind to the totalitarian nature of his system (as we would call it) and he concedes that it may be unpleasant to live under. He simply insists that it is far preferable to the alternative.³⁹ Of the three kinds of commonwealth – monarchy, democracy and aristocracy – Hobbes comes down firmly on the side of the first, and for clear reasons. In the first place, the personal interests of the monarch will tend to coincide with the public interest, and he can after all, always consult whom he pleases and ‘cannot disagree with himself’. In response to the criticism that monarchs will always have favourites, he concedes ‘they are an inconvenience’ but adds that they will tend to be few, whereas ‘the favourites of an assembly are numerous’.⁴⁰

Hobbes knew that his book would be ill-received and he was not disappointed. Indeed, he was in sufficient danger from the Puritans, he felt, that he fled to France. He alienated the Parliamentarian Puritans because of his theory of ‘servile absolutism’, and he alienated the Royalists because, although he believed in absolute monarchy, he did not base his views on divine right.⁴¹ A parliamentary commission was appointed to examine the Leviathan and only the intervention of Charles II saved Hobbes from persecution.⁴² The poor reception of the book also had to do with the novelty of his ideas, partly because he broke with high-minded fashion and based his system not on a divinely inspired morality but on its sheer usefulness. He also rejected any notion of ‘natural law’ or ‘city of God’, which men were familiar with and found comforting. For Hobbes, his Leviathan is justified not because of any high-flown reason that men could have rallied to but simply because it benefits those who comprise it – and that is all.

Today, we do not find Hobbes anywhere near as objectionable as his contemporaries did – because, for the most part, we actually live by many of the precepts he devised. We recognise now that men are indeed activated by fear or pride and we acknowledge moreover that both are equally dangerous. Above all we get by in societies where the often anonymous state is there to guard against the crude selfishness of human nature.⁴³ Machiavelli’s pessimism, extrapolated by Hobbes’, has lasted too long and too well to be entirely misplaced.

The rise of English and Dutch prosperity in the seventeenth century was a long-term consequence of two developments: a change in the salinity of the Baltic Sea which drove the herrings into the North Sea, boosting the catch there and augmenting the fishing industry of the countries that rimmed that body of water. And second, more important, it emphasised the drain away from the Mediterranean countries as the Atlantic Ocean opened up, following the discovery of America and the development of trade with the Indies and India. As a result, the politics of the new nation-states changed too, with trade rivalries beginning to take precedence over religious or dynastic feuds. The general increase in prosperity and the growth of mercantile influence on government produced a greater emphasis on property and more concern with the freedoms that should be allowed for individual business initiatives. It was this set of circumstances that produced the philosophy of John Locke.

‘John Locke is the prophet of the English business commonwealth, of the rule of law and toleration. It was from the political speculation of Locke (1632–1704) and the actual working out in England of the principles of toleration and limited monarchy, that the French thinkers of the Enlightenment drew their inspiration. In their turn, they reinterpreted and generalised the more liberal aspects of English thought, so that it was translated from a local into a world influence.’⁴⁴ Locke does indeed epitomise the common sense of a generation wearied by religious and civil wars and a generation all too ready to benefit from colonialism and the subsequent emergence of a commercial class. Like Hobbes, Locke wrote on political philosophy but also on human nature, an Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of Government. This is one reason why his books were so influential: both aimed to fit political organisation into a wider system of understanding and both tried to do so scientifically. Locke studied medicine, was a Fellow of the Royal Society and his patron was Lord Shaftesbury, chancellor of England. He helped draft the constitution of Carolina.⁴⁵ Locke was a very practical, cautious soul, who disliked abstractions, and thought that truth was probable rather than absolute, making him not untypical of the people then coming to power in England. In his scheme of things, political power should be as far from ‘divine right’ as can be imagined. He thought it was foolish to claim that God passed power to Adam and then through his descendants to today’s royal representatives. After all, he observed tartly, on that basis we are all descendants of Adam and it is impossible today to know who was who. He disagreed fundamentally with Hobbes in that he thought man’s natural state was not war but the use of reason. ‘Political power . . . I take to be a right of making laws with penalties of death, and consequently all the penalties for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the Community in execution of such laws, and in the defence of the Commonwealth from foreign injury; and all this only for the public good.’⁴⁶ By their nature, he says, men are equal, as Hobbes had insisted before him. But for Locke that is not enough. He goes on to make a distinction between liberty and licence. Without licence, he says, liberty is no different from the continual warfare Hobbes so feared. Therefore, the purpose of civil society is the use of reason to avoid ‘the inconveniences of the state of nature which follow from every man being made a judge in his own case, by setting up a known authority to which everyone may appeal and which everyone ought to obey’. Here he goes well beyond Bodin and Hobbes. Princes and kings, he says, can have no place in this scheme, ‘for no man is exempt the law’. The will of the majority must always reign supreme.

Locke reflects the new situation in England more than ever when he goes on to argue that the reason men come together to live in society, with laws, is for the preservation of their property. Since men are ‘driven’ into society, it follows that the power of that society ‘can never be suffered to extend further than the common good’. And this common good can only be determined by standing laws, statutes, that all are aware of and agree to, and not by extemporary decrees of, say, an absolute sovereign. Moreover, these laws must be administered ‘by indifferent and upright judges’. Only in this way can the people (and rulers) know where they are.⁴⁷ In an important amendment to the idea of absolute monarchy, Locke said that the king can never suspend the law.⁴⁸ Finally, Locke gave voice to the main anxiety of the rising commercial classes in England (a fear of something which they saw happening in France, in state intervention in trade), that no power can take from a man his property without his consent. ‘A soldier may be commanded by a superior in all things, save the disposal of his property.’ In the same way, a man has property in his own person, meaning that a man’s labour is his property too. The most important consequence of this, Locke says, is that people can be taxed only with their consent. (We recognise this now in the doctrine ‘No taxation without representation.’⁴⁹)

This is in some ways the final break regarding the divine power of kings. The connection between the state and the individual is, for Locke, a purely legal and economic convenience, relating only to the practical aspects of existence. In other words, and very bluntly, the state had absolutely no part to play in matters of belief or conscience. Where religion was concerned, Locke was a great advocate of tolerance (he devoted two works to the subject, in his Thoughts Concerning Education and Letters Concerning Toleration). Tolerance, he says, should arise from the very obvious fact that different minds have different aptitudes, as is evident from the way different children grow up within the same family. Moreover, the principles of Christianity, he says, demand nothing less than toleration. ‘No man can be a Christian without Charity, and without that faith which works not by force but by love . . .’⁵⁰ The Church, he insists, must be an entirely voluntary association; and it goes without saying that a person’s religion should not affect his or her civil rights. ‘The care of each man’s salvation belongs only to himself.’

As with much of Hobbes’ Leviathan, Locke’s views today seem little more than commonplaces – again because we take them so much for granted. But they were very new in Locke’s own day. The idea that government should derive its authority from the governed, which implied that it should last only so long as the people wanted it, was breathtaking. ‘At a time when kings ruled for a lifetime, this offered the prospect of change, even of revolution.’⁵¹

Baruch de Spinoza (1634–1677) was born two years after Locke but in some ways he had more in common with Thomas Hobbes. Like the latter, he thought that sovereign power is the price we pay for order. Unlike Hobbes, however, he had a better opinion of humanity and felt that, by making more use of the new sciences, intellectual and political liberty would be possible. In his optimistic way, he thought that mutual aid ‘is as natural to men as fear and pride’. The purpose of society, for Spinoza, is therefore the extension of human awareness. In making this assumption, and then by examining man’s psychology, as it is, the scientist can find a political structure to fit to that behaviour. As a result an ethical framework can be found that accords well with human nature.⁵²

Spinoza thought that man can only realise his higher qualities when co-operating for some higher good and that ‘the community alone is the medium through which this can be done’. Indeed, for him government is itself an expression of the impulse to mutual aid ‘instinctive to mankind’. (This is clearly the very opposite of what Hobbes was saying.⁵³) ‘The aim of life and the State is the fullest realisation of its own being.’ ‘It follows,’ he writes in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, his great work, ‘that the ultimate aim of government is not to rule . . . by Fear, not to exact obedience, but to free men from fear, that they may live in all possible security . . . the object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develope their minds and bodies in security and to employ their reason unshackled; . . . in fact the true aim of government is Liberty . . . This outlook is the antithesis of the fear of life apparent in Calvin or St Augustine. We do not need to deny life to gain salvation. On the contrary, in the words of Jesus, the aim of mankind is “To have life and to have it more abundantly” and the State must be directed to this clear end.’⁵⁴ Spinoza believed in tolerance and freedom of speech because in this way, he thought, the state would be more secure.

His most startling attempt to promote freedom of thought comes in that part of the Tractatus where he gives an impartial analysis of the scriptures. In a radical departure, the book opens with ten chapters on the Old Testament, assessing the authenticity of the books and the exact nature of miracles. This was, in effect, the application of science to religion, a head-to-head confrontation. It leads on to an examination of Natural Law and Spinoza’s conclusion that ‘men are not conditioned to live by reason alone, but by instinct, So that they are no more bound to live by the dictates of an enlightened mind . . . than a cat is bound to live by the laws of nature of a lion.’⁵⁵ This position of Spinoza was wholly original: he was a scientist but he wasn’t as much in thrall to reason as most of his fellow scientists. But Spinoza did join with Hobbes in concluding that ‘the basis of political obligation is the desire for security’, a wholly utilitarian notion. And so, at a stroke, Spinoza overturned the entire classical and medieval assumptions that politics was a rational response to a divinely inspired Natural Law. Instead, Spinoza simply looked upon the sovereign state as Hobbes did, as the ‘least of two evils’. He advised the sovereign to listen to the public, ‘since an unpopular government does not last’. Democracy had its advantages, he said, because ‘the danger of irrational commands is less to be feared, since it is almost impossible that the majority of people, especially if it be a large one, should agree on an irrational design’.⁵⁶ ‘The sovereign power should count all men, rich and poor, equal before it . . . The power of the ruler is in practice limited by the fear he feels of his subjects: it is the fact of obedience, not the motive of obedience, which makes a man a subject. The aim of the statesman is to frame our institutions so that every man, whatever his dispositions, may prefer public right to private advantage; this is the task and this the test . . . Public affairs ought to be administered on principles which are fool proof and knave proof.’⁵⁷

For Spinoza, then, life was as much about the fulfilment of instinct as the exercise of reason, the human intellect was part of the divine mind and therefore reason has its shortcomings. ‘Whenever, then, anything in nature seems to us ridiculous, absurd or evil, it is because we have but partial knowledge of things, and are in the main ignorant of the order and coherence of nature as a whole, and because we want everything arranged according to the dictate of our reason . . . Every man has a right to fulfil his own being in so far as he has the power, and men have naturally authority over one another only in so far as they can impose it by force or persuasion; further no man need keep faith with another after he has judged it, rightly or wrongly, in his own interest to break it. Moral values are a human creation, cultivated in an artificial garden.’⁵⁸

On this view of humanity, almost the only relevant political fact is the power of the majority. Since men are inevitably ‘subject to passions’, peace can be had only on these terms. In the same way, the only test of the state is the peace and security it brings.⁵⁹ It is no more than a convenience; the state exists for man, not the other way round.

Where Spinoza differed most from Hobbes and Locke was in his emphasis on knowledge. For knowledge changes and therefore ‘the government must stand ready to change’. Further, insofar as the state is a convenience, an artificial garden, change is to be expected.⁶⁰

In his recent book Radical Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel identifies Spinoza as a key figure in the creation of modernity, uniting the ideas discussed in this chapter, on political theories and arrangements, with those discussed in the previous chapter, on the scientific revolution, in the next chapter, on religious doubt, and in Chapter 26, on the Enlightenment search for the laws of human nature. After Descartes introduced the New Philosophy – his idea of a mechanistic universe – it was Spinoza, Israel says, who changed humanity’s ways of thinking most, in the process creating the modern world. Israel’s argument is that the Enlightenment was not, as generally pictured, a change in thought associated mainly with France, England and Germany (the Aufklärung) but was Europe-wide, taking in Scandinavia, Spain, Portugal and Italy, but led from the United Provinces, as the Low Countries then were. It was Spinoza, he says, who sparked the overall and general change in thought that encompassed five areas which we generally treat separately but where Spinoza’s thought wove a neat web: philosophy, Bible criticism, scientific theories, theology and political thought. Spinoza’s role has been insufficiently appreciated, Israel argues, because a lot of his support was clandestine. He discusses twenty-two ‘Spinozist’ manuscripts which circulated clandestinely and reports on many followers who were forced into exile, or whose works were banned by the authorities. Nevertheless, he describes countless groups of secret ‘Spinozist’ thinkers all over Europe, whose religious, political and scientific views went hand-in-hand, to incubate a new sensibility, which would burst into the open as the Enlightenment.⁶¹

It was Spinoza, he says, who finally replaced theology with philosophy as the major way to understand our predicament, and as the underpinning rationale of politics; it was Spinoza who dispensed with the devil and magic; it was Spinoza who showed that knowledge is democratic – that there can be no special-interest groups (such as priests, lawyers or doctors) where knowledge is concerned; it was Spinoza who more than anyone persuaded us that man is a natural creature, with a rational place in the animal kingdom; it was Spinoza who persuaded his fellow men and women that freedom could only be understood philosophically; it was Spinoza who laid the groundwork for republicanism and democracy; it was Spinoza who explained that the end-result of all these ideas was toleration. For Israel, Spinoza was Newton, Locke, Descartes, Leibniz, Rousseau, Bayle, Hobbes and, yes, maybe Aristotle all rolled into one, the most consequential figure, on this reading, since Aquinas.

‘Man can know himself more profoundly and clearly than even Newton can grasp the laws of matter: consequently knowledge of history, being the story of human motives and their effects, can in principle be far more profoundly and minutely known than the external world, which is ultimately opaque.’ Of all the original thinkers in the world, and despite Jonathan Israel’s claims for Spinoza, the most underestimated figure is the Neapolitan Giambattista Vico (1668–1744). His simple insight, that men can know only what they make, coming as it did at the high point of the scientific revolution, completely transformed man’s view of himself. In fact, it provided man with not one but two views of himself, mutually contradictory. Since these two views have never been reconciled (they are one of the main themes of the last part of this book), we may say that Vico is as responsible as anyone for the modern incoherence.⁶²

Vico, a philosopher for whom history was more important than for anyone else of his time, tried hard to understand the mind of primitive man. Without such understanding, he thought, we can never understand ourselves. To do so he made highly original use of psychology, linguistics and poetry.⁶³ His most famous book was Scienza Nuova, published in 1725. His aim here was to uncover a secular philosophy of history, the laws of which, he believed, would help design workable political institutions for the future. As John Bowle says, by modern standards Vico had a weak understanding of biology, and it would be more than a century before evolution by natural selection was conceived. This limited his vision, yet at the same time Vico brought a magnificent energy to his task. Although he believed, like many people at the time, that God rules the world by means of laws evident in human affairs, he agreed with Spinoza that these laws were ‘immanent’ not transcendent – that is to say, they were not available through revelation but emerged in human institutions and could be deduced.⁶⁴ Unlike Hobbes and others he did not share the view that law stemmed from an overt rational contract; instead, he said it had been assembled from the instinctive realm of custom. ‘Fallen humanity, no longer apprehending truth directly, is yet linked with God by the promptings of instinct. Through the darkness, men and nations still perceive glimmerings of the divine purpose by a “common wisdom”, emergent in response to the challenge of the environment.’

Looking around him, and back through history, Vico uncovered three instincts, he said. These were the belief in Providence, the recognition of parenthood, and the instinct to bury the dead, instincts which found expression in the customs and rites of religion, marriage and sepulture.⁶⁵ He accepted that man had fallen from grace, but he still believed he was the master of his own fate as he increasingly apprehended the evolution of civilised life. Civilisation was, to this extent, an expression of God’s purpose, though philosophic knowledge could supplement instinct. The great collective enterprises of mankind – jurisprudence, the sciences, the arts, religion itself – may be examined for what they reveal about the aims of ‘The Divine Architect’.⁶⁶

The charm of Vico lies in the extent to which some of his ideas now seem so outmoded and absurd and yet in other aspects are so modern and still refreshing. For example, Vico maintained that after the Flood the human race was divided into men of normal size and idolatrous, bestial giants, ‘living in the diluvial marshes’ left by the receding waters. Humanity developed from these titans, though gradually we achieved the proportions we now have. Civilisation arose through a fear of thunder and lightning, which startled the giants out of their ‘brutish stupor’, for which they learned to feel nothing but shame. Thus shamed, they no longer cared to exercise their instincts in the open, and so carried off their mates into caves, where family life was founded. It was this first act of ‘violent authority’ which created the ‘natural docility’ of women and the ‘natural nobility’ of men. Vico was widely read in history and salted his views, for example, with scholarly references to the number of occasions where, in pagan mythology, thunder is made an attribute of Jove. In the same way, Old Testament giants are connected to Greek legends and the war of the Titans against the gods.⁶⁷ This first phase of human history is dubbed, naturally enough, The Age of the Gods, its purpose being for the ancestors of man to learn discipline. They conceived the gods who came to personify the sea, sky, fire and the crops and they evolved the rudiments of religion, family life, speech and property. (Vico thought this last derived from the burial of the dead.) The Age of the Gods was followed by the Heroic Age and then the Human Age.

In the third part of the book, Vico turned his attention to the human race and attempted to reconstruct its history by reference to language, notably poetry and the mythology of early man. ‘Peoples who are in the depths of ignorance naturally interpret their surroundings by fables and allegories: the development of language naturally corresponds with the development of a society. During the Age of the Gods, when men were inventing speech, language was vague and poetical; the lapse of time was indicated by the number of harvests; the names of the gods symbolised the natural interests of food and agriculture. During the heroic age men communicated by symbols and heraldry.’⁶⁸ In another section he argues that man’s social development derives from the three punishments inflicted on fallen humanity – the sense of shame, curiosity and the need to work. Each of the gods and heroes of mythology may be understood, he says, as manifestations of the effects of one or other of these punishments.

For us, today, Vico’s arguments are unconvincing – the details, anyway – and many of those details are self-evidently absurd. But underneath the absurdity was a surprising piece of modern sense – that man evolves, and not just biologically but in terms of language, custom, social organisation, law and literature. And under all of that lay a bigger time-bomb: that religion itself evolves. Thus Vico helped also the advent of doubt, which is the subject of the next chapter.

The date of The Prince, 1513, to 1725, the date of Scienza Nuova, overlapped heavily with the scientific revolution and it is certainly no coincidence that all of these political philosophers attempted to construct their theories based on at least the principles of the new sciences, and to construct systems which could be generalised from state to state. It may be, however, that it was too early to apply the new sciences to the affairs of men. The most enduring legacy has in fact been the distinction between those who, like Machiavelli and Hobbes, were pessimistic about human nature (occasioning authoritarian or conservative philosophies), and those like Locke and Spinoza, who were more optimistic (the liberal philosophies). Broadly speaking, this is still the main political division by which most of us live, though we now call them, respectively, right and left.

The idea of ‘community’ (and its legitimacy as a political authority) has been a theme running through this chapter. But there is one meaning of the word that we have yet to encounter fully but which the Cambridge historian Tim Blanning says also came into being at this time – i.e., the seventeenth, and then the eighteenth century. This ‘community’ is ‘the public’, which he calls ‘a new cultural space . . . Alongside the old culture, centred on the courts and the representation of monarchical authority, there emerged a “public sphere”, in which private individuals come together to form a whole greater than the sum of the parts. By exchanging information, ideas, and criticism, these individuals created a cultural actor – the public – which has dominated European culture ever since. Many, if not most, of the cultural phenomena of the modern world derive from the “long eighteenth century” – the periodical, the newspaper, the novel, the journalist, the critic, the public library, the concert, the art exhibition, the public museum, the national theatre, just to list a sample.’⁶⁹

Blanning concentrates on three of these innovations: the novel, the newspapers and the concert. In the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century there was a ‘reading revolution’, he says, and he quotes scores of memoirs of the time to support this argument. In Britain, for example, the number of books published rose from about 400 per year in the early seventeenth century, to 6,000 a year by 1630, 21,000 in 1710 and fully 56,000 by the 1790s.⁷⁰ He notes that in the eighteenth century in Germany there was at this time a ‘significant move’ from using the words die Gelehrten (the learned) to die Gebildeten (the educated or cultivated). ‘Even for those who rejected revealed religion and scriptural authority, Bildung offered a means of secular salvation through culture.’⁷¹ Changing taste and the rise of the novel may also be seen from this table, taken from Blanning’s book:

Publishing in Germany: 1625–1800

Subject

1625

1800

Law

7.4%

3.5%

Medicine

7.5

4.9

History etc.

12.0

15.7

Theology

45.8

6.0

Philosophy

18.8

39.6

Belles lettres

5.4

27.3

Blanning says that the chief attraction of the novel was its realism, imagination masquerading as factual reportage, and though many were trivial and lachrymose, Samuel Richardson expressed a more serious aim, to investigate ‘the great doctrines of Christianity under the fashionable guise of an amusement’.⁷² Another effect of the novel, and its concern with the here-and-now, was to push centre-stage family relationship and women, partly because most middle- and upper-class women enjoyed more leisure than their menfolk.

So far as newspapers and periodicals were concerned, it was during the last decades of the seventeenth century that the transition from sporadic to regular publication occurred in several parts of Europe – Antwerp, Frankfurt, Turin, as well as Paris and London. Bayle’s Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (‘News of the Republic of Letters’) first appeared in 1684. By the 1730s in London, however, there were six dailies and by the 1770s there were nine, with a combined circulation of 12,600,000. Even those who couldn’t read kept up; they gathered in one of London’s 551 coffee houses, 207 inns or 447 taverns, where the newspapers were read out loud. These figures were eclipsed by those in the Holy Roman Empire, where there were more than a thousand newspapers and periodicals by the time of the French Revolution.⁷³

This picture is amended somewhat by Jonathan Israel’s discussion of ‘learned journals’ which also came into existence at this time. ‘Overwhelmingly orientated towards recent developments in the world of thought, scholarship and science, they did much to shift the focus of the cultivated public’s attention away from established authorities and the classics to what was new, innovative, or challenging, even when such innovation arose in distant lands and unfamiliar languages.’ Whereas previously it took people years to find out about books which had appeared in a language different to their own, now they knew about them ‘within a matter of weeks’.⁷⁴ In addition to making people better informed, these journals generally displayed the new values of toleration and intellectual objectivity, says Israel, and often contributed to the fragmentation of the ‘deeply rooted notion, championed by kings, parliaments and Churches alike, that there existed a universally known, accepted and venerated consensus of truth. At the same time, the journals also attempted to marginalise the more radical aspects of the enlightenment, those parts promulgated by the Spinozists.’⁷⁵

Though their use expanded enormously, books had existed in one form or another for centuries. In contrast, the public concert was a wholly new medium. Blanning says that the first public concert, in the modern sense (a clear distinction being made between audience and performers, an anonymous public admitted on payment of a fee), took place in London, at John Banister’s house, ‘over against’ the George Tavern, in Whyte Freyers, in 1672. This stimulated a demand not only for other concerts but also for sheet music as people achieved musical literacy. This, in turn, created a demand for a certain kind of music, of which Haydn and then Handel in particular were the beneficiaries – the symphony was especially popular with the new musical public. Concert halls proved to be a major attraction at the great market towns (Frankfurt, Hamburg, above all Leipzig), as an added bonus of travel.⁷⁶

The new ideas in music still came from the cities where the courts remained (Salzburg, Mannheim, Berlin) but Blanning’s point is that the new public, the new public sphere, brought with it a much greater national feeling than had ever existed before. In fact, the new, self-conscious public, and the cultural ideas it developed a taste for, formed a powerful cocktail or mix, a new forum for the circulation of ideas which hadn’t existed before. This mix would not only determine what cultural ideas proved popular and enduring, but ensured that culture itself would become a virile and febrile aspect of nationalism. The powerful doctrine that nations should differ in their cultures, which was to prove energising and dangerous in equal measure, really stems from the emergence of the public sphere in the seventeenth century.